The house on Henry Street

by Lillian D. Wald

Bessie and Jimmy and Pippa and Esther and their little comrades stir us to contribute our human documents to the propaganda instituted in behalf of children. In this, as in other experiments at the settlement, we do not believe that what we offer is of great consequence unless the demonstrations we make and the experience we gain are applicable to the problems of the community. On no other single interest do the members of our settlement meet with such unanimity. Years of concern about individual children might in any case have brought this about, but irresistible has been the influence exercised by Mrs. Florence Kelley, now and for many years a member of the settlement family. She has long consecrated her energies to securing protective legislation throughout the country for children compelled to labor and, with the late Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Alabama, suggested the creation of the National Child Labor Committee. In its ten years’ existence it has affected legislation in forty-seven states, which have enacted new or improved child labor laws. On this and on the New York State Committee Mrs. Kelley and I have served since their creation.

Though much has been accomplished during this decade, the field is immensely larger than was supposed, and forces inimical to reform, not reckoned with at first, have been encountered. Despite this opposition, however, we believe that the abolition of child labor abuses in America is not very far off.

In Pennsylvania, within a very few years, insistence upon satisfactory proof of age was strenuously opposed. Officials who should have been working in harmony with the committee persisted in declaring that the parent’s affidavit, long before discarded in New York State, was sufficient evidence, despite the fact that coroners’ inquests after mine disasters showed child workers of ten and eleven years. The Southern mill children, the little cranberry-bog workers, the oyster shuckers, and the boys in glass factories and mines have shown that this disregard of children is not peculiar to any one section of the country, though Southern states have been most tenacious of the exemption of children of “dependent parents” or “orphans” from working-paper requirements.

In the archives at Washington much interesting evidence lies buried in the unpublished portions of reports of the federal investigation into the work of women and children. The need of this investigation was originally urged by settlement people. One mill owner greeted the government inspectors most cordially and, to show his patriotism, ordered the flag to be raised above the works. The raising of the flag, as it afterwards transpired, was a signal to the children employed in the mill to go home. In the early days of child labor reform in New York the children on Henry Street would sometimes relate vividly their experience of being suddenly whisked out of sight when the approach of the factory inspector was signaled.

It is perhaps unnecessary to mention the obvious fact that the child worker is in competition with the adult and drags down his wages. At the Child Labor Conference held in Washington in January, 1915, a manufacturer in the textile industry cited the wages paid to adults in certain operations in the mills as fourteen cents per hour where there were prohibitive child labor laws and eleven cents an hour where there were none.

The National Child Labor Committee now asks Congress through a federal bill to outlaw interstate traffic in goods produced by the labor of children. Such a law would protect the public-spirited employer who is now obliged to compete in the market with men whose business methods he condemns.

Sammie and his brother sold papers in front of one of the large hotels every night. The more they shivered with cold, the greater the harvest of pennies. No wonder that the white-faced little boy stayed out long after his cold had become serious. He himself asked for admission to the hospital, and died there before his absence was noted. After his death relatives appeared, willing to aid according to their small means, and the relief society increased its stipend to his family. At any time during his life this aid might have been forthcoming, had not the public unthinkingly made his sacrifice possible by the purchase of his papers.

Opposition to regulating and limiting the sale of papers by little boys on the streets is hard to overcome. A juvenile literature of more than thirty years ago glorified the newsboy and his improbable financial and social achievements, and interest in him was heightened by a series of pictures by a popular painter, wherein ragged youngsters of an extraordinary cleanliness of face were portrayed as newsboys and bootblacks. In opposition to the charm of this presentation, the practical reformer offers the photographs, taken at midnight, of tiny lads asleep on gratings in front of newspaper offices, waiting for the early editions. He finds in street work the most fruitful source of juvenile delinquency, with newsboys heading the list.

I am aware that at this point numerous readers will recall instances of remarkable achievements by the barefoot boy, the wide-awake young news-seller. We too have known the exceptional lad who has accomplished marvels in the teeth of, sometimes because of, great disadvantages; but after twenty years I, for one, have no illusions as to the outcome for the ordinary child.