Learning Module 2: Activity 1[1]
Lewis Hine Argues for Social Reform
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"With a picture sympathetically interpreted --
what a lever we have for social uplift."–
Lewis Hine
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General Information:
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The work on this activity is due on September 21
Activity:
The
purpose of this activity is gain an understanding of the Social Justice
Movement as an aspect of the progressive reform movement and an example of
reform Darwinism. Specifically, this activity will provide the foundation to
evaluating the work of Lewis Hine, a photographer. As a progressive reformer,
Hine advocated the end of child labor and used his camera to make his argument.
This activity requires that you understand (1) key terms relevant to reform and
social justice during the Progressive era, (2) the background and actions of
those reformers who were part of the Social Justice Movement; (3) Lewis Hine,
the person and the reformer; and (4) child labor in the Progressive Reform Era.
The
resources for these four categories are shown below. Web-based sources on Lewis
Hine have been copied and included.
Key Terms: The following terms are part of the glossary of terms
for this class.
1. Liberalism: The political doctrine that government
rests on the consent of the governed and is duty-bound to protect the freedom
and property of the individual. In the 20th century, liberalism
became associated with the idea that government should regulate the economy and
ensure the material well-being and individual rights of all people. See progressivism and social justice.
2. Progressivism,
(progressive movement): A
wide-ranged 20th century reform movement that advocated government
activism to mitigate the problems created by urban industrialization. Most
specifically, the movement called for government Progressivism reached its peak
in 1912 with the creation of the Progressive Party, which ran Theodore
Roosevelt for president. The term progressivism has come to mean any general
advocating of social welfare programs.
In the United States, the Progressive Era was a period of reform which
spanned from the 1890s to 1920. In that
time progressives strongly opposed waste and corruption, seeking change in
regard to workers’ rights and protection of the ordinary citizen in
general. The reformers (and their
opponents) were predominantly members of the middle class. Most were well educated white Protestants who
lived in cities. Catholics, Jews and blacks crafted their own versions of the
Progressive Movement. In general, progressives in pushed for social justice,
general equality and public safety. Progressivism is still very much part of
the dialogue of social reform and politics.
For example, the belief by many politicians and citizens that the United
States should have a national health care plan is an example of Progressivism.
3. Reform
Darwinism: a social
theory, based on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution that emphasized activism,
arguing that humans could speed up evolution by altering the environment
(conditions of housing, work, education in society). A challenge to social
Darwinism, reform Darwinism condemned laissez-faire and demanded that the
government take a more active approach to solving social problems. It became the ideological basis for
progressive reform in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries.
4. Temperance
Movement: The reform
movement to end drunkenness by urging people to abstain from the consumption of
alcohol. Begun in the 1820s, this
movement achieved its greatest political victory with the passage of a
constitutional amendment in 1919 that prohibited the manufacture, sale, and
transportation of alcohol. That
amendment was repealed in 1933.
5. Social
Justice: Based on the assumption that in a democratic
society the basic needs of food, shelter, jobs, and education should be
available to all citizens. If these
conditions are not met in a free market economy, then it is the responsibility
of the political process (government) to make these needs accessible to
citizens. Underlying this concept is a belief that the assumption that the
needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. See Progressivism.
Progressive Era Reform
6.
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.
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] 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.
Sources – Lewis Hine and a Social Photographer
The quiz will
include questions from the following information:
o Source: The History Place – Child Labor in America
o Issue of Child Labor
o Additional information on Lewis Hine
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.
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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.
The Crusade To End 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
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
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.