Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday December 20, 1911 Report on Child Labor in Mississippi by E. N. Clopper, Part II
From The Hattiesburg News (Mississippi) of December 18, 1911:
CHILD LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI ———————- By E. N. CLOPPER, Mississippi Valley Secretary National Child Labor Committee.
III.Why Mississippi Should Adopt the Uniform Child Labor Law.
[Part II of II]
Oyster Shuckers, Beloxi, Mississippi, by Lewis Hine Children as young as ages 3 and 5 years old.
A uniform child labor law was adopted by the United Stales commissioners on uniform laws at their twenty-first annual meeting in Boston, Aug. 25 and 26, 1911, upon the report of their special committee, a distinguished member of which was the Hon. A. T. Stovall of Mississippi. It embodies the best provisions of the child labor laws already in existence in several states.
The uniform child labor law may be summarized thus:
The law prescribes a general age limit of fourteen for practically all employment, except agriculture and domestic service, and for all occupations during the hours when the public schools in the district in which the child resides are in session; an age limit of twelve for newsboys; an age limit of sixteen for certain specified occupations dangerous to life or limb or injuries to the health or morals of the child, the specified occupations to be increased upon order of the state board of health; an age limit of eighteen for children in specified extra hazardous occupations; an age limit of twenty-one for employment of boys in saloons, the employment of girls in mines or quarries, in oiling or cleaning machinery in motion or in any occupation where this employment compels them to remain standing constantly; an eight hour day for boys under sixteen and girls under eighteen, with a fifty-four hour week for boys under eighteen and girls under twenty-one; an age limit of twenty-one for boys in the night messenger service.
Certificates of employment are to be issued by the superintendent schools or by a person authorized by him in writing.
The adoption of this uniform child labor law in its entirety by the state of Mississippi would not only cure the evils of child labor from which the state is now suffering, but would prevent greater evils in the future development and progress of the state, so that industry would be built upon a secure foundation and the children, the future citizens of the state, be fully protected.
Why should not a southern state, why should not Mississippi, with its traditions of high statesmanship, be the first to put this model child labor law into effect?
Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday December 19, 1911 Report on Child Labor in Mississippi by E. N. Clopper -with Photograph of Little Oyster Shuckers by Lewis Hine
From The Hattiesburg News (Mississippi) of December 18, 1911:
CHILD LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI
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By E. N. CLOPPER, Mississippi Valley Secretary
National Child Labor Committee.
III.Why Mississippi Should Adopt the Uniform Child Labor Law.
[Part I of II.]
THE investigations covered in article 2 were made before the Mississippi child labor law went into effect. A more recent study of the conditions in April and May, 1911, was made by L. W. Hine, an agent of the national child labor committee. Fortunately, Mr. Hine was able to secure the aid of the camera in communicating his impressions to others. No anonymous or even signed denials can contradict the proof given with photographic fidelity by the camera that the law is being violated.
There has in recent years grown up another child employing industry in Mississippi which in some of its aspects is as bad as the cotton mill. It is the business of shucking and canning oysters and packing shrimps along the gulf coast. These children, in contrast to the children of the cotton mills, who are almost altogether of Mississippi stock, are mostly foreign children imported from Maryland and Delaware, where they are employed in the great truck gardens and berry fields and the vegetable canneries during the summer months, on account of the effective laws of those states, and then are brought to the gulf coast during the shrimp and oyster season. Thus they get no chance at all at an education. Mr. Hine’s report is as follows:
Feb. 24, 1911, I asked the manager of a certain packing house for permission to take some photos, and he said very emphatically that they permitted no one to take photos around the place while workers were there because of the fact they might be used by child labor people. On my own responsibility, then, I visited the plant at 5 a. m., Feb. 25, 1911, before the manager arrived and spent some time there. They all began work that morning at 4 a. m., but it is usually 3 a. m. on busy days. The little ones were there, too, and some babies—one, off in the corner, with a mass of quilts piled over it. From 4 a. m. the entire force worked until 4 p. m., with only enough time snatched from work during the day in which to take a few hurried bites. The breakfast, got in a hurry and in the dark, was not likely very nourishing. Sound asleep on the floor, rolled up against the steam chest, for it was a cold morning, was little Frank, eight years old, a boy who works some. His sister, Mamie, nine years old and an eager, nimble worker, said: “He’s lazy. I used to go to school, but mother won’t let me now because I shuck so fast.” I found considerable complaint about sore fingers caused by handling the shrimps. The fingers of many of the children are actually bleeding before the end of the day. They say it is the acid in the head of the shrimp that causes it. One manager told me that six hours was all that most pickers could stand the work. Then the fingers are so sore they have to stop. Some soak the fingers in an alum solution to harden them. Another drawback to the shrimp packing is the fact that the shrimps have to be kept ice cold all the time to preserve them. It would seem that six hours or less of handling icy shrimps would be bad for the children especially.
