Handouts – Activity One

Biographcial Profile of Lewis Hine

Social Photographer
Lewis Wickes Hine was born in 1874 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The youngest child in the family, and the only son, Hine took on the responsibility of supporting his family when his father died in 1892. Hine's employment over the next eight years included a thirteen-hour-day, six-day-a-week shift in a furniture upholstery factory—hours not uncommon at the turn of the century. [28]

Photography and Education
In 1900 Hine enrolled in the University of Chicago to study education. When Frank Manny, principal of the State Normal School in Oshkosh, accepted a position as superintendent of the Ethical Culture School in New York City, he asked Hine and a few other teachers to join him there.

Manny gave Hine his first photography job, taking pictures of students in school clubs. Manny gave Hine a second job photographing immigrants at Ellis Island. The school used Hine's photographs as a teaching aid.

Shortly after his Ellis Island excursions, Hine began teaching photography at the Ethical Culture School. After hours, he attended camera-club meetings. In 1905 he received a master's degree in education from New York University. In 1906 he published several articles on the use of photography in education.

"Sociological Photographer"

Hine enrolled in the graduate program in sociology at Columbia University in 1907. At the urging of his friend, Arthur Kellogg, to become "a sociological photographer," Hine accepted a freelance assignment for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), an organization that campaigned for child labor legislation.

Tenement Family,
New York

Hine's first assignment for the NCLC was New York's tenement homeworkers. In a pamphlet he later wrote, titled, Tasks for the Tenements, Hine stated: "Tenement homework seems to me one of the most iniquitous phases of child-slavery that we have." [29]

Hine's other freelance work included photography for Paul Kellogg's sociological study, The Pittsburgh Survey, and Charles Weller's Neglected Neighbors in the National Capital. Hine became a staff photographer for Charities and the Commons magazine in 1908.

Lewis Hine has been recognized in recent years as one of the pioneers of social reform, later called "documentary," photography.

National Child Labor Committee

Lewis Hine resigned from the Ethical Culture School in 1908 to become a full-time photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).

Photographic Fieldwork
Hine's first assignment was to photograph child labor conditions in the mines, mills, and factories of Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia. While visiting Chicago in 1909 for the annual NCLC conference, Hine took photographs at Jane Addams's Hull House, a settlement home for the poor.

Throughout the next nine years, Hine traveled across the country, reporting on conditions in New York canneries, New Jersey glassworks, New England textile mills, and southern cotton mills and seafood houses. By 1918, Hine had taken thousands of photographs, only a small number of which had been printed.

Lectures and Exhibitions
In addition to conducting photographic fieldwork for the NCLC, Hine managed the agency's exhibit department. He also presented lantern-slide lectures for the agency.

At a 1909 lecture, Hine remarked, "The great social peril is darkness and ignorance." [30] Through his photographic work, Hine shed light on the long workdays, the poor lighting, the inadequate ventilation, and the dangerous machinery that made working conditions difficult for many employees.

The NCLC used magazine articles, posters, and exhibitions to demonstrate the need for child labor legislation. The NCLC's position was that "No anonymous or signed denials can contradict proof given with photographic fidelity." [31] The Child Welfare League also used Hine's photographs to promote its causes.


Freelance Work
Hine's freelance career blossomed. Advertising as the Hine Photo Company, he offered a variety of services, from exhibitions, to reports, to lantern slides, to magazine and newspaper articles. Hine sold photographs to picture agencies and to publications such as McClure's and Everybody's. Hine continued to write and photograph for Charities and the Commons, whose name had become The Survey.

Hine presented his photographs with captions in photo stories, posters, leaflets, and pamphlets. According to social historian Alan Trachtenberg, the purpose of Hine's social photography was "to bring into view what normal social vision has been conditioned to ignore." [32]

Together, Hine's photographs and captions helped the NCLC build its case. But Hine's images were powerful enough to stand alone.

Photography and Social Reform

During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, photography was increasingly used as a method of documentation. The photographer's audience became the mass readership of newspapers, magazines, and books. Line drawings made from photographs, and later, halftone photography, enabled people to see as well as read about the world around them.

The media became a buffer between the wealthy and the working class, framing events so that middle-class and upper-class audiences could maintain their distance and choose their level of involvement in the issues at hand.

The invention of the gelatin dry-plate process, the introduction of roll film and the hand-held camera, and new artificial light technologies inspired many photographers in the 1880s.

The Photo-Secessionists, a group headed by Alfred Stieglitz, promoted photography as fine art. The Photo-Secessionists favored soft lighting and muted scenes, similar to impressionist art.

Photographers of the documentary style—a genre not so-named until the early twentieth century—attempted to capture the realities of life in nineteenth-century America. Solomon Butcher documented the lifestyles of Midwest pioneer families. Adam Clark Vroman, Ben Wittick, and Frank Rinehart created a photographic record of Native American cultures. Arnold Genthe recorded the sights of San Francisco's Chinatown. Joseph and Percy Byron photographed New York's wealthy citizens.

Lewis Hine Photographing Children, c. 1910

Social reformers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine used the medium of photography to bring evidence of their claims to these viewers. Their style of photography may best be called "social reform," for each photographer used the medium to effect social change.

Progressive Era Reform

While the Gilded Age was an era of prosperity for many Americans, economic depressions brought hard times to many businesses and made sporadic employment a reality for the working class.

Economic Instability

The industrial plants that survived became more demanding in terms of both the speed and the regularity with which their workers produced goods. Increasingly frustrated by unfair demands, many laborers chose to strike. It was a collective action, a way of protesting as a group against the economic injustices of the workplace.

Strikes enabled laborers to express disagreement with the idea of a permanent wage-laboring class. This was the opposite of what the American republic claimed to offer.

