Child Labor

An American History

Hugh D Hindman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315290836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Despite its decline throughout the advanced industrial nations, child labor remains one of the major social, political, and economic concerns of modern history, as witnessed by the many high-profile stories on child labor and sweatshops in the media today. This work considers the issue in three parts. The first section discusses child labor as a social and economic problem in America from an historical and theoretical perspective. The second part presents child labor as National Child Labor Committee investigators found it in major American industries and occupations, including coal mines, cotton textile mills, and sweatshops in the early 1900s. Finally, the concluding section integrates these findings and attempts to apply them to child labor problems in America and the rest of the world today.

Part I

The Child Labor Problem

1. INTRODUCTION

Child Labor as a Social and Economic Problem

Out, Out!

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: Day was all but done,

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At that word, the saw,

As if to prove saws could be hungry too,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all,

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart.

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor—when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath,

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing! and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

Robert Frost

From “Out, Out!” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1944 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt & Co., LLC. Reprinted from Poems of Child Labor, NCLC Publication 316, p. 43.

Figure 1.1 Dangerous Work. Beaumont, Tex. Nov. 1913. Dangerous work. Charlie McBride. Said twelve years old. This twelve year old boy has a steady job with Miller & Vidor Lumber Company. He takes slabs out of a chute, which has a moving endless chain to carry the wood up the chute. He passes the slabs on to the other boy who saws them on an unguarded circular saw. Charlie runs the saw himself whenever he gets the chance. He is exposed not only to the above danger, but to the weather—no roof even. Has been here for some months. “Get four bits a day.” Fifty cents. Works ten hours. This is the only mill that I found around Beaumont that employed boys, likely because they are located some distance out of town.* (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Lewis Wickes Hine National Child Labor Committee Collection, LC-USZ62–19574. Photographer Lewis W. Hine.)

Global child labor is correctly perceived as a problem of economically underdeveloped nations. But we know of no major advanced nation that did not go through a stage of pervasive child labor on the path to advancement. If widespread child labor is viewed as predictable during certain stages of economic development, then the economic history of advanced nations may serve as a guide to its eradication in the developing nations of today and tomorrow. This book examines U.S. child labor history with the intention of identifying lessons learned that might be applicable to persistent problems of global child labor.

Child labor is a problem of immense social and economic proportions in many developing regions of the world today. It came to be viewed in the same way when the United States was, industrially speaking, a developing nation. But child labor was not always seen as a problem. We came to recognize the problem only gradually, then to resolve it even more gradually and still incompletely. Though history can never quite repeat itself, a retrospective appraisal of the U.S. experience may inform the struggle against child labor in the world today. To the extent that we better understand the causes and effects of child labor in U.S. history, see why it matters socially and economically, understand how our nation came to grips with and made its accommodation to the child labor problem, understand the how and why of effective reform in our own history and the how and why of our failures to achieve effective reform, we may to able to contribute more effectively to solving the global child labor problem.

No nation has developed an advanced industrialized sector without going through this “dirty” phase of development. In early-twentieth-century America, young boys worked their fingers often literally to the bone in the coal breakers, young boys and girls continued to work sixty- and seventy-hour weeks in the cotton textile industry that they had helped build, and children were drawn into work in agriculture and food processing at such a young age that the term “infant labor” would not have been entirely inappropriate. Child labor stands as one of the more persistent social and economic problems in history and in the world today. This book sheds new light on child labor in U.S. history in a way calculated to shed light on the problem in the world today.

Child Labor in U.S. History

The American experience with child labor is, in many of its general contours, typical of that in other early industrializing nations. With industrialization, poor children and their families were drawn off the family farm, out of the home workshop, or out of the urban tenement into the mines, mills, and factories. The children, who had always worked alongside their parents in preindustrial times, naturally followed their parents into industrial employment. Several industries became dependent on child labor. Eventually, there developed a growing sense that there was something not quite right about this new industrial child labor, and a reform movement emerged. Over the next couple of generations, our society reached a general accommodation on the question, and most industrial child labor was eliminated.

While our history with child labor is not entirely unique, it is exceedingly rich in its unique details. In myriad industries in specific times and places, particular children, with their own names, identities, and histories, went to work. Their collective stories illustrate not only what they have in common with industrial child workers everywhere and always, but also point out much that is specific to the American experience. We developed our own cultural icons—especially in the breaker boys. American ingenuity probably generated more variations on the theme of the family wage than anywhere else in the world. Our reformers and antireformers were individuals—often characters—with their own ideas on aims and methods. We flirted with a constitutional amendment on child labor, but did not finally outlaw the practice until it had already been virtually eliminated. In these and many other ways, the history of child labor in America is richly original.

Children Have Always Worked

Children have always worked. This truth is evident in the history of childhood throughout the world. That simple declaration, “Children have always worked,” appears, often verbatim, in many scholarly treatises on child labor. For example, Walter Trattner opens Crusade for the Children this way:

Children have always worked. During early human history, the young of wandering tribes shared in hunting, fishing, and trapping animals. Later, when tribes and clans separated themselves into families, children continued to work with their elders in the woods and fields and in caring for crops and animals. They also helped in the handicrafts, as these developed.¹

The generalization that children have always worked serves a number of useful purposes. First, it reminds us of the need to justify treatment of child labor as a “problem.” Either explicitly or implicitly, most writers treat child labor as a social and economic problem. But if work has been central, integral, and essential to childhood throughout most of human history—if, in the main, even while acknowledging its abuses, child labor was a good thing—the burden remains on scholars to explain how it became a “problem.” If child labor was good but is now a problem, how, when, and why did it go bad? What changed? What distinguishes “good” child labor from “bad” child labor? No one has seriously suggested that children should not do work. But where is the line to be drawn between work that children should do and work they should not do?

