(2)
Robert Hunter, Poverty (1904)
On cold, rainy mornings, at the dusk of dawn, I have been
awakened, two hours before my rising time, by the monotonous clatter
of hobnailed boots on the plank sidewalks, as the procession to
the factory passed under my window. Heavy, brooding men, tired,
anxious women, thinly dressed, unkempt little girls, and frail,
joyless little lads passed along, half awake, not one uttering
a word as they hurried to the great factory. From all directions
thousands were entering the various gates - children of every
nation of Europe.
(3)
Kate Richards O'Hare, wrote an article
on child labour that was published in Appeal
to Reason. The material on Roselie Randazzo, an Italian
immigrant, was collected while she worked in an artificial
flower factory in New York City (19th
November, 1904)
Walking up the steps I came upon Roselie,
the little Italian girl who sat next to me at the long work table.
Roselie, whose fingers were the most deft in the shop and whose
blue-black curls and velvety eyes I had almost envied as I often
wondered why nature should have bestowed so much more than an
equal share of beauty on the little Italian. Overtaking her I
noticed she clung to the banister with one hand and held a crumpled
mitten to the lips with the other. As we entered the cloak room
she noticed my look of sympathy and weakly smiling said in broken
English. "Oh, so cold! It hurta me here," and she laid
her hand on her throat.
Seated at the long table the forelady brought a great box of the
most exquisite red satin roses, and glancing sharply at Roselie
said; "I hope you're not sick this morning; we must have
these roses and you are the only one who can do them; have them
ready by noon."
Soon a busy hum filled the room and in the hurry and excitement
of my work I forgot Roselie until a shrill scream from the little
Jewess across the table reached me and I turned in time to see
Roselie fall forward among the flowers. As I lifted her up the
hot blood spurted from her lips, staining my hands and spattering
the flowers as it fell.
The blood-soaked roses were gathered up, the forelady grumbling
because many were ruined, and soon the hum of industry went on
as before. But I noticed that one of the great red roses had a
splotch of red in its golden heart, a tiny drop of Rosie's heart's
blood and the picture of the rose was burned in my brain.
The next morning I entered the grim, gray portals of Bellevue
Hospital and asked for Roselie. "Roselie Randazzo,"
the clerk read from the great register. "Roselie Randazzo,
seventeen; lives East Fourth street; taken from Marks' Artificial
Flower Factory; hemorrhage; died 12.30 p.m." When I said
that it was hard that she should die, so young and so beautiful,
the clerk answered: "Yes, that's true, but this climate is
hard on the Italians; and if the climate don't finish them the
sweat shops or flower factories do," and then he turned to
answer the questions of the woman who stood beside me and the
life story of the little flower maker was finished.
(4)
In October, 1908, Mary Mother Jones
wrote about child labour in the socialist
journal, Appeal
to Reason
. The article dealt with the factory owner, Braxton
Comer, the Governor of Alabama who owned a large textile mill
near Birmingham.
It had been thirteen years since I bid farewell to the workers
in Alabama, and went forth to other fields to fight their battles.
I returned in 1908 to see what they were doing for the welfare
of their children. Governor Cromer, being the chief star of the
state, I went to Abdale, on the outskirts of Birmingham, to take
a glance at his slave pen. I found there somewhere between five
and six hundred slaves. The governor, who in his generous nature
could provide money for Jesus, reduced the wages of his slaves
first 10 per cent and then 16.
As the wretches were already up against starvation, a few of them
struck, and I went with an organizer and the editor of the editor
of the Labor Advocate to help organize the slaves into a union
of their craft. I addressed the body, and after I got through
quite a large number became members of the Textile Workers Union.
When I was in Alabama thirteen years ago, they had no child labor
law. Since then they passed a very lame one. They evade the law
in this way: a child who has passed his or her twelfth year can
take in his younger brothers or sisters from six years on, and
got them to work with him. They are not on the pay roll, but the
pay for these little ones goes into the elder one's pay. So that
when you look at the pay roll you think this one child makes quite
a good bit when perhaps there are two or three younger than he
under the lash.
