Nonfiction

Kids at Work: Photos by Lewis Hine

I picked up Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor at the library in connection with our study of history. We’ve only just passed the Luddites, yet this book, written for adults, was nevertheless recommended for children because its many photographs by Lewis Hine give a glimpse of what it meant to be a child laborer in the age of industry.

It’s devastating.

I once took a class on literature of the city, and as I read this book I was reminded of How the Other Half Lives , Jacob Riis’ collection of photographs of tenement life in New York City around the turn of the century. Riis preceded Hine by thirty years or so, but the documentary evidence he accumulated of the underside of the land of the free raised horrified awareness. Lewis Hine’s photographs are more narrowly focused on child labor, and equally telling.

Lewis Hine was a schoolteacher and photographer who became an investigative reporter for the National Child Labor Committee because he believed so strongly that if he could expose the use of young children in factories, mines, and exhausting farm work, change would surely come. Children as young as four worked long hours in the dark, or in the heat, breathing smoke or coal or dust or lint, and frequently getting injured or killed by heavy machinery. In Kids at Work, Russell Freedman chronicles the story of Lewis Hine’s patient accumulation of evidence.

Before reading, I looked through the photos with my children, and many of them made me weep. There are coal mines, cotton mills, canneries, beet fields, and city streets where children deliver papers and shine shoes. You can see a number of them online if you do a google image search using “Lewis Hine” or “Lewis Hine child labor.” Freedman’s text provides a straightforward account of Hine’s life, which included other photography projects as well. (He documented the building of the Empire State Building, and those photos of men dangling in mid-air high above the city are really something.) Though Hine achieved great distinction, by the end of his life his work was considered out of style, and he died in poverty. Only afterward did he gain the permanent acclaim he deserved.

The things we do to each other.

I want to say it’s an inspiring book, and in a way it is. It got me thinking about what one person can do, armed with strength of character and the courage of conviction:

Hine was clever enough to bluff his way into many plants. He searched where he was not welcome, snapped scenes that were meant to be hidden from the public. At times, he was in real danger, risking physical attack when factory managers realized what he was up to. A slender, birdlike man who was usually retiring and shy, he put his life on the line in order to record a truthful picture of working children in early-twentieth-century America.

This is not a feel-good inspirational story, though. Its truth is painful, and although the forms may have changed, the things in humanity that permitted the captains of industry to exploit and sacrifice children are still all too real. I recommend this book highly, but not because it will make anyone feel good. I recommend it because of its searing truth, and because we owe it to these children, now long gone, to let our eyes dwell on their faces and their plight.

Maybe we’ll recognize them when we meet them outside these pages. Maybe we’ll find a way to tell their story, like Lewis Hine did.

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