Child Labor in the Progressive Era
At the beginning of the Progressive Era, children were often required to work long hours in factories, mills, and mines under unsafe conditions for wages that were much lower than those compared to adults. The Progressive Era, which covered the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, brought forth many reformers who set out to end the abuses of child labor and to force businesses to make improvements, such as reducing the number of hours that children could be required to work, and protecting children from working with dangerous machinery and other workplace hazards. The reformers succeeded in informing the pubic of deplorable workplace conditions for children, and to varying degrees, in getting laws passed to improve these conditions. However, progress was slow in getting industries to voluntarily make improvements that cost them money, and the laws that were enacted were often poorly enforced or were overturned by the courts. Nevertheless, the reformers provided a valuable service by turning the country’s attention to the injustices of child labor and laying the groundwork for substantial improvements in the future.
Working Conditions for Children During the Progressive Era
During the progressive era, the number of working children increased greatly. While the population increased by 50 percent from 1890 to 1900, the number of working children increased by 100 percent in the manufacturing industries. The increase in the number of girls working in the manufacturing industries increased by 150 percent. Increases were most dramatic in the South where the number of working children between 10 and 15 years old increased threefold.[1] Fueling these increases was the fact that businesses could hire children to work in factories for a fraction of what they had to pay adult workers. As adult workers stood idle in the market place, children worked inside the factories for low wages.[2]
In 1900, there were an estimated 2 million children working. This estimate may have been too low because the census for that year did not identify child workers under the age of ten, and omitted or underestimated several large occupations of children. Their work was totally lacking in skills, did nothing to educate, and was damaging to the minds and bodies. A study of children 14 to 16 years old at work in New York City during 1901 showed that of 106 children studied, 96 were in “dead end” occupations. Furthermore, the federal Bureau of Labor reported in 1910 that a study of child workers in seven cities showed that 90 percent of the children were in industries in which the average wage of all workers in the industry was less than $10 per week.[3]
Poor families in both the cities and the rural areas were dependent on their children going to work to supplement their meager incomes. While many poor families sacrificed so that their children could be educated, others sided with the employers that put the children to work at very low wages. Such children had no choice other than to spend their days in mines, mills, and factories, rather than attending school.
Although sometimes necessary for the families’ survival, child labor resulted in a brutal existence for the children of the poor families. Many of the working children of the Progressive Era were under 16 years old, and many were under 10 years old. They worked excessive hours under dirty and dangerous working conditions, had little educational opportunities, and worked in low skill jobs that did not offer opportunities to increase and develop skills and improve their job opportunities as they got older. Children in factories found it necessary to work 12 hours a day and keep pace with the speed of the machine. In a few years, the child was turned into a “ shaken, rickety, unskilled incompetent”.[4] As reported in the Chicago Tribune in Feburary of 1903, a little girl was interviewed about working in a silk factory. This girl said: “When I first went to work at night the long standing hurt me very much. My feet burned so that I cried. My knees hurt me worse than my feet, and my back pained all of the time. Mother cried when I told her about it. So I didn’t tell her anymore. It does not hurt me so much now. But I feel tired all the time. I do not feel near so tired, though, as I did when I worked all night. My eyes hurt me, too, from watching the threads. The doctor says my eyes will be spoiled If I work at night. After I have watched the threads I can see threads everywhere. When I look at other things there are threads running across them. Sometimes I think the threads are going to cut my eyes.”[5]
Several causes contributed to the child labor problems in America. Among the most important causes were (1) traditional European and puritanical American values regarding child labor, (2) families under great economic distress, and (3) the inherent benefits to businesses of using children--lower wages and a labor force more subservient to employers than adults would be. Edith Abbott, a teacher, social worker, and reformer, argued that using children in our factories was a consequence of the Puritan belief in the virtue of labor and the sin of idleness. Such beliefs stressed the importance of forcing people to be independent and preventing anyone, including children, from becoming a financial burden on the pubic. She said that the belief in using little children in work was influenced by English customs. In England, Elizabethan law provided for making apprentices of poor children. This philanthropic device of using cheap child labor was much approved. Thus, when the factory system came about, it was widely believed that child labor was a righteous institution, and it was inevitable that children would be employed in factories. However, conditions in the factories--dangerous, dirty, and oppressive--were far different than the environment children had experienced in earlier rural environments.[6]
The fact that parents were dependent upon their children working was among the primary problems in enforcing laws against abusing children in the workplace. For many poor families to survive it was absolutely necessary that their children work, even if survival came at the expense of denying the children the opportunity to go to school and develop the skills they needed to succeed in their lives. Many parents were desperate to obtain the additional income needed. For example, in Chicago in 1910 the packinghouse workers earned only 38 percent of the minimum needed for a family of four. Family income had to be supplemented in some way in order for the family to survive, and it was not until children reached the working age of fourteen that family income was able to meet the families’ needs.[7]
