by S. L. Stoner
My recent legacy-related thoughts have focused on the long-term impact of textile mills on the white Southern mindset. Post-civil war, the mills in the South grew from a few hundred to thousands. Both northern and southern money funded that explosive growth. The mill owners built houses and towns around their mills and recruited Southern tenant farmers who were starving on land exhausted by tobacco and cotton crops. These desperate people considered a steady job in the mills, with a house, to be a great leap up the economic ladder.
These textile mill towns created two problems. The first problem was that only whites were hired, never blacks. And second, the owners focused on hiring tenant farmers who had lots of children. A condition of the adults’ employment was a signed contract stating that their children would also work in the mills as soon as they reached age five or even younger. These children then had to work in the mills ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week. They never went to school.
When Southern progressives tried to make schooling compulsory, these white parents were manipulated by the owners to fight those efforts. They also joined with the mill owners to fight minimum age labor laws. They wanted their children working in the mills earning money for the family and they feared losing their own jobs. Ironically, because these turn-of-the-century mills would not hire black adults or children, the black children’s parents sent them to school.
According to 1900 census data there were 580,000 children in the U.S., between the ages of ten and fourteen, who could neither read nor write. Of these, 570,000 were in the Southern states. The other 10,000 were in the Northern and Western states.
The withholding of education from Southern white children, as well as their parent’s opposition to laws that would educate and better their children’s lives, had to create a mentality and legacy in the South that is still at play today.Newsboys
According to author Hugh Hindman, it is no exaggeration to say that most poor, urban boys worked as newsboys for at least a short period. After buying their papers from the publisher, the “newsies” would hawk the papers on street corners. This arrangement meant that they only profited when they sold a paper. The situation led to fierce competition between them for the best locations and made established residential routes their preferred way to sell papers.
Portland’s newsboys started the Newsboys’ Benefit Association in 1903. It mostly focused on providing a safe place off the streets for its members and on giving them social opportunities like theater going, fair going and holiday dinners. Later it began to address working conditions and income. Unfortunately, intense lobbying by the large city newspapers caused the legislators to exempt the newsboys from the minimum age legislation.
The Chicago superintendent of a boy’s home stated that one-third of the newsboys who entered the home were suffering from venereal disease. Another large city educator stated that the newsboys, who infrequently attended school, were fully one-third smaller in stature than boys of the same age.Messenger Boys
The National Child Labor Committee was particularly opposed to night messenger work by children for precisely the reasons set forth in this story. Most of the night messenger work involved going into brothel houses, gambling dens, saloons and other such places. And the danger was real. The statistics from juvenile delinquency homes of the time establish that boys who formerly worked as messengers far outnumbered boys who worked in every other occupation except for newsboys. And, newsboys came in second.
Western Union was the single largest employer of child labor at the dawn of the twentieth century. The American District Telegraph (ADT) was the second largest. In Portland, messengers struck the ADT in 1903 to win a 2-cent per message increase. There is no evidence, however, of a Portland area scheme to supplant local area messenger services.
Sage’s messenger adventures with the cow in the garden, crying baby and missing husband were taken directly from local news articles of the time. These articles were intended to give readers an understanding of the messenger job.
The character of Jeff Hayes in this story is based on a real person. Hayes managed a number of messenger services in town until he began owning and operating the Hasty Messenger Company. He was blind but well-known for exercising strict control over his messengers. Long before the Common Council enacted an ordinance, Hayes declared that his messengers, “. . . are not allowed to enter disreputable houses, drink, smoke cigarettes or use profanity.”
Idle messengers were blamed for hooliganism at the corner of Third and Stark Streets, in front of the Hasty Messenger Company. This included throwing a Chinese man’s laundry onto the street. It created a problem for Hasty Messenger Company with Jeff Hayes defending his messengers and insisting that the miscreants were not from his company. During this time, messengers riding after dark without bicycle taillights were arrested and fined two dollars.
Hayes took great pride in the accomplishments of his former messengers, telling a reporter that, “I have employed probably 5000 boys and clerks and out of this small army less than half have turned out bad. One of the brightest men in the last legislature was one of my former messengers, and he had the pleasure of greeting in the Legislative hall, six other former comrades. We have doctors, lawyers, dentists, actors, and businessmen by the score. And I know of four ministers of the gospel who formerly ‘donned the cap’ in the messenger service.”
