Children of the Mills: Re-Reading Lewis Hine's Child-Labour Photographs'

GEORGE DIMOCK

There is then, in Hine's earlywork, an implicitcounter- in the United States: textile mills, coal mines, glass- statement to the Progressivereformist ideology he - works, commercial agriculture and the street trades. embraced a subtle but nonethelessdistinct resistance At the same time that Hine's work define the to helped the tendency of reformersto make objects of their interests and of underclass'cases.' values, agendas Progressive reform, it was determined them. The movement Alan Trachtenberg2 largely by comprised a flexible and changing set of alliances at the local, state and national levels, among teachers, suffragists, health-care workers, civil servants, city Reform Photography as Dominant planners, social workers, labour leaders, journalists Ideology and reform politicians. These members of an emergent, professional-managerialclass advocated a Alan Trachtenberg and Maren Stange have new style of reform.4 They sought to minister presented theoretically informed, historical argu- scientifically and bureaucraticallyto the body politic ments for Lewis Hine's child-labour photographs as in response to the systemic ills wrought by corporate manifestations of 'a shared social consciousness' capitalism, including child labour. between the photographer and his subjects.3These Progressivism reached floodtide around 1912 readings appeal greatly in that they locate in the before losing ground to the more entrenched forces work a self-reflexive critique of the Progressives' of the dominant social order. Its failure to take tendency to regard those they sought to help as deeper root can be ascribed, at least in part, to the inferior. Against the current critical consensus that distance between the Progressives' professional Hine's pictures do justice to their subjects, I will elitism and the low class status of those whose lives argue that they depict working children and their they sought to change. By the time of the First World parents as aberrant in relation to a valorized middle- War, the reformers had lost initiative in a trans- class norm. The fight over child labour was not formed pro-business environment. Those who exclusively about bringing an end to an egregious remained committed to the Progressive program aspect of capitalist exploitation. It also entailed far- fought to hold onto the gains of the preceding reaching struggles over who children were, what decade. While Progressive reform significantly their roles in the family were to be, how they were to influenced the political and social landscape of the be valued and cared for, and who had the power to United States at the turn of the century, its regulate them. As a body of work, the child-labour limitations were also profound. Robert Wiebe photographs constitute a seminally influential summarized the central failing of the reformers in instance of social documentary. My intent is not to the following terms: Hine for not to the class castigate conforming had carriedan consciousness of the cultural moment. But I They approachrather than a solutionto present their labours, and in the end constructed an do wish to counter the notion that this work fulfils they just approachto reform,mistaking it for a finishedproduct.5 the contemporary critical desire for a photographic practice that bridges class conflict. The fact that The tendency has been to read Hine's child- Hine worked to represent and to oppose the labour photographs against, rather than within, the economic of exploitation children does not support shortcomings of Progressive reform's political pro- the claim that his photographic practice was exem- gram and affiliations.6In the following pages, I will with plary respect to his working-class subjects. be interpreting, in some detail, several of his photo- Lewis Hine for photographed the National Child graphs of children working in the textile industry Labor Committee (NCLC) between 1906 and 1918. with the aim of taking class more fully into account. This remains his best known and most celebrated Along the way, I will be re-reading two turn-of-the- work. Within a social history of the Progressive century photographic genres, pictorialism and social Reform Movement which rose to prominence in the documentary, as contemporary, mutually re- first decade of the twentieth century, the child- inforcing cultural codes aligned together on the labour photographs served as visual, empirical privileged side of the social divide separating an evidence of the widespread employment of children ascendant middle class from a growing and increas- in a variety of industrial and commercial enterprises ingly problematic, industrial proletariat.

THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 37 In drawing distinctions between pictorialism and which he says, 'The ideal of oppression was realized by documentary photography, photographic historians this dismal servitude. When they find themselves in such have tended to the extent to which Hine's conditionat the dawn of existence- so young, so feeble, ignore - early career unselfconsciously operated on both struggling among men what passes in these souls fresh sides of the line art from from God?' [...] With a picture thus sympathetically dividing separating high what a leverwe havefor the social social reform.7In June 1909, Hine delivered a talk to interpreted, uplift.10 a national conference of social workers. Entitled 'Social How the Camera in In aligning CarolinaSpinner with Victor Hugo, Hine Photography, May Help trades on a well-established tradition the Social Uplift,' it contains, in embryonic form, all literary the and confusions connected wherein the mill child functions as a symbol of the problems, possibilities of industrial On the last of with his project of documenting working-class iniquity capitalism. page children both as a mode of artistic and as MadameBovary, for example, Flaubert signals the expression devastation left in the wake of his heroine's suicide in part of a political reform movement to abolish child labour.8 In the course of his Hine the fate of her only child, Berthe, who is sent 'to a presentation, cotton-mill to earn a in the form of a slide, his living.'11 projected, stereopticon Hine's talk entertains a number of photograph representing a young girl tending a row striking of machines in the Lancaster Cotton Mills contradictory rationales for his photographic prac- spinning tice. He his of chil- in South Carolina on November 30, 1908 1). begins by discussing photographs (Fig. dren in the street trades as of in Hine's presentation attempts to persuade his examples 'publicity that this constitutes a our appeal for public sympathy.' He proceeds by colleagues picture complex in relation to commercial sign in no way limited to its most obvious function as endorsing photography as a to the influ- empirical evidence for the existence of child labour: advertising way promote visibility, ence, and reputation of the social worker. He Take the photographof a tiny spinner in a Carolina demonstrates his awareness of Carolina Spinner's cotton-mill.As it is, it makesan appeal.Reinforce it with semiotic status as a sign distinct from its referent one of those social pen-picturesof [Victor]Hugo's in when he acknowledges that the photograph 'is often

uiIIr. n 4

r

Fig. 1. Lewis Hine: 'CarolinaSpinner' 1908(IMP/GEH 77:181:15).

