I spend hours each day reading through the old newspapers and I am always finding articles that make me “what the hum” out loud.
Earlier today I found an article about child workers published in 1915 where a factory owner claimed that keeping kids in school would make them insane. [Source https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1915-04-13/ed-1/seq-4/]
But wait, let’s back up a moment. Child labor laws did not come into full effect until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act which took children out of the factories and mines.
Before 1938, however, children were put to work in dangerous jobs, using equipment that could kill them or leave them maimed.
There were earlier attempts to put an end to child labor in the US, but they all failed due to the elite needing the cheap labor to keep their factories and mines operating at very little cost.
Here we have a picture of a boy from a newspaper published in 1917. The boy is labelled, “A good prospect. Worth your money.”
And here is another photo, this one from 1911, of a young girl heading to work in a cigarette factory in Virginia.
In the spring of 1915, there was a discussion on child labor among educators, social workers, and factory owners. The goal was to create a bill that would protect children from dangerous jobs and keep them in school.
During the discussion, the factory owners called child labor a “blessing to the child” and one went on to say, and I quote:
“You must get ‘em young to make anything out of them.”
He went on to say that schools were unsanitary and that boys who stayed in school past the age of 14 would become insane due to teachers yelling at them.
And here are some young boys who worked at a cannery in South Carolina in 1913.
A union man at the meeting stated that, “The opponents of the bill [that would protect children] are without exception manufacturers who think more of dollars and cents than the future of the children whom they hire.”
Such as these boys who worked in a cigar factory in Florida, 1909.
In an attempt to make everyone happy, a member of the Teachers’ Federation pointed out that schools with workshops for boys to learn a trade produced good workers for the factories and allowed the boys to keep studying books.
While this is a great idea for students to learn a trade while staying in school, factory owners were actually against it. They would rather have the children in their factories than wait for them to graduate. They even went on to say that trade education produced bad citizens and unhealthy bodies.
As if these boys, workers at a glass factory in Virginia, 1911, looked healthy.
This is hardly surprising. In another article I found, a claim was made that all a child needed was a good meal each day and then he would be a good worker. Never mind getting an education or developing family bonds. A child’s place was in the factories and mines.