However, many families could not wait for their children to reach the working age of fourteen. In an annual report issued in 1901 on compulsory education in Chicago, it was noted that parents filed affidavits that their children were 14 years old or older in order that the children could leave school and go to work. The report showed, however, that the affidavit system “is a farce”. The age records shown at schools for these children in the fifth and sixth grades were at odds with the ages sworn to by parents to gain employment for them.[8]
While many families were willing to sacrifice for their children, many others sided with the employers and opposed any movement to remove children from the workforce.[9] The reformer Jane Addams pointed out that she was well aware that the child labor law in Illinois could bring hardships to many families that needed the extra income from their children’s labor. She said that her experiences showed, however, that there was a willingness among even the poorest families to take on extra work as needed to make ends meet for the good of their children. For example, Addams said that the opposition against child labor laws came not from poor families but from large glass factories that had used and abused children as a source of labor for so long that they were convinced that the manufacturing of glass could not be done without this exploited source of labor. [10]
One of the major shortcomings in New York City’s law against employing children less than fourteen years old was that it did not apply to work performed at home. The reformer, Mary van Kleeck, said that in New York City, manufacturers could not employ a child under fourteen, but they could give out work for a family to do at home. Often the workers at home were young children. Van Kleek gave as an example a family she knew that had six children working in a tenement room. The children were aged two and one-half, five, eight, ten, fourteen, and sixteen years old, respectively. [11] Even when child protection agencies finally became involved, they still faced obstacles. Van Kleeck writes about a girl named Rosina who said that “she went to school regularly all day sessions, and that she and her brother helped at finishing after school.” All the government could do for Rosina was add school work to the never ending struggle of factory work.
Problems with child labor were not confined to major industrial cities, such as New York and Chicago. Children working in cotton mills worked from seven o’clock in the morning until six o'clock at night keeping the children out of school. They worked in rooms with windows closed to keep the cotton threads damp so that they would not break. Working without fresh air and sunshine, their bodies grew weak and underdeveloped.[12]
In southern states during 1906, 60,000 children were employed in cotton mills. In Alabama, ten-year-old boys and girls worked in these mills eleven hours a day and six days a week. Furthermore, it was merely a misdemeanor to work any child old enough to stand on his or her feet more than eleven hours out of 24. As Quincy Ewing, a reformer minister said, “I sometimes wonder whether our civilization is deliberately diabolic, or helplessly insane! It must be to some extent one or the other, or we couldn’t possibly put some men in shackles for shooting craps, and license other men to work ten-year-old children eleven hours a day; we couldn’t possibly regard it as a crime to toss dice, and as no crime to destroy childhood.” [13]
The Reform Movement
In the face of social problems resulting in the abuse of children, a spirit of reform came to the nation in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Some of the reformers were known as muckrakers---writers that exposed political and social injustices, including the abuses of child labor. One of the greatest reformers was Jacob August Riis who started out as a police reporter and became a social reformer. Riis is credited with fighting more effectively than many other social reformers of his day in eliminating the slum conditions on New York’s lower East Side. Riis’ book, How the Other Half Lives, quickly became a landmark in American Social Reform. This book made some civic-minded people aware of, for the first time, the plight, or their fellow citizens, including the helpless children in families desperately attempting to live under the most miserable and discouraging conditions.
Riis also had tremendous success as a photographer. This allowed him to substantiate his case against the tenements and be among the earliest to use photography as a journalistic weapon. Riis was successful in the establishment of the tenement house commission in New York in 1884 to correct injustices and abuses in the conditions of the people required to live in these establishments.[14]
Upton Sinclair was a writer and reformer who exposed various social ills including the maltreatment of children. His novel, The Jungle, not only exposed conditions in the meat packing industry in Chicago, but also brought to public attention the horrendous working conditions of children who had to work to enable their families to have the necessities of life.[15] His powerful novel impressed upon the public the thought that children had to endure “the stench and freezing cans on naked fingers”, working for five cents an hour. His work had great impacts on many political leaders, including President Theodore Roosevelt, and resulted in their efforts to improve working conditions for children and others.[16]
While the muckrakers focused the nation’s attention on child labor, numerous reformers took direct actions to improve conditions. Foremost among them was Jane Addams who, with her friend Ellen Starr, moved into a dilapidated mansion that they named Hull-House, in the heart of Chicago’s slums. By 1910, Hull-House attracted the largest collection of social reformers that believed that America had paid a far too heavy price in human suffering for the industrial growth of the nation. They fought for reforms such as the abolition of child labor and changes in juvenile laws and the regulation of working hours.