- 38 THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 more effective than the reality would have been, empirical fact, romantic symbol, sociological type, because, in the picture, the non-essential and con- moral indictment and aesthetic transfiguration. As flicting interests have been eliminated.' Hine given in the title of his talk, however, Hine's intent endorses the child-labour photograph as legally was to demonstrate to his peers 'how the camera compelling evidence even as he acknowledges may help in the social uplift.' The various, conflict- photographic transparency as a powerful myth ing interpretations of CarolinaSpinner cohere when capable of ideological manipulation: 'Of course, you we come to understand the image as an adaptable, and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity rhetorical device to be deployed in the interests of of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while Progressivereform. photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.' One particularly striking instance of Hine's Hine suggests using photographs to make his willingness to comingle styles in the interests of rhe- audience 'so sick and tired of the whole business that torical persuasion comes in the form of his when the time for action comes, child-labor pictures fashioning from the same negative two radically will be records of the past.' Here the relations differentpictures whose styles separate out on oppo- between photography and social reform become site sides of the fine art/social documentary divide incoherent at the level of both temporality and (Figs. 2 & 3). A photograph captioned 'social worker causality. If Hine means to say that child-labour visits poor home (defective child)' shows a young, photographs will prove so distressing that they will impoverished, immigrant mother seated in her tene- galvanize the body politic into changing the existing ment kitchen holding a small child on her lap.14A conditions of industrial employment and thereby well-dressed, middle-class social worker stands over render the images obsolete, he, nevertheless, her in what appears to be an uncomfortably close, articulates a much more complex position which artificiallyposed attitude. The two women exchange includes a break between 'the time for action' and gazes. The needy mother looks up as if appealing for the time of representation, the latter seeming to both help and guidance. The social worker benignly anticipate and post-date the moment of reform dominates the scene from her superior, supervisory proper. Hine's lack of clarity may have something to position. The little boy stares off to the left, lost in a do with the psychic contradictions entailed in invok- world of his own. This staged interior tableau, star- ing a utopian moment which constitutes both the kly illuminated by the photographer's flash, reveals goal and demise of Hine's child-labour project. the homely details of tenement life: a fragment of a Hine's talk also makes grandiose claims for the wall calendar, the lace trim bordering the underside efficacy of 'social photography' by way of Hugo and of the kitchen cabinet, a sweater lying on the table. Genesis: The image promotes social work as a professional- ized, authoritative, ameliorative intervention by a [T]hestand taken by Hugo [is]that the greatsocial peril is middle-class reform movement on behalf of the low- darknessand 'What then ... is ignorance. required? est strata of the working class. Hine used it in a pos- Light in floods!' The dictum, then of the social Light! ter he prepared for the NCLC's exhibition at the workeris 'Let there be light;' and in this campaignfor we havefor our advance the writer- the Panama-PacificExposition in San Francisco in 1915. light agent light The 'What are we to do about photograph. poster asks, going [child labour]?' and answers with a series of reform measures which include the care of Hine concludes his remarks by advocating the use of 'needy parents and children' which this illus- photography in the service of 'the intelligent inter- photograph ostensibly trates.15 pretation of the world's workers, not only for the But Hine also a version people of today, but for future ages.' With hindsight, produced second, cropped of this 'East Side mother with sick his remarks become a prescient anticipation of his image. Captioned it isolates the mother and son a own career which moved from a photographic child,' against blank, white wall.16 The social worker has vanished and practice rooted in activist reform to a later, rather with her all traces of a tenement life. unsuccessful and naive celebration of the dignity of specific Destitute mother and defective child are trans- labour within the corporate mainstream.12 Even here, at the start of a decade of involvement in child- formed into a Christian icon of Madonna and Child. labour Hine a from The radical surgery required to effect this move from reform, quotes passage George - Eliot in order to reconcile with a social reform to familial sentiment a move in the slide from 'defective formalist aesthetic by way of a mystical reverence for repeated linguistically child' to 'sick child' in the two titles - leaves its the commonplace: traces in the divergent gazes of mother and son [T]herefore,let us alwayshave men [...] who see beauty whose awkward intensities do not conform to the in the commonplace things, and delight in showing how gentle lyricism typical of the genre.17 kindlythe light of heavenfalls on them.13 The fashioning of two such divergent scenes from a single negative suggests the existence of some third Interpreting CarolinaSpinner in the light of Hine's term which renders them interpenetrable. The manifesto leads to a series of contradictory, seem- standard photo-historical narrative positions Lewis ingly incompatible readings: the child worker as Hine's social activism as a foil to Alfred Stieglitz's

- THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 39 Fig. 2. LewisHine: 'SocialWorker Visits Poor Home (Defective Child)', n.d. (IMP/GEH 78:1026:54). struggle to have his pictorialist brand of photo- pictorialistportrait of a young girl of comparable age graphy accepted as a fine art.18In this dichotomy, by Clarence White. While the former stands labour- Hine's child-labour photographs become identified ing before a phalanx of machinery which stunts her with a working-class consciousness, an attribution development, the latter reclines gracefully on an which belies their far more cogent alignment with an elegant sofa reading a book. She is safe at home, ideology of reform imposed from above. Hine's class ensconced in an exquisitely appointed interior light- position becomes the unifying term that allows him years away from the harsh exigencies of wage labour. to appropriate the images of the working-class poor Hine's composition is a matter of straight lines, the in the services of both social documentary and high child trapped between a row of factory windows on art. Social documentary aims to carry '(old) informa- one side and a row of spinning machines on the tion about a group of powerless people to another other. In contrast, White's picture self-consciously group addressed as socially powerful.'19 High art counterbalances the curvilinearforms of the sofa and redeems a privileged elite from the materialist taint reclining figure against the hard-edged rectangles of of the profit motive. picture frames and Persian rug. The elegant formal A comparison of Hine's child-labour images with patterning of the child's white dress against the pictorialist representations of children in bourgeois, plush velvet darkness of the upholstery constitutes domestic settings suggests a 'before and after' an interplay of tonal values characteristic of scenario in the liberal subject's social imaginary with Symbolist-inspired aestheticism.20 regard to 'saving' the child. Implicit in the construc- The polarities generated by the juxtaposition of tion of Hine's child labourers as victims of the these two images (e.g. lower working class vs. industrial-corporate Moloch is a project of social prosperous bourgeoisie, industrial wage labour vs. transformation which conceives of a utopian space domestic leisure, social documentary in the service for children in the pictorialist mode. Compare of political reform vs. pictorialism as high culture) Hine's CarolinaSpinner with Miss Grace(Fig. 4), a correspond suggestively with a turn-of-the-century,

