Yesterday, prompted by some picture floating about the internet, I spent quite some time perusing the Lewis Hine photo collection. Lewis Hine was commissioned to take pictures of working conditions, particularly for children, across America, and his pictures were instrumental in creating child labour laws. But they are also fascinating as photography--documentary portraits, rather than stiff photo-studio ones, of people in their ordinary work clothes, doing their jobs or eating lunch or what have you. We don't often see the working class of the 1910's, and we don't often see pictures of children by themselves, but Hine has both, in beautiful detail.
His photographs have an agenda, and usually his comment is revealing: that the child is out late, or has been known to skip school, and so on. But in some cases one wonders: did the children perhaps enjoy hawking newspapers and earning some money? Did their families need the income? Being a pin boy at the bowling alley sounds like the kind of job a certain stripe of eleven-year-old would find much more interesting than school, and these boys seem to be grinning about it. (I tried to figure out how much they were earning in today's money. The buying power seems to be about $100 today, which is peanuts for a week's wages but nice to have.) Or take this newsboy, flaunting cops to sell more papers after hours. (He's also not wearing his badge...). Or what about Louis Birch, working to help his widowed mother? In the long run, maybe he'd be better off in school, but in the short term, he's better off earning money so he can eat. And the long run is a little dubious too--given the class he was in, would having more education have been more beneficial to him than on-the-job experience? Hard to say. There's lots more to be said about class here, but I won't get into it.
Also a topic for discussion: immigration! This was a peak time for American immigration, and most of Hine's youths are young immigrants. Here's a group of Greek kids at an Irish bowling alley (and Italian ones). At the mills you might find Quebeckers. (More on that here. It's interesting how the accusations of "they're taking our jobs!" and suspicions around the speaking of a foreign language have not gone away...). This photo of mugging boys gives Irish names too, and Italian ones; sometimes there are Poles. In the cranberry bogs there seem to be people of Portuguese extraction. Here and there one finds "Syrians." In Boston one might find an Italian boy in a Jewish area. And that's just in the ones tagged for Massachusetts! Almost every photo has the American melting pot on display.
Some of Hine's comments have aged poorly, too: "A half hour car ride to and from work." The horror! What would he think of today's commutes? Elsewhere he remarks on the female mill workers being exposed to crude remarks, or making them. He also editorializes living conditions. Some of the tenements he entered were in terrible shape. A few do seem like they could get a good cleaning, at least. But this "slovenly" house in New Bedford looks to me like a family in a modest little house with an inadequate floor rug. Or what about this "dilapidated" apartment? Respectable furniture, pictures on the wall, a clock--much nicer than many things I toured in Boston trying to find an apartment under 2k.
Of course, there are working conditions that are visibly bad depicted here: young oyster shuckers with injured hands (or sardine cutters), mill workers with crushed arms, boys working in mines ten hours a day and sometimes losing their legs.But it's interesting that these are somehow deemed intolerable conditions because they are children. Surely adults should also not get their arms crushed? Is there an age at which it *would* be acceptable to have regular workplace injuries? "Don't grind the seed-corn", reads one of Hine's posters--but maybe we shouldn't be grinding up people, full stop! It shouldn't be just children who elicit sympathy.
There are modern parallels here too, of course. In particular, some captions in which the overseer acknowledged that his employment of the child was probably illegal, but he did it anyway, reminded me forcibly of the use of migrant workers in America today. And child workers traveling a great distance for industrial work rather than subsistence farming at home is still a practice today, if not in America--for example in cacao plantations. And again--at what age is this acceptable? Is it bad if a fourteen-year-old wields a machete to support his family, but not an eighteen-year-old? What are our societal guidelines here?
