CHILD LABOR
I have always advised men to read. All my life I have told them to
study the works of those great authors who have been interested in
making this world a happier place for those who do its drudgery. When
there were no strikes, I held educational meetings and after the
meetings I would sell the book, “Merrie England,” which told in simple
fashion of the workers’ struggle for a more abundant life.
“Boys,” I would say, “listen to me. Instead of going to the pool and
gambling rooms, go up to the mountain and read this book. Sit under
the trees, listen to the birds and take a lesson from those little
feathered creatures who do not exploit one another, nor betray one
another, nor put their own little ones to work digging worms before
their time. You will hear them sing while they work. The best you can
do is swear and smoke.”
I was gone from the eastern coal fields for eight years. Meanwhile I
was busy, waging the old struggle in various fields. I went West and
took part in the strike of the machinists of the Southern Pacific
Railroad, the corporation that swung California by its golden tail,
that controlled its legislature, its farmers, its preachers, its
workers.
Then I went to Alabama. In 1904 and ’05 there were great strikes in and
around Birmingham. The workers of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad
were on strike. Jay Gould owned the railroad and thought he owned the
workers along with the ties and locomotives and rolling stock. The
miners struck in sympathy. These widespread strikes were part of the
American Railway Union strike, led by Eugene Debs, a railway worker.
One day the governor called Douglas Wilson, the chairman of the
strike committee, to his office. He said, “You call this strike off
immediately. If you don’t do it, I shall.”
“Governor,” said Douglas, “I can’t call off the strike until the men
get the concessions that they struck for.”
“Then I will call out the militia,” said he.
“Then what in hell do you think we will be doing while you are getting
the militia ready!”
The governor knew then he had a fight on, for Douglas was a heroic
fighter; a fine, open character whom the governor himself respected.
The militia were called out. There was a long drawn out fight. I was
forbidden to leave town without permit, forbidden to hold meetings.
Nevertheless I slipped through the ranks of the soldiers without their
knowing who I was--just an old woman going to a missionary meeting to
knit mittens for the heathen of Africa!
I went down to Rockton, a mining camp, with William Malley and held a
meeting.
Coming back on the train the conductor recognized me.
“Mother Jones,” he said, “did you hold a meeting in Rockton?”
“I certainly did,” said I.
He reported me to the general manager and there was hell to pay but I
kept right on with my agitation. The strike dragged on. Debs was put in
jail. The leaders were prosecuted. At last the strike was called off. I
was in Birmingham.
Debs was on his way north after being released from jail and the local
union arranged a public meeting for him. We rented the opera house and
advertised the meeting widely. He was to speak Sunday evening. Sunday
afternoon the committee were served with an injunction, prohibiting the
meeting. The owner of the opera house was also notified that he would
not be allowed to open the doors of his building.
The chairman of the committee on the meeting didn’t have much fighting
blood in him, so I told several of the boys to say nothing to him but
go over to Bessemer and Pratt, near-by mining towns, and bring a bunch
of miners back with them to meet Debs when he got off the train.
At the Union hall a large number of people had gathered to see what was
going to happen.
When it was train time, I moved that everyone there go down to the
depot to meet Debs.
“I think just the committee on reception should go,” said the chairman,
who was strong for form.
“I move that we all form a committee on reception,” said I, and
everybody hollered, “Yes! Yes!”
When we got down to the station there were several thousand miners
there from Bessemer and Pratt.
The train pulled in and Debs got off. Those miners did not wait for
the gates to open but jumped over the railing. They put him on their
shoulders and marched out of the station with the crowd in line. They
marched through the streets, past the railway offices, the mayor’s
office, the office of the chief of police. “Debs is here! Debs is
here!” they shouted.
The chief of police had a change of heart. He sent word to me that
the opera house was open and we could hold our meeting. The house
was jammed, the aisles, the window sills, every nook and corner. The
churches were empty that night, and that night the crowd heard a real
sermon by a preacher whose message was one of human brotherhood.
When the railroad workers’ strike ended I went down to Cottondale
to get a job in the cotton mills. I wanted to see for myself if the
grewsome stories of little children working in the mills were true.
I applied for a job but the manager told me he had nothing for me
unless I had a family that would work also. I told the manager I was
going to move my family to Cottondale but I had come on ahead to see
what chances there were for getting work.
“Have you children?”
“Yes, there are six of us.”
“Fine,” he said. He was so enthusiastic that he went with me to find a
house to rent.
