by David Nasaw
There was nothing new or extraordinary about asking children to go to work. Only recently has childhood become—almost by definition—an age of irresponsibility. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rural and preindustrial parents routinely sent their children off to work. Large families with many mouths to feed could not afford to keep the kids at home until they were ready to start their own households. Nor could most of them find work for the children at home. The solution was to ship them off to households which could make use of them. Ten- and eleven-year-old boys and girls were placed out as maids, servants, plowboys, and helpers of every description.
Roxbury, Massachusetts, August 1912. “Family of Mrs. Donovan, 293½ Highland Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts, tying tags for Dennison Company. This is the family that has worked on tags for seven years and makes an average from that work of $30 a month. One month they made $42 a month.… All the children aged 13, 9, 11 and the twins, 4½ years, help the mother. They often have to work late at night to get done.” (Lewis Hine Collection, LC)
Only the coming of industrialization—here and in Europe—altered this pattern. With the expansion of factory cities—with their thousands of jobs for children—working-class families discovered that they could find work for their youngsters within walking distance of home.7 Child labor kept working-class families solvent and together, but it did so by sacrificing the children who were sent into the mines, mills, and factories. As observed in England by commentators as diverse as Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and Benjamin Disraeli, child laborers in industry were so brutally exploited that many did not survive to become adults.
Across the Atlantic, Americans with their characteristic optimism saw what was happening in England and declared that they could do better. Child labor might pose a problem to society, but as American commentators observed with growing distaste and suspicion, so too did the increase in the number and visibility of the idle urchins, orphans, runaways, and “ragged outcasts” who were found in such quantities on the streets of the larger cities.8
Charles Loring Brace, founder of the Children’s Aid Society, proposed sending the urchins out of the city to live, work, and be properly raised on small family farms. Unfortunately, as he soon discovered, there was an overabundance of urchins and only a limited supply of farm families prepared to take them in. An alternate solution to the problem was to remove the children from the streets by sending them to work. Though Brace was no doubt aware of the English industrial experience, he was confident that conditions in this country would be different. If manufacturing could put idle teenagers to work, it could only benefit them and their city. From the 1860s on, the Society, while continuing to place children on family farms, devoted more and more of its funds to lodging houses and industrial schools designed to protect and prepare the city’s “ragged outcasts” for productive labor in manufacturing establishments.9
This vision of the future—with middle-class reformers sweeping idle teenagers off the streets into industrial schools and from there into factories—may have been a comforting one and, in the 1870s, not entirely unrealistic. Regrettably, industrial society was not to progress along these paths. Although employment possibilities for teenagers expanded through the last decades of the nineteenth century, manufacturing jobs did not. Children who found work found it in dead-end positions: as helpers, errand boys, messengers, maids, and unskilled laborers. By the turn of the century, even these jobs were disappearing. Children, once a major component of the work force in factories, shops, and department stores, were being pushed back onto the streets.10
Children at work in a stringbean cannery. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
The decrease in the number of child laborers was most dramatic in the department stores, those paragons of modernity. During their nineteenth-century infancy, the stores had employed thousands of children, most of them as “cash” boys and girls. When sales were made, the children were called on to carry the item sold, the customer’s money, and the sales slip to an inspector who checked the price and wrapped the merchandise. From the inspector the children hurried to the cashier, then back to the customer with wrapped package and change.
In the 1870s, one third of Macy’s employees had worked in this capacity. By the turn of the century they were gone, all of them. The pneumatic tube, followed swiftly by cash registers at each sales counter, made the children superfluous. Some were kept on as messengers, but only until the stores installed telephones on the sales floor. By the early decades of the century, the only children still at work in the stores were those hidden below in the packing rooms and warehouses and those sent out on deliveries.11
Automation not only eliminated the department store employees, it took away the jobs of many of the children who had packed candies, pulled bastings, folded paper boxes, pasted labels on cans, and assisted glassblowers at the glassworks. In the nineteenth century and into the early years of the twentieth, boys had been as much a part of the glassmaking process as the huge furnaces which melted the glass. In 1892, according to Robert and Helen Lynd, 42 percent of the employees in the Middletown glass plant had been “boys.” The “take-out boys” and “snapper-ups” carried the blown glass in tongs from the blowers to the finishers; the “carry-in boys” picked it up from the finishers and placed it in the cooling ovens to harden.
As long as the glassworks remained organized on craft lines, there was plenty of work for the boys. When the manufacturers automated their plants, the boys’ usefulness came to an end. They and the skilled blowers and finishers they had assisted were replaced by machines and machine tenders, most of them recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.12
The manufacturers, though they fought like hell to keep the child labor reformers from tampering with their infant work force, were not sorry to see the children go. While cheap, the boys and girls had never been the most productive of laborers. They were sloppy, unsteady, prone to falling asleep and forever taking unauthorized vacations or quitting without notice.13 They were also no longer needed. Though there remained thousands upon thousands of unskilled, menial tasks to be performed in the nation’s mines, mills, factories, and workshops, adult immigrants arriving daily from eastern and southern Europe were available to perform them as cheaply as the children had, and more efficiently.
