It is easy to overlook how far we have come

Fifty years of boxes of books, 10-15,000 in total, take a lot of going through. I try and get through 2-4 boxes a weekend with an intent, occasionally realized, of parting with a quarter of them.

Ah, but so many interesting things to read about. So many old memories. So many books that still need to be read. And some wonderful art books.

One such, this past weekend, combining art and history, was Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor by Russell Freedman.

Lewis Hine, per Wikipedia:

Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saved his money for a college education. He studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium.

Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs) and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform.

In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation; he photographed life in the steel-making districts and people of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for the influential sociological study called The Pittsburgh Survey.

In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), leaving his teaching position. Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits.

Hine's work for the NCLC was often dangerous. As a photographer, he was frequently threatened with violence or even death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but also posed a serious threat to the industry. To gain entry to the mills, mines and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or even an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery

The effort was long but eventually, with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, child labor in the USA finally began to disappear. 1938!

Hine had made child labor real and hard to ignore through his photographs, many captured in this book. You cannot look at these pictures and gloss over the cruel realities of child labor.

I have read a lot of history and many biographies. I can't recall a single one by or about someone who had experienced this kind of child labor. Farm labor, yes. But industrial and mining? Can't think of one. Gazing at those young faces, you have to wonder, how many even survived to adulthood.

A sampling:

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In the scheme of things, this wasn't much more than the day before yesterday. It was just dying out when my parents were born. Almost within living memory.

It is easy to overlook how far we have come.