The devastating economic hardships of the nineteenth century forced many American families to put their young children to work, and the Soderstroms were no exception. Reuben spent his childhood in blacksmith shops, trolly tracks, and filthy factories, all to send meager money home to his impoverished parents. As a boy in Streator, he worked amid the danger of rolling cars on the rail lines, the blazing furnaces of local glass factories, and the loud print shops of the local newspaper. For Reuben the child, there was scant evidence of workplace safety or childhood education.

Reuben’s tragic childhood was not uncommon. By the turn of the twentieth century, one out of every five children in the United States aged 10 to 14—over 1.75 million in total—were earning their own living.[1] Industrialization presented factory work involving simple, repetitive tasks, and manufacturers lowered costs even further by hiring children for these jobs. Young and desperate, children were hired at low wages to work in dangerous conditions. Many industries came to rely on this labor; in some states more than one out of every four textile workers was under the age of sixteen.[2] For many, factory toil at such an age “crippled the soul of the child at the time that it was just opening itself” to the wonders of life.[3]

The horrors of child labor can be glimpsed in the Lewis Hine photographs placed on these pages. One of America’s seminal photojournalists, Hine was born in Wisconsin and became an ardent recorder of the American child labor market and workplace conditions in the early 1900s. In 1908, he became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee in New York, and spent a decade aiding their lobbying to influence legislative changes.

Hine’s photographs show the alarming number of amputations children suffered from their work on trolley lines, railroad cars, and underground mining carts. Because of their dexterity, children often were ordered to scamper across cars and often fell to the tracks. One of Hine’s subjects, 14-year-old Frank Monongah, is pictured on these pages; he lost both legs when he slipped onto the tracks in the damp darkness of a West Virginia mine in front of an oncoming cart. In 1904, another Hine subject, 11-year-old Neil Gallagher, lost a leg when it was crushed between two railroad cars; he stayed in the hospital for nine weeks and was uneducated and unemployable when he left, hoping to find work in a pool hall.

The “breaker boys,” also captured here by Hine’s seemingly omnipresent lens, spent interminable days hunched over bins of coal in crude stools breaking impurities from coal lumps with their hands, hammers, and chisels. Their efficiency was monitored by taskmasters, who were also photographed, armed with thick wooden rods. Other children were relegated to coal companies’ underground tunnels to squeeze through tight places or pull carts as if they were mules. And if the kids did not suffer death or amputation, they were subjected to severe dust and early onset of miner’s lung. Their lives were over before they began. Many children worked in the coal mines of Streator, Illinois.

One can only imagine the undocumented, off-the-job horrors also endured by these children. Living in a man’s world, they were subjected to physical abuse, salary abuse, and sometime sexual abuse. The Dickensian conditions of their lives included shantytowns, railroad cars, thievery and street brawls. Often, child workers spoke different languages than each other and their taskmasters. Fluent in both Swedish and English, Reuben adapted to the multiple languages of his constantly changing workplaces, and there is no doubt that his daily survival included phrases of Italian or German and even Scottish colloquialisms.

LEGALIZED EXPLOITATION

So what were governments across the United States doing to outlaw the child labor market? Sadly, the answer was often very little. Many state officials personally benefitted from the child labor, and openly flouted what meager protections existed to save money. Governor Braxton Comer of Alabama, for example, evaded the 12-year-old minimum age law in his state by putting his child laborers’ younger siblings—some as young as six—to work in his Avondale textile mill, placing all their wages on a single paycheck to make it appear as if the eldest child earned a fair wage. Mother Jones savagely attacked such moral and religious hypocrisy, writing that the “brutal governor” perpetrated such abuse while acting as “a pillar of the First Methodist Church in Birmingham. On Sundays he gets up and sings ‘O Lord, will you have another star for my crown when I get there?’”[4] In Reuben’s Illinois, legislation meant to protect working women and children precipitated the creation of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association (IMA), the Illinois Federation’s greatest foe, which saw the law quickly repealed.[5]