One woman told me that her mother had gone into that mill and
worked, and took four children with her. She says, "I have
been in the mill since I was four years old. I am now thirty-four."
She looked to me as if she was sixty. She had a kindly nature
if treated right, but her whole life and spirit was crushed out
beneath the iron wheels of Comer's greed. When you think of the
little ones that his mother brings forth you can see how society
is cursed with an abnormal human being. She knew nothing but the
whiz of a machinery in the factory.
The wives, mothers and the children all go in to produce dividends,
profit, profit, profit. The brutal governor is a pillar of the
First Methodist church in Birmingham. On Sunday he gets up and
sings, "O Lord will you have another star for my crown when
I get there?"
I saw the little ones lying on the bed shaking with chills and
I could hear them ask parent and masters, what they were here
for; what crime they had committed that they were brought here
and sold to the dividend auctioneer.
The high temperature of the mills combined with an abnormal humidity
of the air produced by steaming as done by manufacturers makes
bad material weave easier and tends to diminish the workers' power
of resisting disease. The humid atmosphere promotes perspiration,
but makes evaporation from the skin more difficult; and in this
condition the operator, when he leaves the mill, has to face a
much reduced temperature which produces serious chest infections.
They are all narrow-chested, thin, disheartened looking.
(5)
The Manufacturers Record published an article against attempts
to bring an end to child labor (4th September, 1924)
This proposed amendment is fathered by Socialists, Communists,
and Bolshevists. They are the active workers in its favor. They
look forward to its adoption as giving them the power to nationalize
the children of the land and bring about in this country the exact
conditions which prevail in Russia. These people are the active
workers back of this undertaking, but many patriotic men and women,
without at all realizing the seriousness of this proposition,
thinking only
of it as an effort to lessen child labor in factories, are giving
countenance to it.
If adopted, this amendment
would be the greatest thing ever done in America in behalf of
the activities of hell. It would make millions of young people
under eighteen years of age idlers in brain and body, and thus
make them the devil's best workshop. It would destroy the initiative
and self-reliance and manhood and womanhood of all the coming
generations.
A solemn responsibility
to this country and to all future generations rests upon every
man and woman who understands this situation to fight, and fight
unceasingly, to make the facts known to their acquaintances everywhere.
Aggressive work is needed. It would be worse than folly for people
who realize the danger of this situation to rest content under
the belief that the amendment cannot become a part of our Constitution.
The only thing that can prevent its adoption will be active, untiring
work on the part
of every man and woman who appreciates its destructive power and
who wants to save the young people of all future generations from
moral and physical decay under the domination of the devil himself.
(6)
Florence Kelley, Survey Magazine
(June, 1927)
Hull House was, we soon discovered, surrounded in every direction
by homework carried on under the sweating system. From the age
of eighteen months few children able to sit in high chairs at
tables were safe from being required to pull basting threads.
Out of this enquiry, amplified by Hull House residents and other
volunteers, grew the volume published under the title Hull House
Maps and Papers. One map showed the distribution of the polyglot
peoples. Another exhibited their incomes indicated in colours,
ranging from gold which meant twenty dollars or more total a week
for a family, to black which was five dollars or less total family
income. There were precious little gold and a superabundance of
black on that income map!
The discoveries as to home work under the sweating system thus
recorded and charted in 1892 led to the appointment at the opening
of the legislature of 1893, of a legislative commission of enquiry
into employment of women and children in manufacture, for which
Mary Kenney and I volunteered as guides. With backing from labour,
from Hull House, from Henry Demarest Lloyd and his friends, the
Commission and the report carried almost without opposition a
bill applying to manufacture, and prescribing a maximum working
day not to exceed eight hours for women, girls, and children,
together with child labour safeguards based on laws then existing
in New York and Ohio.
When the new law took effect, and its usefulness depended on the
personnel prescribed in the text to enforce it, Governor Altgeld
offered the position of chief inspector to Henry Demarest Lloyd,
who declined it and recommended me. I was accordingly made chief
state inspector of factories, the first and so far as I know,
the only woman to serve in that office in any state.
