Child Labour in America

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 2, 14 July 1909, Page 44

Child Labour in America

HOW BOYS AND GIRLS ARE RUINED BY INDUSTRY

By

Edwin Markham,

Author of "The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems,"

L THE CHILD AT THE LOOM We must not grind the seed corn. —Jefferson Davis. ©NCE, so the story goes, an old Indian chieftain was shown the ways and wonders of New York. He saw the cathedrals, the skyscrapers, the bleak tenement, the blaring mansions, the crowded cireus, the airy span of Brooklyn Bridge. “ What is the most surprising thing you have seen?” •sked several comfortable Christian gentlemen of this benighted pagan whos? ■worship was a “ bowing down to stocks and stones.” The savage shifted his red blanket, and answered in three slow Words: “ Little children working.” It has remained, then, for civilisation to give the world an abominable custom which shocks the social ethics of even an um egenerate savage. For the Indian father does not ask his children to work, but leaves them free until the age of maturity, when they are ushered with solemn rites into the obligations of their elders. Some of us are wondering why our savage friends do not send their medicine men as missionaries, to shed upon our Christian darkness the iight of barbarism. Child-labour is a new thing in human affairs. Ancient history records no such infamy. “ Children,” says the Talmud, “ must not be taken from the schools even to rebuild the Temple.” In Greece and Rome the children of both slave and master fared alike in a common nursery, trainers worked to build up strong and beautiful bodies, careless of the accident of lineage or fortune. But how different is our “Christian civilisation”! Seventeen hundred thousand children at work! Does the enumeration bring any significance to our minds when we say that an army of one million seven hundred thousand children are at work in our “ land of

the free”? This was the figure in 1900; now there are hundreds of thousands more. And many of them working their long ten or fourteen hours by day or by night, with only a misserable dime for wage! Can the heart take in the enormity ?

Picture the long procession of them—enough to people a modern Babylon—all held out from the green fields, barred from school, shut out from home, dragged from play and sleep and rest, and set tramping in grim, forced march to the mills and mines and shops and offices in this our America—the land whose other name we have been told is Opportunity! We of the “ upper crust ” give our children books and beauty by day, and fold them into white beds by’ night; and we feel all this caretaking to be only the

natural order of things. Do we ever think of the over two-million children who—in free America —are pushed ont as little burden-bearers to share the toils and strains and dangers of the world of battling men? Let us glance into the weaving rooms of the cotton mills and behold in the hot, damp, decaying atmosphere the little wan figures flying in hideous cotillon among looms and wheels—children ehoked and blinded by clouds of lint forever molting from the webs, children deafened by the jar and uproar of an eternal Niagara of machines, children silenced utterly in the desert desolation in the heart of the never-ceasing clamour, children that seem like spectre-shapes, doomed to silence and done with life, beckoning to one another across some thunder-shaken Inferno.

Is it not shameful, is it not astounding that this craft that was known to the toilers of Memphis and Shushan, of Sardis and Tadmor, should now, after all the advance of the ages, be loaded in any degree upon the frail, half-formed bodies of

little children? To what purpose then is our “age of invention”? Why these machines at all, if they do hot help to lift care from the soul and burden from the back? To what purpose is our “age of enlightenment,” if, just to cover our nakedness, we establish among us a barbarism that overshadows the barbarism of the savage cycle? Is this the wisdom of the wise? Is this the Christianity we boast of and parade in benighted Madagascar and unsaved Malabar? Is this what our orators mean when they jubiflate over “ civilization ” and “ the progress of the species”? After all these ages, more children are crowded into this limbo of the loom than into any other cavern of our industrial abyss. In the Southern cotton mills, where the doors shut out the odour of the magnolia and shut .in the reeking damps of clouds of lint, and where the mocking bird outside keeps obligato to the whirring wheels within, we find a gaunt goblin army of children keeping their forced march on the factory-floors -—an army that outwatehes the sun by day and the stars by night. Eighty thousand children, mostly girls, are at work in the textile mills of the United States. The South, the centre of the cotton industry, happens to have the bad eminence of being the leader in this social infamy. At the beginning of 1903 there were in the South twenty thousand children at the spindles. The “ Tradesman,” of Chattanooga, estimates that with the springing up of new mills there must now be fifty thousand children at the Southern looms. This is tliirty per cent of all the cotton workers of the South—a spectral army of pigmy people sucked in from the hills to dance beside the crazing wheels.

