CHAPTER XI

THE WORLD OF THE CHILD WORKERS

“No, we can’t go to school, much as we’d like to. You see, school holds only a few weeks each year and we have to help with the tobacco.”

This was the reply of a twelve-year-old girl to a question regarding her school work. She also informed the visitor that helping with the tobacco meant doing everything that was necessary to be done from the time the plants are set out until the leaves are finally cured. While the conversation was going on, this girl’s eight-year-old sister came out of the barn, and the visitor said:

“Do you help with the tobacco, too?”

“Yep,” was her reply, “I jest now been out wormin’ it.”

When asked what she meant by that she was utterly amazed that any one could be so ignorant as not to know that tobacco had to be wormed. To display her efficiency, she showed a tomato-can nearly full of worms that she had just brought in from the tobacco-field. To prove the quality of her catch, she held up a nice fat one and even offered to let the visitor take it if he so desired.

The Burley tobacco is made into plugs for chewing and is used in pipes. It is grown very extensively in central Kentucky. It was on one of these tobacco farms that this conversation took place. The worm that infests the plant looks like a caterpillar with a smooth skin. A small boy described it as a “bald-headed caterpillar.” It has huge eyes and is twice the size of the woolly caterpillar. These creatures crawl all over the plants, and, because of their size and their voracious appetite, unless they are closely looked after, soon destroy all the leaves. The plants cannot be sprayed with poison for obvious reasons. The only prevention is to have the worms picked off by hand. This work falls to the lot of the boys and girls in the district. It is not a very congenial task, and it is hard work for the children stooping and raising the leaves as they toil all day in the burning sun. The little girls wore their sunbonnets tied under their chins but pushed back on their necks. They were barefooted and carried a tin can in one hand to hold the worms. They followed down each row peering under the leaves and picking off the worms. “Wormin’ time” came just at the period when they ought to have been in school, but the tobacco had to be saved.

=The Beet-Fields.= There is a settlement of Russians near Billings, Montana. The fathers, mothers, and all the children work in the beet-fields. The work commences early in the spring when the beets have to be thinned out. Apparently no child is too young to pull beets. I saw boys in the beet-fields hoeing and the hoe-handle was almost as big as their little bare legs. When the crop is ready to harvest, the dirt is loosened about the beets and then they are pulled out by hand. The dirt is knocked off the roots and they are thrown to one side so that when a row of beets has been pulled they look like hay in a windrow. This work is heavy and hard, for a beet will average from seven to eight pounds, and by the time a person has lifted them all day long from five in the morning to seven at night, he has lifted several tons. After the beets are laid in rows they have to be topped with a strong, broad-bladed knife with a hook at the end. The beet is held against the knee of the worker, and with one stroke of the knife the top is severed from the root. In the beet-fields the beauties of nature are reduced to a dull round of production. According to a report made by the National Labor Committee there are five thousand children working in the beet-fields. “Money and not children is evidently the chief concern of these families” is the testimony given in the report made by Miss Ruth McIntire. She says: “An eleven-year-old girl was found, who with her sister aged seven, was kept out of school to work in the beet-field, although her family boasted that they had made ten thousand dollars last year from their farm. A certain parent declared to a school principal that his boy was worth $1,000 for work during the beet season. If he went to school he was nothing but an expense.”[6]

[6] “Children in Agriculture,” by Ruth McIntire, a pamphlet published by the National Child Labor Committee.

=Mills, Factories, and Workshops.= With the development of the cotton-mill there was opened up a wide field for the exploitation of childhood. The spools full of thread have to be put on the machine and the empty spools removed. Boys and girls of six and eight years can do this work even better than a grown man or woman. One worker in a mill can take care of several machines, and if there is a child to care for the spools the machines can be run very economically, and the profits will be large. Children are used in works and on the breakers in the coal-mines. In one of the silver-mills in the Cœur d’Alene mining district boys stand on the platform alongside the incline down which the ore rushes in a ceaseless stream going into the breakers. As it passes down their quick eyes detect the rocks, and especially the hard round stones that get mixed up with ore. These they pick out and throw to one side. This is a boy’s job. He can do it better than a man. Thus all modern processes of industry seem to be at work to make easy the utilization of the immature and the unskilled.

