The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption by Kathryn Joyce Page A

him $20 for a frightened Catholic newsboy.” The final panel of the cartoon showed the newsboy transformed into a grown man, a Baptist minister nearly identical to the CAS agent who “rescued” him.
    By contrast, Catholic relief programs that gained steam during this period emphasized helping poor children by aiding their impoverished parents to keep them. (Though at least one Catholic order running a hospital changed the names of abandoned Jewish children to present them as Catholic in their own form of conversion by fiat.)
    In time, a preference for adopting young children and babies supplanted interest in older children whom the orphan trains had farmed out as a source of labor. By the late 1920s, as the movement was slowing down, most orphan train riders were infants, toddlers, and even newborns. After the orphan trains stopped running, another child-saving project began to gain more prominence: the effort to Christianize Native Americans by forcibly enrolling them in boarding schools, a mission that had been in place since the late 1800s, would become more aggressive from the 1950s through the ’70s as the Child Welfare League of America’s Indian Adoption Project. This project would relocate between 25 and 35 percent of all Native American children from reservations into the homes of white American adopters, orphanages, and foster homes. The blatant assimilationist aims of the Indian Adoption Project (similar to the forced mass adoption of indigenous children in Australia) resulted in the 1978 enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which now severely restricts the adoption of Native American children outside their communities.
    Eventually, as the drive to save children through adoption was directed overseas, the history of international adoption also became inextricably linked to Christian evangelism. In 1955 adoption first went beyond US borders in a significant way with the mission of Harry and Bertha Holt, evangelical farmers from eastern Oregon and an aggressively humble couple, he in overalls, she in long braids pinned to her crown. In 1954 they were moved while watching a film made by the evangelical relief group World Vision about Korea’s “Amerasian” war orphans: the shunned and often abandoned biracial offspring of Korean mothers and US or British soldiers during and after the Korean War. Several months later Harry Holt found himself at the Grand Hotel in Tokyo, spending thenight before boarding a connecting plane. He was halfway between his home in Creswell, Oregon, and his destination in a war-racked South Korea, where he was going to pick out eight orphans to raise.
    After watching World Vision’s movie, the Holts, deeply conservative Christians who were involved in child evangelism through the Good News Club, an organization that hosts after-school proselytizing meetings for elementary school children, wanted to help the Amerasian children in a more profound way than simply sending cash. They looked around their farmhouse and decided that, by squeezing their six biological children together, they had room for eight more.
    In the hotel room Holt wondered and worried about where to begin his search for the children he and his wife would adopt. As his resolve wavered and he began to doubt his mission, he performed an exercise in bibliomancy common to many Christians in times of uncertainty or challenge. Kneeling in the dark beside the hotel bed, he opened his Bible at random and let his finger point the way to whatever message God had for him. It landed, incredibly, on Isaiah 43:5–7, which began, “Fear not for I am with thee.” In a letter home to his wife, Holt emphasized the scripture’s shocking relevance, italicizing key lines in the rest of the verse: “I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth; Even every one that is called