The mother of three-year-old Mary said she really does help considerably. So does a five-year-old sister, but they said the youngest was the best worker.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday October 1, 1911 Behold: Babies Born into Child Slavery and Poverty in America
From the Spokane Industrial Worker of September 28, 1911:
There is little hope for the child of today, born of working parents, but a life of unceasing toil in the master’s profit-grinding hell pens. The child has supplanted the mother and father, because it works cheaper. Child slavery in America is openly carried on and many thousands of little tots are wearing their little lives away in order to make wealth for a fat profit-monger. If nothing else would rouse the great army of men toilers to action, the very thought of the thousands of little children working in the mills, should stir them to action. Child slavery is a greater blot on civilization than prostitution, as it is a forerunner of prostitution, disease and misery. Let us unite industrially and free every child from the greedy grasp of the gold-crazed glutton that fattens from their toil. Ninety percent of the child slaves of the cotton factories of the south are absolutely illiterate. Be a man and fight. Organize and save he children and then yourselves.
Hellraisers Journal – Sunday March 5, 1911 Carrie W. Allen on Child Slaves of the Cotton Mills, Part II
From the International Socialist Review of March 1911:
[Part II of II.]
The Senate report already quoted gives this verbatim statement from one of the federal agents concerning a mill in North Carolina:
The mill employs many children, and the smallest I have seen working in any mills. I asked five exceptionally small ones how old each was and each answered, “I don’t know.” These children, the superintendent says, work from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m. * * * I know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that there are ten or twelve children under twelve years of age working in the mill, seven or eight of them at night.
One of the children is an emaciated little elf fifty inches high, and weighing perhaps forty-eight pounds, who works from 6 at night till 6 in the morning, and who is so tiny that she has to climb upon the spinning frame to reach the top row of spindles.
Instances might be multiplied of the criminally long hours these little victims are imprisoned in the mills, no sound reaching them except the racking whirr of the machinery, no air reaching their choked lungs except the fluff laden air of the dusty factory.
Is it any wonder that these poor little over-wrought beings under continuous nervous strain, frequently have their fingers and hands caught in the cruel cogs, which lacerate and tear and frequently cripple them? One hundred and twenty-two mills reported 1,241 accidents for a year, and it is known that these figures are only partial, as mill owners only report accidents when forced to do so.
Hellraisers Journal – Saturday March 4, 1911 Carrie W. Allen on Child Slaves of the Cotton Mills, Part I
From the International Socialist Review of March 1911:
[Part I of II.]
THE shrill scream of the factory whistle smites the chill morning air at the dawn of each new day, and obedient to its hideous call, a ghostly array of anemic children, rudely awakened from sleep, gulp down a bit of food and stumble sleepily to the factory door.
This pitiful multitude of children, whose days are completely swallowed by the cotton mills, keep up their incessant dance from one spindle to another, or from one loom to another, dizzily watching the ten, twelve or fifteen shuttles play hide and seek among the labyrinth of threads.
So much has been written about these youngest victims of capitalist greed, the children of the cotton mills, that were we not misery hardened, were we not blinded by brutal toil, long ago an awakened working class would have united to wipe this iniquity out.
And yet, the workers are not to blame that the forced struggle for existence has limited their vision and stupefied their imagination.
