skygiants

The organ grinder thing was actually a really common popular culture anxiety at the time! There was a lot of human trafficking and a lot of fears about human trafficking, much of which centered around organ grinders and other street performers - organ grinders often had either small human children as assistants, or small non human primates, and the children actually often were trafficked.

Statistically speaking most of those children were not English speaking US citizens. They'd usually been smuggled over borders to places where they didn't have family and had minimal language skills. But middle class reformers were really anxious about the idea that this was happening to English speaking white kids. The whole thing was closely related to that White Slavery prostitution panic.

So uh. It was less weird then than it sounds now?