Child protection advocates took their cause to the national level, and by 1916 Congress passed and President Wilson signed the Keating-Owen Act into law, which established federal minimum-age requirements for work. But while Congress sought child protections in law, business interests worked to undo them in court. Under direction of the conservative Chief Justice White, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions undermining many pro-labor laws, including child protection acts. In 1918, it declared the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional in Hammer v. Dagenhart, stating that Congress could not regulate the manufacture of goods, even if those goods were sold across state lines (a decision later reversed). In a stinging dissent, the famous Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ridiculed the majority’s tortured reasoning that congress had the right to prohibit “evil” goods—such as liquor or prostitution—but not “evil” processes, declaring:

If there is any matter upon which the civilized countries have agreed—far more unanimously than they have with regard to intoxicants and some other matters over which this country is now emotionally aroused—it is the evil of premature and excessive child labor…this Court always had disavowed the right to intrude its judgment upon questions of policy or morals. It is not for this Court to pronounce when prohibition is necessary to regulation if it ever may be necessary--to say that it is permissible as against strong drink but not as against the product of ruined lives.[6]

Congress then tried taxing factories and mines that employed children in the Revenue Act of 1919. Again the Supreme Court ruled Congress’s actions unconstitutional, stating in Bailey V. Drexel Furniture Company that taxes could not be used to regulate employers (another decision abandoned by later courts).

Eventually Congress sought to bypass the obstructionist court altogether and proposed a constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to regulate child labor for those under the age of sixteen. Factory owners demonized the move, wildly charging in the pages of the pro-business Manufacturers’ Record that:

This proposed amendment is fathered by socialists, communists and Bolshevists. They are the active workers in its favor. They look forward to its adoption as giving them the power to nationalize the children of the land and bring about in this country the exact conditions which prevail in Russia…If adopted, this amendment would be the greatest thing ever done in America in behalf of the activities of hell. It would make millions of young people under eighteen years of age idlers in brain and body, and thus make them the devils’ best workshop. It would destroy the initiative and self-reliance and manhood and womanhood of all the coming generations.”[7]

Thanks in part to such characterizations, the Child Labor Amendment was only ratified by 28 states and never became law.

While owners tried to cast child labor as a character-building bulwark against “idleness,” their own actions indicated otherwise. It was poverty, not industriousness, that forced families like the Soderstroms to send their children off to work. Owners wouldn’t dare sentence their own daughters and sons to such a fate, sending them instead for the schooling they so fiercely denied other children. They justified such blatant hypocrisy by claiming that they were actually acting on the children’s best interests, sparing them from the corrosive effects education could have on those fated to a life of labor. “There is such a thing as too much education for working people sometimes,” explained one New England mill manager in his testimony on the issue before the US Senate Committee on the Relations Between Labor and Capital. “I have seen cases where young people are spoiled for labor by a little too much refinement.”[8] As ISFL President John Walker noted in response to the IMA’s attacks on the child labor amendment:

There are a great many men who are manufacturers in Illinois who are decent, broad-minded, well-informed and generous, but the average manufacturer is not much different from other men, and as it is to his immediate interest financially to get cheap labor and high profits, to have the kind of labor he can exploit most easily and in the greatest measure, and as child labor has always been the most desirable kind for those purposes, that is the thing that influences the selfish manufacturer. He is in business to make money.[9] This money came at a heavy price, often paid in disease and disfigurement. A 1923 study of working children under the age of eighteen in Illinois found over 4,655 injuries, 4,160 cases of temporary disablement, 455 permanent disablements, and 40 deaths.[10] Children lucky enough to avoid injury still suffered; child labor victims were left physically stunted and underdeveloped. “One learns not to judge the ages of working children by their physical appearance,” the muckraking journalist John Spargo wrote in his child labor expose The Bitter Cry of Children, “for they are usually behind other children in height, weight, and girth of chest—often as much as two or three years…In textile mill towns like Biddeford, Me., Manchester, N.H, Fall River and Lawrence, Mass., I have seen many such children, who, if they were twelve or fourteen according to their certificates and the companies’ registers, were not more than ten or twelve in reality.”[11]

“CREATING A NEW DAY FOR AMERICAN CHILDREN”