- 40 THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 4. ClarenceWhite: 'Miss Grace' c. 1898 Fig. 3. Lewis Hine: 'EastSide Mother with Sick Child' Fig. (Museumof Modem n.d. (IMP/GEH 78:1026:53). Art). ideological struggle over the ways children, fourteen cered with the 'personality of the subject.'22 In years of age or younger, were conceptualized and contrast, the child who works in the Lancaster Cot- represented. From a pre-nineteenth century tradi- ton Mills of South Carolina remains anonymous tion of being regarded as useful workers, children except in Hine's field note transcribed onto the back gradually became transformed, against a concerted, of a print in the archives of the George Eastman mostly working-class resistance, into 'priceless' House.23 There it appears in typescript as 'Sadie beings whose value was incommensurate with the Pfeifer.' But there also it is crossed out and economic order.21 Within this framework, the accompanied by a handwritten injunction: 'Do not Carolina spinner becomes both tragic and use names.' While the withholding of the child's unseemly. Her redemption lies in Progressivereform name may have protected her privacy, that need is which will remake her in the image of Miss Grace. telling in relation to the unproblematic circulation of These two photographs can be seen then to act in 'Miss Grace.' The differencesin identity between the concert. As representations produced by the two girls are structurally embedded in their relative dominant culture, they construct an image of the class positions. Miss Graceis endowed with an aura child worker as the pathologized victim of an of familial intimacy and psychological investment outmoded social and industrial order. Within the nowhere in evidence in the child-labour photo- new regime, CarolinaSpinner and Miss Gracerepres- graphs. She is represented as a valued member of a ent opposite sides of the same conceptual coin, the privileged class as seen by one of her own. Sadie idea that all children have as their birthright the Pfeifer does not signify in and for herself as a privilege of being cherished and nurtured as subjective being but matters sociologically and typo- economically useless but intrinsically invaluable logically as a child labourer. She is defined as a vic- beings. tim by reformers who, while 'concerned,' are not An obvious yet telling distinction between the two personally affected by her fate. She does not merit, in girls lies in the fact that one gets named (in an other words, the psychological consideration impli- extremely apt manner) while the other remains, for cit in the term 'portrait.' the most part, nameless. However immersed The pictorialist school of photography to which White's portrait is in a formalist aesthetic, it is, White belonged recorded the domestic settings of nevertheless, still a portrait at least nominally con- the bourgeois milieu for which Freud produced his

THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 41 narrativeof psychic life. In this sense Miss Grace has The plaintiff's suit set forth that in 1914 a photo- a story (even if, as in this case, it remains untold) in a grapher appeared in the 'Hell's Kitchen district way that Sadie Pfeifer does not. Carolyn Kay where he lived and took his picture on the ground Steedman has pointed to the complex ways in which that he wanted "Boy Scout Pictures."' The ruling by working-class subjectivity is largely defined by lack Justice Ford voiced outrage against those who in relation to the emotional and material plenitude engaged in such practices in the name of Progressive of the middle classes.24 Clarence White photo- reform: graphed a cherished member of his social circle and celebrated her as such. In photographing the That is the great trouble with these movements.[...] working-class 'other,' Hine produced an image of a These people from their height of self-conscious child who existed on the margins, a being as yet righteousnessand superiorexcellence peer down on and incoherent and unvalued except in relation to what discussthese humble beings as thoughthey were so many Progressivesexpected her to become.25 cobblestonesin the street,without any regardat all for At least once in the historical record, one of Hine's theirfeelings or theirrights in the community.28 child-labourers contested the narrative of Progres- sive reform which conscripted him.26 An undated Following the war, Hine's role changed from newspaper clipping in the archives of the George social reformer to corporate apologist. His photo- Eastman House gives an account of how William graphs of female textile workers taken at the Cheney McCue brought a lawsuit against the Russell Sage Silk Mills in 1924 reveal a dramatic reversal in Foundation for a photograph of him made by Hine. ideological orientation.29 No longer representing The photograph was reproduced in a book about children in need of protective labour laws, they juvenile delinquency entitled Boyhoodand Lawless- become flattering portraits illustrating 'favourable ness (Fig. 5). A New York Supreme Court awarded working conditions.' Unlike the earlier negatives McCue $3500 damages on the basis of the book's made surreptitiously or under false pretences in the presentation of him as 'the toughest kid on the face of management opposition, these later, larger, street.'27(At the time McCue had been an altar boy 5" X 7" images are formally posed and could not in St. Ambrose's Church and had never been have been made without the employer's coopera- arrested or charged with delinquency in any form.) tion. A typical example (Fig. 6) shows an attractive

J 3131

.i-: i 4 4 i: * C. .i 1 .1 i I. : t

E

:I

?:

5: ?

' : :- i. *.:R I

..i ,:',ii '"'..

~il .. *' ,

. . a: X*.:i

.1

*$g. 't

'

:,

S

4'

Fig. 5. Lewis Hine: 'The "ToughestKid" on theStreet' ('Boyhood and Lawlessness'p. 123).

42 THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 Carolina Spinner

Beaumont Newhall included CarolinaSpinner in his 1949 The Historyof Photography.His accompanying text divests it of its politics by valorizing a dehistori- cized individualism at the expense of the social con- text, newly defined as transparently self-evident and irrelevantto the true meaning of the picture:

These photographswere taken primarily as records. They are directand simple.The presencein them of an extraordinaryemotional quality raisesthem to worksof art.Hine's training enables him to comprehendinstantly and withouteffort the backgroundand its socialimplica- tions;unbothered by unnecessarydetails, his sympathies concentrateon the individualbefore him; throughouthis picturesthis harmonyis felt.30

