Chapter 7
Chapter 5 of Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Joanna Michael Hoyt. Darkness and Daylight, or Lights and Shadows of New York Life. Chapter 5 by Helen Campbell
The One Hundred Thousand Little Laborers of New York child workers, their homes and daily life. Whoever reads that in the state of New York some 24,000 children are employed in factories, but that the law forbids the admission of any under 13 years of age, settles back comfortably certain that with few exceptions all waifs and strays are provided for,
and that at 13 a child is not likely to be stunted or overworked. If parents told the truth as to age, and if there were 50 instead of the two inspectors who must cover the ground for the whole state, there would be some chance for carrying out the law. But it is hardly more than a form of words, evaded daily by parents who want the earnings of the child, the children themselves aiding them
in the deception. The census returns touch only children in factories. They do not include either mercantile establishments or trades carried on in tenement houses. Figures drawn from the registers of night schools and from many other sources make the number of little workers in New York City over 100,000. In one night school for boys, 200 of them were employed in industries outside of factories. The registers of these schools are full of suggestions, and in running over them one
finds over 200 employments in which children are engaged. Ink in all its processes, tassel-making, tin and paper boxes, whips, whale bones, feathers, artificial flowers, and tobacco are samples. The boys like to enlarge their profession and write themselves down as blacksmiths, architects, and in one case, Sexton's assistant. The last dusted pews and helped to shake cushions, while the young blacksmiths and architects were simply errand and general utility boys.
Girls share the same ambition that the boys feel, and in one school 80 of them registered as nurses. Being interpreted, this means that they take care of the baby at home while the mother goes out to day's work. It is astonishing to see the real motherliness of the little things, who lug about the baby with devotion, and if they feed it on strange diet, they are but following in the footsteps of the mothers, who regard the baby, at six months old, as the sharer of whatever the
family bill of fare has to offer. The small German child is early taught to take his portion of lager with national placidity. The Irish children have tea or coffee and even a sup of the crater, and so each nationality is instructed according to the taste that is part of its inheritance. I have seen a six-year-old girl scrubbing the floor of the one room in which lived a widowed mother and three children. She's a woody washerwoman, said the dot, a creature with big blue eyes and a
thin, eager little face. Yes, ma'am, she's a woody washerwoman and I keep house. That's the baby there and he's good all the time, even when his teeth is too big for him. It's teeth that's hard on babies, but I mind him good and he thinks more on me than he does of mother. See how beautiful he sucks at the pork. The small housekeeper pointed with pride to the bed, where the tiny baby lay, a strip of fat pork in his mouth. He's weakly like, and mother gives him the pork to set
him up, and he takes his suppotate beautiful too. When the summer comes, we'll have to get him go to the children's home at Bath, maybe, or down to Coney Island or somewhere. I might be a fresh air child myself, but I have to keep house, you know, and so mother can't let me go. This is one phase of child labor, and the most natural and innocent one, though it is a heavy burden to lay on small shoulders, and premature age and debility are its inevitable results. Far truer is this of the long
hours in shop or manufactory. A child of eight, one of a dozen in a shop on Walker Street, stripped feathers, and had for a year earned three dollars a week. In this case the father was dead, and the mother sick, and the little thing went home to do such cooking as she could, though like many a worker she had already learned to take strong tea and to believe that it gave her strength. She was dwarfed in growth from confinement in the air of the workshop,
from lack of proper food and no play, and thousands of these little feather strippers are in like case. In another workshop in the same neighborhood, children of from eight to ten and one much younger cut the feathers from cocktails. The hours were from eight to six,
and so for ten hours daily they bent over the work, which included cutting from the stem, steaming, curling, and packing. Eight thousand children make envelopes at three and a half cents a thousand. They gung, separate, and sort. The hours are the same, but the rooms are generally lighter and better ventilated than the feather workers' surroundings.