=Why Child Labor.= Because the machine produces so much it is possible to pay the child worker a wage that seems large in comparison to what a man would receive. The father of a boy who worked in one of the cotton-mills said, “I can make a dollar and seventy-five cents a day; but my nine-year-old kid makes anywhere from eighty cents to one dollar a day.” The quick returns from child labor appeal to the selfishness of the manufacturer as well as to the greed of the father and mother. It is not good business to have a man do anything that a machine can do; nor is it good business to put a man to work on a job that a boy can do just as well as a man. This is the dictate of business. Children are an expense, and with the increased cost of living there is always a temptation to utilize the children in the family as economic assets. “I have three children,” said a father in an Indiana town, “and all of them are working. We are about as happy a family as you want to find anywhere. Every month we are able to put a tidy sum in the savings-bank. Every member of the family is doing his or her full share. But now on the other hand, my brother has four children and not one of them is earning a cent. The oldest girl had to have a college education and that is just a drain on the family. Poor George has never known a moment’s ease or peace all of his life, what with an extravagant wife and four children eating their heads off!”

“Children are a blessing from the Lord,” says an old writer. But the modern interpretation is that they are industrial units that can be utilized to advantage. Another reason for child labor, however, is found in the stress of poverty. Here is the story told by another father: “I love my children just as much as anybody in the city and I would like to see them have a good time. Joe is selling papers on the street, May working as cash-girl in a dry-goods store, Frankie clerking in a five-and-ten-cent store, and William working in a pencil factory--but not just because I do not care to provide for them. You see it is this way. My folks were poor and there were nine of us children. When I was eight years old I had to go to work. To begin with I got good wages for a boy, and until I was eighteen or nineteen years old I got along all right. Just about that time other fellows came in that had more than twelve dollars a week. I began at six dollars. Now I am nearly fifty, and am already considered an old man, and I am getting forty dollars a month. How can I support my children and give them an education such as they ought to have?” This indicates the vicious circle that is formed between poverty and childhood. Poverty forces children into industry. They help out for the time being but it is not very long before they have used up all their initiative, and have gone just as far as they can go; and as they grow older their wages are reduced, and in turn their children have to go into the mills to help them out.

=Poverty and the Cost of Living.= Poverty is the chief enemy of humanity. It is the parent of nearly all of our ills. This is the demon that drives bad bargains. For the present the high wages that are being paid for labor everywhere has done away with a great deal of poverty; but even yet wages have not been advanced in proportion to the increased cost of living. Last fall in Scranton a gentleman whom I met was bitterly complaining of the high price of coal. “If it is so high now what in the world will the poor people of the city do when the cold weather really comes?” Scranton is built on the largest anthracite coal deposit in the world. It is said that in some places the vein is seventy-five feet thick. It is estimated that at the present rate of production the supply will last for one hundred years. If, therefore, the poor people of Scranton suffer for lack of coal what about the people in other places? We learned last winter how essential coal is to the life of the people. Combinations all tend to keep the prices high; our foodstuffs, our fuel, our clothes are high, not because of the law of supply and demand, for we have learned how to circumvent that law, but we are all “jobbed by the jobbers.”

Cold storage enables vast quantities of goods to be brought together and kept for a rise in the market. James E. Wetz, the so-called egg-king of Chicago, boasted early last winter that he had six million dozen eggs in storage, and in defiance of the Federal Prosecutor said, “All the investigation, legislative or otherwise, will not bring the price of eggs down this year. This is a broker’s year and as for me I am going to sit tight, watch the prices climb up, and the public can pay. Nobody can do anything to me.” In the French Revolution the queen appealed to one of the superintendents of finance and urged him to bring about a change, for the people were starving. He was obdurate, however, and in despair she said to him, “What will the people eat?” The contemptuous statement of the French official was, “Let the people eat grass.” With the increased cost of living, and the manipulation of the market so as to keep prices always above a certain level, the present rise in wages is not as great as under ordinary circumstances. As long as there is poverty there will always be a strong incentive for the piratical industrial agent and the greedy conscienceless father to join hands in exploiting childhood.