Newhall's analysis posits the child laborer as the pretext for a circuit of meanings connecting a sensitive artist with a sensitive viewer trained in the codes of high culture. His commentary first appeared, together with a reproduction of Carolina Spinner,in the Magazine of Art a decade before its incorporation into The History of Photography.31It prepares the ideological ground for the inclusion of Hine's work in the modernist museum, a venue that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era. Fig. 6. Lewis Hine: 'Favorable Working Conditions, My re-reading of this photograph seeks to hold CheneySilk Mills' 1924 (Libraryof Congress,NCLC onto the mill child as a site of class-specific, social Microfilm,lot 7479, no. 4978). contestation. The photograph was first reproduced in a 1909 article published in Charities and the Commons,a journal whose name was soon changed to The Surveyin keeping with the changing aspira- tions of the social work profession.32This journal female worker to be young but clearly not under- constituted a principal outlet for the work Hine did aged. She is well-dressed and exists in harmony with under the auspices of the NCLC. Entitled 'Child her machine. Technical competence, health, pros- Labour in the Carolinas,' the article was written by perity and contentment are the order of the day. A. J. McKelway, a leading figure in the movement. It Hine's portrayal of the dignity of the worker called attention to and denounced the exploitation becomes indistinguishable from an apologia for the of young children in the cotton mills of the New corporate status quo. South. The half-tone reproduction of Carolina The photographs of the workers at the Cheney Spinnerappeared above a caption which detailed the Silk Mills suggest that the social critique informing specifics of her working existence. She had been the earlier child-labour photographs had no in- employed for the past six months, was forty-eight dependent existence outside the frame of Progressive inches tall, and could work legally during the reform. The paradigm of Hine as political and summer months no matter how young she was as artisticdissident undermining the mainstream codes long as she had attended school four months out of of representation simply doesn't work. It cannot and the year and could read and write. McKelway's text should not be used to enlist his photographs never acknowledges the photograph's status as a unproblematically on the side of an alternative, contingent, mediated image. As a window on 'the working-class history of child labour. Hine's child- real,' the picture has no consciously articulated labour photographs must be read carefully and aesthetics. What matters is the child as an embodi- cautiously 'against the grain' given their complicity ment of sociological data: her age, height, place of in the construction of the working-class 'other.' The work, duration of labour, and juridical status. She is following discussions of particular images are not 'one of many,' a synecdoche for child-labour as part of that much-needed reading. Rather they social evil. contribute to a story that is more easily told: of the In an editorial introduction to McKelway's many ways these pictures have served a middle-class article, Florence Kelley, Secretary of the National audience by constructing and confirming the Consumers' League, extols photographic empiri- marginality of the working-class child throughout. cism as an antidote to the obscurantism of those who

THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 43 would deny or cover up the exploitation of children investigator by the name of Thomas Robinson in the Southern cotton mills: Dawley. In 1912 he published The ChildThat Toileth Not: The Storyof a GovernmentInvestigation That Was In South Carolinafrom whatever official source we seek Supressedin which he argues that the mills con- illuminationwe find only Stygiandarkness. There is no stituted the child's best protection against the statecensus, no departmentof labourstatistics, no factory physical, moral and social degradation brought commis- inspector,no truantofficer, no joint legislative about by the decay of the Southern agrarian sion of investigation. [...] economy. One of Dawley's strategies is to reproduce The Departmentof Labour,the Departmentof Educa- and re-contextualize a number of Hine us to the of a photographs tion, the census leave ingenuity young for the second for current of the sad lot of the of mill children. The Survey'scaption photographer knowledge details the work and the most unfortunateof our littlefellow citizens - the white, Carolina spinner long day lack of enforcement of whatever minimal state Englishspeaking, native children of the southerncotton states. regulations existed. Dawley re-prints Hine's image but replaces it with a caption designed to make her Kelley welcomes Hine's photography as a means of out as a negligible exception: information whose truth-value is self- gathering in evident. She it as the and A child spinner.Such as is representedas marching presents precursor catalyst the of dailyprocession into the mills,but I findthat employ- for a more centralized, federally sponsored system ment of such a child is and then she is surveillance which will the nation and exceptional, only enlighten as a 'learner,'and not becauseof any adequate 'save the children' without it employed thereby challeging, returnsto the mill corporation.35 should be noted, the ideology of Southern racism.33 The article our of this as shapes reading photograph Dawley attributes the sorry condition of the mill the reform an illustration of Progressive agenda: children not to the ruinous effects of wage labour but children of a certain should to working-class age go rather to the poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and school rather than work as unskilled labourers. (The disease endemic to a prior rural life from which the fact that these children's race unmarked goes mills provide escape. His own photograph, titled A them as specifies 'white, English speaking, [and] True Productof the CottonMill, constitutes a visual terms.)34 native,' to use Kelly's rebuttal to Hine's Carolina spinners. Its caption article Carolina McKelway's juxtaposes Spinner conveys a symmetrically opposite meaning (Fig. 8): with another Hine photograph of a second young in The girl working the same mill (Fig. 7). article's She is a spinnerat the GranitevilleMills. Note her robust layout presents them as mirror images of one form,strong limbs and brightand smilingcountenance. another thereby visually underscoring the idea that The cotton-millhas done forher and her generationwhat behind any given representationof the exploited mill it has done forhundreds of othersfrom the poorfarms of child there stands a multitude of others subjected to the sterilesections.36 the same deplorable conditions. This second Carol- ina Spinner was enlisted in a vigorous pro- To think that one has to choose between Hine and management defense of child labour in the Southern Dawley, however, or to come up with some com- textile industry mounted by a disaffected federal posite, intermediary truth, either in relation to A

F : ^" ,

.. , i ...* R.

.4

Fig. 7. Lewis Hine: 'Lancaster,S.C.' and 'CarolinaSpinner' 1908 Double-pagelayout from 'Child Labor in the Carolinas' 'Charitiesand the Commons'(January 30, 1909).