Today, however, the notion that children have always worked is a dangerous generalization. First, it has never been true that all children worked. Child labor, at least those forms considered to be a social and economic problem, has always been closely associated with poverty. With few exceptions, children of the well-to-do never had a serious child labor problem. Second, even if it once had been so, it is no longer true that children have always worked. In the world today, there are now several dozen nations where it is fair to say that, in the main, children no longer work. In some nations, there have been several consecutive generations of children who have never known child labor. For the most part, most economically advanced nations have largely solved their child labor problem. For them, child labor is a thing of the past.

This is not to suggest that any nation has solved the problem once and for all. In the United States, we have yet to overcome persistent problems in migrant agricultural labor; garment sweatshops have re-emerged on domestic soil; and children remain vulnerable to exploitation in the street trades. But we do have child labor laws on the books that are generally respected and enforced. Nearly all the children are in school, even the children of the poor; and very young children no longer work. Indeed, we have gone so far in sheltering our children from work that our social and economic problem is no longer child labor but rather youth employment. That is, policy is now more oriented toward socializing people to the world of work as they approach adulthood than toward protecting them from working during their childhood.

It is no longer necessary to approach child labor as a problem, like poverty, that will always be with us, as some have contended. We know it is a problem that can be solved. Today it is possible to approach the topic from the perspective that—while it remains true in most of the world that children have always worked, and until recently in all parts of the world—child labor is not inevitable. It is now possible to embrace and express an optimism that is grounded in historical fact, not simply in utopian vision.

A Theoretical Framework for Approaching the Child Labor Problem

Child labor has long been a topic of interest to a wide array of disciplines, from economics to history, from sociology to occupational health, from literature to poetry, and many others. Work in these various disciplines on the issue has often remained fragmented. Nevertheless, there is a considerable body of historical, sociological, and economic literature on which to draw. More complete discussion of a theory of child labor is reserved for chapter 10, where findings from this study are integrated with the previous literature, but it is useful to have a theoretically guided framework before proceeding with the inquiry. Thus, it is not necessary at this point to present a formal or exhaustive theory of child labor, or even a comprehensive literature review, but it is important to sketch the broad contours of a framework that can guide the inquiry that follows.

My main thesis, simply stated, is that industrialization is the cause of both the child labor problem and, later, its eradication. Before industrialization, children generally worked, but their labor was not seen as a problem. The ideal arrangement involved having children, from as early an age as possible, and within the confines of a kinship-based household, contributing to production for the group’s own consumption. As production shifted to production for markets—that is, toward industrialization—children accompanied their elders into industrial employment. But industrial employment of children came to be seen as a social and economic problem—an evil, if you will. So society reacted to protect itself and its children. Restating the thesis: During early industrialization, forces conspired to create the child labor problem; during continuing or later industrialization, forces conspired to eradicate the problem. In the early phases of industrialization, factors such as habit, custom and tradition, uneven technological advancement, and lack of alternatives (especially schools), virtually ensured that children would be put to work. In later stages of industrialization, factors such as emergence of a reform movement, continued technological advancement, and growing availability of alternatives (especially schools) operated to curb child labor.

Previous literature makes clear certain fundamentals. Child workers were supplied to the labor market by the household. Supply can generally be understood within the framework of the household economy, for which there is a rich theoretical and empirical literature in both economics and sociology. In turn, emphasis on family economy encouraged attention to the availability of alternatives (especially schooling), family wage, and other, more subtle, issues such as parental altruism. Demand for child workers was provided by employers. If previous literature on the supply of child workers is fairly well understood, the literature tells us much less about the demand for child workers. We know that child labor is cheap labor, but we also know that it is low productivity labor. What is the interplay of these factors? What other factors might create a demand for children over adults? In examining demand, it will also be important to take into account the available technology. Finally, it is important to take into account the reform movement itself, since it seeks to reduce both supply and demand for child workers. What are the effects of law and regulation on the child labor problem?

Plan of the Book

The book is organized into three parts. Part I, comprising the first three chapters, presents “The Child Labor Problem.” Part II, “Child Labor in America,” comprising the middle six chapters, is the heart of the book. And Part III, “Child Labor’s Legacy,” offers a synthesis in two chapters to conclude the book.

Part I relies largely, but not entirely, on secondary sources to establish child labor as a persistent social and economic problem. Building on the theoretical framework sketched here, chapter 2, “Industrialization of Child Labor,” traces the industrialization process in America and its intersection with child labor. It begins by establishing the centrality of child labor to family life in preindustrial America, where child labor is considered essential to the child’s upbringing, then proceeds into industrialization—the transformation that changes everything—where child labor comes to be seen as morally repugnant. Chapter 3, “Child Labor Reform,” chronicles American society’s reaction against child labor, the efforts of reformers and counterreformers, and the evolution of state and federal law.

Part II, “Child Labor in America,” presents the book’s most important original contribution to the literature. It relies largely but not entirely on primary sources to portray child labor in six key industries in early-twentieth-century America. Chapter 4 examines child labor in the coal mines. Chapter 5 considers the light manufacturing sector by high-lighting children in the glasshouses. C...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Ttile page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. The Child Labor Problem
• Part II. Child Labor in America
• Part III. Child Labor's Legacy
• Notes
• Note On Sources
• Bibliography
• Index