Many more burnish china, for, strange as it may seem, the most delicate wear is entrusted to children of ten or twelve. The burnishing instrument is held close against the breast, and this is a fruitful source of sickness, since the constant pressure brings with it various stomach and other troubles, dyspepsia being the chief. Paper collars employ a host. The youngest
bend over them, for even a child of five can do this. One child of twelve counts and boxes twenty thousand a day, and one who pastes the lining on the buttonholes does five thousand a day. Over ten thousand children make paper boxes. Even in the making of gold leaf a good many are employed, though chiefly young girls of fifteen and upwards. It is one of the most exhausting of the trades, as no air can be admitted and the atmosphere is stifling. Feathers, flowers, and tobacco employ
the greatest number. A child of six can strip tobacco or cut feathers. In one great firm, employing over a thousand men, women, and children, a woman of eighty and her grandchild of four sit side by side and strip the leaves, and the faces of the pair were sketched not long since by a popular artist. With the exception of matchmaking and one or two other industries, there is hardly a trade so deadly in its effects. There are many operations which children are competent to carry
on, and the phases of work done at home in the tenement houses often employ the entire family. In cellars and basements, boys of ten and twelve brine sweeten and prepare the tobacco, preliminary to stemming. Others of the same age keep the knives of the cutting machines clean by means of sponges dipped in rum, thus spending their young lives in an atmosphere of liquor and tobacco. Cigar-making in the tenement houses goes on, though the fact is often denied.
In a report of the State Bureau of Labor, it is stated that in one room less than twelve by fourteen feet, whose duplicate can be found at many points, a family of seven worked. Three of these, all girls, were under ten years of age. Tobacco lay in piles on the floor and under the long table at one end where cigars were rolled. Two of the children sat on the floor, stripping the leaves, and another sat on a small stool. A girl of twenty sat near them, and all had sores on lips, cheeks, and hands.
Some four thousand women are engaged in this industry, and an equal number of unregistered young children share it with them. As in sewing, a number of women often club together and use one room, and in such cases their babies crawl about in the filth on the wet floors, playing with the damp tobacco, and breathing the poison with which the room is saturated. Skin diseases of many sorts develop in the children who work in this way, and for the women and girls nervous and hysterical
complaints are common, the direct result of poisoning by nicotine. In this one house alone thirty children were at work, thirteen of them strippers, doing their ten hours of work daily. Twine factories are clean and well ventilated, but they are often as disastrous in their effects. The twisting room is filled with long spindles, innocent-looking enough, but taking a finger along with the flax as silently and suddenly as the thread forms.
In one factory, two hundred children under fifteen years old are employed spinning, winding, and twisting flax. In one room, ten little boys, so small that they were mounted on a platform to enable them to reach the clamps that hold the flax, run the hackling machines, and change the clamps as necessary. The machine must be fed continuously at both ends, and the boys work with an energy, and steadiness that to the casual observer seems as if they were trying to show off.
They are driven by the machine, and the overseer laughed as he said, Yes, there isn't much let up for them. They have to run pretty lively else they get into trouble. In the twisting room several children lacked a finger or two, and one explained how it happened in her case. You see, you mustn't talk or look off a minute. They just march right along. My sister was like me. She forgot and talked, and just that minute her finger was off and she
didn't even cry till she picked it up. My little finger always did stick out, and I was trying to twist fast like the girl next to me, and somehow it caught in the flax. I tried to jerk away, but it wasn't any use. It was off just the same as hers, and it took a great while before I could come back. I'm sort of afraid of them. For any minute your whole hand might go, and you'd hardly know till it was done. In a small room on Hester Street, a woman at work on overalls, for the
making of which she received one dollar a dozen, said, I couldn't do as well if it wasn't for Ginny and Mame there. Mame has learned to sew on buttons first rate, and Ginny is doing almost as well. I'm alone today, but most days three of us sew together here,
and Ginny keeps right along. We'll do better yet when Mame gets a bit older. As she spoke, the door opened, and a woman with an enormous bundle of overalls entered and sat down on the nearest chair with a gasp.
Them stairs is killin', she said. It's lucky I've not to climb em' often. Something crept forward as the bundle slid to the floor and busied itself with the string that bound it. Hear you, Ginny, said the woman. Don't you be foolin'. What do you want, anyhow? The something shook back a mat of thick hair and rose to its feet.
A tiny child who in size seemed scarcely three, but whose countenance indicated the experience of three hundred. It's the string of... the small voice said. Me and Mame was going to play with it. there's small time for play said the mother there'll be two pair more in a minute or two when you are to see how mame does one and do it good too or i'll find out why not mame had come forward and stood holding to the one thin garment which but partly covered jenny's little bones she too looked out from a wild thatch of black hair and with the same expression of deep experience
the pallid hungry little face lighting suddenly as some cheap cakes were produced Both of them sat down on the floor and ate their portion silently. Mame's seven and Ginny's going on six, said the mother. But Ginny's the smartest. She could sew on buttons when she wasn't much over four.
