Hellraisers Journal – Saturday July 1, 1922
“The Knight of the Round Belly” by Robert Minor
-United State Supreme Court Rules Against Nation’s Child Workers
From The Liberator of July 1922:
January 1911, South Pittston Pennsylvania
-Breaker Boys of Pennsylvania Coal Company by Lewis Hine
The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrates the utmost recesses of the boy’s lungs. A kind of slave driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding or kicking them into obedience.
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SOURCES & IMAGES
Mother Jones Quote ed, Suffer Little Children, CIR May 14, 1915
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=PeweAQAAMAAJ&pg=GBS.PA10641
The Liberator
(New York, New York)
-July 1922, page 18
https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1922/07/v5n07-w52-jul-1922-liberator.pdf
Breaker Boys, Jan 1911, Lewis Hine
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2018676220/
See also:
Hellraisers Journal – Monday June 26, 1922
United States Supreme Court Rules Against Nation’s Children
Hellraisers Journal – Thursday May 25, 1922
Report Describes Child Labor in Shrimp and Oyster Canning Industry
Tag: Breaker Boys
https://weneverforget.org/tag/breaker-boys/
Tag: Child Labor Laws
https://weneverforget.org/tag/child-labor-laws/
Tag: Child Labor
https://weneverforget.org/tag/child-labor/
John Spargo re Breaker Boys
-from
The Bitter Cry of the Children
-by John Spargo
Macmillan, 1906
(search: “breaker boys”)
https://books.google.com/books?id=5qSXMJQG6E4C
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. 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…..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…..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.
[Paragraph breaks added.]
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Breaker Boys – Lex Romane