According to the census of 1900, there were 25,000 boys under sixteen
years of age employed in and around the mines and quarries of the United
States. In the state of Pennsylvania alone,—the state which enslaves
more children than any other,—there are thousands of little “breaker
boys” employed, many of them not more than nine or ten years old. The
law forbids the employment of children under fourteen, and the records
of the mines generally show that the law is “obeyed.” Yet in May, 1905,
an investigation by the National Child Labor Committee showed that in
one small borough of 7000 population, among the boys employed in
breakers 35 were nine years old, 40 were ten, 45 were eleven, and 45
were twelve—over 150 boys illegally employed in one section of boy labor
in one small town! During the anthracite coal strike of 1902, I attended
the Labor Day demonstration at Pittston and witnessed the parade of
another at Wilkesbarre. In each case there were hundreds of boys
marching, all of them wearing their “working buttons,” testifying to the
fact that they were _bona fide_ workers. Scores of them were less than
ten years of age, others were eleven or twelve.
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.[124] 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. The gloom of the breaker appalled me. Outside the
sun shone brightly, the air was pellucid, and the birds sang in chorus
with the trees and the rivers. Within the breaker there was blackness,
clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of
the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes
filled the ears. I tried to pick out the pieces of slate from the
hurrying stream of coal, often missing them; 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.
[Illustration:
BREAKER BOYS AT WORK
]
I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve
years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had
never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer.
True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten
hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were
practically _nil_. “We goes fer a good time, an’ we keeps de guys wots
dere hoppin’ all de time,” said little Owen Jones, whose work I had been
trying to do. How strange that barbaric patois sounded to me as I
remembered the rich, musical language I had so often heard other little
Owen Joneses speak in far-away Wales. 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.
From the breakers the boys graduate to the mine depths, where they
become door tenders, switch-boys, or mule-drivers. Here, far below the
surface work is still more dangerous. At fourteen or fifteen the boys
assume the same risks as the men, and are surrounded by the same perils.
Nor is it in Pennsylvania only that these conditions exist. In the
bituminous mines of West Virginia, boys of nine or ten are frequently
employed. I met one little fellow ten years old in Mt. Carbon, W. Va.,
last year, who was employed as a “trap boy.” Think of what it means to
be a trap boy at ten years of age. It means to sit alone in a dark mine
passage hour after hour, with no human soul near; to see no living
creature except the mules as they pass with their loads, or a rat or two
seeking to share one’s meal; to stand in water or mud that covers the
ankles, chilled to the marrow by the cold draughts that rush in when you
open the trap-door for the mules to pass through; to work for fourteen
hours—waiting—opening and shutting a door—then waiting again—for sixty
cents; to reach the surface when all is wrapped in the mantle of night,
and to fall to the earth exhausted and have to be carried away to the
nearest “shack” to be revived before it is possible to walk to the
farther shack called “home.”
Boys twelve years of age may be _legally_ employed in the mines of West
Virginia, by day or by night, and for as many hours as the employers
care to make them toil or their bodies will stand the strain. Where the
disregard of child life is such that this may be done openly and with
legal sanction, it is easy to believe what miners have again and again
told me—that there are hundreds of little boys of nine and ten years of
age employed in the coal-mines of this state.