Upworthy: Once In A While, Somebody Comes Along And Captures Images That Change A Nation

[Skidmore]

Another look at history through photographs.


http://www.upworthy.com/once-in-a-while-somebody-comes-along-and-captures-images-that-change-a-nation?c=ufb1

Along And Captures Images That Change A Nation
Curated by Brandon Weber

A special Upworthy mini-series about labor history, made possible by the AFL-CIO. Read more.

Some of the most disturbing images that were captured in the early part of the 1900s were those of kids working in factories, coal mines, and other places where no kids belonged. The most famous photographer was Lewis Hine; his pictures brought these children into the spotlight in a way the nation could no longer ignore.



More at site....

[daleanime]

1. K&R....

[BlueJazz]

2. The 6 year old berry picker breaks my heart.

[valerief]

3. Republican .001%ers have wet dreams about child labor. They love this shit. nt

[rurallib]

5. really, really, really cheap labor and they won't complain

easily intimidated - a capitalists dream.
ETA - that's why Gingrich was all over child labor.

[brer cat]

4. Childhood totally lost.

Thanks, Skidmore. May we never forget.

[Warpy]

6. What this picture doesn't show is how thick the air in the spinning room was

with cotton dust and fibers. This little girl probably died in her thirties from brown lung.

When I was in school, the kids started in the mills at 14 and went full time at 16, when they quit school. It was seen as a career back then since it paid quite a bit better than minimum wage once the kids had learned their jobs.

It wasn't lost on me that the kids working in the spinning room were 100% black. I had trouble tolerating that room for 15 minutes. They worked 15 hour days when there was some sort of huge order to fill. If they were lucky, they progressed to the weaving room where a mixed group of men and women, black and white worked. Those old machines were noisy, so if their lungs survived, their hearing didn't.

[jtuck004]

7. To be honest this is after nearly 50 years of fighting, and starving, and dying by workers,

and the only reason these pictures were taken is because the sacrifice of those workers and the work of the Progressives had resulted in the formation of offices like the "National Child Labor Committee" which commissioned these very pictures, and the Commission on Industrial Relations.

These pictures did, in fact, add to the work already being done in trying to sway people, but there were already wagons of disfigured kids, some without the scalps, limbs, or fingers that were taken by the sewing machines, along with simply hungry children whose families had no food, trucked from city to city on display for all to see and talk to. Sometimes they marched by the White House and other prominent venues.

I don't mean to minimize their impact, but that article seems to give them far too much weight and not nearly enough to the organizing and sacrifice that went on during the period which led to their being created.

'Course, they could sacrifice and all that back then, since they didn't have cable.

[Skidmore]

8. Does it hurt to have a visual representation of what

those times were like? These images were taken in my grandparents lifetimes. We now have generations who don't even learn the history of the labor movement because the companies they end up working for would prefer to erase it from history.

[jtuck004]

9. Nope, as long as they don't misrepresent them as being more than they are. What has been forgotten

is that the people who made change didn't put up a bunch of web sites and pictures and ask for money to make excuses, they went out and changed it, and many times died trying. A much different approach than today.

Regardless, the headline suggests that pictures were anything but a visual record, seeming to downplay the idea that they came 50 years after the struggle was really joined by many.

[SoCalDem]

10. Children have worked forever

It's only been fairly recent (in evolutionary terms) that children other than the ones born into wealth have even had a chance for school and a chance to have a childhood.

As recently as my grandparents time, a person with a 6th grade education was considered learned in many circles..