SEARCH
The Face of Child Labor |
|
There are some images that in a single second, convey an entire era, silently speaking volumes in a way words can never do.
Such is the case with the famous Louis Hine photo depicting a thin, drawn, 12-year-old girl standing by her cotton mill in Vermont. The photo has become synonymous with U.S. child labor at the turn of the 20th century and stands for one of the greatest fights we have faced in the union movement—abolishing the work of children.
Hine, whose photographs of working people have become the gold standard for conveying the horror and hardship, dignity and determination of industrial-era workers, spent several years documenting workers in Pennsylvania coal mines, East Coast fisheries and New York tenement factories—many of them children.
It turns out the little girl at the cotton mill has a name—and a history. Addie Card’s real name was not known until very recently, when novelist Elizabeth Winthrop and researcher Joe Manning tracked through records in town offices, historical societies, funeral homes and Social Security death records. (For years, her last name was thought to be Laird.)
In the September issue of the Smithsonian Magazine (article not online), Winthrop describes how she uncovered a 1910 Census record listing a Mrs. Adalaid Harris as head of household, living with six orphaned or abandoned grnadchildren, including the Card sisters, Anna, 14, and Addie, 12.
Eventually, Winthrop and Manning met with two of Addie’s adoptive descendents. Writes Winthrop:
We learned that by the time she died, at 94, she was living in low-income housing and surviving on a Social Security check. “She didn’t have anything to give, but she gave it,” Piperlea Provost, her great-granddaughter, told us. “I would not imagine my life without Grandma Pat’s guidance.”
In 1900, more than 1.7 million of America’s children worked, an increase of more than 1 million over the previous three decades. According to historian Todd Postol:
Although 28 states had some child labor law on their books, statutes typically regulated only the ages and hours children could work; as long as these standards were not violated, employers could and did work minors as they saw fit. In lower Manhattan, girls suffered permanent spinal damage as they sat for long, uninterrupted stretches hunched over their sewing tables…And in the mills of the southeast, youngsters worked 12-hour days in deafening, lint-filled spinning rooms.
The public was largely unaware of these deplorable conditions—until labor organizer Mary “Mother” Jones made it a national issue. Again, Todd Postel:
On May 29, 1903, 100,000 textile workers, including 16,000 children below 16, walked off their jobs at mills in and around Philadelphia. Strikers were demanding a reduction in the work week from 60 hours to 55 hours. The following month, Jones arrived in the city’s Kensington district and found, as she later recalled, little children, “some with their hands off, some with their fingers off at the knuckle. They were stooped little things, round shouldered and skinny.”
Despite the fact that Pennsylvania prohibited children under 13 from working, many of the children Jones saw were below 10. Jones assembled a group of maimed children before city hall: “I called upon the millionaire manufacturers to cease their moral murders,” she noted in her autobiography, but Philadelphia officials literally closed their windows, “just as they had closed their eyes and hearts.”
Dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America” by her foes, Mother Jones proceeded to launch a “children’s crusade” that same year, involving nearly 300 marchers headed from New York City to President Theodore Roosevelt’s estate at Oyster Bay, 125 miles away. While heat and distance depleted the ranks to a half-dozen by the end of the trek, Jones had accomplished her goal of drawing national attention to the health risks faced by working children.
Mother Jones, a fiery orator and fearless organizer for the Mine Workers during the first two decades of the 20th century, inspired men half her age into action and compelled their wives and daughters to join in the struggle. If that didn’t work, she would embarrass men to action:
I have been in jail more than once and I expect to go again. If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight.
Mother Jones set in motion the fight to end child labor, a struggle carried forward by unionists and Progressive-era reformers. Yet ending child labor took many more years. In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law barring some forms of child labor—even though the law was limited to prohibiting labor for children under age 14 and set an eight-hour day for those less than 16.
In 1919, the Supreme Court struck down a second federal child labor. And so on. Not until the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938 under President Franklin Roosevelt were national limitations placed on child labor. The new FLSA laws raised the full-time working age to 16 and strictly limited the conditions of labor for 14 and 15 year olds.
The struggle to end child labor, as we know, goes on today: The International Labor Organization (ILO) has estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and 14 work in developing countries—at least 120 million full time. Some children still labor today in the United States.
Wynthrop, who was so inspired by the Hine photo she wrote a novel about Addie Card, Counting on Grace, learned Addie had no idea of the legacy she left nor of the impact of her image, which resonates even today.
Addie never knew that her face ended up in a Reebok advertisement or on a postage stamp issued 100 years after her birth, or that Hine’s glass plate negative resides in the Library of Congress. Addie Card LaVigne never knew that she had become a symbol.
The Hine image of Addie Card remains the face of child labor. The life of the adult Addie Card-LaVigne, surviving through the support of a social safety net whose creation in the 1930s and 1940s alleviated the hardships for the working poor, should be a sting to the conscious of those who today would return the United States to a time when millionaires—and the government officials who do their bidding—literally closed their windows.
See: Todd Postel, “Public Health and Working Children in Twentieth-Century America: An Historical Overview,” Journal of Public Health Policy, Autumn 1993.
No Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