“Here’s a house that will do plenty,” said he. The house he brought me
to was a sort of two-story plank shanty. The windows were broken and
the door sagged open. Its latch was broken. It had one room down stairs
and unfinished loft upstairs. Through the cracks in the roof the rain
had come in and rotted the flooring. Downstairs there was a big old
open fireplace in front of which were holes big enough to drop a brick
through.
The manager was delighted with the house.
“The wind and the cold will come through these holes,” I said.
He laughed. “Oh, it will be summer soon and you will need all the air
you can get.”
“I don’t know that this house is big enough for six of us.”
“Not big enough?” he stared at me. “What you all want, a hotel?”
I took the house, promising to send for my family by the end of the
month when they could get things wound up on the farm. I was given work
in the factory, and there I saw the children, little children working,
the most heart-rending spectacle in all life. Sometimes it seemed to me
I could not look at those silent little figures; that I must go north,
to the grim coal fields, to the Rocky Mountain camps, where the labor
fight is at least fought by grown men.
Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the
endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery
to repair snapped threads. They crawled under machinery to oil it.
They replaced spindles all day long, all day long; night through,
night through. Tiny babies of six years old with faces of sixty did an
eight-hour shift for ten cents a day. If they fell asleep, cold water
was dashed in their faces, and the voice of the manager yelled above
the ceaseless racket and whir of the machines.
Toddling chaps of four years old were brought to the mills to “help”
the older sister or brother of ten years but their labor was not paid.
The machines, built in the north, were built low for the hands of
little children.
At five-thirty in the morning, long lines of little grey children came
out of the early dawn into the factory, into the maddening noise, into
the lint filled rooms. Outside the birds sang and the blue sky shone.
At the lunch half-hour, the children would fall to sleep over their
lunch of cornbread and fat pork. They would lie on the bare floor and
sleep. Sleep was their recreation, their release, as play is to the
free child. The boss would come along and shake them awake. After the
lunch period, the hour-in grind, the ceaseless running up and down
between the whirring spindles. Babies, tiny children!
Often the little ones were afraid to go home alone in the night. Then
they would sleep till sunrise on the floor. That was when the mills
were running a bit slack and the all-night shift worked shorter hours.
I often went home with the little ones after the day’s work was done,
or the night shift went off duty. They were too tired to eat. With
their clothes on, they dropped on the bed ... to sleep, to sleep ...
the one happiness these children know.
But they had Sundays, for the mill owners, and the mill folks
themselves were pious. To Sunday School went the babies of the mills,
there to hear how God had inspired the mill owner to come down and
build the mill, so as to give His little ones work that they might
develop into industrious, patriotic citizens and earn money to give to
the missionaries to convert the poor unfortunate heathen Chinese.
“My six children” not arriving, the manager got suspicious of me so
I left Cottondale and went to Tuscaloosa where I got work in a rope
factory. This factory was run also by child labor. Here, too, were the
children running up and down between spindles. The lint was heavy in
the room. The machinery needed constant cleaning. The tiny, slender
bodies of the little children crawled in and about under dangerous
machinery, oiling and cleaning. Often their hands were crushed. A
finger was snapped off.
A father of two little girls worked a loom next to the one assigned to
me.
“How old are the little girls?” I asked him.
“One is six years and ten days,” he said, pointing to a little girl,
stoop shouldered and thin chested who was threading warp, “and that
one,” he pointed to a pair of thin legs like twigs, sticking out from
under a rack of spindles, “that one is seven and three months.”
“How long do they work?”
“From six in the evening till six come morning.”
“How much do they get?”
“Ten cents a night.”
“And you?”
“I get forty.”
In the morning I went off shift with the little children. They stumbled
out of the heated atmosphere of the mill, shaking with cold as they
came outside. They passed on their way home the long grey line of
little children with their dinner pails coming in for the day’s shift.
They die of pneumonia, these little ones, of bronchitis and
consumption. But the birth rate like the dividends is large and another
little hand is ready to tie the snapped threads when a child worker
dies.
I went from Tuscaloosa to Selma, Alabama, and got a job in a mill. I
boarded with a woman who had a dear little girl of eleven years working
in the same mill with me.
On Sunday a group of mill children were going out to the woods. They
came for Maggie. She was still sleeping and her mother went into the
tiny bedroom to call her.
“Get up, Maggie, the children are here for you to go to the woods.”
“Oh, mother,” she said, “just let me sleep; that’s lots more fun. I’m
so tired. I just want to sleep forever.”
So her mother let her sleep.
The next day she went as usual to the mill. That evening at four
o’clock they brought her home and laid her tiny body on the kitchen
table. She was asleep--forever. Her hair had caught in the machinery
and torn her scalp off.