Few working-class citizens were able to own or operate a business, buy property, or upgrade to better housing. By the turn of the century, most reformers favored the argument that poverty was the result of the nation's unstable economic conditions.


Child Labor Reform
Concern for the conditions of the poor gave way to a growing interest in the rights of the working class. [4] One of the most persistent causes of Progressive Era reformers was child labor reform.

The 1890 census revealed that more than one million children, ten to fifteen years old, worked in America. [5] That number increased to two million by 1910. Industries employed children as young as five or six to work as many as eighteen to twenty hours a day.

Breaker Boys, Pennsylvania

Physical ailments were common. Glassworks employees were exposed to intense heat and heavy fumes. Young miners sat on boards in cramped positions, breathing heavy dust, sifting through coal. Seafood workers stood for hours shucking oysters at five cents a pail. The sharp oyster shells sometimes cut their hands.

Industrialization did not create child labor, but it did contribute to the need for child labor reform. The replacement of skilled artisans by machinery and the growth of factories and mills made child labor increasingly profitable for businesses. [6] Many employers preferred hiring children because they were quick, easy to train, and were willing to work for lower wages.

Progressive Era reformers believed that child labor was detrimental to children and to society. They believed that children should be protected from harmful environments so that they would become healthy, productive adults. Their goals were to develop programs that would eliminate children's participation in industry and increase their involvement in education and extracurricular activities.

The Crusade Against Child Labor

Hine and other Progressive Era reformers campaigned against child labor and other social conditions. In the early twentieth century, several child labor reform organizations formed to secure effective laws.

Lewis Hine, 1936

The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), founded in 1904, provided research expertise, supported local child labor committees, informed the public of existing conditions, and worked to ensure that laws would be passed to prohibit child labor.

The NCLC hired Lewis Hine to travel around the country photographing child workers in factories, mills, mines, and canneries. Hine created an extensive photographic record that enabled the NCLC to present its case to the public and to federal government officials.

Hine had a long and successful career as a photographer. By the time of his death in 1940, social reform photography had become an acceptable method of documentation, worthy of mainstream publications like Life magazine. Social reform photography had also become appreciated as an art form.

Child Labor Laws

While the reformers had an ally in President Theodore Roosevelt, politicians with ties to industry voted against any long-term solutions to problems such as child labor.

The Keating-Owen Act passed in 1916 but was later declared unconstitutional on the grounds that Congress could not regulate local labor conditions. The act, if passed, would have freed children from child labor only in industries that engaged in interstate commerce.

Boy Lost Arm Running
Saw in Box Factory

In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson approved and signed into law the "Tax on Employment of Child Labor." This placed a ten percent tax on net profits of businesses that employed children under age fourteen or made them work more than eight hours a day, six days a week. [7]

The Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional. Yet the initial passage of the bills may have had some effect on businesses, as the number of working children between ages ten and fifteen declined by almost fifty percent between 1910 and 1920. [8]

There was still a great deal of opposition to a national amendment against child labor. Opponents labeled the proposed amendment a communist idea that would control the nation's businesses. [9]

The Smith-Hughes Act, passed in 1917, provided one million dollars to states that agreed to improve their public schools by providing vocational education programs. The National Child Labor Committee and other organizations believed that these programs would offer children an alternative to work.

By 1929 every state had a provision banning children under fourteen from working. Thirty-six states had laws that prohibited factory workers under sixteen from working at night or for more than eight hours a day. [10]

In February 1941 the Supreme Court overruled the 1918 decision against the Keating-Owen Act. As a result, businesses that shipped goods out of state had to abide by the ruling that children could only work outside of school hours and that children under eighteen were unable to work in jobs that were hazardous to their health.

Child Labor in America – The History Place

As early as the 1830s, many U.S. states had enacted laws restricting or prohibiting the employment of young children in industrial settings. However, in rural communities where child labor on the farm was common, employment of children in mills and factories did not arouse much concern. Another problem for children was the popular opinion that gainful employment of children of the "lower orders" actually benefited poor families and the community at large.

Entire families were hired, the men for heavy labor and the women and children for lighter work. Work days typically ran from dawn to sunset, with longer hours in winter, resulting in a 68-72 hour workweek. Many families also lived in company owned houses in company owned villages and were often paid with overpriced goods from the company store. Thus they lived a life entirely dominated by their employers.

By the late 1800s, states and territories had passed over 1,600 laws regulating work conditions and limiting or forbidding child labor. In many cases the laws did not apply to immigrants, thus they were often exploited and wound up living in slums working long hours for little pay.

Throughout America, local child labor laws were often ignored. On a national level, progress to protect children stalled as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled several times that child labor laws under question were unconstitutional. A subsequent attempt to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution failed.

In 1904, the National Child Labor Committee was organized by socially concerned citizens and politicians, and was chartered by Congress in 1907. From 1908 to 1912, photographer Hine documented numerous gross violations of laws protecting young children. At many of the locations he visited, youngsters were quickly rushed out of his sight. He was also told youngsters in the mill or factory had just stopped by for a visit or were helping their mothers.

Attempts at child labor reform continued, aided by the widespread publicity from Hine's photographs. As a result, many states passed stricter laws banning the employment of underage children. In 1938, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, better known as the Federal Wage and Hour Law. The Act was declared constitutional in 1941 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Act set a work week of 40 hours, with a minimum wage of 40 cents per hour. It prohibited child labor under age 16 while allowing minors 16 and over to work in non-hazardous occupations. The Act set 18 as the minimum age for work in industries classified as hazardous. No minimum age was set for non-hazardous agricultural employment after school hours and during vacations. Children aged 14 and 15 could be employed in non-manufacturing, non-mining, and non-hazardous occupations outside of school hours and during vacations for limited hours.