Let us again reckon up this Devil’s toll. In the North (where, God knows, conditions are bad enough), for every one thousand workers over sixteen years of age there are eighty-three workers under sixteen (that young old-age of the working child); while in the South, for every one thousand workers in the mills over sixteen years of age, there are three hundred and fifty-three under sixteen. Some of these are eight and nine years old, and some are only five and six, For a day or

a night at * stretch these little childraa de some one monotonous thing—a honing their eyes in watching the rushing threads; dwarfing their muscles in an eternity of petty movements; befouling their lungs by breathing flecks of flying cotton; bestowing ceaseless, anxious attention for hours, where science says that “ a twenty-minute strain is long enough for a growing mind.” And these are not the children of recent immigrants, hardened by the effete conditions of foreign servitude. Nor are they negro children who have shifted their shackles from field to mill. They are white children of old and pure colonial stock. Think of it. Here is a people that has outlived the bondage of England, that has seen the rise and fall of slavery—a people that must now fling their children into the clutches of capital, into the maw of the blind machine; must see their latest-born drag on in a base servility that reminds us of the Saxon churl under the frown of the Norman lord. For Mammon is merciless. Fifty thousand children, mostly girls, are in the textile mills of the South. Six times as many children are working now as were working twenty years ago. Unless the conscience of the nation can be awakened, it will not be long before one hundred thousand children will be hobbling in hopeless lock-step to these Bastilles of labour. It will not be long till these little spinners shall be “ far on the way to be spiders and needles.” Think of the deadly drudgery in these cotton mills. Children rise at half-past

four, commanded by the ogre scream of the factory whistle; they hurry, ill fed, unkempt, unwashed, half-dressed, to the walls whieh shut out the day and whiclil confine them amid the din and dust and merciless gaze of the machines. Here, penned in little narrow lanes they look and! leap and reach and tie among acres and! acres of looms. Always the snow of the lint in their faces, always the thunder of the machines in their ears. A scant halfhour at noon breaks the twelve-hour vigil, for it is nightfall when the long hours end and the children may return to the barracks they call “home,” often too tired to wait for the cheerless meal which the mother, also working in the factory, must cook, after her factory-day is over. Frequently at noon and at night they fall asleep with the food unswallowed in the mouth. Erequently they snatch only a bite and curl up undressed on the bed, to gather strength for the same dull round to-morrow, and to-mor-row, and to-morrow. | When I was in the South I was everywhere charmed by the bright courtesy of the cultured classes, but I was everywhere depressed by the stark penury of the working-people. The penury stands grimly out in the gray monotonous sheila that they call “homes”—dingy shacks, or bleak, barn-like structures. And for. these dirty, desolate homes the workers must pay rent to the mill-owner. But the rent is graded according to the number of children sent<o work in the milk The more the children, the less the rent. Mammon is wise: he knows how to keep a cruel grip upon the tots at the fireside.

And why do these children know not rest, no play, no learning, nothing but the grim grind of existence? Is it because we are all naked and shivering? Is it because there is sudden destitution in the land? Is it because pestilence walks at noonday? Is it .because war’s red hand is pillaging our storehouses and burning our cities? No, forsooth! Never before were the storehouses SO crammed to bursting with bolts and bales of every warp and woof. No, forsooth!. The children, while yet in the gristle) are ground down that a few more useless millions may be heaped up. We boast that we are leading the commercialiM#

ail Che world, *nd we grind in our mills tbc bonee of the little one* to make good •or bout Rev. Edgar Murphy, of Montgomery, fhlulwMna, ha* photographed many group* of these pathetic little toilers, all under twelve. Jane Addams saw in a nightfactory a little girl of five, her teeth blacked with snuff, like all the little ones about her—a little girl who was busily and clumsily tying threads to Coarse muslin. The average child lives only four years after it enters the miffs. Pneumonia stalks in the damp, lint-filled

rooms, and leads hundreds of the little ones out to rest. Hundreds more are maimed by the machinery, two or three for eaeh of their elders. One old millhand carries sixty-four scars, the cruel record of the shuttles. The labour commissioner of North Carolina reports that there are two hundred and sixty-one cotton mills in that State, in which nearly forty thousand people are employed, including nearly eight thousand children. The average daily ■wage of the men is fifty-seven cents, of the women thirty-nine cents, of the children twenty-two cents. The commissioner goes on to say: “I have talked iwith a little boy of seven years who worked for forty nights in Alabama, and with another child who, at six years of age, had been on the night-shift eleven months. Little boys turned out at two o’clock in the morning, afraid to go home, would beg a clerk in the mill for permission to lie down on the office-floor. In one city mill in the South, a doctor said he had amputated the fingers of more than one hundred children, mangled in the mill machinery, and that a horrible form of dropsy occurs frequently among the overworked children.

