BEDFORD REFORMATORY
W. J. Lampton, in the New York Times
[Bedford Reformatory, a State institution doing invaluable service in the reclamation of wayward girls, is overcrowded and asks $700,000 from the state for extension purposes.]
Behold, she stands
And stretches out her hands
For aid.
Those firm, strong hands,
Those gentle, helpful hands,
Whose spirit unafraid
Of sin and shame and loss
Have borne the burden of the cross
For girls unnamable, whose feet
Have trod the open street,
The market-place
Of body and of soul,
In search of toll
From any man who gave
To own a common slave,
The chattel of the street.
These Bedford comes to meet,
But not as shameless things;
To them she brings
Love, courage, hope, the better way,
The clean, new day
Whose morning sun awakes
Another world to those half gone
And hopeless ones
To whom there was no other dawn.
And now she stands
With outstretched hands
For aid; the means to lift
Out of the ghastly drift
These girl-souls crying in the night
For kindly light.
And shall she be denied?
Shall men who buy
Deny?
Shall any man, in whom his pride
In his own womankind is strong,
Go wrong
And say
To Bedford: “Nay”?
May 3, 1913.
THE OYSTERMAN
BALTIMORE TO BILOXI AND BACK
THE CHILD’S BURDEN IN OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERIES
Investigation and Photographs by
LEWIS W. HINE
for the National Child Labor Committee
[Mr. Hine’s photographs and the equally vivid impressions he sets down in the text, tell a story of child labor along the South Atlantic and the Gulf. In an especial sense these are conditions which public opinion can bring to the door of the Democratic Party to remedy. For in these states that party is dominant, as it is in the nation.
First lies the channel of state action, which has thus far been laggard, and has been obstructed by the child employing interests of the South. At the present time, a child labor bill which would reach this shore work, is pending in Florida. In Mississippi shucking is prohibited but there is no enforcing agency and the work is going on as before.
If the channel of state action fails, child labor reformers point to such national legislation as would prohibit interstate commerce in canned oysters and shrimps which are so humanly costly. The recent decision of the United Stores Supreme Court in the white slave case would seem to indicate that legislation could be drafted which would hold in the courts, and several bills along the lines of the much controverted Beveridge bill of 1907 are now before Congress.
It is for the Democratic Party in state and nation to proceed through one channel or the other.—Ed.]
When we speak of child labor in oyster canning, we refer to the cooked or “cove” oysters, not to the raw ones. Children are not used in opening raw oysters for the sole reason that their fingers are not strong enough. Occasionally one finds young boys at work on the boats dredging for the oysters, but not many children work on the boats, for that is a man’s job.
The two chief sections engaged in the work of canning oysters and shrimps are the Gulf Coast, from New Orleans eastward to Florida, and the Atlantic Coast of Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Maryland was the pioneer state, but it has already been outstripped by Mississippi, and several other states follow close in amount of annual output.
A TYPICAL OYSTER AND SHRIMP CANNERY
WORKING UNDER THE WATCHFUL EYE OF THE BOSS
Every year about October, hundreds of Polish and Bohemian people (some authorities say thousands) are herded together by various bosses or “padrones” in Baltimore and other centers of the South shipped over to the coasts by train and by boat and set up in shacks provided by the canning companies. We are told by one of the canners, “We give these people all the modern conveniences.” The modern conveniences appear to be summed up in artesian wells. If there were no cold or wet weather in these parts, if waste and sewage were carried off, and if there were no crowding, these temporary quarters would be endurable; but in cold, or hot, or wet weather they are positively dangerous, especially to children. One row of dilapidated shacks that I found in South Carolina housed fifty workers in a single room house. One room sheltered eight persons, and the shacks were located on an old shell pile within a few rods of the factory, a few feet from the tidal marsh where odors, mosquitoes, and sand flies made life intolerable, especially in hot weather.
There is a prevailing impression that in the matter of child labor the emphasis on the labor must be very slight, but let me tell you right here that these processes involve work, hard work, deadening in its monotony, exhausting physically, irregular, the workers’ only joy the closing hour. We might even say of these children that they are condemned to work.
RAMSHACKLE SHEDS HOUSING NEARLY FIFTY WORKERS PORT ROYAL, S. C.
THREE-YEAR-OLD ALMA WHOSE MOTHER IS “LEARNIN’ HER THE TRADE”
Come out with me to one of these canneries at three o’clock some morning. Here is the crude shed-like building, with a long dock at which the oyster boats unload their cargoes. Near the dock is the ever present shell pile, a monument of mute testimony to the patient toil of little fingers. It is cold, damp, dark. The whistle blew some time ago, and the young workers slipped into their meager garments, snatched a bite to eat and hurried to the shucking shed. The padrone told me “Ef dey don’t git up, I go and git ’em up.” See those little ones over there stumbling through the dark over the shell piles, munching a piece of bread, and rubbing their heavy eyes. Boys and girls, six seven and eight years of age, take their places with the adults and work all day.