And as if all this weren't enough, there's some really fascinating follow-ups by a fellow in Massachusetts, who has tracked down and interviewed some of the living descendants of those depicted. Despite their hardscrabble lives, they emerge as often interesting, resourceful, kind and generous folk. In many cases, the children got to graduate high school, and the grandchildren from college; in other cases, the later generations are not doing anything so different from their forebears. Some are dismayed by the their grandparent's working conditions; others think it's not so different from their own jobs as kids. Really interesting stuff.
His photographs have an agenda, and usually his comment is revealing: that the child is out late, or has been known to skip school, and so on. But in some cases one wonders: did the children perhaps enjoy hawking newspapers and earning some money? Did their families need the income? Being a pin boy at the bowling alley sounds like the kind of job a certain stripe of eleven-year-old would find much more interesting than school, and these boys seem to be grinning about it. (I tried to figure out how much they were earning in today's money. The buying power seems to be about $100 today, which is peanuts for a week's wages but nice to have.) Or take this newsboy, flaunting cops to sell more papers after hours. (He's also not wearing his badge...). Or what about Louis Birch, working to help his widowed mother? In the long run, maybe he'd be better off in school, but in the short term, he's better off earning money so he can eat. And the long run is a little dubious too--given the class he was in, would having more education have been more beneficial to him than on-the-job experience? Hard to say. There's lots more to be said about class here, but I won't get into it.
Also a topic for discussion: immigration! This was a peak time for American immigration, and most of Hine's youths are young immigrants. Here's a group of Greek kids at an Irish bowling alley (and Italian ones). At the mills you might find Quebeckers. (More on that here. It's interesting how the accusations of "they're taking our jobs!" and suspicions around the speaking of a foreign language have not gone away...). This photo of mugging boys gives Irish names too, and Italian ones; sometimes there are Poles. In the cranberry bogs there seem to be people of Portuguese extraction. Here and there one finds "Syrians." In Boston one might find an Italian boy in a Jewish area. And that's just in the ones tagged for Massachusetts! Almost every photo has the American melting pot on display.
Some of Hine's comments have aged poorly, too: "A half hour car ride to and from work." The horror! What would he think of today's commutes? Elsewhere he remarks on the female mill workers being exposed to crude remarks, or making them. He also editorializes living conditions. Some of the tenements he entered were in terrible shape. A few do seem like they could get a good cleaning, at least. But this "slovenly" house in New Bedford looks to me like a family in a modest little house with an inadequate floor rug. Or what about this "dilapidated" apartment? Respectable furniture, pictures on the wall, a clock--much nicer than many things I toured in Boston trying to find an apartment under 2k.
Of course, there are working conditions that are visibly bad depicted here: young oyster shuckers with injured hands (or sardine cutters), mill workers with crushed arms, boys working in mines ten hours a day and sometimes losing their legs.But it's interesting that these are somehow deemed intolerable conditions because they are children. Surely adults should also not get their arms crushed? Is there an age at which it *would* be acceptable to have regular workplace injuries? "Don't grind the seed-corn", reads one of Hine's posters--but maybe we shouldn't be grinding up people, full stop! It shouldn't be just children who elicit sympathy.
There are modern parallels here too, of course. In particular, some captions in which the overseer acknowledged that his employment of the child was probably illegal, but he did it anyway, reminded me forcibly of the use of migrant workers in America today. And child workers traveling a great distance for industrial work rather than subsistence farming at home is still a practice today, if not in America--for example in cacao plantations. And again--at what age is this acceptable? Is it bad if a fourteen-year-old wields a machete to support his family, but not an eighteen-year-old? What are our societal guidelines here?
And as if all this weren't enough, there's some really fascinating follow-ups by a fellow in Massachusetts, who has tracked down and interviewed some of the living descendants of those depicted. Despite their hardscrabble lives, they emerge as often interesting, resourceful, kind and generous folk. In many cases, the children got to graduate high school, and the grandchildren from college; in other cases, the later generations are not doing anything so different from their forebears. Some are dismayed by the their grandparent's working conditions; others think it's not so different from their own jobs as kids. Really interesting stuff.
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