Jane Addams told a story that, during her first winter at Hull-House, three boys who had visited her were injured by one machine at a factory and that the machine could have been fixed for a few dollars. Addams said that even after the three accidents the owners of the factory refused to fix the machine and were protected from prosecution by documents that the parents had signed promising to make no claim for damages resulting from “carelessness”. Addams also said that at the first Christmas at Hull House, a number of little girls were offered candy but refused saying that they “worked in a candy factory and could not bear the sight of it.” The people at Hull House discovered that the girls worked from seven in the morning until nine at night.[17] At the time, the only law in Illinois governing child labor was confined to working conditions in coal mines. During her time at Hull-House, Addams was effective in getting the first state child-labor law enacted in Illinois, in addition to establishing a variety of programs to assist working children.[18]
Robert la Follette, “Battling Bob”, the Governor of Wisconsin, was one of the most influential political leaders who fought against inappropriate working conditions for children. La Follette’s “Wisconsin idea” was instrumental in enacting a number of reform laws. He was a driving force in working to pass laws prohibiting the employment of children under 14 years old in Illinois.[19]
Another reformer and an early resident of Hull-House was Florence Kelley who had suggested to the Illinois state Bureau of Labor that it conduct an investigation of child labor in Chicago. She was subsequently assigned by the bureau to perform the study. Her report resulted in the first factory law in Illinois, regulating the sanitary conditions of the workplace and fixing fourteen as the minimum age at which a child might be employed.[20]
Legislative Efforts to Regulate Child labor
As the muckrakers succeeded in making the abuses of child labor known to the nation, a number of laws were enacted to deal with the situation. In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee was formed to address numerous problems. The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) is a private, non-profit organization founded in 1904 and incorporated by an Act of Congress in 1907 with the mission of promoting the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working. Among the committee’s objectives were to (1) promote the welfare of working children, (2) raise the level of public opinion with respect to the employment of children, (3) assist in the enactment of legislation against premature or injurious employment and secure children an opportunity for elementary education and physical development, (4) promote the enforcement of laws relating to child labor, and (5) coordinate and supplement the work of state or local child labor committees. To this end, the committees developed a program that called for the following:
· All children between fourteen and sixteen shall be employed for no more than eight hours per day.
· No child shall be employed unless satisfactory evidence is given that he or she has normal physical development.
· All children should be given an opportunity to obtain the foundations of an American education.
The committee noted that a number of states had no laws whatsoever for regulating child labor. The need for such laws was evident from available statistics showing the seriousness of the problem. A report of the Department of Mines in Pennsylvania showed, for example, that children working in the coal breakers had a ratio of fatalities and other accidents that was three times higher than the ratio for adults.
In the six years after the committee was formed, it achieved great success. Child labor laws were passed in five states, a 14-year age limit was established in factories and stores in 17 states, and the eight-hour day was enacted in 11 states. Nevertheless, putting these successes in perspective, 13 states still allowed children under 14 years old to work in factories, and children under 16 yeas old were allowed to work more than 8 hours a day in 35 states. Children under 16 years old were also allowed to work in dangerous occupations in 25 states.[21]
But even where laws were enacted at the state level, their enforcement was generally not effective. Among the principal reasons were that the laws were not accompanied by (1) state compensatory education requirements for children, (2) a general lack of persecution of violators, (3) an absence of published information to inform the public n the abuses of child labor, and (4) a lack of personal responsibility on the part of the population for ensuring that children we treated appropriately.
Florence Kelley, the secretary of the National Consumers League pointed out that when the state of Illinois passed a compulsory child labor law the population of children in Chicago schools trebled. Furthermore, the child labor law was persistently enforced in Illinois, hundreds of employers paid substantial fines, and the number of children in school increased accordingly. Conversely, in the southern states compulsory education laws did not exist, and there were not enough schools to enroll the children working in the mills and other industrial facilities. Consequently, the population of working children did not decrease as it did in Illinois.
Kelley also pointed out that little information is collected and published so that people who maintain that they stand against child labor abuses have the information needed to determine whether and how laws are being enforced.[22]
This lack of information was noted by Owen Lovejoy, the Assistant Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, who said, “During the recent legislative campaign in Pennsylvania members of the legislature from Philadelphia were found who had not seen the interior of a textile mill, while members from that hive of industry known as the Pittsburgh district confessed to me they had never visited a glass house and had not entered one of those little tenement cigar shops where girls and young children roll the famous “Pittsburg Toby” for eight cents a hundred.