Irene Macfadyen, of England, after inspecting our conditions, a year or two ago, wrote: “The physical, mental, and moral effect of these long hours of toil on the children is indescribably sad. Mill children are so stunted that every foreman will tell you that you cannot judge their ages. The lint in their lungs forms a perfect cultivating medium for tuberculosis and pneumonia, and consumption is common among them. Many die after a few years of this service.” The “Washington Post,” commenting on

child-labour in the South, says: “The average life of the children after they go into the mills is four years. It would be less cruel for a State to have children painlessly put to death than it is to permit them to be ground to death by this awful process.” All who have gone through the mills tell the same story of misery and injustice. Mrs. John Van Vorst, in her book, “The Woman Who Toils,” tell* a piteous and moving story. This is a book which ought to go out as a cry of conscience over the nation. Among a thousand little tragedies, she tells of an overseer who said: “I have a hundred kids in here who ought to be over twelve, tout sometimes I have to ask the parents

if they are bringing me triplets. They generally manage to have three between twelve and fourteen years old. Anything to get ’em in. But if they swear falsely, what can I do?” Elbert Hubbard ha* been through the mills of South Carolina. “I know,” says he, “the sweat-shops of Hester-street, New York; I am familiar with the vice, depravity, and degradation of Whitechapel, London; I have visited the Ghetto of Venice; I know the lot of the coal miners of Pennsylvania; and I know somewhat of Siberian atrocities; but for misery, woe, and hopeless suffer-

ing, I have never seen anything to equal the cotton-mill slavery of South Carolina.”

But not alone upon the South lies the blame of these human hells. Many of the mills of the South are owned by New England capitalists, the machinery having been removed from the North to the South, so as to be near the cotton fields, near the water-power, and, shame to record, near the cheap labour of these baby fingers, for the brief time before they shall be folded waxenly and forever. It was the New England shipper, greedy for gold at any cost, who carried the blacks to the South, planting the tree of slavery in our soil. And now it is the Northern money-grubber who is grafting upon our civilisation this new and more terrible white slavery. “South Carolina weaves cotton that Massachusetts may wear silk!” This new slavery of the mills is worse than the old slavery of the cotton fields. For the negro of the old days was well fed and sure of shelter; he did his work under the open sky, singing as he toiled, and finding time to weave out of his mystic brain a wild balladry and a poetic folklore. But the slavery of the white women and children sucks life dry of all vigour and all joy. These white workers are stunted, slow, and sad; their lives are emptied of passion and poetry. In the long revolution of the wheel of Change, in the irony of the grim Destinies who laugh behind the veil, it is now the stiff-necked whites —they who of bld would not work beside the negro—who in this generation must bear all the burden of the mill. The young negro, not cunning enough to speed the spindle, is spared. It is now the white child who is in bondage, while the little darky is out in the cotton fields under the open heavens. These white children often begin work in the mill with no fragment of education. And often after a year of this brain-blasting labour they lose the power to learn even the simple art of reading. There is sometimes a night-school for the little workers, but they often topple over with sleep at the desks, after the long grind of the day. Indeed, they must not spend too many wakeful hours in the night-school, shortening their sleep-time; for the ogre of the mill must have all their strength at full head in the early morning. The overseer cannot afford to be sending

his mounted “poker-up” to their homes to rout them out of bed d'ay after day, nor can he be continually watching lest they fall asleep on the mill-floor while working or eating. Nor •an he afford te keep a clerk busy docking the wages of these little sleeps starved workers for the constant mistakes and accidents of the fatigued and fumbling fingers. For these little drudges are fined for their lacks and lapses; and they are sometimes in debt to the concern, at the week’s end. But worse than all the breakdown of the body is the breakdown of the soul in these God-forgetting mills. Here boys and girls ar e pushed into the company of eparse men who. jib with •oaths and reeking jests. Torrents of foul profanity from angry overseers wash over the souls of the children, till they, too, grow hardened in crusts of coarseness. Piled on all these are the fearful risks that the young girls run from the attentions of men “higher up,” especially if the girls happen to be cursed with a little beauty. What avail our exports, our tariffs, our dividends, if they rise out of these treasons against God? All gains are losses, and riches are poverties, so long as the soul is left to rot down. What the friends of mercy are pleading, is the old, old plea of the Friend of Children—the plea of Him who cried out, “Be not afraid of them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both body and soul in hell.” The poor remnant of these young toilers, they who do not crumble down in an early death, or drift to the gutter or the brothel, are left, alas! to become fathers and mothers. Fathers and mothers, forsooth! W’hat sort of fatherhood and motherhood can we hope for from these children robbed of childhood, from these children with the marrow sucked out of their bones and the beauty run out of their faces’ Tragical is it beyond words to think that any of these poor human effigies should ever escape to engender their kind and to send on a still more pitiable progeny. What child worthy of the name can spring from the loins of these withered effigies of men? What babe worthy of the name ean be mothered in the side of this wasted and weakened woman who has given her virgin vitality to the moloch of the mill? And what wonder that, if expelled from the factory as no longer competent to be a cog or a pulley in the vast machine, they ■have no ambition but to sit idly in the sun? What wonder that the Commonwealth, having fostered the.se dull degenerates, should be forced to care for them in her almshouses, her gaols, her asylums? What wonder that only the cheapest and coarsest pleasures can stir their numb spirits? The things of the soul which they have missed, they will never know what they have missed. They sit idly in the sun, a sorrowful type of the savage created by civilisation, a sad protest against

