“There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work.”
– Lewis Hine, 1908
When brainstorming a topic, I knew that I wanted to do something with labor history, for that is my favorite period in time. However, I knew I was not interested in covering unions or miners; I wanted something that was still prevalent in our society today. The answer? The child labor movement beginning in the onset of the twentieth century. But I knew I had to narrow that down. I remembered from my AP US History class about the social reformers movement and remembered the name Lewis Hine. I knew that he was heavily involved with the National Child Labor Committee and took photographs of children in labor in roughly thirty states. And then my topic was born: I would take the photographs of Lewis Hine and equate them to the child labor movement which culminated in the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was the first legislation regulating child in the workplace, passed in 1938. Critics have said that Hine staged many of his photographs, reminiscent of his mentor, Jacob Riis. However, regardless, or perhaps even with this, my ultimate question is: without the aid of the thousands of pictures Lewis Hine took, would the NCLC have been as successful in the passing on the Fair Labor Standards Act.
(Picture from: http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates…)
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