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Progressive Era Children and the Photographs of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine

By Andrew Gulliford

Volume VI, Number 2
Winter, 1987

Photography added realism and urgency to reform movements at the turn of the century, particularly to those reforms which centered on children. In the skillful hands of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, the camera became a major tool to sway public opinion, to influence legislation, and to document unequivocally the excesses and abuses of an emerging industrial society. Walter Rosenblum has asserted that, “Hine’s photographs were the single most important influence in this country’s passage of child labor legislation.” Hine took his visual cues from the earlier work of Jacob Riis.1

Other authors have explored the relationship between the camera and the American social conscience, but they have not concentrated on the photographs of children taken by Riis and Hine nor on the changing concept of child care in America between 1880 and 1917.2 Jacob Riis showed the misery of life in the city and advocated placing urban children in the country. Lewis Hine demonstrated that children in the country and in small towns were not much better off than city children. Industrialization and Social Darwinism, whether on the farm or in the city, knew no distinctions concerning child labor.

By the 1880s a slum environment was a known evil, and a host of child savers, primarily middle-class women, sought to save children from their own slum-dwelling parents. During the last quarter of the 19th century, religion-based orphanages thrived. Private charities held total hegemony over child care in this country. In this book The Search for Order 1877-1920, Robert H. Wiebe writes, “If humanitarian progressivism had a central theme, it was the child. He united the campaigns for health, education and a richer city environment.” Wiebe explains that children were “the carrier(s) of tomorrow’s hope.”3

The Progressives’ world focused on the slums – the tenements and ghettos of the great urban industrial cities of America.   At the turn of the century, New York’s Lower East Side had a population density second only to Asia. In one year alone, 1907, over a million immigrants stepped off the boat at Ellis Island. Many immigrants brought children who would die or be deserted in the confusion and congestion which was then New York. In his classic book How the Other Half lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Jacob Riis wrote of the million and a half children who swarmed the city’s streets. Half a million were starving and one out of ten ultimately rode in the white hearse to Potter’s Field. As children lived elbow to elbow so they were buried coffin to coffin in unmarked group graves.

Jacob Riis photographed the Lower East Side in the late 1880s and Lewis Hine documented Ellis Island in 1905. Both of them left vivid images which shape our perception of the past, but their impact on their own generation was equally profound.   Because photography was a relatively new medium at the turn of the century, in an era characterized by a worship of science and machine technology, photographs became significant visual tools in the complex process of raising public awareness about the plight of children, particularly immigrant orphans and child laborers.

Photography better than any other medium documented the change from an agricultural society characterized by “gemeinschaft” or limited, neighborly relationships to one of personal alienation and bureaucratization or “gessellschaft” – the direct result of industrialization.4 In How the Other Half Lives Jacob Riis described the inhumane consequences of an expanding industrial society. According to Riis, in 1899 at the Infant’s Hospital on Randall Island, of the 508 babies received, 66% or 333 children died. Of those babies who died, 90% were picked up in the streets.5

The bitter reality of multitudes of abandoned children struck at the very heart of Victorian sensibility and affection for offspring during the late Gilded Age. Large families had been an economic necessity in both rural and industrial America where mothers and fathers had defined themselves not only by their occupations but also by their progeny. Early settlement to America by northern Europeans had reinforced the ideal of the nuclear family revolving around one set of parents and stable, lasting marriages.   Yet the ideal of such familial and intergenerational stability did not take into account the brutal excesses of the American Industrial Revolution. Inhumane working conditions persisted because labor found it difficult to organize; there were always hungry immigrants willing to work longer hours for less wages. Though the Irish had had their problems assimilating in the early decades of the Gilded Age, the real crisis came in the 1890s with the onslaught of southern and eastern Europeans in New York City.

The second great wave of immigrants to America was composed of rural peasants utterly bewildered by the life they were forced to lead on Hester Street, Mulberry Street, Ludlow Street and in such squalid slums as Hell’s Kitchen, Battle Row, and Poverty Gap. By 1900 over 350,000 rooms in New York City had only dark interiors with no access even to the faint light and fetid air from the dingy gray air shafts.6 The tenements were diseased and filthy, and families with six or more members frequently shared only two rooms.

