Children of the Loom
June 14th, 2009 Text and Photo Caption Editing
By DANIEL M. ROPER
Editors Note: Thanks to Georgia BackRoads publisher Dan Roper for originally publishing these Lewis Wickes Hine photographs in the 
Summer 2009 issue of Georgia BackRoads and for making them available to others on the Brown’s Guides website.
Some say that the end doesn’t justify the means, but you couldn’t have 
convinced acclaimed photographer Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940). In order to further a cause he held most dear, Hine cajoled, deceived and flat-out lied to persuade people to pose before his camera or to allow him onto their property so that he could take pictures. He had no reservations, whatsoever, about the means he used to achieve an end, but withhold your judgment of his actions until you read the rest of this article.
A century ago, Hine embarked on a mission to expose child labor in the United States by graphically portraying the exploitation of children as young as seven years old. These children, Hine and many others believed, should have been in school or at home playing with friends. Instead, they toiled in some of America’s most unwholesome work environments, including canneries, mines, quarries, and fisheries.
In the South, the cotton mills drew Hine’s attention. From Virginia to Alabama, thousands of children worked in textile mills that produced the fabric that clothed a nation. In Georgia, there were dozens of these cotton factories in cities and towns like Lafayette and Athens in the north, Columbus, Macon, and Augusta in central Georgia, and Tifton in the south. Note: Read a New York Times story written February 14, 1898, reporting that because of lower wages, longer hours and lower taxation, Massachusetts Cotton Mill was shifting more of its manufacturing from Lowell, Massachusetts, to the Lindale Mill in northwest Georgia’s Floyd County near Rome.
By 1910, one in four workers in the South’s textile mills was between the ages of 10 and 15 years. These youths received a few dollars a week for tasks ranging from running heavy machinery to monitoring the thread to guard against breaks. This was perfectly legal at the time, but Hine documented many instances of children as young as seven being employed. The youngest of these were usually “dinner toters” paid to carry meals to adult laborers. Schooling for any of the children who worked in the mills was irregular at best, or quite often non-existent.
Hine, who was born in Wisconsin and worked many years in New York, came to Georgia twice to document child labor in the state’s textile mills. His first visit took place in January 1909, and the second in April 1913. (A note on the dates on photographs in the Gallery: Sometimes Hine recorded the exact day on which a photograph was taken, but more often he recorded only the month and year. When an exact date was not specified, Brown’s Guides arbitrarily assigned it to the 15th of the month in which it was taken to satisfy the dating requuirements of the Gallery software). To gain entrance to the mills, he would arrive on the grounds dressed in suit and tie, posing as a Bible salesman, fire inspector, or as an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. When denied entry, he would linger by an entrance and photograph children as they arrived or departed.
Hine’s stratagems were usually successful, for he proved to be a prolific photographer and researcher. Of 65 reports issued by the National Child Labor Committee, he authored at least 30. He illustrated each report with scores of photographs bearing highly detailed notations right down to the ages and addresses of the children depicted.
His beautiful yet disquieting photographs brought home the humanity – and inhumanity – of child labor. Incongruously, some of his photographs show youngsters with dirty faces and bare feet, dressed in coveralls, while others feature children seemingly freshly scrubbed and wearing fine outfits. Since photography was still very much a novelty at the time, parents aware that their children were to be photographed undoubtedly dressed them for the occasion.
The undeniable beauty of Hine’s photographs and the dignity possessed by his subjects prompted some child-labor activists to complain. They felt Hine should have tried harder to exaggerate the poverty of the youngsters he portrayed.
Yet Hine was an effective and powerful opponent of child labor. He once told an audience, “Perhaps you are weary of child labor pictures. Well, so are the rest of us, but we propose to make you and the whole country so sick and tired of the whole business that when the time for action comes, child labor pictures will be records of the past.”
Thanks in no small part to Hine’s work, in 1916 Congress enacted the Keating-Owen Act that restricted employment of children under 14 in industry. “The work Hine did for this reform,” said the chairman of the National Child Labor Committee, “was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention.”
After finishing with child-labor work, Hine continued his social-advocacy photography. His later career included documenting poverty in the Balkans following World War I, drought and relief efforts in the Midwest during the Great Depression, and construction workers building the Empire State Building in New York City.
Despite his record of accomplishment, Hine found it difficult to earn an adequate living as a photographer. In January 1940, he lost his home to foreclosure. Ten months later, he died in extreme poverty in Dobbs Ferry, New York. His child labor photographs, though, remain a stirring memorial to his work, and all the more since they went so far to abolishing the practice.
Emily J. Gómez is originally from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. She received her B.A. in Fine Arts/Photography from Loyola University Chicago in 1998 and her M.F.A. with Distinction from the University of Georgia in 2006. She is an adopted member of the Santee Indian Nation of South Carolina and an Assistant Professor of Art at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. Photo by Ernesto Gómez.
Years later after I was working with and publishing Howard Finster’s prints, I pulled out the poster and had Howard sign it and then I had it framed in the wood-burned molding that he had personally designed.
linstrum+matre Artworks in the Bennett Street art district in Atlanta to buy his new book, The Reconstruction of America, and view a powerful, timely exhibition of the sketches, drawings and paintings that went in to creating it.