44 THE OXFORDART JOURNAL- 16:2 1993 circulation as an illustration for a Surveyarticle by A. J. McKelway, this one entitled 'Child Labour in Georgia' (1910).39('Doffer' is a technical term used in the textile industry to designate the worker, most often a small child, whose job it was to replace full bobbins with empty ones on the huge spinning machines used to twist cotton fibers into thread.) A vintage print of DofferFamily in the archives of the George Eastman House includes Hine's detailed, if cryptic, field note on its verso:

A familyworking in the Ga. cottonmill. Mrs.A. J. Young worksin mill and at home.Nell (oldestgirl) alternates in mill with mother.Mammy (next girl)runs 2 sides [spin- jI' -flil. ning machines].Mary (next) runs 11 sides. Elie (oldest works Eddie in mill. IMPOX-W' " boy) regularly. (next girl) helps iLW y~L~* *' Stickson bobbins. 4 smallestchildren not workingyet. The mother said she earns $4.50 a wk. and all the childrenearn $4.50 a wk. Husbanddied and left herwith 11 children.2 of them went off and got married.The familyleft the farm 2 yrs. ago to work in mill. Jan. 22, 1909. L.W.H. [Lewis Wickes Hine] [Emphasisin the original.]40

Hine's text, like the caption accompanying Carolina Spinner, is oppressively statistical. Field note and photograph work together to prove that child labour exists: here are the children and their mother; this is what they do, how little they make, where they come from. Just as the text presents the facts from the mother on down through her children, so Hine deploys his subjects in the visual field, arranging 8. ThomasRobinson 'A TrueProduct the Fig. Dawley: of them in formal, frontal poses in order of their age CottonMill' c. 1910. Child That ToilethNot' ('The and height. Yet only the mother (Mrs. A.J. p. 439.) Young) and those children who work (Nell, Mammy, Mary, Elie, Eddie) are relevant and there- TrueProduct of the CottonMill or to CarolinaSpinner is fore named. The four smallest remain anonymous to become mired within the confines of a debate since they do not yet work and consequently do not between Southern capitalists and Northern re- signify as economic statistics. This family is formers, both of whom treat the mill children as the presented as an atomized, regulated, wage-earning objects of ideological contention. Historical judge- unit devoid of personal interrelations. (The mother's ments concerning the suffering and injustices gently monitoring and protective gestures with stemming from child-labour practices at the turn of regard to her two youngest children mitigate some- the century need to be framed within a moral and what the slide toward reification.) epistemological framework attuned to the instru- Hine's field note, quoted above, provides the basis mental nature of the images deployed by both sides. for the caption that accompanies the image when it Only then can the analysis attend to the silence of appears in McKelway's 'Child Labor in Georgia,' an these children whose voices do not appear, at least article that makes explicit the reform agenda of the directly, in the historical record. They remain, like National Child Labor Committee.41 McKelway all children, always spoken for by others.37 Both specifically contests the provision in Georgia law that sides of the debate trade heavily on the ideology of allows a child under twelve to work in support of a the child as undeserving victim of a deplorable widowed mother or disabled father rather than present and sanguine hope for a better future.38 attending school. DofferFamily both illustrates this Neither argument admits the possibility that the exemption in existing child-labour legislation and subjects of representation might speak from a constitutes an indictment against it. The article different class position within the social formation. assigns fixed and clear roles to all parties involved. Parents, mill owners, state legislators, and grown-up siblings actively conspire against the interests of the Doffer Family children who figure only passively as the objects of concern. The 'we' whom the author continually Like CarolinaSpinner, Hine's child-labour photo- addresses in the pamphlet constitute the producers graph, Doffer Family (Fig. 9), first received wide and intended consumers of the text at hand. As

- THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 45 I

I*Ms

1I I

a Fig. 9. Lewis Hine: 'DofferFamily, Tifton, Georgia',January, 1909 (IMP/GEH 77:181:30).

enfranchised members of the middle class entitled to the corporation to preside over the well-being of effect social change, 'we' are accorded the moral poor-white, working families 'rescued' from back- prerogative to judge and act on behalf of the child woods poverty. Upon this materialist base grew an worker. What does not get considered within this ethic and ideology of paternalism. But an alternative framework is the possibility that the family's working-class understanding of family could presence in the mills represents a rational choice provide, albeit within a patriarchal framework, a admitting of no better alternative given the struc- sense of continuity and mutual support easing the tural realities of their historical circumstances. While transition from rural to industrial life. the lack of alternatives itself could be said to con- DofferFamiy, like CarolinaSpinner, becomes a site stitute the system of exploitation facing the family, it of contestation in Thomas Robinson Dawley's book would be hard to argue that the NCLC offered any decrying the reform efforts of the NCLC. Dawley solutions apart from the long-term prospect of discusses the image but does not reproduce it. I educating the next generation. quote at some length in order to indicate the histor- Recent labour histories of the Southern cotton ical specificity with which Dawley implicates Hine's mills provide complex and nuanced accounts of just photograph in the workings of Progressivereform: how important the concept of the family was in structuring the lived experiences and world views of One of the stockphotographs of the intereststhat live by owners and workers alike.42To fill the demand for these misrepresentationsrepresents a woman and nine taken at The unskilled labour brought about by the rapid children, Tifton, Georgia.... photograph, mechanization of the textile which althoughtaken several years ago, has been publishedand industry (of and is still and lantern doffing was a part), Southern mill owners hired re-published, being published, slides of it are exhibited,with varyingstatements that families rather than individual workers. Within this fromthe truth... The last time I saw the adults could be less than a diverge picture system, paid living wage published,it was by that 'Progressive,'La Follette,in his since their children's income was expected to make weekly, in which he declaredthat the Commissioner's up the difference. The construction of company Reporton child laborwas a 'BlackRecord' ... villages in conjunction with the new mills allowed I subsequentlysaw the same pictureexhibited by that