Naturally, children turned to the streets for play and recreation. Riis called these children “Street Arabs” and their very presence bothered the Victorian sensibility of middle class reformers who were appalled by the children’s appearance.   These children slept in the streets and ate what they could earn, beg, or steal. Charles Loring Brace in his book The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (1872) described children who had become “street waifs, vagabonds, drunken bums, pickpockets, petty thieves and beggars.”7 Brace helped to organize the Children’s Aid Society in the early 1850s, and he strongly believed in separating children from their working-class parents.

Convinced of their moral obligation to save children, reformers stressed the need for schools, playgrounds, and juvenile courts; they also demanded rapid assimilation through a process of Americanization. In his book Children of the Poor (1892), Riis wrote of an “immediate duty . . . to school the children first of all into good Americans, and next into useful citizens.”8

Christopher Lasch has suggested that at the end of the 19th century the family was threatened by expanding powers of the state, but prior to 1900 it was not the state which had hegemony over child care, it was private charities acting in paralegal fashion. In her article on the transformation of state-family relations in the early 20th century, Ann Vandepol explains that laws routinely assigned custody of dependent children to statewide charity boards or children’s asylums.9

Charles Loring Brace was the manager of such a powerful private charity. Brace’s decidedly anti-immigrant book, The Dangerous Classes, was only one of numerous polemics that railed against the problems caused by industrialization and urbanization. Brace’s book had a limited effect, but Jacob Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives, met with phenomenal success and went through eleven printings in five years. It came to be published because of his photographs.

Jacob Riis was the first American to use photographs of slums in magic lantern shows, similar to slide shows of today. Magic lantern slides had been used for entertainment, travelogues, and temperance lectures; Riis used the same visual format for social reform.

Ferenc M. Szasz and Ralph F. Bogardus explain that as a reporter for the New York Sun, Riis grew tired of writing about tenements and failing to stimulate people to help change the intolerable conditions.10 In the fall of 1887 Riis went with two amateur photographers at midnight into slums where they utilized the new Blitzlichtpulver or explosive flash powder. Riis photographed dark alleys in an attempt to expose, in his own words, the “somnolent policemen on the street, denizens of the dives in their dens, tramps and bummers in their so-called lodgings, and all the people of the wild and wonderful variety of New York night life.”11 Riis’s later photographs featured children as “Street Arabs” on their cobblestone turf. His photographs tell a story of immigrant isolation, poverty, and wretched living conditions. They are direct and powerful images which established photographs as “the preeminent mode of proof in the rhetoric of social and urban reform.”12

On January 25, 1888, Riis presented a magic lantern show entitled “The Other Half: How It Lives and Dies in New York.”   Within a month the New York Sun published the story with wood carvings made from his photographs. Riis gave his lecture in the Broadway Tabernacle and in churches in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Madison Square. At the request of an editor who had seen one of the magic lantern shows, Riis wrote an article for Scribner’s. Subsequently the editor of the Critic suggested Riis write a book.

How the Other Half Lives appeared in 1890 with seventeen halftones in very poor detail and nineteen drawings made from photographs. It earned Riis numerous accolades and the friendship of Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become Police Commissioner of New York.   Roosevelt dubbed Riis New York City’s “most important citizen” and Riis began his reform work on a national scale, writing a dozen books including Children of the Poor (1892) and Children of the Tenements (1897). He had found a successful formula, and his lantern slide shows were to become the essential element of his speeches as he traveled from coast to coast speaking to Progressives. He often spoke for two hours and showed a hundred slides to fascinated audiences who had rarely seen projected photographic images, much less photographs of New York slums.

Wherever Riis went he spoke about children. His articles, his books, and his photographs made clear the desperate plight of children in New York City’s crowded tenements.   Yet, despite strong middle class conventions about the sanctity of children growing up under the watchful eyes of family members, frequently Riis advocated that children be removed from the custody of their parents. His belief in splitting up families was strictly along class lines. Though he would never have advocated such family fissures for his Progressive era middle class supporters, for working class waifs Riis firmly believed that they would thrive best “in the country” particularly “in the West.”