(7)
Jane Addams, Newer Ideals (1907)
There are, in the United States, according to the latest census
(1900), 580,000 children between the ages of ten and fourteen
years, who cannot read nor write. They are not the immigrant children.
They are our own native-born children. We have two millions under
the age of sixteen who are earning their own livings.
(8)
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull
House (1910)
Our very first Christmas at Hull House, when we as yet knew nothing
of child labor, a number of little girls refused the candy which
was offered them as part of the Christmas good cheer, saying simply
that they "worked in a candy factory and could not bear the
sight of it." We discovered that for six weeks they had worked
from seven in the morning until nine at night, and they were exhausted
as well as satiated.
In a recent investigation of two hundred working girls it was
found that only five per cent had the use of their own money and
that sixty-two per cent turned in all they earned, literally every
penny, to their mothers. It was through this little investigation
that we first knew Marcella, a pretty young German girl who helped
her widowed mother year after year to care for a large family
of younger children. She was content for the most part although
her mother's old-country notions of dress gave her but an infinitesimal
amount of her own wages to spend on her clothes, and she was quite
sophisticated as to proper dressing because she sold silk in a
neighborhood department store. Her mother approved of the young
man who was showing her various attentions and agreed that Marcella
should accept his invitation to a ball, but would allow her not
a penny toward a new gown to replace one impossibly plain and
shabby. Marcella spent a sleepless night and wept bitterly, although
she well knew that the doctor's bill for the children's scarlet
fever was not yet paid. The next day as she was cutting off three
yards of shining pink silk, the thought came to her that it would
make her a fine new waist to wear to the ball. She wistfully saw
it wrapped in paper and carelessly stuffed into the muff of the
purchaser, when suddenly the parcel fell upon the floor. No one
was looking and quick as a flash the girl picked it up and pushed
it into her blouse. The theft was discovered by the relentless
department store detective who, for "the sake of example,"
insisted upon taking the case into court. The poor mother wept
bitter tears over this downfall of her "frommes Mädchen"
and no one had the heart to tell her of her own blindness.
(9)
Florence Kelley and Alzina
Stevens, Hull House Maps and Papers (1895)
The Nineteenth Ward of Chicago is perhaps the best district
in all Illinois for a detailed study of child labour, both because
it contains many factories in which children are employed, and
because it is the dwelling-place of wage-earning children engaged
in all lines of activity.
The largest number of children to be found in any one factory
in Chicago is in a caramel works in this ward, where there are
from one hundred and ten to two hundred little girls, four to
twelve boys, and seventy to one hundred adults, according to the
season of the year. The building is a six-story brick, well-lighted,
with good plumbing and fair ventilation. It has, however, no fire
escape, and a single wooden stair leading from floor to floor.
In case of fire the inevitable fate of the children working on
the two upper floors is too horrible to contemplate.
In the stores of the West Side, large numbers of young girls are
employed thirteen hours a day throughout the week, and fifteen
hours on Saturday: and all efforts of the clothing-clerks to shorten
the working-time by trade-union methods have hitherto availed
but little.
Bennie Kelman, a Russian Jew, four years in Chicago, was found
running a heavy sewing-machine by foot-power in a sweat-shop of
the nineteenth ward where knee-pants are made. A health certificate
was required, and the medical examination revealed a severe rupture.
Careful questioning of the boy and his mother elicited the fact
that he had been put to work in a boiler factory two years before,
when just thirteen years old, and had injured himself lifting
masses of iron. Nothing had been done for the case; no one in
the family spoke any English, or knew how help could be obtained.
The legislation needed is: (1) The minimum age for work fixed
at sixteen; (2) School attendance made compulsory to the same
age; (3) Factory inspectors and truant officers, both men and
women, equipped with adequate salaries and travelling expenses,
charged with the duty of removing children from mill and workshop,
mine and store, and placing them in school; 94) Ample provision
for school accommodations; money supplied by the State through
the school authorities for the support of such orphans, half-orphans,
and children of the unemployed as are now kept out of school by
destitution.
