Part 11

There are more than 80,000 children employed in the textile industries of the United States, according to the very incomplete census returns, most of them being little girls. In these industries conditions are undoubtedly worse in the Southern states than elsewhere, though I have witnessed many pitiable cases of child slavery in Northern mills which equalled almost anything I have ever seen in the South. During the Philadelphia textile workers’ strike in 1903, I saw at least a score of children ranging from eight to ten years of age who had been working in the mills prior to the strike. One little girl of nine I saw in the Kensington Labor Lyceum. She had been working for almost a year before the strike began, she said, and careful inquiry proved her story to be true. When “Mother” Mary Jones started with her little “army” of child toilers to march to Oyster Bay, in order that the President of the United States might see for himself some of the little ones who had actually been employed in the mills of Philadelphia, I happened to be engaged in assisting the strikers. For two days I accompanied the little “army” on its march, and thus had an excellent opportunity of studying the children. Amongst them were several from eight to eleven years of age, and I remember one little girl who was not quite eleven telling me with pride that she had “worked two years and never missed a day.”

One evening, not long ago, I stood outside of a large flax mill in Paterson, N.J., 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. “If thow’lt bide till th’ mills shut for th’ day, thow’lt see plenty on ’em—big kids as plenty as small taties,” said one old woman to whom I spoke about it. She was right. 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 as 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 super-heated steaming rooms into the bitter cold in just that condition. No wonder that such children are stunted and underdeveloped!

In textile mill towns like Biddeford, Me., Manchester, N.H., Fall River and Lawrence, Mass., I have seen many such children, who, if they were twelve or fourteen according to their certificates and the companies’ registers, were not more than ten or twelve in reality. I have watched them hurrying into and away from the mills, “those receptacles, in too many instances, for living human skeletons, almost disrobed of intellect,” as Robert Owen’s burning phrase describes them.[115] I do not doubt that, upon the whole, conditions in the textile industries are better in the North than in the South, but they are nevertheless too bad to permit of self-righteous boasting and complacency. And in several other departments of industry conditions are no whit better in the North than in the South. The child-labor problem is not sectional, but national.

V

Of the fifteen divisions of the manufacturing industries, the glass factories rank next to the textile factories in the number of children they employ. In the year 1900, according to the census returns, the average number of workers employed in glass manufacture was 52,818, of which number 3529, or 6.88 per cent, were women, and 7116, or 13.45 per cent, were children under sixteen years of age. It will be noticed that the percentage of children employed is about the same as in the textile trades. There are glass factories in many states, but the bulk of the industry is centred in Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio. The total value of the products of the glass industry in the United States in 1900 was $56,539,712, of which amount the four states named contributed $46,209,918, or 82.91 per cent of the entire value.[116] After careful investigation in a majority of the places where glass is manufactured in these four states, I am confident that the number of children employed is much larger than the census figures indicate.

Perhaps in none of the great industries is the failure to enforce the child-labor laws more general or complete than in the glass trade. There are several reasons for this, the most important, perhaps, being the distribution of the factories in small towns and rural districts, and the shifting nature of the industry itself. Fuel is the most important item in the cost of materials in the manufacture of glass, and the aim of the manufacturers is always to locate in districts where fuel is cheap and abundant. For this reason Pennsylvania has always ranked first in the list of glass-manufacturing states. Owing, mainly, to the discoveries of new supplies of natural gas in Indiana, the glass products of that state increased fourfold in value from 1890 to 1900.[117] When the supply of gas in a certain locality becomes exhausted, it is customary to remove the factories to more favorable places. A few rough wooden sheds are hastily built in the neighborhood of some good gas supplies, only to be torn down again as soon as these fail. Hence it happens that glass factories bring new industrial life into small towns and villages, which soon become to a very large extent dependent upon them. Almost unconsciously a feeling is developed that, “for the good of the town,” it will scarcely do to antagonize the glass manufacturers. I have heard this sentiment voiced by business men and others in several places. On the other hand, the manufacturers feel the strength of their position and constantly threaten to remove their plants if they are interfered with and prevented from getting boys.

I shall never forget my first visit to a glass factory at night. It was a big wooden structure, so loosely built that it afforded little protection from draughts, surrounded by a high fence with several rows of barbed wire stretched across the top. I went with the foreman of the factory and he explained to me the reason for the stockade-like fence. “It keeps the young imps inside once we’ve got ’em for the night shift,” he said. The “young imps” were, of course, the boys employed, about forty in number, at least ten of whom were less than twelve years of age. It was a cheap bottle factory, and the proportion of boys to men was larger than is usual in the higher grades of manufacture. Cheapness and child labor go together,—the cheaper the grade of manufacture, as a rule, the cheaper the labor employed. The hours of labor for the “night shift” were from 5.30 P.M. to 3.30 A.M. I stayed and watched the boys at their work for several hours, and when their tasks were done saw them disappear into the darkness and storm of the night. That night, for the first time, I realized the tragic significance of cheap bottles. One might well paraphrase Hood’s lines and say:—

“They are not bottles you idly break, But human creatures’ lives!”