Because he looked back nostalgically upon the bucolic village life of his native Denmark, Riis urged children be resettled out of the city and on to farms. Yet he appears to have forgotten that long hours of farm work from sunup to sundown could be equally deleterious to young children forced to serve under a taskmaster determined to squeeze every ounce of work from them in return for room and board.   Jacob Riis eagerly adopted a belief in the vigorous outdoor life advocated by his bully friend Theodore Roosevelt, but hard farm labor for relocated tenement children should not have been confused with exercise gained from occasional hunting expeditions by members of the middle and upper classes. Riis believed any “plan of rescue for the boy in which the appeal to the soil has no place” was “false in principle” and he applauded the work of Charles Loring Brace and the Children’s Aid Society. Brace worked diligently to uproot poor urban children from their families and neighborhoods.

In How the Other Half Lives Riis wrote, “From the lodging houses and the schools are drawn the battalions of young emigrants that go every year to homes in the Far West, to grow up self-supporting men and women safe from the temptations and the vice of the city. Their number runs far up in the thousands. The Society never loses sight of them.”13

In reality, the Children’s Aid Society not only lost sight of them, but many children were only half orphans with one parent still living; they were never reunited again. In 1873 family status for 2,986 of the Society’s children showed 15% or 449 had one parent still living and fully one-fourth, 26% or 674, had both parents alive.14 Progressives, with their unshakable belief in social engineering, separated children from immigrant and working class families. Riis’s photographs gave them ammunition for their children’s crusade.

Between 1859 and 1927, the Children’s Aid Society, responsible for over 90,000 children, was the largest private institution to place children as laborers. In her book Children West (1964) Miriam Z. Langsam clarifies that the children did not go to the Far West; rather they were transported to the Midwest. Nine states - New York, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Kansas and Michigan – received 91% of all the children sent out.15 They went virtually as indentured servants and received only free room and board in return for years of hard farm labor. Lincoln Steffens considered Riis the one man “who has done more than anyone else to alleviate the condition of the poor in New York by revealing their misery.”16 Yet what Riis did not reveal, what he may not have known, is exactly who the tenement children were.

Many were not immigrant children but rather native-born, rural Americans who had moved with their families from the farm to the city. In a careful analysis of census data, historian Stephan Thernstrom explains, “The prime cause of population growth in nineteenth-century America, and the main source of urban growth, was simply the high fertility of natives living outside the city.”17 As America lurched forward from an agricultural to an industrial society, the poor sought urban employment. In Children West, Langsam explains that between 1860 and 1890, native-born American children placed out by the Children’s Aid Society in New York were 62% of the total in 1860, 44% in 1870, 50% in 1880, and 51% in 1890.18

While Jacob Riis extolled the virtues of country living and the re-settlement of tenement children to the West, those children’s parents struggled to survive in American cities. Progressive Era reformers returned children to rural areas.   Caught in the economic maelstrom of industrial life, the poor were deprived of their progeny. Other parents, particularly unwed mothers, abandoned their children in record numbers.

However sincere Jacob Riis and the Progressives were about social reforms and unwanted children in the slums, in their efforts to change the tenement environment, they sent children off to bondage. Miriam Langsam confirms, “Not only did the [Children’s Aid] Society respond to the labor needs of rural areas, it learned to take advantage of seasonal demands for labor…From 1869 on, most placement took place in the fall and in the spring, during the main planting and harvesting months.”19

Jacob Riis and Charles Loring Brace offered Progressives a panacea for immigrant overcrowding and the problem of children growing up in urban squalor, yet conditions in small towns and in the countryside were hardly better. The need for social reform was not limited to the nation’s burgeoning industrial cities.   Robert Weibe has characterized the Progressive Era as “the search for order” among isolated “island communities” or mid-sized and small towns throughout America. Lewis Hine penetrated that isolation. Lewis Hine showed the Progressives what they did not want to see – the hidden underside of American industrial expansion was child labor which affected both rural and urban children and native-born as well as immigrants.

Like Riis, Lewis Hine gained his first significant photographic experience in the crucible of New York City. Hine had come from Wisconsin, where as a young man he had worked in a furniture factory, a bank, and a retail store thirteen hours a day, six days a week. He went to the University of Chicago to take courses in teacher preparation and he became familiar with the ideological stance of the Chicago School of Sociology, which became highly influential in the 1920s.

Caught up in the spirit of Progressivism, he followed one of his Wisconsin instructors, Frank Manny, to New York City to teach at Felix Adler’s School of Ethical Culture. There he took up photography as a new way of seeing and as an important technical skill to impart to students, but photography became an overwhelming passion, and in 1906he started work for the National Child Labor Committee as a photographer.