=Effect of Child Labor.= The children of the nations at war have been called the second line of national defense. The men in the front line are the soldiers and the children growing up will take their places. If the childhood of the nations at war is destroyed, there is no chance for men to take the places of the ones who fall at the front. It is perfectly clear then that in times of war the nations are dependent upon the growing boys. If, however, the children in times of war form the second line of defense, in times of peace they form the first line of defense. The future of a nation is in the hands of the boys and girls of the present generation. They are the men and women that will take the places of the business men, the workers in the factories and workshops, and the tillers of the soil. They must become the future people who will be responsible for transportation, producers of the raw materials of civilization, and those who with cunning hands and ingenious brains work these raw materials into finished fabrics that go to make up the wonders of civilization and of the age. We are robbing the nation when we set children to work and make producers out of them.

=Physical Evils.= The effects of child labor are so bad and so well known that there is no need of entering into a formal discussion of the question. I taught a class of boys in a settlement in Chicago some years ago. One of the little fellows had hands that were as black as a Negro’s, and he always held his hand in a certain position. One night after class I asked him to wait for a few minutes. I said, “Just a minute, Fred. I notice that you always hold your hand in a peculiar way.” “Gee, it is the only way I can hold it,” he replied. Then he showed me that his fingers were all pressed out of shape and that the black stain was ink that had been ground into his hand and into his very flesh. This boy looked to be about twelve years old but he was nearly nineteen. For almost nine years he had been working in a box factory. His job was to stencil the ends of boxes. He would lay the stencil on the wooden end of the boxes, then hold a brush resembling a shaving brush in his hand and this he would dip into the pot of black and rub it across the stencil. This constant work for ten hours a day for nine years had blackened his hands so that they would never be white again; and the constant pressure from the brush had deformed his right hand so that it was good for nothing else than to hold a stencil brush.

Nearly all the unemployable men who gather in our cities, who sleep on the park benches in good weather, eat wherever they can, and in cold weather fill up the municipal lodging houses or sleep upon the floors of the police stations, are physically unfit because they were forced to go to work at too early an age. The number of these men who are the victims of child labor is remarkable. A student of social conditions, who made a study of the problem of unemployment in this country in the winter of 1913-14 said, “We are coming to see the rank folly of putting children in at one end of the industrial hopper, grinding them up, and taking inefficient, no-account men out at the other end. We have thousands of children in the country doing work that they ought not to do, and hundreds of thousands of men who can get nothing to do. We are not only faced with the problem to-day, but we are projecting the problem into to-morrow.”

An accurate study of the life of the cotton-mill operators shows that the death-rate is so high that the inference is justified that work in the mill has an unfortunate influence upon those who follow it. Approximately half of the deaths of the operatives between fifteen and forty-five years of age are due to tuberculosis. Some years ago a book was published in defense of child labor in the South. The contention was that the workers in the cotton-mill were the most healthful of any people in the community. A report made by the United States government on the conditions in the mills shows that beyond any doubt the mill is a hazardous place for an adult, to say nothing of the child. In Massachusetts, according to reports quoted by Florence I. Taylor of the National Committee on Child Labor, it was found that the average fourteen-year-old mill boy was decidedly below standard in weight and height; and that the sixteen-year-old boys did not show a normal gain in height over the fifteen-year-old boys, and actually decreased two and a half pounds in average weight. “It was evident from the physical examination alone,” said the report, “that there were boys whose interests from the point of view of physical welfare called for further attention after being permitted to go to work, whatever the work for which an employment certificate might be issued.”

In the printing trades, in the paint shops, in glass works, in coal-mines, in fact, in every place where children are employed, we find the physical effects all bad. The undeveloped boy or girl is more susceptible to diseases that are inherent in the several businesses themselves. For instance, lead attacks a child worker more quickly than it would an adult. The fumes inhaled and the substances breathed in affect the child, and owing to the demands put upon his physical strength by his growing body it is difficult for nature to throw off the bad effects of these poisons.