- 46 THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 learned Doctor McKelway ... under the auspices of a suffragetteorganization, and he told anotherstory about it. The factsin this case are that the familywas a tramp family or a family of semi-nomads, such as I have describedelsewhere as havingbeen quite commonin the South before there were any industriesthat gave them employmentand taught them how to work.The family lived around in the pine woods of Southern Georgia, abiding from time to time in abandoned shacks or whereverthey could find shelter.The motherand father continuedto bringchildren into the world at the rate of about one a year until they had eleven,when they found their way to the cotton-mill.There they were given a house to live in, and they were suppliedwith food and clothing,for they weredestitute, and fourof the children, rangingin yearsfrom twelve up, weregiven employment. Employment was offered to both the father and the mother,but they would not or could not workwith any Fig. 10. LewisHine:'TheDependent Widower, Meridian, degree of efficiency.However, the improvementin this Mississippi'April 26, 1911(IMP/GEH 77:181:33). family,after their arrival at the mill and the olderchildren went to work,was most marked.After a while they went to another wherethe fatherdied of tuberculosis.The mill, NCLC exhibition of his shown at the mother then with her brood to Tifton, where posters returning Panama-Pacific in San Francisco. En- the two eldest girlsmarried, leaving the motherwith her Exposition nine remainingchildren dependent for supporton the titled 'The High Cost of Child Labor,' it contains a two that were old enough to work. The managerof the diagram which illustrates a concept of social cotton-millthereupon used his influenceto get the seven pathology labelled 'The Vicious Circle' (Fig. 11). youngerchildren into a Methodistorphan asylum, and This diagram gives visual form to the rationale he took them therehimself. informing Hine's negative attitude toward the In the meantime the photographof the mother and parents of child labourers. It shows a cycle nine childrenwas taken a of the by representative special composed of 'child labor, illiteracy, industrial ineffi- intereststhat lie by misrepresentations,and this is the low low standards of liv- that is and exhibited ciency, wages, long hours, photograph published throughout bad the before Schoolclasses and ing, housing, poor food, unemployment, country Sunday suffragette child labor.' The the evilsof child labor,when the fact intemperance, disease, poverty, meetings,depicting crucial is that it is a closed 'If is that the little childrenrepresented as workingin the point system: you put cotton-millwere in an orphan asylum, and never had an American citizen at any point in this circle, it is workeda day in theirlives.43 likely to lead him to all the rest.' What follows from this is a remarkably explicit proclamation of social triage: While anecdotal and uncorroborated, Dawley's counter-narrative is more sustained and complex We cannot abolish povertytoday; we cannot abolish than Hine's field note. Both, however, are equally we cannot all the instrumental. intemperancetoday; provide people with decent housing conditionstoday; we cannot raise Although Hine labored long and hard in the wages and the standardof living today. But this is my interests of mill children, it cannot be assumed that argument:child laboris the one link in this viciouscircle his attitude toward the mother represented in Doffer that the Americanpeople can cut rightout and thereby Family was empathetic or understanding. His make the circle smaller,thereby reduce the number of writings often aligned parents with employers as co- contributingcauses.46 conspirators against their own children whose true interests were best represented by the agents of What stands out in Hine's formulation is the reform. One photograph by Hine purports to show a ideological imperative of excising child labour from father loafing on the front steps of a country store a working-class history formulated as a litany of while his two young sons are sent to work in the mills social pathology openly acknowledged as existing (Fig. 10). The note on the back castigates him as a beyond the pale of imminent reform. 'dependent widower' who lacks 'backbone' and Maren Stange, who discusses Doffer Family at whose 'sanctimonious disquisition on his "love for great length, interprets Hine's field note as evidence the family" was nauseating.'44 In his article on child that the photographer was sympathetically engaged labour in the oyster and shrimp canneries, Hine in enlisting the Young family's 'enacted consent' in wrote with regard to a mother's pride in her the picture making process.47This image serves as a daughter's devotion to hard work: 'Can we call that test case for her valorization of Hine's photographic motherhood? Compared with real maternity, it is a practice as the articulation of 'a social consciousness distorted perversion, a travesty.'45 restored and shared.'48Such a reading is influenced In 1914, Hine wrote an article to accompany a by a moder understanding of the exchange of gazes

- THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 47 :- . . , .. .

34

' 1T 'i'i]' a w'.'' '1'a) .'.;[.,'tE '

. ' ": .1? . . : l ' : ...::','''? ' ". .... ;' '. ".II' :.' '1i,-.. ': ', '., ; tim.,ii,."'. i:. . ,.'~,,'.'.; I, ':: I,. iT:i.. 'hr' "

':, l ','.:,' ...h' -. e,,-a',',"- }. ,t'J. ri,'1; :'1. .,t ..S'i,],'" . :,.!.i :,i 'S:],,;r.- .'1l.."':,': .:- .., .... ' t.. .' ' ' ..v.;;'.. , ; ;'i,"" r.,| ',:i']|l 1,1 ,

,', "t ,)i'. ',,:': "r'..,1-... ;tI.]' iTM r! ~', '.'[!..Tl-,r*']"rr']il 5 ';'.t

.' '

.: .... I] i."....,.;-!,.:, ".:'i. , ' .,'rI ;! ;'i,l ii',

Fig. 12. Lewis Hine: 'DofferBoy in a CottonMill' n.d. (IMP/GEH 77:181:1). as isolated, fragile figures, framed against a harsh, dangerous, or impersonal industrial setting.49 In looking out toward the middle-class spectator, iflS.noHL dA addressed as an agent of social reform, the child labourer embodies the inherent of his ],l; i inadequacy rti'.. ' :lw' Ii ' . i.ttc , ; - ! . i le 'r : . ,T. 'e.' T:' J:-. i all-too-interruptable life. By way of contrast, in

. Hine's of three students the Ethical 1 image attending Fig. Le. is Hine: 'he Vicious Circle [Diagram Culture School (Fig. 13), where Hine once taught, the children are represented as self-sufficiently engaged within the picture frame. The photograph is one in a series representing a wide range of pro- educational activities. The students Fig. 11. Lewis Hine: 'The Vicious Circle[Diagram]' gressive depicted do not the camera from 'The ChildLabor Bulletin 3 (1914-15), p. 34. acknowledge precisely because they have better things to do. As full, inviolate subjects, they create meanings and rela- between camera and subject as an enlightened to which the bears witness.50 The tionships photographer acknowledgement of intersubjectivity. inter- As far as I have been able to the motif of stakes are that the determine, pretive high given frontally posed the isolated child or group of children standing at figure staring back at the camera constitutes a attention and looking out at the camera is never dominant motif of the child-labour photographs, Hine when these one that critics and historians have construed as employed by photographing students or their the Walden evidence of Hine's toward and for counterparts attending sensitivity respect School.51 those whom he photographed. As an of a attractivechild I find it more to this image young, vunerable, However, plausible interpret who confronts the viewer lends motif as a of the class dom- directly, DofferBoy sign photographer's itself to a humanist reading. This interpretation sets inance vis-a-vis his subjects. because the Precisely up a circuit of empathetic engagement travelling mother and children depicted in Doffer Family are from the boy via the camera and photographer to us, lower working-class, Hine is free to pose them as he the audience.52Yet in a them as present-day poster prepared pleases, positioning frontally objectifications for the NCLC Hine this same of his the child labour. (Fig. 14), transposes political project, fight against into an of 'human The is look back figure image junk.' boy The family members at the camera conflated with a of to do so. Their metonymically photograph because they have been told gazes industrial waste and remain because do not have the presented as, quite literally, unproblematic they worthless. Hine's violation of the of this to contest the and subjectivity power authority presuppositions child has unnoticed. the fact of the man behind the camera. gone largely Perhaps that children's lives seem to be at stake has some- thing to do with our ability to overlook the violence Doffer Boy of the rhetoric employed. On the one hand, given this boy's status as a precious innocent, all claims of As exemplified in DofferBoy in a CottonMill (Fig. 12), advocacy become acceptable and self-justifying.On child labourers in Hine's representationsoften stand the other, given his status as a dependent child, we