For Riis, photography had been useful as the most dramatic means to get his message across. For over a decade he gave lectures and wrote articles and books on tenement reform, drawing upon photographic work from the late 1880s.   Like Riis, Hine stated, “The greatest advance in social work is to be made by the popularizing of camera work.”20 Hine’s best photographs are acknowledged to be the 5,000 images he took between 1906 and 1917 for the National Child Labor Committee. Riis photographed the obvious abuses – the oppressive tenements and the immigrant children on New York’s Lower East Side, while Hine photographed the less obvious abuses – the insidious child labor of native-American boys and girls working ten hour days in textile mills in New England and in the South. Hine photographed children who picked cotton in Oklahoma and Texas, peeled shrimp and cracked oysters in the Gulf Coast canneries, sold newspapers on the streets in New York and Washington, D.C., and sorted slag from coal in Pennsylvania coal mines.

Hine also photographed immigrant children: Mexican youngsters in the fishing industry and German-Russian children in the stoop labor of thinning beets, but it was his photos of native-born American children with their weary eyes, slumped shoulders, and expressions of perpetual fatigue which chowed the Progressives a part of America they did not believe existed.   Hine’s vivid portraits of children blowing glass in Indiana, spinning thread in Georgia, canning sardines in Maine, or picking strawberries in Delaware is in sharp contrast to the self-contained world of Riis’s immigrant children.

Because Jacob Riis was a Danish immigrant who had worked his way up from nights spent sleeping in a police station to a newspaper reporter, an author, and finally a famous lecturer who stayed at the Roosevelt White House whenever he was in Washington, his message of charity and his requests for assistance were supported by people who liked his stalwart Christianity, his avowed belief in America, and his successful upward mobility. Riis was warmly received wherever he went.

Lewis Hine, however, had to be secretive. He was documenting a reality that Americans did not want to face. When denied access into factories, he posed as a fire inspector or an industrial photographer. Once inside he photographed the little doffer boys, spinners, and helpers as quickly as he could. To avoid attention he used no flash. He remained inconspicuous, photographing children as they worked alone, scribbling notes on scraps of paper with his hand in his pocket. He estimated the height of the children by comparing how tall they were to the placement of buttons on his vest. When forcibly evicted from factories, he waited outside and photographed the children leaving from work, or he photographed them in the first morning light as they waited outside for another exhausting day of mindless manual lavor.21

Riis took few photographs but wrote ten books and hundreds of articles. Hine published only one book, Men at Work, a children’s book; yet like Riis’s images of the Lower East Side, Hine’s photographs have become ingrained in the American conscience.

Both men were published in Paul Kellogg’s Charities and the Commons (later to become Survey Graphic and finally The Survey), one of the first publications concerned with the reform movement and urban sociology, yet apparently Riis and Hine never met.   Kellogg published Riis’s writing and Hine’s photographs, which between 1907 and 1940 appeared 189 times within those pages and 34 times on the cover. Like Riis, Hine made his photographs into stereopticon slides.

In 1909 the National Child Labor Committee prepared to loan Hine’s slides in sets of 50 to 75 images which included shots of street trades in Connecticut, child labor in Maryland, and children making glass in New Jersey. That same year the Hull House reformer Jane Addams published The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909). Addams had become as famous as Riis, but Hine remained in obscurity, letting his photographs speak louder than words.

Industrial America was swallowing up its young, and Hine worked at the raw edge of that mammoth social transformation. While Riis wrote about tenements and Chicagoan Jane Addams wrote about Victorian morality and factory girls prized for their tender beauty” and vulnerable to the “fundamental susceptibility of sex,” Hine despaired over children trapped in endless cycles which he described as “child labor, illiteracy, industrial inefficiency, low wages, long hours, low standards of living, bad housing, poor food, unemployment, intemperance, disease, poverty…”

Hine photographed six-year-old children standing on tons of oyster shells they had pulled apart by hand. In contrast, reformer Jane Addams only stressed the need to “fit the child for an intelligent and conscious participation in industrial life.”22

Lewis Hine knew all about industrial life.   Hine knew of children deprived of an education, stunted in growth because of malnutrition and continuous exertion, and locked into their parents’ treadmill of abominable working conditions and recurrent poverty.

