Braxton
Comer was born in Spring Hill, Barbour, on 7th November, 1848. After
graduating from the University of Alabama and the University of Georgia,
Comer became a banker.
Comer invested in several different businesses including a cotton
plantation and a textile factory. In 1890 he moved to Birmingham,
Alabama and served as president of the Railroad Commission of Alabama
(1905-06).
Comer, a member of the Democratic Party,
was elected as governor of Alabama in 1907. The following year, the
trade union leader, Mary
Mother Jones, wrote an article in the socialist
journal, Appeal to Reason, that
revealed that Comer was illegally employing young children in his
textile factories.
After retiring as governor in 1911, Comer concentrated on his business
interests. However, he did serve for a short time in the United States
Senate (March, 1920 to November, 1920). Braxton Comer died in Birmingham
on 15th August, 1927.
(1)
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.
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