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Hellraisers Journal – Thursday July 3, 1902
“Child Labor in Free America” by John Spargo, Illustrated by Ryan Walker
From The Comrade of July 1902:
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Mocking the stately phrases of the Declaration of Independence and the proud boast enshrined in our national songs, is the terrible reality of child-slavery. From the far South comes a cry from children that know no childhood and upon whose degradation the great edifice of our commercial supremacy is being raised. Not since the early years of the last century when the great and good Robert Owen, Michael Sadler and the seventh Earl of Shaftsbury (then Lord Ashley) gave voice to the terrible condition of the mere babes who languished and toiled in British mills and factories, has such a terrible story of shame been told as that which is told of Alabama, Georgia, and the two Carolinas to-day. Little boys and girls of five, six, seven, and eight years, toiling in factories ten, and even twelve, hours a day, all unconsciously mock our “civilization” and imperil the very life of the nation.
But it is not alone in these States that child labor prevails. From almost every State in the Union the cry of the child toiler for rest, for childhood, for life, is heard. In the North no less than the South; East no less than the West, the same great problem exists-the problem of child labor co-existing side by side with a permanent army of unemployed adults. In the textile mills of the South it is estimated that there are at least 20,000 children at work under fourteen years of age. In Alabama alone there are some twelve hundred children employed, being a proportion of between six and seven per cent of all the operatives. In Georgia the proportion of children under twelve to grown persons employed in the mills is stated to be not less than 14 per cent, and in South Carolina it is at least nine per cent. The ages of these children thus classified as “under twelve” run all the way down to six and even five years!
Let those who prate of our “glorious progress,” and boast of our ascendant commercial power, reflect upon the terrible fact that little children, scarcely more than babies, can be found by the thousand in these southern mills working 12 and 12½ hours every day at the spinning frames for wages that range from ten to twenty cents a day. Here is a terrible account of this child slavery, written by a special correspondent of Cincinnati Post, which should be sufficient of itself to shame the people of this country, and to rouse them to vigorous action. He says:
I secured entrance to the People’s mills of Montgomery, (Alabama) which manufacture sheeting for the China trade. In the spinning room, where most of the children are employed, there were 125 persons of all ages at work. Of that number between 40 and 50 were children less than 12 years old. Those who had ever been in a school house were rare exceptions. In this room I saw boys and girls so small that their efforts to perform their work were absolutely pitiful. In reaching up to join the ends of the broken threads they were obliged to strain and stretch every muscle and sinew of their frail bodies and some were so small that they were compelled to stand on their tiptoes. This was repeated every five minutes or oftener for twelve long hours. I called the foreman’s attention to several little ones who I was sure could not be over six years old and was told “they are not working,” which meant that they were not on the pay-roll, but were helping the parent or older brother or sister, or learning the machines, so as to be able to take their place in that mill.