civilisation—the starved, the stunted the stunned, who speak no protest! Well does Emerson cry out, “Give ua worse cotton, but give ua better men!" Well does Carlyle cry out, “Deliver me those rickety, perislung souls of infanta, and let the cotton trade take its chances.” What boots a social order that makes thousands of degenerates as the by-product of its exquisite linens and delicate muslins? Must we take our civilisation on such terms as this? Must thousands fall and perish that a few may soar and shine? Let us rather go back to the clout of the savage, for “the body is more than raiment.” The savage, the grim son of the forest, has at least a light step, a sound body, a brood of lusty children, and a treasure of poetic legend and song. But our savage of civilisation, what of him? Look at his wasted body, his empty face, his beauty-robbed existence. Men are such cravens before custom that they often think a thing right because it has been long in existence. But child-labour has about it no halo of antiquity. It-is a thing of yesterday—a sudden toadstool in the infernal garden. It shot up with the coming of steam and loom at the end of the eighteenth century. England began to fight the villainy in 1802, yet to-day the black shadow of it lies wide upon America. The factory, we are told, must make a certain profit, or the owners (absentee proprietors generally, living in larded luxury) will complain. Therefore the president is goaded on by the directors. He in turn whips up the overseer; the overseer takes it out of the workers. So the long end of the lash cuts red the backs of the little children. Need we wonder, then, the cotton-factory stock gives back portly profits—twenty-five, thirty-five, yes, even fifty per cent? It pays, my masters, to grind little children into dividends! And the silks and muslins do not show the stain of blood, although they are splashed with scarlet on God’s side.

But is there no hand reached out to stay these children lured to their ruin by the Pied Piper of Greed? Yes, a brave company of men and women both North and South are banded for the rescue. At the centre of this fighting phalanx is the Child-Labour Committee of New York City. Ardently supporting this centre arc the Consumers’ League and thousands of labour union: and women’s clubs scattered over the nation. The Church of the South, its steeples in the shadow of the mill, instead of hurling anathema against this treason to “the least of these,” too often stands complacent, acquiescent, silent. And so the men and women of mercy and rescue find themselves hindered by the icy indifference of organised religion, as well as by the iron opposition of vested interests.

“Rob us of child-labour, and we will take our mills from your State.” This is the frequent threat of the mill-ow-ners in the chambers and lobbies of leg-

Llation. And, alas’ we are in a civilisation where such a threat avails. Still, in spite of the apathy of the Church, in spite of the assault of capital, the friends of mercy have in all but four States forced some sort of a protective law: No child under twelve years of age shall work, nor any for longer than eight hours, nor any without a common-school education. This reads fairly well; but a law on the Statute Book is not always a law on the factory floor. The inspectors arc often vigilant and quick with conscience. Some mills desire to keep the law. But others are crooked; they have their forged and perjured certificates, their double pay-rolls—one for the inspector, another for the counting-house. They have, also, the device of bringing children in as “mothers’ helps,’’ giving the mothers a few more pennies for the baby fingers.

Hard masters of mills, shiftless or hapless parents, even misguided children themselves, all conspire to hold the little slaves to the wheels. Yes, even the children are taught to lie about their age, and tlieir tongues are ever ready with the glib rehearsal. Some mills keep a look-out for the inspector, and at the danger signal the children scurry like rats to hide in attics, to crouch in cellars, behind bales of cotton, under heaps of old machinery. But God’s battle has begun. Still there must be a wider unification of the bands of justice and mercy, a fusing end forcing of public opinion. Let the women of America arise, unite, and resolve in a great passion of righteousness to save the children of the nation. Nothing can stand against the fire of an (a wakened and abandoned ■womanhood.