The Photographs that Changed America's Child Labour Laws

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

Famous for stunning images of men working hundreds of feet above ground on the Empire State Building, photographer Lewis Hine's real legacy is  a collection of photographs of child workers in factories, fields and sweatshops, highlighting the appalling conditions they were made to work in at the beginning of the 20th Century.
The images, taken for the National Child Labor Committee, shamed America and helped change the laws governing child workers.

A 11-year-old young girl gazes out of a window during a break from her factory work in Lincolnton, North Carolina. She was one of scores of child laborers pictured by investigative photographer Lewis Hine

Amos, six, and Horace, four, are dwarfed by the tobacco plants they tend in this picture from 1916. Their father, John Neal, was a renter and raised tobacco, he said both boys work day after day from 'sun-up to sun-down'

These breaker boys worked for the Pennsylvania Coal Company in 1911. Hundreds of thousands of youngsters were made to work for very low wages to earn money for their families

Children often helped their parents cotton-picking in the fields to earn extra income

Hine toured the country, documenting the lives of children working in a range of diverse and adult professions. Children as young as three and four-years-old were pictured cotton picking, scavenging on garbage heaps, laboring in factories and coal mines or whatever work they could find in the dangerous inner-cities.
The money earned by these children was vital and often life-saving for their families and meant they could not go to school, many of the youngsters photographed by Hine were completely illiterate. The photographer joined the NCLC in 1908, leaving his job as a teacher. He spent the next decade documenting child labor and lobbying Government to change the laws.

Vance, pictured, worked in a coal mine in West Virginia aged just 15-years-old and would be paid only $0.75 for a ten-hour shift

Hine used photography during the project with the National Child Labor Committee to highlight the stark poverty and conditions children were forced to work in. The three girl farmhands, were no more than six-years-old, while 'dinner-toters', like the tiny boy, would illegally help in the mills in appalling conditions

Manuel, a five-year-old shrimp-picker stands in front of a mountain of child-labour oyster shells in this photograph taken in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1911

 

A young cigar maker in Tampa, Florida smokes in this picture taken in 1909. Hine wrote that the boys looked under 14 and that all the youngsters smoked

 

The committee was formed in 1904 and launched many campaigns to end child labor, though the Fair Labor Standards Act was not passed until 1938.

Hine referred to his job as 'detective work' and captioned his photographs with the names, ages, hours and wages of his subjects. He was frequently regarded with suspicion and would often bluff his way into factories and workplaces to see the conditions children worked in. Hine learned to write with his hand in his pocket so he would not give himself away to bosses and famously never touched up his work.

He gained fame in the 1930s for his jaw-dropping pictures of construction workers on the Empire State Building.

This bootblack, or shoe polisher, was photographed by Hine in City Hall Park in New York in 1924 for the National Child Labour Committee

 

Six-year-old Jewel and five-year-old Harold pick cotton in Geronimo, Oklahoma in 1916. Their father CJ Walker said he promised them a waggon 'if they picked steady'

 

The skinny newsboy, above, looks suspiciously at the camera in the picture taken in 1908 and appears even smaller compared to the newspaper he is holding. The income earned by children, such as those, was often crucial to a family's survival

More than 5,000 of the activist’s pictures are stored at the Library of Congress in Washington and the NCLC. In the 1980s the NCLC created an award in his name and is presented to five professionals and five volunteers each year for their work helping young people. More than 200 people have received the Lewis Hine Awards in the past two decades.

Nine-year-old Nan de Gallant, pictured in Maine in 1911, worked as a cartoner with her mother and two sisters. Hine wrote notes on each of the subjects and for Nan he wrote: 'Work is very irregular. Nan is already a spoiled child'

 

Two boys laugh as their picture is taken. The young children scavenged on the garbage heaps at 'the Dumps' in Boston, October 1909

Hine would often have to bluff his way into factories in order to take pictures of child laborers and referred to his job as 'detective work'