The 1870 census showed 739,000 children between the age of 10 and 15 were employed in the work force. By 1900 that figure had grown to 1.7 million and the Census Bureau did not take into account the thousands of children who worked half-time or those under ten years of age who were working illegally. Vandepol states, “Virtually all child-saving organizations in the United States in the late 19th century recommended separating working-class parents and children in economically precarious households.” Once separated from their parents and in the care of private charities, the children went to work. Even when attitudes towards child care changed and mothers’ pensions were implemented to keep children home, the children worked.23

On his photographs Hine wrote succinct and sometimes caustic captions such as: “Home Sweet Home. Homework on artificial flowers in New York City, 1912. Montaria family, Downing St. The 3 year old at left was actually putting petals together.   She often works until 8 p.m.   Other children work much later.”

Riis took equally powerful portraits of boys working in sweat shops, making handrolled cigars, minding their infant siblings, and sleeping prostrate over heating vents to stay warm. One of his most forceful images is of a young girl already in the labor force. The caption is simply “Katie: I scrubs.”

In 1914 when North Carolina raised the minimum working age to 15, employers sought to place sewing machines in homes. Hine was there to photograph and he wrote, “Tenement homework seems to me one of the most iniquitous phases of child-slavery that we have.”

Of Lewis Hine’s dedication to photography, Walter Rosenblum has written, “the social turmoil of the Progressive period of American history was the fabric of his vision.” He continued a tradition of reform photography begun by Jacob Riis. Both men used photography to arouse the public to much needed reform, but where Riis operated within the 19th century context of private charities and their dubious claims to child care, Hine took on the task of presenting the public with incontrovertible evidence that state laws on child labor were not being enforced.

Ever the optimist, Jacob Riis continued to seek donations and individual help for private philanthropies while blithely assuming that legislation to protect children, once enacted, would be carried out.   Hine was well aware of indifference to laws. He knew first-hand the twisted logic of factory owners who encouraged mothers to bring children into factories to work beside them and supplement motherhood with industrial productivity.

Though best known as an author and a journalist, Jacob Riis began the genre of documentary photography in America which was continued and expanded by the tireless Lewis Hine. The work of Riis and Hine was a major factor in the transformation of social attitudes towards children at the end of the Gilded Age between 1890and 1917. Their photographs radically changed the concept of responsibility towards child care and children’s welfare in American society.

But though they both focused their lenses on children, Riis and Hine led singularly separate lives. Jacob Riis became a social climber and a prominent American citizen who fervently spoke of the dangers of children growing up in tenements.   While Riis preached against the urban evils of crowded cities, Lewis Hine exposed on film the larger and more insidious evil of child labor in all aspects of American life and in every region of the United States. Riis was welcomed anywhere because his work corroborated growing nativistic movements and fears for the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon Americans. Hine, on the other hand, had to be secretive because his photographs showed that children of Yankee stock worked excessive hours in factories throughout the country and were trapped in an endless cycle of low wages and poverty with no hope for educational achievement or economic advancement.

Jacob Riis bought a large housed in a New York City suburb and eventually retired to a country farm thanks to wise investments made with his influential friends. Lewis Hine lost the family home and was forced into poverty after paying expensive doctor bills incurred from his wife’s fatal illness. Yet both men have left us a profound and disturbing legacy. For in the faces of the Progressive Era children they photographed we see the problems and the promise of an America burdened with the excesses of rapid industrialization.

Notes

The author wishes to acknowledge an intellectual debt to Dr. Patricia Raub and Dr. Leslie H. Fishel, jr. for helping with sources and reading earlier drafts of this article).

1Walter Rosenblum‘s introductory essay in America and Lewis Hine. (New York, 1977) and Alan Trachtenberg’s concluding essay along with excellent photographic reproductions make this the standard reference on Lewis Hine. Citation, p. 13.

Additional information on Hine and child labor laws was presented by Howard Bossen (Michigan State University) at the International Conference on Visual Communication held at the Annenberg School of Communication May 30 – June 1, 1985 in a paper titled “The Influence of Lewis Hine’s Photographs on the Passage of Federal Child Labor Legislation in 1916 and 1918.”