=Child Labor and Education.= Another evil is the loss of educational opportunities. “There is plenty of time for the children to go to school,” is a common saying among fathers and mothers. “I will send Mary to school next year,” said a farmer in Oklahoma. “She wants to go on with her class. I cannot see that it makes any great difference whether she gets her learning this year or next.” Mary was fourteen years old and we have no record of Mary’s career, but it is quite probable that she never got a chance to go back to school. The school promised to boys and girls who are being used in gainful occupations is like the promise that St. Patrick made to the snakes in Ireland after he had put them all into a box. He promised that he would let them out to-morrow, but to-morrow never came, according to the old Irish legend.

A returning visitor from Russia tells us that the cause of Russia’s collapse is to be found in the ignorance of the people. Only one per cent. of the people are able to read and write. In the midst of this dense ignorance the peasant groups believe everything and nothing; are easily influenced by anything no matter how unsubstantial, passionate, cruel, brutish. No wonder that Russia presents one of the most pitiable spectacles of any nation in the world’s history. There is serious danger that in America we will produce a rural peasantry that is ignorant, and if such should be the case, there will grow up with this ignorance a narrow-minded prejudice against everything that we think is worth while in life. Education is the hope of this nation as well as that of every other nation.

=What of Disposition and Character?= Child labor has a bad effect on the disposition. It crushes initiative from the group, and while it will develop a type of leadership in the future, the leadership is not that of free, broad-minded Americans, but is self-assertive cheap, tricky, and clannishly shrewd. For instance, I was told that the children attending school in an Arkansas city who came from the mill district were the leaders in all the sports. I asked some of the boys about this, and named to them several who I had been told were leaders. The reply was that these fellows were not leaders but were bullies. “No matter what we play, they want to run everything, and if we do not do what they want us to do, we have a fuss.” The struggle in the mill and the bearing of responsibilities had led the mill boys to rely upon themselves. They knew that they could never get anything unless they got it for themselves and by the most direct and brutal means. In an age when a new emphasis is being put upon cooperation any power that warps the disposition and creates wrong ideals is a real menace.

=Robbers of Childhood.= “Ketch,” cried a small lad as he turned with the ball in his hand just as he was entering the mill door at the end of the thirty minute noon period of freedom. The boy to whom he had called, and who had been playing ball with him during this period raised his hands preparatory to catching the ball. Then he dropped them to his side and said, “Naw, don’t throw it, else we’ll get fined for not comin’ in on time after the whistle blew.” No time for play! Thirty minutes for lunch and out of that thirty minutes these boys had taken as much as possible for a game of ball. By night they would be so tired that there would be no inclination to play. They would stand around and talk a little, or sit on the front porch for an hour after supper, and then crawl into bed and sleep until aroused by the whistle of the factory early in the morning. This was the life of these children. The only period in their lives when they might have been free was taken away from them and they were made to work in the mills of industry, grinding out the raw materials of civilization which go into the very foundation of our society, and grinding out at the same time the joy of life and the possibilities of ever being able to gain the best that life holds in store for them.

=A National Evil.= East, west, north, and south we have been robbing children on every hand. California canners deplore the conditions among the child workers in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts those who employ children find excuses for themselves in the laws of the state, and in the traditions of New England, but they have no good thing to say about conditions in the mills of the South. In the South it is easy to find men who are responsible for the children working who see nothing but good evolution of the family from bad rural conditions to a condition of comparative opulence in their mill cities, but who can see nothing good in the child labor as it is found in the coal-mines in Pennsylvania and the beet-fields of the Northwest. In Montana and Nebraska the farmer everywhere will tell you that “Nothing is so good for a child as to work in the beet-fields. It makes a man of him quicker than anything else.”

=The Unfinished Task.= When the Federal Child Labor Law was passed which prohibited the shipping of any goods in interstate commerce that had been manufactured by child labor, a great many people foolishly thought that the last trench was taken and the final victory won in behalf of the children. Now that this law has been declared unconstitutional we will have to begin the fight for its reenactment in terms that will be in accord with the constitution of the United States. This law was a great advance over anything we have ever had before. While it held, it released thousands of children from toil, but there were still employed in small towns, in villages, and in the rural communities boys and girls in domestic service, as bootblacks, as newsboys, as messenger boys, and at work in stores and local shops. According to the last census in the United States, 1,990,225 children under fifteen years of age are at work at some gainful occupation and 895,976 of these children are thirteen or under. Advanced legislation has been taken in most of the states, but as the standards of such legislation rise in the different states it becomes clear that with the reenactment of the child labor law further steps must be taken for the protection of children against exploitation. For instance, the child labor law can be administered effectively and for the best good of the child only in connection with compulsory education laws. It is futile, and dangerous as well, to take the children out of the mills and leave them in idleness upon the streets. Higher and better health standards must be raised and safeguards thrown about the home and school life of the children. Owen Lovejoy says, “The physical development of children securing employment is quite as important as their age.”