The substitution of immigrant adults for children and the automation of many of their specialized jobs did not mean an end to child labor. Those employers (e.g., southern textile mills) who had not yet automated their plants or were unable to secure a large enough supply of unskilled adult immigrant laborers continued to hire children by the thousands. In the South and in rural areas throughout the country, children continued to sort coal, pick berries, can fruit, shuck oysters, and tend machines in textile mills.14
In urban areas as well, though the larger commercial and manufacturing establishments no longer needed child laborers, families who could not have survived without the young ones’ help could still find places for them. Children no more than ten or eleven were hidden away in sweatshops, back rooms, and their own tenement flats where for hours on end they assisted their parents and other adults at menial tasks that had not yet been automated or moved into factory buildings. Day after day they pulled bastings and assembled artificial flowers. Day after day, the same tasks, from early in the morning until the light grew too dim to see what lay before them.
Picking cotton. (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
It was these working children—in countryside and city—who aroused the sympathy of the reform community and motivated the early twentieth-century crusade against child labor. Though their numbers—and their suffering—remained worthy of the reformers’ attention, these children were a minority—and a diminishing one. In urban areas especially, the decline in child laborers accelerated through the first years of the new century. By 1920, the proportion of ten-to-fourteen-year-olds in non-agricultural pursuits was less than one third what it had been twenty years before.15 As the Lynds di
scovered in Muncie, children were beginning work “from two to five years later” than they had in the 1890s.16 Reformers and educators—with their improved laws and enforcement—took full credit for the decreases in child labor and the accompanying increases in school enrollments.* But the children and their parents were also responsible for the changes. As it was perceived that the more schooling students received, the better their chances for landing preferred white-collar jobs, families who could afford to kept their children in school and out of full-time work as long as possible.
Bowling Green, Kentucky, November 1916. “The Howell Family ‘stripping tobacco’; the 8 and 10 year old boys ‘tie up waste.’ There are two children (12 and 14 years old) not in the photo who are regular strippers. All lost much schooling on account of farm work.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
Fortunately for the children—and their families—earning money and going to school were not mutually exclusive activities in the early twentieth century. There might have been a shortage of decent full-time positions for children in their teens, but there were more than enough part-time, after-school jobs. For the children of the city, schooling was a major activity, but not a full-time, all-inclusive one. Not for a moment did their parents consider the possibility that attending school should exempt ten- to sixteen-year-olds from helping out at home.
The children who are the subject of this book were a privileged group of youngsters, privileged at play and at work. Not only were they spared the deadly tedium of full-time menial labor, but they were freed from the pressures that had accompanied such work for their nineteenth-century counterparts and the minority of their peers who were still at work. Children who worked full-time did so because their parents—or parent—had no way of making ends meet without their weekly wages. Children who worked part-time, on the contrary, knew that their income was extra, that their little brothers and sisters would not go hungry if they brought home less this week than they had the week before.
Work for the part-time child laborers of the early twentieth-century city was far from the routinized hell that had destroyed generations of working children. It was, on the contrary, almost a pleasant interlude between a day’s confinement in school and an evening in cramped quarters at home.
* From 1910 to 1920, school enrollments for seven-to-thirteen- and fourteen-to-fifteen- and fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds increased for native-born, foreign-born, and second-generation immigrant children. By 1920, the number of fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds in high school was 600 percent what it had been just thirty years before. Of Chicago’s fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, 73 percent were in school. Comparable figures were, for Baltimore, 69 percent; New England, 75 percent; the Middle Atlantic region, 79 percent; and the Middle West, 84 percent.17
The Littlest Hustlers
City kids who worked part-time after school, on weekends, and during vacations were blessed with abundant job opportunities. The early twentieth-century cities, it appeared, survived on the part-time work of their children. The children did the work that would, in later years, be taken over by adults, alleviated by labor-saving appliances, or automated out of existence. They provided city workers and residents with their afternoon and Sunday papers, their gum, candy, pencils, and shiny shoes. They helped out at home with the cooking, cleaning, and laundry. They ran errands and made deliveries for neighborhood tradesmen, carried messages for downtown businessmen who could not yet rely on their customers to have telephones, and did odd jobs for shopkeepers and local manufacturers. In summer, their part-time jobs were extended into full-time positions. There was more than enough work to go around—so much, indeed, that children could quit or get fired, knowing that they would soon find other work. Jan Peerce, the future opera singer, worked one summer in a metal-spinning factory as a nine-dollar-a-week errand boy. The following summer he had three different jobs. He began the season delivering cotton trimmings, canvas, and white binding tape in a wheelbarrow. When he was fired after two weeks, he found a second job on Houston Street under a “Boy Wanted” sign. “It was a pants factory … My job was to turn the trousers inside out.” A month later, Peerce, fired again, landed his third and “best job yet” at the Breakstone Dairy, where he recorded “the gallons of milk delivered by farmers.”1