I had five, but the Lord took him all but these two. I couldn't get on if it wasn't for Mame. Mame looked up, but said no word, and, as I left the room, settled herself with her back against the wall, Ginny at her side, laying the coveted string near at hand for use if any minute for play arrived.
in the next room half lighted like the last and if possible even dirtier a jewish tailor sat at work on a coat and by him on the floor a child of five picking threads from another coat "'Nettie is good help,' he said after a word or two. "'So fast as I finish, she picks all the threads. "'She care not to go away, she stay by me always to help.' "'Is she the only one?'
"'But one that sells papers. "'Last year is five, but Mother and Drea gone with fever. "'It is many that die. "'What will you? "'It is the will of God.'
On the floor below, two children of seven and eight were found also sewing on buttons, in this case for four women who had their machines in one room, and were making the cheapest order of corset cover, for which they received fifty cents a dozen, each one having five buttons.
It could not be called oppressive work, yet the children were held there to be ready for each one as completed, and sat, as such children most often do, silent and half asleep, waiting patiently for the next demand.
It's hard on them, one of the women said. We work till ten and sometimes later, but then they sleep between and we can't, and they get the change of running out for a loaf of bread or whatever's wanted, and we don't stir from the machine from morning till night.
I've got two of me own, but they're outpedlin' matches. Descending the stairs to reach the rear of the building, our way led past three little girls shoveling coals into bags. On the lower floor back of the small grocery in which the people of the house bought their food supply,
wilted or half-decayed vegetables, meat of the cheapest order, broken eggs and stale fish, a tailor and two helpers were at work. A girl of nine or ten sat among them and picked thread or sewed on buttons as needed.
a haggard, wretched-looking child who did not look up as the door opened. A woman who had come down the stairs stopped a moment, and as I passed out said, If there was a law for him, I'd have him up. It's his own sister's child, and he's working her ten hours a day, and many a day into the night, and she with an open sore on her neck, and crying out many's the time when she draws out a long needle full and so gives it a jerk. She's sewed on millions
of buttons, that child has, and she's but a little past ten. May there be a hot place waiting for him. From the notes of a physician whose name is a guarantee of accurate and faithful observation, and whose work is in connection with the Board of Health, I have a series of facts, the result of 18 months' work. During this period of daily observation in tenement housework, she found among the people with whom she came into contact 535 children under 12 years old,
most of them between 10 and 12, who either worked in shops or stores, or helped their mothers in some kind of work at home. Of these 535 children, but 60 were healthy. In one family, a child of three years old had infantile paralysis, easily curable. The mother had no time to attend to it.
At five years old, the child was taught to sew buttons on trousers. She is now, at 13 years, a helpless cripple, but she finishes a dozen pairs of trousers a day, and the family are thus twenty cents the richer. In another family, she found twin girls four and a half years old,
sewing on buttons from six in the morning till ten at night, and near them a family of three, a woman who did the same work, and whose old father of eighty and a little girl of six were her co-workers. Does the compulsory education law help these? It requires only fourteen weeks of the year, and does a poorer class work from early morning till eight a.m., and after school hours from four till late at night. What energy for study is left under such conditions? The chief
harm is not here, though this is harm enough. It is in the inevitable physical degeneration of the child. Thoughtful owners and managers here and there realize this, and many have testified that a child put out into factory life at eight or nine years of age becomes practically useless by the time twenty is reached. Physical, mental, and moral development are not only wanting, but rendered impossible. This is no place for the many questions involved, but every woman who reads, every man
whose children look to him for teaching, may well ponder the issues involved. A world of thought and action is already given to the rescue of children from the slums. Let it reach one step farther and rescue them with no less eagerness and determination from the factory. If present methods of production cannot go on without them, alter the methods. The loss on one side will be more than balanced by a lessening rate in our asylums, and a gradual lowering of the tax for their support, paid now
with a cheerfulness which may well be transferred to another form of loss, loss today perhaps, but gain for all days to come. We expend money for foreign missions while the heathen are here at our own doors. Out from the child faces, preternaturally aged, brutalized, and defrauded of all that belongs to childhood,
look eyes that hold unconscious appeal for that justice which is the birthright of every soul born to the Republic. Ignore it, deny it, and the time comes when the old words sound again, and we hear the judgment. Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.
End of chapter 5