At night after the day shift came off work, they came to look at their
little companion. A solemn line of little folks with old, old faces,
with thin round shoulders, passed before the corpse, crying. They were
just little children but death to them was a familiar figure.
“Oh, Maggie,” they said, “We wish you’d come back. We’re so sorry you
got hurted!”
I did not join them in their wish. Maggie was so tired and she just
wanted to sleep forever.
I did not stay long in one place. As soon as one showed interest in or
sympathy for the children, she was suspected, and laid off. Then, too,
the jobs went to grown-ups that could bring children. I left Alabama
for South Carolina, working in many mills.
In one mill, I got a day-shift job. On my way to work I met a woman
coming home from night work. She had a tiny bundle of a baby in her
arms.
“How old is the baby?”
“Three days. I just went back this morning. The boss was good and saved
my place.”
“When did you leave?”
“The boss was good; he let me off early the night the baby was born.”
“What do you do with the baby while you work?”
“Oh, the boss is good and he lets me have a little box with a pillow in
it beside the loom. The baby sleeps there and when it cries, I nurse
it.”
So this baby, like hundreds of others, listened to the whiz and whir of
machinery before it came into the world. From its first weeks, it heard
the incessant racket raining down upon its ears, like iron rain. It
crawled upon the linty floor. It toddled between forests of spindles.
In a few brief years it took its place in the line. It renounced
childhood and childish things and became a man of six, a wage earner, a
snuff sniffer, a personage upon whose young-old shoulders fortunes were
built.
And who is responsible for this appalling child slavery? Everyone.
Alabama passed a child labor law, endeavoring to some extent to protect
its children. And northern capitalists from Massachusetts and Rhode
Island defeated the law. Whenever a southern state attempts reform, the
mill owners, who are for the most part northerners, threaten to close
the mills. They reach legislatures, they send lobbies to work against
child labor reform, and money, northern money for the most part,
secures the nullification of reform laws through control of the courts.
The child labor reports of the period in which I made this study put
the number of children under fourteen years of age working in mills as
fully 25 per cent of the workers; working for a pittance, for eight,
nine, ten hours a day, a night. And mill owners declared dividends
ranging from 50 per cent to 90.
“Child labor is docile,” they say. “It does not strike. There are no
labor troubles.” Mill owners point to the lace curtains in the windows
of the children’s homes. To the luxuries they enjoy. “So much better
than they had when as poor whites they worked on the farms!”
Cheap lace curtains are to offset the labor of children! Behind those
luxuries we cannot see the little souls deadened by early labor; we
cannot see the lusterless eyes in the dark circle looking out upon us.
The tawdry lace curtains hang between us and the future of the child,
who grows up in ignorance, body and mind and soul dwarfed, diseased.
I declare that their little lives are woven into the cotton goods they
weave; that in the thread with which we sew our babies’ clothes, the
pure white confirmation dresses of our girls, our wedding gowns and
dancing frocks, in that thread are twisted the tears and heart-ache of
little children.
From the south, burdened with the terrible things I had seen, I came to
New York and held several meetings to make known conditions as I had
found them. I met the opposition of the press and of capital. For a
long time after my southern experience, I could scarcely eat. Not alone
my clothes, but my food, too, at times seemed bought with the price of
the toil of children.
The funds for foreign missions, for home missions, for welfare and
charity workers, for social settlement workers come in part, at least,
from the dividends on the cotton mills. And the little mill child
is crucified between the two thieves of its childhood; capital and
ignorance.
“Of such is the kingdom of Heaven,” said the great teacher. Well, if
Heaven is full of undersized, round shouldered, hollow-eyed, listless,
sleepy little angel children, I want to go to the other place with the
bad little boys and girls.
In one mill town where I worked, I became acquainted with a mother and
her three little children, all of whom worked in the mill with me. The
father had died of tuberculosis and the family had run up a debt of
thirty dollars for his funeral. Year in and year out they toiled to
pay back to the company store the indebtedness. Penny by penny they
wore down the amount. After food and rent were deducted from the scanty
wages, nothing remained. They were in thralldom to the mill.
I determined to rescue them. I arranged with the station agent of the
through train to have his train stop for a second on a certain night.
I hired a wagon from a farmer. I bought a can of grease to grease the
axles to stop their creaking. In the darkness of night, the little
family and I drove to the station. We felt like escaping negro slaves
and expected any moment that bloodhounds would be on our trail. The
children shivered and whimpered.
Down the dark tracks came the through train. Its bright eye terrified
the children. It slowed down. I lifted the two littlest children onto
the platform. The mother and the oldest climbed on. Away we sped, away
from the everlasting debt, away to a new town where they could start
anew without the millstone about their necks.