One little child set in the midst of a crowd, because in his person misery is visualized, makes a more eloquent appeal than the story of all the thousands of children whose lives are crushed by the cruel millstones of industry.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 1, 1901 Mother Jones Remembers “Civilization in Southern Mills” of 1896
From the International Socialist Review of March 1901:
Civilization in Southern Mills
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The miners and railroad boys of Birmingham, Ala., entertained me one evening some months ago with a graphic description of the conditions among the slaves of the Southern cotton mills. While I imagined that these must be something of a modern Siberia, I concluded that the boys were overdrawing the picture and made up my mind to see for myself the conditions described. Accordingly I got a job and mingled with the workers in the mill and in their homes. I found that children of six and seven years of age were dragged out of bed at half-past 4 in the morning when the task-master’s whistle blew. They eat their scanty meal of black coffee and corn bread mixed with cottonseed oil in place of butter, and then off trots the whole army of serfs, big and little. By 5:30 they are all behind the factory walls, where amid the whir of machinery they grind their young lives out for fourteen long hours each day. As one looks on this brood of helpless human souls one could almost hear their voices cry out, “Be still a moment, O you iron wheels or capitalistic greed, and let us hear each other’s voices, and let us feel for a moment that this is not all of life.”
We stopped at 12 for a scanty lunch and a half-hour’s rest. At 12:30 we were at it again with never a stop until 7. Then a dreary march home, where we swallowed our scanty supper, talked for a few minutes of our misery and then dropped down upon a pallet of straw, to lie until the whistle should once more awaken us, summoning babes and all alike to another round of toil and misery.
I have seen mothers take their babes and slap cold water in their face to wake the poor little things. I have watched them all day long tending the dangerous machinery. I have seen their helpless limbs torn off, and then when they were disabled and of no more use to their master, thrown out to die. I must give the company credit for having hired a Sunday school teacher to tell the little things that “Jesus put it into the heart of Mr. – to build that factory so they would have work with which to earn a little money to enable them to put a nickel in the box for the poor little heathen Chinese babies.”
Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday November 23, 1910 Manchester, New Hampshire – Lewis Hine Exposes “Unspeakable” Conditions
From the New Orleans Times-Democrat of November 22, 1910:
GIRLS OF FOUR WORK AT NIGHT ———- Unspeakable Moral Conditions Declared to Exist in New Hampshire Cotton Mills -Child Labor Law Is Being Urged. —–
Special to The Times-Democrat
New York. Nov. 21.-A Special from Concord. N. H., says: Because of what are termed the “unspeakable” conditions existing in the immense cotton mills at Manchester, N. H., the New Hampshire Legislature will this winter be asked to pass a law forbidding the employment of young girls in the cotton mills of the State at night. The mills employ 15,000 persons.
A report made by Lewis Hine, a special agent of the National Child Labor Commission, after an investigation of the mills, refers to the “unspeakable moral conditions under which girls are employed at night.”
Mr. Hine was loaned to the superintendent of public instruction, Mr. Morrison, to make the investigation, and it is understood on his findings that Mr. Morrison will ask for a law prohibiting the employment of children between the hours of 6 at night and 6 in the morning. Mr. Hine’s report will be incorporated in that which Mr. Morrison will place before Gov. Bass and his council. It will show that girls of four and upward are employed in the mills throughout the night and that this is not forbidden by law. Mr. Morrison is averse to publishing the facts that have come to his knowledge, if the Legislature will pass the bill without such publicity. He makes no threats about publication, but he says:
“We want that law.”
He also urges that the age limit for child labor be abolished, and that the qualification be one of education, except that no children be permitted to work nights.
“There are big hulking boys under the age limit.” said Mr. Morrison to-day, “who are only in the way at school, and who might just as well be at work.
“On the other hand, there are undersized and underfed little children of sixteen and over, mere skin and bones, who ought to be pulled out of the mills and shops in the name of humanity.”
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[Emphasis added.] [Note: photograph added is by Lewis Hine, taken at Manchester, N. H., on May 25, 1909.]
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