Rosenberg - Child labor in America: a history

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-0272-1

2013 Chaim M. Rosenberg. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: young doffers in Elk Cotton Mills, Fayetteville, Tennessee, November 1910 (photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, Library of Congress)

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Above all I thank my wife, Dawn, for her patience and support and for reading every word I wrote. My family, David, Linda and Adrienne, helped shape the book. Professor Susan Ware of Harvard University discussed with me the role of Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop and Lillian Wald in drawing public attention to the use of child labor in America. These remarkable women championed the belief that the years of childhood are for play, study and maturation, but not for labor. Professor Eric Edmonds of Dartmouth University sent me data on the state of child labor today, particularly in Asia and Africa. Michael Kravitz of the Wage & Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor sent me information on present day child law violations.

The public libraries of Boston, Wellesley, Newton, Winchester and Needham as well as the remarkable archives of the New York Times have provided much of the material for this book. That modern day resource, Google Books, brings the scholarship of the ages, housed in the great libraries of the world, to our computer screens at the touch of our ngers, saving time and countless journeys.

Photographs showing children at work, particularly for the period from 1908 to 1918, enrich my book. Most come from the camera of Lewis Wickes Hine when the National Child Labor Committee employed him. These photographs are a national treasure, now in the custody of the Library of Congress.

Soon after the War of Independence, the United States entered the industrial age. Machines installed in large factories, powered rst by water and later by steam, did the work formerly done by hand. Child labor was cheap labor, and large numbers of children were put to work in the mills and mines. Little children worked on the farms picking fruits, vegetables, cotton and tobacco. Children as young as ve or six were put to work in tenement industries making ink, articial owers, paper and clothing. Little boys dug deep underground for copper and coal. Many boys worked the furnaces of the bottle factories; others rolled cigars. Telegram boys pedaled their bicycles to deliver messages. Small girls worked as domestic servants or sold owers on street corners. Children peeled tomatoes, shucked oysters, and cut shrimp and sardine in the canning factories. With the growth of cities, children were out early in the morning selling newspapers and tending pushcarts selling fruit and vegetables. Young boys walked the streets offering to shine shoes or worked in shoeshine parlors. By 1900, over two million children under the age of sixteen held jobs, earning low pay for long hours.

Manufacturers and their lobbyists mobilized powerful forces to keep the age-old practice of child labor, arguing that without the discipline of work idle hands led to mischief and that children needed to work to support their sick and disabled parents. Opposition to child labor grew vocal during the Progressive Era arguing that child labor was an evil, destroying the physical and mental health of the children. Child labor led to illiteracy and stunted the intellect, dooming the children to dull lives. Furthermore, cheap child labor replaced adult workers and kept wages low. The childs place, argued the reformers, was at school to acquire the skills needed for good citizenship and a varied and productive life. A quartet of forceful womenFlorence Kelley, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop and Lillian Waldled the battle to abolish child labor as well as the ght for womens rights, a minimum wage, and eight-hour workdays, health care and insurance against disability. They insisted that children had rights and were not mere appendages of their fathers. By their advocacy of education, these women were determined to lift poor children, home-born and immigrant alike, out of the slums and into the mainstream of American life. Their example motivated many others to join in the half-century battle that played out in the press, state and federal legislatures as well as in the courts. Through the efforts of these four women the National Child Labor Committee and the United States Childrens Bureau were founded to ensure a childhood of play, education and hope, but free of toil.

The indefatigable photographer Lewis Wickes Hine documented an important part of the story of child labor in the United States. From 1908 to 1918, Hine traveled the length and breadth of the nation carrying with him his large box camera, taking pictures of children at work in the mills, on the farms, in the glass houses, on the streets and down the mines. The Hine pictures, preserved in the Library of Congress, record better than words the image of child labor in America. Most of the pictures reproduced in this book were selected from the Hine collection of over ve thousand images. Child labor increased during the Great Depression but at the expense of jobs for adults. It took the New Deal legislation to put a legal end to child labor. Frances Perkinsa disciple of Florence Kelleyserved as secretary of labor in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration that saw the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 into law.

This book describes the many types of child labor in the United States and follows the struggle to keep children in school and out of the workforce. Rising prosperity and labor saving technology such as canning machinery, ofce machines, bowling alley machines, vacuum cleaners, clothes washing and drying machines and dishwashers eliminated many of the jobs once done by children.

Taking children out of the workforce and keeping them in school is a measure of a countrys social and economic advancement. A sound education, the reformers argued, is the necessary foundation to good citizenship of a democracy. In the United States most children now complete high school and many go on to college. Despite strong laws, child labor still nds ways of coming back, such as migrant farm labor. In under-developed countries, especially in parts of Asia and Africa, child labor is still endemic.

The children of the very poor have no young times.Essays to Elia, Charles Lamb, 1823

Probably no segment of the progressive crusade engaged more fully the moral energies of the reformers than the battle against the exploitation of children in mine, factory, street and eld.

Clarke A. Chambers, 1963

George Washington lived sixty-seven years, twice as many as of the average American of his time. The next ve presidents lived even longer: John Adams to ninety, Thomas Jefferson to eighty-three, James Madison to eighty-ve, James Monroe to seventy-three and John Quincy Adams to eighty. Wealth and position in early America, however, did not ensure a long life. The rich Boston merchant-turned-manufacturer Francis Cabot Lowell died at forty-three, his mother at twenty-three, his sister at forty-one, his wife at forty-two, his older son, John Jr., at thirty-six, his daughter, Susanna, at twenty-six and his younger son Edward at only twenty-two. During the course of the nineteenth century life expectancy in America rose slowly to reach forty-seven years for men and fty years for women in 1900. In the twentieth century life expectancy climbed steadily and at the start of the twenty-rst century reached almost eighty years for men and a few more years for women.