The cars are ready for them with their loads of dirty, rough clusters of shells, and as these shells accumulate under foot in irregular piles, they soon make the mere matter of standing one of physical strain. Notice the uncertain footing, and the dilapidated foot-wear of that little girl, and opposite is one with cloth fingers to protect herself from the jagged shells—they call them “finger-stalls.” Their fingers are often sore in spite of this precaution.
When they are picking shrimps, their fingers and even their shoes are attacked by a corrosive substance in the shrimp that is strong enough to eat the tin cans into which they are put. The day’s work on shrimp is much shorter than on oysters as the fingers of the worker give out in spite of the fact that they are compelled to harden them in an alum solution at the end of the day. Moreover, the shrimp are packed in ice, and a few hours handling of these icy things is dangerous for any child. Then, too, the mornings, and many of the days, are cold, foggy and damp.
The workers are thinly clad, but, like the fabled ostrich, cover their heads and imagine they are warm. If a child is sick, it gets a vacation, and wanders around to kill time.
The youngest of all shift for themselves at a very early age. One father told me that they brought their baby, two months old, down to the shucking shed at four o’clock every morning and kept it there all day. Another told me that they locked a baby of six months in the shack when they went away in the morning, and left it until noon, then left it alone again all the afternoon. A baby carriage with its occupant half smothered under piles of blankets is a common sight. Snuggled up against a steam box you find many a youngster asleep on a cold morning. As soon as they can toddle, they hang around the older members of the family, something of a nuisance, of course, and very early they learn to amuse themselves. For hours at a time, they play with the dirty shells, imitating the work of the grown-ups. They toddle around the shed, and out on to the docks at the risk of their lives.
A little older and they learn to “tend the baby.” As a substitute for real recreation, this baby tending is pathetic.
Mary said, “I shucks six pots if I don’t got the baby; two pots if I got him.”
As soon as they can handle the oysters and shrimps, they are “allowed to help.”
The mother often says, “Sure. I’m learnin’ her de trade,” and you see many youngsters beginning to help at a very early age. Standing on a box in order to reach the table, little Olga, five years old, was picking shrimps for her mother at the cannery I visited. Later in the day, I found her at home worn out with the work she had been doing, but the mother complained that Olga was “ugly.” Little sympathy they get when they most need it! Four-year-old Mary was working irregularly through the day shucking about two pots of oysters. The mother is the fastest shucker in the place, and the boss said,
“Mary will work steady next year.” The most excitement that many of them get from one month to another is that of being dressed up in their Sunday best to spend the day seeing the sights of the settlement.
Now we all know that the amount of work these little ones can do is not much, and yet I have been surprised and horrified at the number of hours a day a six or a seven year old will stay at work, and this with the willing and eager consent of the parents. “Freckled Bill,” a bright lad of five years, told me that he worked, and his mother added reproachfully,
“He kin make fifteen cents any day he wants to work, but he won’t do it steady.”
Annie, seven years old, is a steady worker. The mother said, for her benefit, of course, “She kin beat me shuckin’, an’ she’s mighty good at housework too, but I mustn’t praise her too much right before her.”
This is only one of the means used to keep the children at work. Another method is to tell the neighbors that Annie can shuck eight pots a day. Then some other child beats the record, and so the interest is kept up, and incidentally the work is done and the family income enlarged. Can we call that motherhood? Compared with real maternity, it is a distorted perversion, a travesty. The baby at Ellis Island little dreams what is in store for him.
Hundreds of these children from four to twelve years of age are regularly employed, often as helpers, for the greater part of the six months if it is a good season. At three and four years of age they play around and help a little, “learnin’ de trade.” At five and six years of age they work more regularly, and at seven and eight years, they put in long hours every working day. This is the regular program for these children day after day, week after week for the six months of their alleged—“outing down South.”
I remarked to one of the village people, “It’s a wonder that these youngsters live through it all.”
“Yes,” she replied, “and when they don’t live through it, there is a corner over in a little cemetery waiting for them, and many of them go there.”
You see, “They’re only Hickeys.”
I suppose the cemetery is one of the “conveniences” that the company does not boast about.
CHILDREN OF THE OYSTER CANNERIES
A young girl who has been shucking six years and earns a dollar a day; a little mother who alternates baby tending and oyster shucking; a ten-year-old worker has no time for school.
The wages of these workers vary according to their locality, and the kind of season they find. The work on the shrimp is better paid than oyster shucking, but it is much more irregular. On the latter families frequently earn ten and fifteen or twenty dollars a week so when there are several children, and the work is steady, there is a great temptation to make them all help. Children of seven years earn about twenty-five cents a day, and at eight and ten years of age often fifty cents a day or more. At twelve and fourteen years they frequently earn as high as a dollar a day and this is adult pay. The fastest adult shucker seldom earns much more than a dollar a day after years of experience. What then is the outlook for children beginning this industry?