Probably Washington, D.C., April 1912. “At Center Market, eleven year old celery vendor, Gus Straleges, 212 Jackson Hole Alley. He sold until 11 P.M. and was out again Sunday morning selling papers and gum. Has been in this country only a year and a half.” (Lewis Hine Collection, NCLC)
Harry Golden, who sold papers during the winter, got delivery jobs in summertime. One summer, he landed the ideal job for a city boy on vacation. “I delivered pretzels to the Polo Grounds for Bock and Company. Mr. Bock gave me two big bags of pretzels, two nickels for carfare, and a dime for myself. I took the pretzels to the Stevens concession on the mezzanine and had to be there by ten A.M. Then I could hang around the ball park until the game started that afternoon.”2
Not many children were as fortunate as Golden when it came to finding work for the summer. Hy Kraft had a job “working for the National Cloak and Suit Company, a mail-order house. I had the very responsible job of hanging suits on hangers and then hanging the hangers on racks that were wheeled away to some mysterious burial ground. I did that for eight hours a day for a month and gave up.”3
While most of the eleven- to fifteen-year-olds left the immediate neighborhood to earn their money, a significant number stayed closer to home. In those days before the widespread residential use of the telephone, there were plenty of errands to run—and children to pay for running them. The neighborhood children and the local shopkeepers were made for one another. The baker, the butcher, the grocer, and the delicatessen owner, all in need of help but unable to afford full-time assistants, hired boys by the week, the day, or the hour. Theodore Waterman, described by an investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee as a “West Indian Negro,” worked after school for the butcher on his Harlem block. He got a dollar a week for himself and a piece of meat to take home to his family every evening. Milton Berle and Eddie Cantor both claimed in their autobiographies that they earned their first money making deliveries for local delis. Berle got paid in tips, raspberry soda, and halvah; Cantor in salami sandwiches.4
Most of the work the children did in the neighborhood was too ill-paid to be offered to adults. There was a separate kiddie labor market with jobs set aside for them to do after school. Author Harry Roskolenko tells us in his memoirs that he “rolled empty milk cans for Breakstone & Levine, then starting out in business.… For a nickel an hour we got the containers into the freezers in the back, taking a little cheese away with us for home use.” James Cagney and his brothers worked at the library, where they “picked up books left on the table.” George Burns and his friends had an after-school job in the basement of Rosenzweig’s candy store. “The four of us each got five cents a day mixing the syrup that Rosenzweig put in his ice cream sodas. And as a fringe benefit we got all the sodas we could drink. By the end of the first week we could have opened a pimple factory.”5
Though running errands, making deliveries, and doing odd jobs in the neighborhood could pay off handsomely in sweets and salami, these were not the children’s favorite jobs. Many of the children who ran errands for local tradesmen did so not out of choice but because they were forbidden to work elsewhere. Antonio Giordano, a Lower East Side “wood carver,” explained to an investigator from the New York Child Labor Committee that he forced his son Nicholas to take “a place at errands for a baker after school.” The boy had wanted to sell papers downtown but his father forbade it, convinced that “paper selling makes boys gamblers and bums.”6
Whether paper-selling made boys “gamblers and bums” was not precisely the issue. What the father objected to and the boy desired was the relative freedom offered the street traders. Errand boys had bosses and worked regular hours in a fixed location. From the moment they left school until the time the
y arrived home for dinner, they were watched over by responsible adults. They had no free time to play with the gang, gamble, or get into trouble. Street traders, on the contrary, had neither bosses or supervisors nor regular hours. They were on their own from the sound of the dismissal bell until dinnertime.
Parents like Antonio Giordano were concerned that their boys and girls would, if allowed downtown to work, get in with the wrong crowd. Their fears were misguided but understandable. Children who traded away from the neighborhood were swept up in a children’s community of the streets. Out of school, off the block, away from home, they looked to one another for advice, guidance, and support. Aside from a minority who worked with their parents, like the Italian children Edward Clopper found selling baskets, fruit, and flowers in Cincinnati, most street traders were on their own.7 They learned what they had to know on the streets, not from parents at home or teachers in school.
Max Ravage began his career as a street trader peddling chocolates at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, an “American” shopping street located within walking distance of his Lower East Side flat. On his first day as a trader, he was taken in hand by the lace peddler who set up beside him. Americans, he was informed, had no sense of value. They were so rich they didn’t need any. Ravage had started off selling his chocolates for a penny a piece. At that price, the peddler warned him, customers would be sure to pass him by, convinced that he was selling trash—which he was. If he raised the price, however, and advertised sufficiently, he just might be able to convince them that his chocolates were quality merchandise.