In light of this, it is not surprising that many of the most forceful advocates for child labor reform were themselves products of that very environment. Illinois State Federation of Labor President John Walker had worked alongside his father in the coal mines since the age of nine or ten, as had labor leader John Williams. Williams later recalled working there with a “dread at times amounting to loathing.”[12] As a teenager he banded together with other young men from the pits to form a “study group,” discussing their readings and topics of the day. Williams would later use this model to form an education program for children who, like him, had been denied a traditional education. Williams assigned readings from classical literature to contemporary economics, and arranged borrowing from private libraries.[13]

Reuben began his education as one of Williams’ students. Like Williams, Reub’s experience had shaped his views on child labor. Although he did not speak much on his personal experience, his sister Olga described Reuben’s time as a “victim of the child labor market.”[14] In the Streator glass factory where he worked:

Conditions were bad. Workers would fight, air was polluted from smoke, workers were burned from the hot furnaces and hot bottles. Ventilation was very poor and there were no safety laws or toilets or wash rooms, so you went home blistered and dirty…he rebelled silently about conditions as they were, about children working so hard in sweatshops…and determined that he sure was going to try and do something about all these things.[15]

Reuben would grow to become a strong defender of children’s rights. “Our children are our most precious resource,” he later wrote. “It is on them that the future of our nation depends. Planning for progress should be the aim of our lives and of our state and nation.”[16] As a state representative who served as Chairman of the Education Committee in the Illinois House, Soderstrom called for and won many increases in state funding for education. He worked alongside labor officials in the state and nation to pass crucial child labor protections, finding a powerful ally in President Franklin Roosevelt. After seeing his first attempt at ending child labor reversed when the Supreme Court overturned the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, Roosevelt and his supporters finally succeeded with passing the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. Defining child labor as “the employment of children under sixteen, or the employment of children under eighteen in occupations designated as hazardous by the Children’s Bureau” the FLSA, still in effect today, was the first national legislation to set lasting minimum ages and standards for the employment of youths.[17]

At last the children of the United States would be protected from dangerous adult work. Reuben celebrated the bill’s passage in his Labor Day Message of 1939, declaring “Children have been taken out of mills, mines and factories and placed in schools where they are given the opportunity to grow into strong, healthy, fine young men and women.”[18] Reuben and his compatriots, many themselves the product of child exploitation, had succeeded in creating a new day for American children.

* * *

ENDNOTES

[1] Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), 31.

[2] John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 148.

[3] Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 134.

[4] Mother Jones, “Governor Comer’s Alabama Cotton Mills,” St. Louis Labor, October 24, 1908.

[5] Alfred H. Kelly, “A History of the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association” (University of Chicago, 1940), The University of Chicago Libraries, 3.

[6] Hammer V. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918) (Holmes Dissenting).

[7] The Manufacturers Record, September 4, 1924, quoted in Charles Lincoln Van Doren and Robert McHenry, eds., Webster’s Guide to American History: A Chronological, Geographical, and Biographical Survey and Compendium (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1971), 421.

[8] Report of the Committee of the Senate Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital, and Testimony Taken by the Committee (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885), 15.

[9] “Walker Answers Glenn on Child Labor Amendment,” Illinois State Federation of Labor Weekly News Letter, January 24, 1925.

[10] Genevieve Walmsley, “New Evidence,” Illinois State Federation of Labor Weekly News Letter, May 19, 1928.

[11] John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of the Children (New York, New York: Macmillan, 1906), 152-153.

[12] Dale Lee Bennett, “The Labor Movement of Streator, Illinois, 1868 To 1933” (University of Illinois, 1966), 17.

[13] Ibid., 82.

[14] Olga R. Hodgson, Reuben G. Soderstrom (Kankakee, IL: Olga R. Soderstrom, 1974), 4.

[15] Ibid., 5.

[16] Reuben Soderstrom, “Labor Day Message,” Illinois State Federation of Labor Weekly News Letter, August 23, 1941.

[17] Sandy Hobbs, Jim McKechnie, and Michael Lavalette, Child Labor: A World History Companion (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 87.

[18] Reuben Soderstrom, “Labor Day Message,” Illinois State Federation of Labor Weekly News Letter, August 26, 1939.