Lovejoy argued that the lack of published information limited the ability of reformers to form a national consensus the need to take action against child abuse. For example, he pointed out that where information was collected, it showed that the factory child is two and one-half to three times as likely to be injured as an adult often times the records that are available are not accurate to hide violations of child labor laws. The laws of Pennsylvania forbade the employment of children under fourteen in coal breakers—and the records of the coal company showed the law was being obeyed. However, an investigation of the national child labor committee showed that in a small borough of the state with a population of 7,000, over 150 boys were working illegally in the breakers. Of these, thirty-five were only nine years old. Forty were ten, forty-five were eleven, and another forty-five were twelve. Because the records of the company indicated that all employees were fourteen or older, the inspector responsible for enforcing the law was powerless to correct the problem.[23]
Given these conditions, the establishment of a consensus in favor of federal regulations and the passage of the first federal child labor law in 1916 were a turning point in the movement to end child labor in the United States. The first child labor law that was enacted used the government’s ability to regulate interstate commerce as a basis to regulate child labor. However, the Supreme Court ruled that the law was unconstitutional because it overstepped the purpose of the government’s powers to regulate interstate commerce. A second child labor law passed in 1918. This law imposed a ten percent tax on the profits of any manufacturing company, cannery, or mine that did not meet specific standards regarding how many hours that children could work. However, this law was also declared unconstitutional. While the legislation to deal with abuses regarding child labor demonstrated that American’s wanted to address the problem, he rulings of the of the supreme court effectively prevented these efforts from succeeding.
To overcome this problem, a constitutional amendment was proposed to give the Congress specific authority to regulate child labor. However, the ratification of the Child Labor Amendment was stalled in 1920 because of (1) states’ rights complaints about increases in federal power and (2) the concerns expressed by some that the amendment was part f a communist-inspired plot to subvert the constitution. At the time, the country was going through a period of anti-Communist hysteria and these arguments were highly effective. Federal protection of children would not be obtained until the Fair Labor Standards Act n 1938.[24]
Conclusions
The Progressive Era began with a emphases on reigning in the excesses of the industrial progress being made in America that stressed production and profits above the decent treatment of the people, including young children who were exploited along with every one else and often to even a greater degree. The periods' many social reformers, newspaper, and magazine writers, and politicians distinguished themselves by taking the lead to address the problems of children working in the nations factories, mill, and mines. Their efforts made a difference by raising the public's awareness of child labor abuses and in getting laws passed at state and national levels. However, the effectiveness of these efforts suffered badly because of a general unwillingness of stares to enforce the laws, and at the national level, the Supreme Court called into question the constitutionality of the laws that had been enacted to protect child workers. Nevertheless, although progress was very slow and more evolutionary than revolutionary in overcoming the problems associated with child labor, the actions that were taken did achieve many improvements and were necessary to move society toward a dedication to protecting children from abuses in the workplace.
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[1] John Whiteclay Chambers, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era 1890-1920 (Rutgers University Press, 1992) 65.
[2] Owen L. Lovejoy, “The Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation”, The Public March 7, 1903: 5.
[3] “Children’s Labor”, New York Times 4 Dec. 1913 A 8.
[4] “Childhood’s Golden Dream,” Chicago Tribune February 22, 1903
[5] “Childhood’s Golden Dream”
[6] Edith Abbott, “A Study of the Early History of Child Labor in America,” American Journal of Sociology July 1908: 14
[7] Leon Fink, Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001) 61, 149.
[8] “ Child Labor Law Evaded”, New York Times 6 Oct. 1901 A1.
[9] Chambers 93.
[10] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, (1990; Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1910) 121.
[11] Mary Van Kleek, “Child Labor in New York City Tenements”, Charities and the Commons January 18, 1908: 2
[12] Fink 380
[13] Quincy Ewing, “The Child Labor Iniquity,” The Public October 13, 1906
[14] Charles A. Madison, preface, How the other Half Lives, by Jacob A. Riis (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971) v-viii
[15] Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905; Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 2003)
[16] Earl Lee, Foreword, The Jungle, by Sinclair Lewis (Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press, 2003) i-vi
[18] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House ( 1907; Urbana and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 117-123
[19] Chambers 158-161
[20] Florence Kelley, “Obstacles to the Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation,” Child Labor and the Republic (New York: National Child Labor Committee, 1907)
[21] Owen Lovejoy, “A Six Years Battle for the Working Child,” American Review of Reviews 42 November 1910
[22] Kelley 4
[23] Owen R. Lovejoy, “ The Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation,” Charities August 26, 1905
[24] The Campaign to End Child Labor, ed. Jim Zwick (Zwick, 1995-2004) Internet, 1 Nov. 2004.
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