Children employed as varnishers in cheap furniture factories inhale poisonous fumes all day long and suffer from a variety of intestinal troubles in consequence. The gilding of picture frames produces a stiffening of the fingers. The children who are employed in the manufacture of wall papers and poisonous paints suffer from slow poisoning. The naptha fumes in the manufacture of rubber goods produce paralysis and premature decay. Children employed in morocco leather works are often nauseated and fall easy victims to consumption. The little boys who make matches, and the little girls who pack them in boxes, suffer from phosphorous necrosis, or "phossy-jaw," a gangrene of the lower jaw due to phosphor poisoning. Boys employed in the type foundries and stereotyping establishments are employed on the most dangerous part of the work, namely, rubbing the type and the plates, and lead poisoning is excessively prevalent among them as a result. Little girls who work in the hosiery mills and carry heavy baskets from one floor to another, and their sisters who run machines by foot-power, suffer all through their life as a result of their employment. Girls who work in factories where caramels and other kinds of candies are made are constantly passing from the refrigerating department, where the temperature is perhaps 20 degrees Fahr., to other departments with temperatures as high as 80 or 90 degrees. As a result, they suffer from bronchial troubles.
These are only a few of the many occupations of children that are inherently unhealthful and should be prohibited entirely for children and all young persons under eighteen years of age. In a few instances it might be sufficient to fix the minimum age for employment at sixteen, if certain improvements in the conditions of employment were insisted upon. Other dangers to health, such as the quick transition from the heat of the factory to the cold outside air, have already been noted. They are highly important causes of disease, though not inherent in the occupation itself in most cases. A careful study of the child-labor problem from this largely neglected point of view would be most valuable. When to the many dangers of health are added the dangers to life and limb from accidents, far more numerous among child workers than adults, the price we pay for the altogether unnecessary and uneconomic service of children would, in the Boer patriot's phrase, "stagger humanity," if it could be comprehended.
No combination of figures can give any idea of that price. Statistics cannot express the withering of child lips in the poisoned air of factories; the tired, strained look of child eyes that never dance to the glad music of souls tuned to Nature's symphonies; the binding to wheels of industry the little bodies and souls that should be free, as the stars are free to shine and the flowers are free to drink the evening dews. Statistics may be perfected to the extent of giving the number of child workers with accuracy, the number maimed by dangerous machines, and the number who die year by year, but they can never give the spritual loss, if I may use that word in its secular, scientific sense. Who shall tally the deaths of childhood's hopes, ambitions, and dreams? How shall figures show the silent atrophy of potential genius, the brutalizing of potential love, the corruption of potential purity? In what arithmetical terms shall we state the loss of shame, and the development of that less than brute view of life, which enables us to watch with unconcern the toil of infants side by side with the idleness of men?
The moral ills resulting from child
labor are numerous and far-reaching. When children become wage earners
and are thrown into constant association with adult workers, they develop
prematurely an adult consciousness and view of life. About the first consequence
of their employment is that they cease almost at once to be children. They
lose their respect for parental authority, in many cases, and become arrogant,
wayward, and defiant. There is always a tendency in their homes to regard
them as men and women as soon as they become wage-earners. Discipline is
at once relaxed, at the very time when it is most necessary. When children
who have just entered upon that most critical period of life, adolescence,
are associated with adults in factories, are driven to their tasks with
curses, and hear constantly the unrestrained conversation, often coarse
and foul, of the adults, the psychological effect cannot be other than
bad. The mothers and fathers who read this book need only know that children,
little boys and girls, in mills and factories where men and women are employed,
must frequently see women at work in whom the signs of a developing life
within are evident, and hear them made the butt of the coarsest taunts
and jests, to realize how great the moral peril to the adolescent boy or
girl must be.
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Lincoln Steffens, excerpt from The Shame of the Cities (1904)
Now, the typical American citizen is the business man. The typical business man is a bad citizen; he is busy. If he is a "big business man" and very busy, he does not neglect, he is busy with politics, oh, very busy and very businesslike. I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York. He is a self-righteous fraud, this big business man. He is the chief source of corruption, and it were a boon if he would neglect politics. But he is not the business man that neglects politics; that worthy is the good citizen, the typical business man. He too is busy, he is the one that has no use and therefore no time for politics. When his neglect has permitted bad government to go so far that he can be stirred to action, he is unhappy, and he looks around for a cure that shall be quick, so that he may hurry back to the shop.