In the middle of the room was a large round furnace with a number of small doors, three or four feet from the ground, forming a sort of belt around the furnace. In front of these doors the glass-blowers were working. With long wrought-iron blowpipes the blowers deftly took from the furnace little wads of waxlike molten “metal” which they blew into balls and then rolled on their rolling boards. These elongated rolls they dropped into moulds and then blew again, harder than before, to force the half-shaped mass into its proper form. With a sharp, clicking sound they broke their pipes away and repeated the whole process. There was not, of course, the fascination about their work that the more artistic forms of glass-blowing possess. There was none of that twirling of the blowpipes till they looked like so many magic wands which for centuries has made the glass-blower’s art a delightful, half-mysterious thing to watch. But it was still wonderful to see the exactness of each man’s “dip,” and the deftness with which they manipulated the balls before casting them into the moulds.

Then began the work of the boys. By the side of each mould sat a “take-out boy,” who, with tongs, took the half-finished bottles—not yet provided with necks—out of the moulds. Then other boys, called “snapper-ups,” took these bodies of bottles in their tongs and put the small ends into gas-heated moulds till they were red hot. Then the boys took them out with almost incredible quickness and passed them to other men, “finishers,” who shaped the necks of the bottles into their final form. Then the “carrying-in boys,” sometimes called “carrier pigeons,” took the red-hot bottles from the benches, three or four at a time, upon big asbestos shovels to the annealing oven, where they are gradually cooled off to insure even contraction and to prevent breaking in consequence of too rapid cooling. The work of these “carrying-in boys,” several of whom were less than twelve years old, was by far the hardest of all. They were kept on a slow run all the time from the benches to the annealing oven and back again. I can readily believe what many manufacturers assert, that it is difficult to get men to do this work, because men cannot stand the pace and get tired too quickly. It is a fact, however, that in many factories men are employed to do this work, especially at night. In other, more up-to-date factories it is done by automatic machinery. I did not measure the distance from the benches to the annealing oven, nor did I count the number of trips made by the boys, but my friend, Mr. Owen R. Lovejoy, has done so in a typical factory and very kindly furnished me with the results of his calculation.[118] The distance to the annealing oven in the factory in question was one hundred feet, and the boys made seventy-two trips per hour, making the distance travelled in eight hours nearly twenty-two miles. Over half of this distance the boys were carrying their hot loads to the oven. The pay of these boys varies from sixty cents to a dollar for eight hours’ work. About a year ago I gathered particulars of the pay of 257 boys in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the lowest pay was forty cents per night and the highest a dollar and ten cents, while the average was seventy-two cents.

In New Jersey, since 1903, the employment of boys under fourteen years of age is forbidden, but there is no restriction as to night work for boys of that age. In Pennsylvania boys of fourteen may work by night. In Ohio night work is prohibited for all under sixteen years of age, but so far as my personal observations, and the testimony of competent and reliable observers, enable me to judge, the law is not very effectively enforced in this respect in the glass factories. In Indiana the employment of children under fourteen in factories is forbidden. Women and girls are not permitted to work between the hours of 10 P.M. and 6 A.M., but there is no restriction placed upon the employment of boys fourteen years of age or over by night.[119]

The effects of the employment of young boys in glass factories, especially by night, are injurious from every possible point of view. The constant facing of the glare of the furnaces and the red-hot bottles causes serious injury to the sight; minor accidents from burning are common. “Severe burns and the loss of sight are regular risks of the trade in glass-bottle making,” says Mrs. Florence Kelley.[120] Even more serious than the accidents are those physical disorders induced by the conditions of employment. Boys who work at night do not as a rule get sufficient or satisfactory rest by day. Very often they cannot sleep because of the noises made by younger children in and around the house; more often, perhaps, they prefer to play rather than to sleep. Indeed, most boys seem to prefer night work, for the reason that it gives them the chance to play during the daytime. Even where the mothers are careful and solicitous, they find it practically impossible to control boys who are wage-earners and feel themselves to be independent. This lack of proper rest, added to the heat and strain of their work, produces nervous dyspepsia. From working in draughty sheds where they are often, as one boy said to me in Zanesville, O., “burning on the side against the furnace and pretty near freezing on the other,” they are frequently subject to rheumatism. Going from the heated factories to their homes, often a mile or so distant, perspiring and improperly clad, with their vitality at its lowest ebb, they fall ready victims to pneumonia and to its heir, the Great White Plague. In almost every instance when I have asked local physicians for their experience, they have named these as the commonest physical results. Of the fearful moral consequences there can be no question. The glass-blowers themselves realize this and, even more than the physical deterioration, it prevents them from taking their own children into the glass houses. One practically never finds the son of a glass-blower employed as a “snapper-up,” or “carrying-in boy,” unless the father is dead or incapacitated by reason of sickness. “I’d sooner see my boy dead than working here. You might as well give a boy to the devil at once as send him to a glass factory,” said one blower to me in Glassborough, N.J.; and that is the spirit in which most of the men regard the matter.