- 48 THE OXFORDARTJOURNAL 16:2 1993 7"0". .lI _ra ... w~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * , ~ 1Zs ~------I--- ~_~_~~~~ ~-??? S??????~f:?"""~P

rsppw in_t

_ k - i L ..... e::_ r~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.._I.

w_|!l '

:. E ?,- I~~~2.

sB'V

Fig. 13. Lewis Hine: 'EthicalCulture School' c. 1905(IMP/ sanction Hine's right as an authorized adult to frame him in this fashion. Most disturbing of all, however, is a Hine photo- In 1925, a slightly cropped version of DofferFamily graph in the that completes the was reproduced in Rexford Tugwell's American erasure of this doffer boy as subject by superimpos- EconomicLife where it was captioned 'widow and her ing his image onto that of the young woman, nine children' and served to illustrate 'poverty self- cropped from a different negative, who stands perpetuating.'57Tugwell pairs it with a second Hine directly to his left in the 'Making Human Junk' photograph purporting to represent a 'mother and poster (Fig. 15).53 This composite portrait con- child of the comfort group' (Fig. 17). In this latter stitutes a rather crude attempt to combine visual and image, a single, charming toddler sits comfortably statistical representation in the service of a positivist on his mother's lap, enjoying her undivided and social science.54The female figure with whom the loving attention. Mother and child serve as the doffer boy is conjoined has been lifted from a Hine modelsubjects of a well-regulated,representea economically'motherchild and secure, of th photograph representing six adolescent girls in a emotionally rewardingfamily life to which Doffer Georgia cotton mill (Fig. 16).55 In reversing and Family provides a foil.5 Somewhat surprisingly, in superimposing her onto DofferBoy, Hine constructs lig of reformht photography'savowed commitment a reified image of pathology from a photograph that, to the objective portrayal of sociological truths, the once again, Dawley interprets in opposite fashion as a record of the ravages of hook-worm, a disease comfort group,'although never named, can be endemic to her rural existence beforeshe came to identifiedhis the photographer'swife and son, Sarah work in the mills.56 Hine's poster and composite and Corydon Hine.59 Since Hine worked with Roy portrait come as something of a shock, since they Stryker in providing the illustrations for American force upon us the realization that the child-labour EconomicLife, he presumably sanctioned itsinclu- photographs are used here to devalue rather than sion.family The inthis deployment contextof undermines photographer'sthethe argument that own sacralize the child worker. To represent the child wife as andprototypes child ofmiddle-class the labourer as 'human junk' cannot be reconciled with a politics or an aesthetics based on observing and Hine identified with the subjects represented in preserving the integrity of the subject. DofferFamily.

- THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 49 MAKIN G HUMAN JUNK

it., GOODMATERIAL AT FIRST

II .... . f If

THL Kic;. ',L, j 1

y _ .? ~ ; ? . ... L/. u.... .c', 's :,. V, ' I . i? . *. . I :..

Y?r,

,,:r .e2:-_e'-i'a .: E,,~I,.:1 I . ... ., I

No futuire and low "Junk" wagesb Fig. 15. LewisHine: 'CompositePortrait' 1913(Library SHALL INDUSTRY BE ALLOWEDTO PUT of Congress:NCLC Microfilm,lot 7479, no. 3259). THIS COST ON SOCIETY?

Stange's commitment to 'a shared social con- 14. Lewis Hine: W'CLCPoster: Human sciousness' as a means of mitigating the 'unjust and Fig. "Making undeserved done to an a Junk" ' 1915. 'The ChildLabor Bulletin ',3 (1914-15). damage unlucky family by criminally irresponsible system' may explain, at least in part, her reference to smiles, which, upon closer examination, do not exist.60 Only one of For all the into in this con- oppositions put play Hine's subjects, the third child from the right, turns trast between and profligate, proletarian poverty out to be actually smiling. Mrs. Young and her eight Hine, as nuclear, bourgeois prosperity, photogra- other children remain tight-lipped and enigmatic pher and literal husband/father, assumes the before the camera lens. Here I wish to make a case function in both. of paternal Stange's interpretation for Stange's misreading, a combination of partial DofferFamily falls prey to this surfeit of paternity. In blindness and as of the a she conceives of her projection, symptomatic telling interpretive move, critical tradition of which this paper is also a part. I restoration of Hine's field note to this image as surmise that the non-existent smiles in for the husband/father imagined yet compensation missing Hine's photograph have been summoned into being whose absence renders the so vulnerable. She family in unconscious to the intense pleasure that does in those terms I have response so, moreover, precisely I, too, along with Stange, Trachtenberg and many been Hine's makes the contesting. photograph others, have taken in Hine's child-labour photo- whole the dead father with 'a family by replacing graphs. This pleasure may be grounded in the class social consciousness restored and shared': position of those of us who write the history of photo- graphy as heirs to the tradition of Progressivereform. With Hine's text and captionrestored, we can realizethe The invested from 1909 to the in the meanings present intersectionof industryand family life that image Hine's child-labour can be shown to be actuallyrepresents. The imagegains, if notthe absent father photographs at least a socialconsciousness restored and shared; the produced discursively by complex, contingent Youngs' forces. Yet a of this andtheir smiles, signify a kind of imaginative cursory survey eighty-year composure child- participationin the image-making- whichparticipation history suggests a periodized circularity. The [...] reveals the workings of Hine's photographic art. labour photographs originate as adjuncts to Progres- [Emphasisadded.] sive social reform (1909-1918), are re-discovered as

50 THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 j F. - I"- T,i? r - . r.i Y .* Fig. 16. LewisHine: 'SomeAdolescents in a GeorgiaCotton Mill' c. 1909(from 'Southerners of Tomorrow 'TheSurvey', Oct.2, 1909).