“What is your name, little girl?”
“Dunno.”
“How old are you?”
“Dunno.”
“How many pots do you shuck in a day?”
“Dunno.”
And the pity of it is that they do not know.
What then do they know? Enough to stand patiently with the rest picking up one hard, dirty cluster of shells, deftly prying them open, dropping the meat into the pot; and then go through this process with another and another and another, until after many minutes the pot is full—a relief, for they carry it over to the weigher and rest doing nothing a minute, and walk back,—such a change from the dreary standing, reaching, prying and dropping—minute upon minute, hour upon hour, day upon day, month after month. Or perchance, for variety, the catch may have been shrimp, and then the hours of work are shorter, but the shrimp are icy cold, and the blood in one’s fingers congeals, and the fingers become so sore that she welcomes the oysters again.
Are you surprised then to find that many children seem dumb and can not understand our language?
“But we educate them” some canners tell us.
This is the way they do it. In the few places where I found any pretense to education the children shucked oysters for four hours before school. Then they went to school for half a day, returning at one o’clock for a hurried lunch. They worked for four hours more, five days in the week. On Saturday they put in an alleged half day consisting of eight or nine hours work. Is it any marvel that the school principal told me “It isn’t satisfactory, but at least we are giving them some help in learning the language.” They need the help. At another place, with two canneries, but two children were going to school, and the illiteracy of both adults and children was appalling.
“There is no compulsion about schooling here,” the principal said.
The “vocational guidance” which most of them receive, year in and year out, is seen in the sheds where under the eagle eye of the boss, who watches to see that they do not shirk, and under the pressure of parental authority, they put in their time where it will bring tangible returns. One padrone told me:
“I keep ’em a-working all the year. In the winter, bring ’em down here to the gulf. In Summer, take ’em to the berry fields of Maryland and Delaware. They don’t lose many weeks’ time, but I have a hard time to get ’em sometimes. Have to tell ’em all kinds of lies.”
So here we have a certain kind of “scientific management” of child labor by means of which even the vacation time of the children is utilized.
“Why do they do it?”—that question comes to one over and over; what keeps these little ones at their uninteresting task? In the first place, their immigrant parents are frugal, even parsimonious, and every little helps. Then they think it keeps the children out of trouble, little realizing that they are storing up trouble when they grow up, handicapped by lack of education, broken physically, and with a distaste for work. Small wonder if they drift into the industrial maelstrom of cheap, inefficient labor, and float on as industrial misfits.
If we look at it from the employer’s point of view, we find his chief justification is that children are needed because the goods are perishable, and must be put up immediately. You ask him if the children are not perishable, and he says he can’t see that they are spoiled. “It doesn’t hurt ’em. They’re tough. I began myself at their age,” and so on. It will be long years before these employers will be looking at this children’s labor with a long-range finder, a problem to be met along with that of improved machinery. The children themselves are docile; they do as they are told; they are imitative, like to do what the rest are doing; they are easily stimulated by the idea of competing with other children; and they are very sensitive to criticism and ridicule. I do not, however, recall a single case of a child being whipped for not working. It can easily be seen that with the parents, or employers, and children against it, the task of liberation from this commercialized family peonage of immature workers is not an easy one.
On the Atlantic Coast more Negroes are employed, than on the Gulf Coast, and they do not work the children very much, except where they have come under the influence of the immigrant workers. In almost every case, the bosses and padrones agree that the Baltimore workers are much more satisfactory than the Negroes. They say:
“There is no comparing them. The whites work harder, longer hours, are more easily driven, and use the children much more.”
The chief advantage of Negro help is that it saves the cost of transportation. Where it is necessary to get the work done promptly the immigrants are imported.
That this exploitation of the children is absolutely unnecessary is proven by the canneries that get along without them. It needs merely more efficient planning on the part of the managers, and better supervision on the part of the state. It is certainly a condition not to be endured when we consider the hardships involved—the long hours, the monotonous and tiring work, the irregular conditions of work and of life, the exposure, the unsanitary surroundings, the moral dangers, the lack of education, and the double exploitation of summer and winter.
One morning I found a little cannery worker setting about her endless job. At the end of the day as I passed near, human nature asserted itself. She asked me to photograph her dolly too, this oyster shucker.
SHE SHUCKS OYSTERS
For twenty-five cents a day. Seven-year-old Gulf Coast worker.
M’AMS AND SUPERM’AMS
How the public school, responding to the trend of the twentieth century, is developing new staff and personality to link up the classroom with the individual aptitudes of children and with their life outside of school hours, with home-making, workmanship and community life.
THE VISITING TEACHER
THE VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR
THE HOUSEHOLD ADMINISTRATOR