So great is the demand for boys that it is possible at almost any time for a boy to get employment for a single night. Indeed, “one shifters” are so common in some districts that the employers have found it necessary to institute a system of bonuses for those boys who work every night in a week. Out of this readiness to employ boys for a single night has grown a terrible evil,—boys attending school all day and then working in the factories by night. Many such cases have been reported to me, and Mrs. Van Der Vaart declares that “it is customary in Indiana for the school boys to work Thursday and Friday nights and attend school during the day.”[121] Mr. Lovejoy found the same practice in Steubenville, O., and other places.[122] Teachers in glass-manufacturing centres have repeatedly told me that among the older boys were some who, because of their employment by night in the factories, were drowsy and unable to receive any benefits from their attendance at school.

In some districts, especially in New Jersey, it has long been the custom to import boys from certain orphan asylums and “reformatories” to supply the demand of the manufacturers. These boys are placed in laborers’ families, and their board paid for by the employers, who deduct it from the boys’ wages. Thus a veritable system of child slavery has developed, remarkably like the old English pauper-apprentice system. “These imported boys are under no restraint by day or night,” says Mrs. Kelley, “and are wholly without control during the idle hours. They are in the streets in gangs, in and out of the police courts and the jails, a burden to themselves and to the community imposed by the demand of this boy-destroying industry.”[123] It is perhaps only indicative of the universal readiness of men to concern themselves with the mote in their brothers’ eyes without considering the beam in their own, that I should have attended a meeting in New Jersey where the child labor of the South was bitterly condemned, but no word was said of the appalling nature of the problem in the state of New Jersey itself.

VI

According to the census of 1900, there were 25,000 boys under sixteen years of age employed in and around the mines and quarries of the United States. In the state of Pennsylvania alone,—the state which enslaves more children than any other,—there are thousands of little “breaker boys” employed, many of them not more than nine or ten years old. The law forbids the employment of children under fourteen, and the records of the mines generally show that the law is “obeyed.” Yet in May, 1905, an investigation by the National Child Labor Committee showed that in one small borough of 7000 population, among the boys employed in breakers 35 were nine years old, 40 were ten, 45 were eleven, and 45 were twelve—over 150 boys illegally employed in one section of boy labor in one small town! During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, I attended the Labor Day demonstration at Pittston and witnessed the parade of another at Wilkesbarre. In each case there were hundreds of boys marching, all of them wearing their “working buttons,” testifying to the fact that they were _bona fide_ workers. Scores of them were less than ten years of age, others were eleven or twelve.

Work in the coal breakers is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes.” The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked out later smothered and dead.[124] Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption. I once stood in a breaker for half an hour and tried to do the work a twelve-year-old boy was doing day after day, for ten hours at a stretch, for sixty cents a day. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; my hands were bruised and cut in a few minutes; I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.

I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were practically _nil_. “We goes fer a good time, an’ we keeps de guys wots dere hoppin’ all de time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been trying to do. How strange that barbaric patois sounded to me as I remembered the rich, musical language I had so often heard other little Owen Joneses speak in far-away Wales. As I stood in that breaker I thought of the reply of the small boy to Robert Owen. Visiting an English coal-mine one day, Owen asked a twelve-year-old lad if he knew God. The boy stared vacantly at his questioner: “God?” he said, “God? No, I don’t. He must work in some other mine.” It was hard to realize amid the danger and din and blackness of that Pennsylvania breaker that such a thing as belief in a great All-good God existed.

From the breakers the boys graduate to the mine depths, where they become door tenders, switch-boys, or mule-drivers. Here, far below the surface work is still more dangerous. At fourteen or fifteen the boys assume the same risks as the men, and are surrounded by the same perils. Nor is it in Pennsylvania only that these conditions exist. In the bituminous mines of West Virginia, boys of nine or ten are frequently employed. I met one little fellow ten years old in Mt. Carbon, W. Va., last year, who was employed as a “trap boy.” Think of what it means to be a trap boy at ten years of age. It means to sit alone in a dark mine passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living creature except the mules as they pass with their loads, or a rat or two seeking to share one’s meal; to stand in water or mud that covers the ankles, chilled to the marrow by the cold draughts that rush in when you open the trap-door for the mules to pass through; to work for fourteen hours—waiting—opening and shutting a door—then waiting again—for sixty cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of night, and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the nearest “shack” to be revived before it is possible to walk to the farther shack called “home.”

Boys twelve years of age may be _legally_ employed in the mines of West Virginia, by day or by night, and for as many hours as the employers care to make them toil or their bodies will stand the strain. Where the disregard of child life is such that this may be done openly and with legal sanction, it is easy to believe what miners have again and again told me—that there are hundreds of little boys of nine and ten years of age employed in the coal-mines of this state.

VII