In November 1905, the Oregonian announced the formation of the Messenger Boy’s Protective Union. Its initial purpose was to provide a safe place for messengers to sleep. In 1906, there was a small walkout staged by the messengers of Portland’s Western Union office. It lasted only an afternoon. The widespread installation of telephones doomed the messenger occupation. By the 1920s messenger services had greatly diminished in the country’s economic life.Glass Factories
Reports at the turn of the 20th century stated over 7,500 boys under the age of sixteen worked in glass factories, two-thirds of them during the night shift. This number is thought to be grossly under-reported. The work was hard, intensely hot, and required constant heavy lifting. One social statistician recorded that a child glass worker traveled twenty-two miles during a single shift. Glass factory children were frequently ill—especially with rheumatism, TB, and pneumonia. Heavy fumes and dust caused serious respiratory diseases and most children carried scars from burns and cuts. Many became blind.
The glass factory experience that led to the death of Johnny Devlin in the story is based on a situation that existed in St. Louis at the turn-of-the-century. Using orphans for factory work began in New England. Some factories were notorious for actually starving and working them to death. In St. Louis, the proliferation of glass factories led to a child worker shortage. Consequently, the glass manufacturers hired “getters” to bring them children. Some of these children were purchased off the orphan trains. The reports of the day noted that some of these glass factory children lived on the river scows of those who’d bought them and essentially turned them into slave labor.Child Labor and Conditions Today
It is estimated that 1 in every 6 American children lives with hunger. More than 12 million children in the United States live in “food insecure” homes. That phrase means that those households don’t have enough food for every family member to lead a healthy life. Our country lags behind a number of countries, including some poorer countries, when it comes to feeding school children. Sadly, right-wing politicians have been cutting what little society provides to under-fed families and have been engaged in “food-shaming” schoolchildren who need nutritional support. One school district in New Jersey stated, in August 2019, that it planned to let its students go hungry if the student owed more than twenty dollars for lunch.
While federal law currently prohibits minors from working in non-farm industries until they’re 14, for example, that is not true of farm labor. Children as young as 12 can be hired to perform agricultural work for longer hours, and under more hazardous conditions than children in other industries. Many of these children are imm
igrants and refugees from Latin American despotic regimes supported by the U.S. government and global mega-corporations.
Children working in U.S. tobacco fields face great health risks. When Human Rights Watch interviewed 140 child tobacco workers in North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, the majority reported symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning, including nausea, vomiting, headaches, and dizziness. The U.S. is the world’s fourth-largest producer of tobacco, yet it has no regulations to protect children in the fields from being poisoned by nicotine exposure. Some tobacco companies are now refusing to purchase tobacco from farms employing children younger than 16, but voluntary policies are not enough.
The Koch Brothers’ right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has drafted model child labor legislation. Four states have adopted ALEC legislation that lessens restrictions on child labor. Missouri’s Republican speaker of the house proposed eliminating all workplace inspectors after learning that they had issued over 1700 citations for child labor violations.
In dismantling child labor protections, Wisconsin focused on older students—age 16 and over—but enacted much more sweeping legislation, abolishing all restrictions on the number of hours minors are permitted to work during the school year. Previously, 16- and 17-year-olds could not work more than five hours a day on school days or more than 26 hours per week during the school year or more than six days in a row. Despite substantial evidence that increased workloads make it more difficult for students to concentrate in school, the new law frees 16- and 17-year-olds to work an unlimited number of hours per week, seven days a week, throughout the school year. Maine, Idaho, and Michigan have followed Wisconsin’s backward-steps with somewhat less draconian repeals of child labor protections.
Today throughout the world, around 218 million children work, many full-time. They do not attend school and have little or no time to play. Many do not receive proper nutrition or care. They are denied the chance to be children. More than half of them are exposed to the worst forms of child labor such as working in hazardous environments, slavery or other forced labor in illicit activities including drug trafficking and prostitution, as well as involvement in armed conflict. The ten worst countries for child labor are Bangladesh, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, India, Liberia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia.