When Pat Dolan was president of the Pittsburgh miners’ union, and
there never was a better president than Pat, he got permission from
the general managers of the mines for me to go through the district
and solicit subscriptions for The Appeal to Reason. The managers must
have thought the paper some kind of religious sheet and that I was a
missionary of some sort.
Anyway, during those months, I came into intimate contact with the
miners and their families. I went through every mine from Pittsburgh
to Brownsville. Mining at its best is wretched work, and the life and
surroundings of the miner are hard and ugly. His work is down in the
black depths of the earth. He works alone in a drift. There can be
little friendly companionship as there is in the factory; as there is
among men who built bridges and houses, working together in groups.
The work is dirty. Coal dust grinds itself into the skin, never to be
removed. The miner must stoop as he works in the drift. He becomes bent
like a gnome.
His work is utterly fatiguing. Muscles and bones ache. His lungs
breathe coal dust and the strange, damp air of places that are never
filled with sunlight. His house is a poor makeshift and there is little
to encourage him to make it attractive. The company owns the ground it
stands on, and the miner feels the precariousness of his hold. Around
his house is mud and slush. Great mounds of culm, black and sullen,
surround him. His children are perpetually grimy from play on the culm
mounds. The wife struggles with dirt, with inadequate water supply,
with small wages, with overcrowded shacks.
The miner’s wife, who in the majority of cases, worked from childhood
in the near-by silk mills, is overburdened with child bearing. She
ages young. She knows much illness. Many a time I have been in a home
where the poor wife was sick in bed, the children crawling over her,
quarreling and playing in the room, often the only warm room in the
house.
I would tidy up the best I could, hush the little ones, get them ready
for school in the morning, those that didn’t go to the breakers or to
the mills, pack the lunch in the dinner bucket, bathe the poor wife and
brush her hair. I saw the daily heroism of those wives.
[Illustration: Mother Jones with the Miners’ Children]
I got to know the life of the breaker boys. The coal was hoisted to
a cupola where it was ground. It then came rattling down in chutes,
beside which, ladder-wise, sat little breaker boys whose job it was to
pick out the slate from the coal as the black rivers flowed by. Ladders
and ladders of little boys sat in the gloom of the breakers, the dust
from the coal swirling continuously up in their faces. To see the slate
they must bend over their task. Their shoulders were round. Their
chests narrow.
A breaker boss watched the boys. He had a long stick to strike the
knuckles of any lad seen neglecting his work. The fingers of the little
boys bled, bled on to the coal. Their nails were out to the quick.
A labor certificate was easy to get. All one had to do was to swear to
a notary for twenty-five cents that the child was the required age.
The breakerboys were not Little Lord Fauntleroys. Small chaps smoked
and chewed and swore. They did men’s work and they had men’s ways,
men’s vices and men’s pleasures. They fought and spit tobacco and told
stories out on the culm piles of a Sunday. They joined the breaker
boys’ union and beat up scabs. They refused to let their little
brothers and sisters go to school if the children of scabs went.
In many mines I met the trapper boys. Little chaps who open the door
for the mule when it comes in for the coal and who close the door after
the mule has gone out. Runners and helpers about the mine. Lads who
will become miners; who will never know anything of this beautiful
world, of the great wide sea, of the clean prairies, of the snow capped
mountains of the vast West. Lads born in the coal, reared and buried in
the coal. And his one hope, his one protection--the union.
I met a little trapper boy one day. He was so small that his dinner
bucket dragged on the ground.
“How old are you, lad?” I asked him.
“Twelve,” he growled as he spat tobacco on the ground.
“Say son,” I said, “I’m Mother Jones. You know me, don’t you? I know
you told the mine foreman you were twelve, but what did you tell the
union?”
He looked at me with keen, sage eyes. Life had taught him suspicion and
caution.
“Oh, the union’s different. I’m ten come Christmas.”
“Why don’t you go to school?”
“Gee,” he said--though it was really something stronger--“I ain’t lost
no leg!” He looked proudly at his little legs.
I knew what he meant: that lads went to school when they were
incapacitated by accidents.
And you scarcely blamed the children for preferring mills and mines.
The schools were wretched, poorly taught, the lessons dull.
Through the ceaseless efforts of the unions, through continual
agitation, we have done away with the most outstanding evils of child
labor in the mines. Pennsylvania has passed better and better laws.
More and more children are going to school. Better schools have come to
the mining districts. We have yet a long way to go. Fourteen years of
age is still too young to begin the life of the breaker boy. There is
still too little joy and beauty in the miner’s life but one who like
myself has watched the long, long struggle knows that the end is not
yet.