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Any parent who would abandon their child should be shot dead in the street like a dog.

Then you would have killed a lot of Americans in the era before the New Deal's social safety net.

During the Great Depression, families who could not support their children usually found other family members in better circumstances who could take them in, and many families were broken up that way. There was also a common intitution called the orphanage, run by counties or private charities, that took children in from families who could not support them.

It was quite common for older children to be asked to leave if feeding them made it impossible to feed other children. Then they would take to the road and the railroad, hobo-ing from town to town looking for work.

In 1933, William Wellman directed "Wild Boys of the Road", which is the definitive film about this phenomenon. The writers grafted on a happy ending for the boy. In the real world, he would have ended up in prison, molested by some older bum on the road, or beaten to death by a railroad bull. I recommend renting or downloading the film. It's a real eye-opener.

Like-wise, all of the children on the "Orphan Trains" from the 1850s through the 1920's were not orphans.

Some weren't wanted, some were abandoned on streets, some had families who couldn't care for them, and some were taken from bad homes, but regardless of why, many had families.

The accepted estimate is around 200,000 children being rehomed in that time period.

Anne of Green Gables is a prettied-up, glossed-over version of an ugly story which happened to too many children to count.

Wow...support for the new deal right here on FR. It's hard to imagine.

The "new deal" was a lie, as is all forms of socialism. Government cannot take enough money from the people to make the people prosperous. The "safety net" was nothing more than a revenue raising ponzi scheme that is just now coming to its inevitable end.

During the Great Depression, families who could not support their children usually found other family members in better circumstances who could take them in, and many families were broken up that way.

That's precisely the way extended families SHOULD work, and it's what we need to get back to, or at least having the better off members of the extended family assist, of course giving the children up should only be the last resort-still beats being a ward of the State.