Naturally, too, when he talks politics, he talks shop. His patent remedy is quack; it is business. "Give us a business man," he says ("like me," he means). "Let him introduce business methods into politics and government; then I shall be left alone to attend to my business." There is hardly an office from United States Senator down to Alderman in any part of the country to which the business man has not been elected; yet politics remains corrupt, government pretty bad, and the selfish citizen has to hold himself in readiness like the old volunteer firemen to rush forth at any hour, in any weather, to prevent the fire; and he goes out sometimes and he puts out the fire (after the damage is done) and he goes back to the shop sighing for the business man in politics. The business man has failed in politics as he has in citizenship. Why? Because politics is business.
That's what's the matter with it. That's what's the matter with everything, -- art, literature, religion, journalism, law, medicine, -- they're all business, and all -- as you see them. Make politics a sport, as they do in England, or a profession, as they do in Germany, and we'll have -- well, something else than we have now, -- if we want it, which is another question. But don't try to reform politics with the banker, the lawyer, and the dry-goods merchant...
But there is hope, not alone despair, in the commercialism of our politics. If our political leaders are to be always a lot of political merchants, they will supply any demand we may create. All we have to do is to establish a steady demand for good government...
If we would leave parties to the
politicians, and would vote not for the party, not even for men, but for
the city, and the State, and the nation, we should rule parties, and cities,
and States, and nation. If we would vote in mass on the more promising
ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that
is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other parry
that is in -- then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand
for good government and he would supply it. That process would take a generation
or more to complete, for the politicians now really do not know what good
government is. But it has taken as long to develop bad government, and
the politicians know what that is. If it would not "go," they would offer
something else, and, if the demand were steady, they, being so commercial,
would "deliver the goods."
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Graham Taylor, excerpts from Chicago Commons Through 40 Years (1936)
[Taylor, a social gospel minister and social reformer, is discussing the initial hopes of the founders of the Chicago Commons settlement house in the 1890s]
So we hoped that Chicago Commons might be a community center where all people, without distinction of class, color, race or sect, could meet and mingle as fellow-men to exchange their social values in something like a clearing-house for the Commonwealth. Here we hoped that friendship, neighborship, and fellow-citizenship might form the personal bonds of that social democracy, which lone can save our body politic from being cloven under any economic stress and strain or by class-conscious conflict. Here we dreamed that the brotherhood of which we talk and sing, and for which we preach and pray, might be more practically lived out and inwrought, as it must be if religion is to be a way of life and its churches the people's fellowships....
The family became, and ever since has continued to be, the unit of our
work both in the neighborhood and the city. In all these years we have
discovered no neighborhood nor city conditions, no problems nor movements
for progress that did not reflect the family life of the community. Human
interests center in the home more than anywhere else. Industry and commerce
exist more to furnish food, shelter, clothing, and equipment for men, women,
and children in family groups than for any other legitimate purpose. City
government is little if anything more than the extension of house- keeping.
Economics, the term for all our scientific administrative standards and
measures, is derived from the Greek word meaning "house" or "household."
.
Where the natural bonds of the family and the neighborhood are weak
or lacking, the population is deprived of its tie for co-operative fellowship.
The local community lacks the group units essential for social, political,
and religious organized life. We had good reason to respect the family
groups for what they contributed to us. To the family folk around us we
owed not only the earliest confidence and cooperation which led the way
to all other alliances, but also guidance to the specific aims and methods
of our work...
We were surprised, however, to find that the family was not sufficient
unto itself so much as it had proved to be in our own experience under
more favorable conditions. For, where family connections are numerous and
strong there is less inclination, especially in the city, to seek or rely
upon neighborhood associations. But where the artificiality of modern city
life has not displaced the normal human relations, neighborliness is the
one thing held in common not only by those who share the same origin, but
also by those of different national or racial heritages who live near each
other.
Our own little initiatives which we had taken to even up the odds against
neighboring family life led to the discovery of the instinctive dependence
of the immigrant family upon neighborly relations and upon the many ways
in which it sought and clung to them for the promotion of the very life
of the home.
Image Below: Activities at the Chicago Commons (1896).
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