(10)
Edwin
Markham, Cosmopolitan
(January, 1907)
In unaired rooms, mothers and fathers sew by day and by
night. Those
in the home sweatshop must work cheaper than those in the factory
sweatshops.
And the children are
called in from play to drive and drudge beside their elders.
All the year in New
York and in other cities you may watch children radiating to and
from such pitiful homes. Nearly any hour on the East Side of New
York City you can see them - pallid boy or spindling girl - their
faces dulled, their backs bent under a heavy load of garments
piled on head and shoulders, the muscles of the whole frame in
a long strain.
Is it not a cruel
civilization that allows little hearts and little shoulders to
strain under these grown-up responsibilities, while in the same
city, a pet cur is jeweled and pampered and aired on a fine lady's
velvet lap on the beautiful
boulevards?
(11)
Oscar Neebe, Autobiography of Oscar
Neebe (1887)
I worked in a factory where they made oil cans and tea-caddies.
This was the first place where I saw children from 8 to 12 years
old work like slaves, working on machines; most every day it happened
that a finger or hand was cut off, but what did it matter, they
were paid off and sent home, and others would take their places.
I believed that children working in factories has for the last
twenty years made more cripples than the war with the south, and
the cut off fingers and mangled bodies brought gold to the monopolies
and manufacturers. How often has the sweat of a poor man or child
paid for the silk dress of a kept woman of these men, whose only
desire is "to have lots of fun and a good time."
(12)
John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (1906)
The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children.
In the cotton trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons
employed throughout the United States are under sixteen years
of age. In the Southern states, where the evil appears at its
worst, so far as the textile trades are concerned, the proportion
of employees under sixteen years of
age in 1900 was 25.1 per cent, in Alabama the proportion was nearly
30 per cent. A careful estimate made in 1902 placed the number
of cotton-mill operatives under sixteen years of age in the Southern
states at 50,000. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative
estimate placed the number of children under fourteen employed
in the cotton mills of the South at 30,000, no less than 20,000
of them being under twelve. If this latter estimate of 20,000
children under twelve is to be relied upon, it is evident that
the total number under fourteen must have been much larger than
30,000. According to Mr. McKelway, one of the most competent authorities
in the country, there are at the present time not less than 60,000
children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of the Southern
states. Miss Jane Addams tells of finding a child of five years
working by night in a South Carolina mill; Mr. Edward Gardner
Murphy has photographed little children of six and seven years
who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day in Alabama
mills. In Columbia, S. C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have seen hundreds
of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or ten years
of age, at work in the mills, by night as well as by day.
One
evening, not long ago, I stood outside of a large flax mill in
Paterson, New Jersey, while it disgorged its crowd of men, women,
and children employees. All the afternoon, as I lingered in the
tenement district near the mills, the comparative silence of the
streets oppressed me. There were many babies and very small children,
but the older children, whose boisterous play one expects in such
streets, were wanting.
At six o'clock the
whistles shrieked, and the streets were suddenly filled with people,
many of them mere children. Of all the crowd of tired, pallid,
and languid-looking children I could only get speech with one,
a little girl who claimed thirteen years, though she was smaller
than many a child of ten. Indeed, as I think of her now, I doubt
whether she would have come up to the standard of normal physical
development either in weight or stature for a child of ten. One
learns, however, not to judge the ages of working children by
their physical appearance, for they are usually behind other children
in height, weight, and girth of chest, - often as much two or
three years. If my little Paterson friend was thirteen, perhaps
the nature of her employment will explain her puny, stunted body.
She works in the "steaming room" of the flax mill. All
day long, in a room filled
with clouds of steam, she has to stand barefooted in pools of
water twisting
coils of wet hemp. When I saw her she was dripping wet though
she said that she had worn a rubber apron all day. In the coldest
evenings of winter little Marie, and hundreds of other little
girls, must go out from the superheated steaming rooms into the
bitter cold in just that condition. No wonder that such children
are stunted and underdeveloped.