2See Ferenc M. Szaszand Ralph F. Bogardus, “The Camera and the American Social Conscience: The Documentary Photography of Jacob A. Riis,” New York History 55. (October, 1974) and Judith Mara Gutman, Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience. (New York, 1967).

For information on child care see Anthony Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. (Chicago, 1969) and Leroy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children 1890-1917.   (Philadelphia, 1984). For juvenile delinquency in particular see Joseph M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century America.   (New York, 1971).

3Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920. (New York, 1967), 169. Judith Mara Gutman concurs in Lewis W. Hine. She writes, “If anything seemed to draw groups together, if anything seemed to present a beacon for the separate movements it was the sheer existence of and hope for children.”

4The classic definitions of “gemeinschaft” and “gesellschaft” were first advanced by Ferdinand Tonnies in 1887. Charles P. Loomis, ed., Communities and Society. (Lansing, 1957).

5Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. (New York, 1957), 142.

6Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted. (New York, 1951), 152. For additional immigrant references see Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History. (New York, 1940) and Carl Wittke, We Who Built America – The Saga of the Immigrant.   (Cleveland, 1934).

7Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them. (New York). See the third edition with addenda, 1880. For additional information on “Street Arabs” and their play see David Nasaw, Children of the City at Work and at Play. (New York, 1985).

8Jacob Riis, Children of the Poor. (New York, 1892), 8. Also see Riis, Children of the Tenements. (New York, 1897) and the introduction to Francesco Cordasco, ed., Jacob Riis Revisited: Poverty and the Slum in Another Era. (Garden City, NY, 1968).

9Christopher Lasch, “Social Pathologists and the Socialization of Reproduction,” The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective. (New York, 1983). Ann Vandepol, “Dependent Children, Child Custody, and the Mothers’ Pensions: The Transformation of State-Family Relations in the Early 20th Century,” Social Problems, vol. 29, #3. (February 1982), 227. This article synthesizes much historical material on 19th century orphanages, private charities, and child care. Also see Linda Gordon, “Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880-1920,” American Quarterly, Vol. 37, #2. (Summer 1985).

10Szasz and Bogardus, “The Camera and the American Social Conscience,” 419-425.

11Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography. (New York, 1964), 139. The best commentary and collection of Riis’s photographic prints is in Alexander Alland, Jacob A. Riis, Photographer and Citizen. (New York, 1974).

12An important new book on the subject of urban photography is Peter Bacon Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization 1839-1915.   (Philadelphia, 1984). Hales has an excellent chapter on Riis.

13Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 156.

14Miriam Z. Langsam, Children West. (Madison, Wis., 1964), 25. This book offers detailed data on the placement efforts of the Children’s Aid Society.

15Ibid.

16Roy Lubove, The Progressive and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917.   (Pittsburge, 1962), 49. For additional biographical information and commentary on Riis see Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis, Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen. (New York, 1939) and Edith Patterson Meyer, “Not Charity But Justice” The Story of Jacob A. Riis.   (New York, 1974).

17Stephen Thernstrom, “Urbanization, Migration and Social Mobility in Late Nineteenth Century America,” in Alan Trachtenberg, Peter Neill, and Peter C. Bunnell, eds., The City – American Experience. (New York, 1971), 100. For additional information on the urban population explosion see C.N. Glaas and A.T. Brown, A History of Urban America. (New York, 1967), 107-111.

18Langsam, Children West, 26-28.

19Ibid.

20Trachtenberg, America and Lewis Hine, 119. It is interesting to note that Hine’s photographs are well-known in the People’s Republic of China where they are used to illustrate the excesses of early American industrialism.

21Recent publications which confirm the difficulty Hine experienced photographing working children include: Jonathan Doherty, Lewis Wickes Hine’s Interpretive Photography. (Chicago, 1978), and the catalogs Lewis W. Hine: Child Labor Photographs. (Washington, D.C., 1980) and Verna Posever Curtis and Stanley Mallach, Photography and Reform, Lewis Hine & The National Child Labor Committee.   (Milwaukee, 1984).

Some of Hine’s best child labor photographs were taken in the southern textile mills. For vivid descriptions of child labor in Pennsylvania textile mills in the antebellum period see excerpts on employment of children in Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution.   (New York, 1980).

22Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets. (New York, 1909), 53.

23Vandepol, “Dependent Children,” 225.