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By MARY THERESE BIEBEL marytb@leader.net
Sunday, January 30, 2000 Page: 1G
Hunched over a chute more than 12 hours a day, breaker boys picked chunks
of slate and stone from a moving stream of jagged, clattering coal.
Behind them stood an overseer with a stick, a grown man prepared to
motivate the youths if they should slacken.
Crusading photographer Lewis Wickes Hine immortalized this bleak scene from
a Pittston coal mine in 1910. It became part of a series of haunting images he
collected in New England textile mills and Mississippi canneries, Texas cotton
fields and a West Virginia glass factory.
The photographs, commissioned by the National Child Labor Committee and
collected, sometimes surreptitiously, from 1908 to 1916, galvanized
legislators to pass laws limiting the hours and conditions under which the
youngest workers could legally be employed.
“Let Children Be Children,” an exhibit of 55 artistically stunning Hine
pictures, is on display at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown
through Feb. 27.
The museum is housed in the extensively renovated, former Bucks County
Jail. Coincidentally, the Hine exhibit shows that work too often became a kind
of prison for the children, who spent long hours, usually six days a week,
shucking oysters with sharp tools, picking cotton in the hot sun and running
saws in factories.
Yet while some of Hine’s subjects appear tired and dispirited, others do
not seem unhappy. One of his photos even shows some breaker boys grinning for
the camera.
“When children are in an abusive situation,” museum curator Erika Jaeger
says, “it’s not until they’re older that they realize not everyone lives this
way. I have two sons, and it’s hard for me to look at those children whose
childhood was robbed.”
Among the more horrifying images is a picture of a boy who lost his right
arm in a factory accident. Flat and limp, the empty sleeve of his striped
shirt is tucked neatly into the waist of his coveralls. His eyes wide and
stricken, he seems to be still reeling from the shock. SUBHED: Stories behind
the photos
Some of the notes Hine scribbled on the back of his prints give additional
insight to the children’s lives. A newsboy said his father would beat him if
he didn’t sell enough newspapers. A mill worker gave her age as 12, but her
co-workers informed Hine she was two years younger. Young workers in Biloxi,
Miss., began to arrive at the cannery at 5 a.m. just to hold their place while
they waited for fishing boats to bring in the catch.
Compared to the others, two young berry pickers seem to have an idyllic job
outdoors in a sunny field. But their mother’s impatient orders, telling them
to “pick, pick” as Hine took their photograph, hint at the economic stress
the whole family endured.
At least those children had fresh air. Not so Willie Bryden, a 13-year-old
Pittston boy whose family said he was 16 so he could be employed as a
“nipper” or “trapper boy.” His job involved spending the day in a damp
mine, 500 feet down the shaft, waiting for coal cars and mules to come along
so he could open the door for them and then scamper out of the way so he
wouldn’t be crushed.
“A short distance from here the gas was pouring into the mine so rapidly
that it made a great torch when the foreman lit it,” Hine wrote.
The photographer lamented the plight of the breaker boys, too. “They bend
over the chutes until their backs ache and they get tired and sick because
they have to breathe coal dust instead of good, pure air.”
A foreman told the photographer, “There are 20 boys in that breaker and I
bet you could shovel 50 pounds of coal dust out of their systems.”
But the adults in charge were not always that straightforward. Some most
assuredly did not want a reform-minded photographer taking pictures of
children so small they had to climb onto machines to replace empty bobbins.
SUBHED: A stark beauty
Craftily, Hine sometimes gained access to factories by pretending to be a
Bible salesman, an insurance agent or a photographer fascinated by industrial
equipment. He devised a way to gauge children’s height, and estimate their
true age, by discreetly measuring them against the buttons on his coat.
The Oshkosh, Wis., native, who had once worked 13-hour days in a furniture
factory, traveled an estimated 50,000 miles to photograph children at work.
Each of his photographs, on loan from the George Eastman House/International
Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y., tells its own stark story.
But the stories are told with such clarity, the portraits stand as works of
art.
“You can divorce yourself from the content and look at the beauty of the
composition,” said Jaeger, the curator, pointing to a wistful yet resolute
mill girl in a smudged smock. “This could not be more beautiful.”
Call Biebel at 829-7283.
If You Go
WHAT: “Let Children Be Children: Lewis Wickes Hine’s Crusade Against Child
Labor” photo exhibit.
WHERE: James A. Michener Art Museum, 138 S. Pine St., Doylestown.
HOURS: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday to Friday, until 9 p.m. Wednesday, and
1- a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
INFO: (215) 340-9800. COURTESY GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE A barefoot young cotton
picker leans into his task in 1908.