=The War and Childhood.= The war has put a new emphasis upon the value of children as industrial assets, and many states attempted to rescind the laws protecting children so that they might be allowed to work in the munition factories as a war measure. England had her experience. Schools suffered, juvenile delinquency grew, and chaos resulted from the short-sighted policy of those who wanted children to help out in a time of need. An English periodical is quoted as saying, “When the farmers clamored for boys and girls at the outbreak of the war, it was ‘for a few weeks only,’ and ‘to save the harvest.’ The few weeks have spread out to a few years; and a few years cover all the brief period ‘’twixt boy and man’ when character is molded, education completed, and skill of hand and eye and intellect acquired. Even in the time of peace one of our statesmen said that one of the most urgent national problems was how to check the evils by which too many of our bright, clean, clever boys leaving school at the ages of thirteen or fourteen, had become ignorant and worthless hooligans at seventeen or eighteen. Much has been done in recent years by patient, skilful endeavor to stanch this wound in the body politic; but now all is reversed and the hooligan harvest promises to be truly plenteous. The victims are of two classes. First, the little children taken from school at illegal ages for a few weeks under promises that their interrupted school time should be completed later on--a ‘later on’ which was never really practicable, and is now frankly abandoned. Secondly, the boys and girls, who, having completed their legal school attendance, would normally have gone to learn a trade, and would by a few years of patient training and industry at small wages have made themselves skilled workers and worthy citizens. But training for any future efficiency, either industrial, social, or moral, has been brushed aside by the necessities or the hysteria of war time.” It remains to be seen whether we will learn the lesson from Britain’s experience.

=The Church’s Part.= There is no one thing in which the church should be so much interested as in the welfare of the children. When Jesus was asked who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, he took a little child and set him in the midst of the disciples. If any one offends a child, he said, it were better for him that “a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were thrown into the sea.” Entrance into his kingdom was dependent upon a childlike attitude, and the measure of rewards and punishments was to be meted out according to the treatment of children by the individual man and woman.

“Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or athirst?” is the question which we must ask. “Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me,” is the promised reply. The program of the church relating to the children is perfectly simple and plain. Each church should keep in close touch with the work of the National Committee on Child Labor. Information can be secured by writing to the Secretary, Owen R. Lovejoy, 105 East Twenty-second Street, New York. One Sunday in each year, the fourth Sunday in January, is set aside as Child Labor Sunday. Every church should take pains to observe this day and make it a time when the members of the church will be made acquainted with the work being done by the Child Labor Committee; and should strive to understand the conditions concerning the child laborers of America, and the plans and purposes that are being devised for meeting needs and for protecting our nation’s greatest asset. Child Labor Sunday was observed in nearly 10,000 churches last year.

The child laborer suffers because we do not know about him. His life is lived in a world apart. While he is producing the things that we accept, we have forgotten or passed over lightly the needs of the producer himself. The war puts a new responsibility upon us. Its agony and suffering have made us seemingly callous to suffering and we stand in grave danger of losing our power to sympathize. It is during such periods as these that the hard won gains of generations may be lost. We have gone far in our legislation for the protection of children since the days when the Earl of Shaftsbury first began his work for the poor boys of London. Much remains to be done. The church cannot slacken its efforts nor clear its skirts of responsibility if it does not exert every effort and put forth all its strength to pass new legislation, and steadfastly to set its face against every effort to break down existing laws or set them aside even as a temporary measure.

The battle for democracy cannot be won, and will not be won, even with the destruction of German autocracy if we allow the bulwark that has been built up for the protection of the children of democracy to be torn down.