Adam Benforado - A Minor Revolution: How Prioritizing Kids Benefits Us All

When your children are swinging in the hammock, playing in the park, or hunting eggs down by grandpas barn, stop and give a thought to the pale-faced factory boys and girls of the metropolis.

On a summer evening in 1906, readers of TheSpokane Press received the charge on their porch steps. The story, bottom center, appeared on page four, the back page of the penny broadsheets.

Give a thought to the boy with twitching, nervous hands rolling cigarettes all day long. Five inches short for the bench, his emaciated legs do not touch the floor. They dangle like hung candlesticks, disturbed into motion by some erratic, soundless metronome. His body smells of his workan acorned musk in his flesh and clothes. His widowed mother, with five younger mouths to feed, had no choice but to swear falsely to the age of her eldest. For this boy, there are no July vacations to dream of. There are no hammocks. There is no play. Sunday is but a day for sleep after the long, hard week.

Stop and give a thought to the girl with weak, red eyesan apparition of the candy factory. Her eyes cast an added pallor to her unhealthy skin. She arrives in the dark, she departs in the dark, blinking out of the gates in a perpetual moonlight. You could look through her, but she can be touched; there are scars to be found. Her hands are thin and bony, with here and there a big, ugly water blister where the hot chocolate has spattered. All day, she stands before a long wooden table dipping creams into hot chocolate coating. But she does not eat them: Long ago her stomach revolted at the constant sweet smell. Candy to her is just bitter, miserable toil.

At the turn of the twentieth century, people in Spokane and around the country did stop to ponder the hundreds of thousands toiling on for their pittance in sweatshops, canning factories, and foundries. They considered the street children, the starved and battered waifs, the poisoned infants, the illiterate girls, the doomed boys destined for arrest and prosecution. They stopped to feel outrage. They stopped to despair. Their gaze was directed to the plight of children, near and far.

Sitting in the heat of a June dusk looking out on barley fields, a Spokane farmer read, on page three, about five English children trailing their mother in an indifferent London downpour. It was their scrape in this life to scrounge twenty-four cents each day to rent a room for the night. Chairs werent included, so the family shared their supper, if they had itcondensed milk mixed with oatmeal, potatoessat upon soapboxes. The outside light was weak when it arrived, passed through brown paper windowpanes and smoke from a foul chimney. If they came up short, the rent collector tossed the family out, and they went to a shelter: either the Twopenny Coffin or the Penny Sit Up. For the Twopenny Coffin, each child lay down in a numbered casket on the floor and was covered with a piece of oilcloth for the night. It stuck to your skin unless you put newspaper over your face. As the mother explained, shed had six children, but the baby had died when she was in the workhouse. They keep the little ones separate there and tell the mothers its a better system. The day her daughter was dying, they let her see her child, but they didnt let her nurse. That left the ashes of doubt: My husband says I couldnt have saved her, but it has always been in my mind that perhaps I might.

The people of Spokane did not simply think of Mrs. John Mathewss dead child and what might have been. They stopped to consider what should be.

Above the fold on page four of the newspaper was a report out of Louisville, Kentucky, on the annual convention of the National Childrens Home Society attended by [m]ore than 100 men of national prominence in the field of child saving and general social problem work. Their aim was to promote childrens welfare by ensuring that orphaned children languishing in almshouses and orphanages were moved into family homes. And every week, The Spokane Press printed announcements of womens clubs, charitable associations, religious brotherhoods, academic conferences, and conventions keynoted by university presidents all working to better the lives of children.

There was nothing special about this Tuesdays editionor the paper, in general. It carried the routine reports of an exceptional juncture, a zero hour. In 1906, there was a broad movement under way that championed and prioritized the rights of children, an urgent quaking felt by picking up any newspaper on any day in any town in America. The child saversas reformers were sometimes knownhad emerged in the late nineteenth century and by the early twentieth were forging ahead on numerous fronts. They gave us child labor laws and playgrounds. They helped marshal resources to protect children from abuse and neglect by their parents, and pushed for basic health measures, like ensuring clean cows milk.

As supper beckoned, the Spokane reader might have wondered on the safety of the ground beef that awaited his children that evening: page one noted that a state law introducing meat inspections had passed but not yet gone into effect. Tonights hamburgers were still bacterial trust exercises. But progress was in process. By the end of 1906, Mrs. Winslows Soothing Syrup, advertised at the foot of page four as a miracle cure used by Millions of Mothers for their children while Teething for over Fifty Years, would be forced to disclose that its primary ingredients were morphine and alcohol. Mrs. Winslows had long been a dark magic, so effective in calming cries, but always threatening a sleep too deep. For thousands of kids, the creeping shroud could not be lifted: each breath slower, the limbs growing cold and waxy, the pupils vanishing to pinpricks, until the ember was snuffed altogether. Regulation came because journalists, doctors, and coroners investigated, organized, and demanded changes to protect children from such fraudulent and dangerous nostrumsBaby Killers, as the Journal of the American Medical Association warned in no uncertain terms. They pressed on until Mrs. Winslows removed morphine from its formula and soothing from its name.