And then there are the countless children maimed, killed and traumatized by war. As John Spargo noted, every harm done to a child ultimately has a negative impact on human society. Who knows what their individual contributions would have been had these mistreated children grown up healthy, well-fed, educated, and cherished?
Acknowledgments
Sage Adair has been encouraged to keep fighting for social and economic justice because of the support so many readers have given to this series. As always, the biggest thank-you goes to them. I especially want to thank those people who have invited me to speak to their reading groups and gatherings. Sage, Mae, Fong, and the other like-minded people resonate with readers of this series. Every time I speak, I hear stories of other families’ hardships and unsung triumphs in days gone by.
The series is written for those who are fighting for and, support, progressive change today. Encouragement and inspiration abound in the triumphs and courage of those progressives who fought for economic and social justice one hundred years ago against opposition that was just as strong, powerful and amoral as what progressives face today.
As always I am grateful for the work done by the staff of the Portland City Archives, the Oregon State Archives, and the Oregon Historical Society. All of these people are working to preserve our history and heritage. They deserve our gratitude and support.
I also especially want to thank Michael Munk, author of the valuable Portland Red Guide, for introducing me to his neighbors; Kelley Baker, author and screenwriter who wrote the wonderful Road Dog; and, Layne Poncy, a hostess of KBOO radio’s Labor Show. Each of them, in their unique way, has contributed much in order to make all our lives better.
Special thanks go to Christine Webb who painstakingly tried to identify and correct all the errors in the story. If any remain, it’s solely on me.
And finally, as always, I must acknowledge my husband, George Slanina. Like Millie Trumbull’s husband, his unwavering support, kindness and always pithy observations continue to make this series possible. As I’ve said before, one can never acknowledge or appreciate wonderful partners too often or too much.
Thank you for reading Bitter Cry
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If you would like to receive notice of the publication dates of the next Sage Adair historical mystery novel, please contact Yamhill Press at www.yamhillpress.net.
Other Mystery Novels in the Sage Adair Historical Mystery Series by S. L. Stoner
Timber Beasts
A secret operative in America’s 1902 labor movement, leading a double life that balances precariously on the knife-edge of discovery, finds his mission entangled with the fate of a young man accused of murder.
Land Sharks
Two men have disappeared, sending Sage Adair on a desperate search that leads him into the Stygian blackness of Portland’s underground to confront murderous shanghaiers, a lost friendship and his own dark fears.
Dry Rot
A losing labor strike, a dead construction boss, a union leader framed for murder, a ragpicker poet, and collapsing bridges, all compete for Sage Adair’s attention as he slogs through the Pacific Northwest’s rain and mud to find answers before someone else dies.
Black Drop
In this ripping yarn, President Theodore Roosevelt has left Washington D.C., embarking on his historic train trip through the American West. Little does he know that assassination awaits him in Portland, Oregon. The words of a dying prostitute warn Sage Adair and his allies that they will be blamed for Roosevelt’s murder. Since life is never simple, Sage also learns of young boys who need rescuing from a fate worse than death. As the presidential train and the boys’ doom rush ever closer, every crucial answer remains elusive. Who is enslaving the boys? Who plans to kill the president? Can either tragedy be stopped?
Dead Line
Sage Adair encounters murder and mayhem midst the sagebrush and pine trees of Central Oregon’s high desert. This captivating land of big skies, golden light and deadly secrets is the home of hardy and hard people–some of whom intend to kill him.
The Mangle
During a blistering 1903 summer, Portland’s steam laundry women are working ten hellish hours a day. Exhausted and ill, they demand a nine-hour workday. Sage Adair, and his mother, Mae, join their fight until women begin disappearing. Desperately searching for the missing women, Sage and Mae face grave danger midst suffragettes, prostitutes, social workers, white slavers, arsonists and heartless bosses. Inspired by actual historical events, this is the sixth book in the award-winning Sage Adair mystery series.
Slow Burn
Arson, murder, kidnapping and false accusations abound in this seventh book of the Sage Adair Series. What begins as a simple assignment—helping the city’s firefighters unionize, catapults Sage onto firefighting’s front lines and into solving the deeper mystery of who is burning down the city and why.
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