The textile industries rank first in the enslavement of children. In the
cotton trade, for example, 13.3 per cent of all persons employed
throughout the United States are under sixteen years of age.[109] In the
Southern states, where the evil appears at its worst, so far as the
textile trades are concerned, the proportion of employees under sixteen
years of age in 1900 was 25.1 per cent, in Alabama the proportion was
nearly 30 per cent. A careful estimate made in 1902 placed the number of
cotton-mill operatives under sixteen years of age in the Southern states
at 50,000. At the beginning of 1903 a very conservative estimate placed
the number of children under fourteen employed in the cotton mills of
the South at 30,000, no less than 20,000 of them being under
twelve.[110] If this latter estimate of 20,000 children under twelve is
to be relied upon, it is evident that the total number under fourteen
must have been much larger than 30,000. According to Mr. McKelway, one
of the most competent authorities in the country, there are at the
present time not less than 60,000 children under fourteen employed in
the cotton mills of the Southern states.[111] Miss Jane Addams tells of
finding a child of five years working by night in a South Carolina
mill;[112] Mr. Edward Gardner Murphy has photographed little children of
six and seven years who were at work for twelve and thirteen hours a day
in Alabama mills.[113] In Columbia, S.C., and Montgomery, Ala., I have
seen hundreds of children, who did not appear to be more than nine or
ten years of age, at work in the mills, by night as well as by day.
The industrial revival in the South from the stagnation consequent upon
the Civil War has been attended by the growth of a system of child
slavery almost as bad as that which attended the industrial revolution
in England a century ago. From 1880 to 1900 the value of the products of
Southern manufactures increased from less than $458,000,000 to
$1,463,000,000—an increase of 220 per cent. Many factors contributed to
that immense industrial development of the South, but, according to a
well-known expert,[114] it is due “chiefly to her supplies of tractable
and cheap labor.” During the same period of twenty years in the cotton
mills outside of the South, the proportion of workers under sixteen
years of age decreased from 15.6 per cent to 7.7 per cent, but in the
South it remained at approximately 25 per cent. It is true that the
terrible pauper apprentice system which forms such a tragic chapter in
the history of the English factory movement has not been introduced; yet
the fate of the children of the poor families from the hill districts
who have been drawn into the vortex of this industrial development is
almost as bad as that of the English pauper children. These “poor
whites,” as they are expressively called, even by their negro neighbors,
have for many years eked out a scanty living upon their farms, all the
members of the family uniting in the struggle against niggardly nature.
Drawn into the current of the new industrial order, they do not realize
that, even though the children worked harder upon the farms than they do
in the mills, there is an immense difference between the dust-laden air
of a factory and the pure air of a farm; between the varied tasks of
farm life with the endless opportunities for change and individual
initiative, and the strained attention and monotonous tasks of mill
life. The lot of the pauper children driven into the mills by the
ignorance and avarice of British Bumbledom was little worse than that of
these poor children, who work while their fathers loaf. During the long,
weary nights many children have to be kept awake by having cold water
dashed on their faces, and when morning comes they throw themselves upon
their beds—often still warm from the bodies of their brothers and
sisters—without taking off their clothing. “When I works nights, I’se
too tired to undress when I gits home, an’ so I goes to bed wif me clo’s
on me,” lisped one little girl in Augusta, Ga.
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.
[Illustration:
NIGHT SHIFT IN A GLASS FACTORY
]
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.