*~~~- 3 C~~~~~~~~~r4???*...,:. ,? -? j~~~~~A'r,a r*r *i - i

Fig. 17 Lewis Hine: 'Motherand Childof the ComfortGroup' and 'Widowand Her Nine Children[Doffer Family]' (AmericanEconomic Life and theMeans of Its Improvement'p. 35).

- THE OXFORDART JOURNAL 16:2 1993 51 prototypes and precursors to Depression era photo- 11. Gustave Flaubert, MadameBovary (Penguin, Baltimore, 1950), documentary (), become canonized as formal p. 361. 12. As Peter Seixas Hine's and works of art under the aegis of the Museum of convincingly argues, subordinate Modem Art's modernist economically dependent position throughout his career left his photo- hegemony (1970s), finally graphic practice vulnerable to the ideological constraints of those who to be re-enlisted by advocates of a 'new social paid the bills. Hine never saw the 'historical significance of worker's documentary' as examples of an exemplary photo- control,' a position which might have afforded him some conceptual graphic practice capable of contesting dominant ide- leverage with which to problematize the gap between the workers he Whatever such a photographed and his own professional, middle-class identifications. ology (1980s). conceptual clarity Peter 'Lewis Hine: From "Social" to Photo- schema have, it does to the Seixas, 'Interpretive" may hardly justice grapher,' AmericanQuarterly, Vol. 39, no. 3, Fall 1987, p. 393. complexities involved in the various shifts between 13. Hine, 'Social Photography,' pp. 355-9. the domains of the aesthetic and the social. Nor does 14. IMP/GEH 78:1026:54. it address the impulse toward valorization that 15. Hine, The Child LaborBulletin, 3 (1914-15), 'The High Cost of Child 37. remains constant. The pleasure we take in the work Labor,' p. and the it elicits from us be 16. IMP/GEH 78:1026:53. projections may insepar- 17. The IMP/GEH Archives contain a number of images of mothers able from class privilege. Paternalism runs deep. and children from both the and tenement series whose titles Hine's child-labor photographs may have a power- mobilize the religious archetype: Ellis Island Madonna (77:177:128), ful, if unacknowledged, set of coordinates: what it Moder Madonna(78:1056:4), TenementMadonna (78:1056:32). Work/Social American means to have been sacralized children subject to 18. See Trachtenberg, 'Camera Work,' Reading the unconscious investments of our own Photographs(op. cit.) and EstelleJussim, 'Icons or Ideology: Stieglitz and parents; Hine,' TheMassachusetts Review (Winter 1978). what it means to be enfranchised, adult viewers 19. Martha Rosler, 'In, Around, And Afterthoughts (On Documen- situatedin imaginaryrelations of dominancevis-a- tary Photography),' The Contestof Meaning: CriticalHistories of Photo- vis these 'victims' of industrial capitalism. Our graphy,edited by Richard Bolton (MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma.), p. 306. of these 20. For a related discussion of symmetrical, working-class frontality experience images may include, perhaps, of the aristocratic see the that we can 'save' have those in contrast with the posed asymmetry pose, John fantasy (or 'saved') Tagg, The Burdenof Representation:Essays on Photographiesand Histories children. (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988), pp. 193-4. 21. For an important historical and sociological examination of this phenomenon see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the PricelessChild: The Notes Changing Social Value of Children(Basic Books, New York, 1985), p. 209. 22. Charles H. Caffin, 'Clarence H. White,' CameraWork, 3 (July 15-17. 1. This paper has benefitted greatly from the insights of Janet Wolff, 1903), 77:181:15. Robert Westbrook and Thomas DiPiero. I am grateful for their critical 23. IMP/GEH 24. Steedman support and encouragement. The work of John Tagg and Allan Sekula Carolyn Kay brilliantly juxtaposes Henry Mayhew's watercress with Freud's Dora within a class which informs my thinking concerning photography's relations to history and girl Sigmund analysis the former's as the force which main- power. postulates marginality structuring 2. Alan Trachtenberg, ReadingAmerican Photographs: Images as History, tains the latter's centrality: MathewBrady to WalkerEvans (Hill and Wang, New York, 1989), p. 206. But there is no for the little watercress The she to 3. Maren Stange, Symbolsof IdealLife:SocialDocumentary Photography in story girl. things spoke about of the bunches of the scrubbed America, 1890-1950 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), Mayhew (pieces fur, cress, floor) still startle after 130 not because are in them- p. 96. years, they strange things but because in our conventional are not held 4. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, 'The Professional-Managerial selves, reading, they in to each other. to some Class', in BetweenLabor and Capital,Pat Walker, ed. (Boston: South End together figurative relationship According both narrative and work Press, 1979), pp. 5-45. authorities, metaphor by bringing together and but which moved 5. See Robert Wiebe, The Searchfor Order1877-1920 (Hill and Wang, things that at first seem separate distant, then, towards each make a new and New York, 1967), p. 223. other through logical space, pertinent sense. But this shift on our as listeners and 6. For the most part, photo-history has generally subscribed to the through space depends ability the new of events and entities which have history of child labour written in the narrativeform of a romance. In this readers to accept ordering the of a or the use of a Where story, Hine's photographs illustrate a shining moment in an iniquitous, been made by plot story, by metaphor. there is not the vision that the of these new by-gone era of industrialization in which the child worker was 'saved' permits understanding a cannot be told. once and for all from the debilitating and dangerous exploitations of connections, then story corporate capitalism. For the English version of this phenomenon, see a GoodWoman: A TwoLives Hugh Cunningham, The Childrenof the Poor:Representations of Childhood Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscapefor Storyof 138. sincethe Seventeenth Century (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991), pp. 8-17. (Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 25. the most visual of the intense intro- 7. To take but one example, in 1908 Hine published an article in The Among arresting expressions the are Gertrude Kasebier's PhotographicTimes entitled 'Photography in the School.' Following spection informing pictorialist family ClarenceH. Whiteand and Edward Steichen's 1904 series standard photographic pedagogy, he advocates the study of Old Master Family (1908), and His Katherine. with White's of paintings and reproduces his own A TenementMadonna: A Studyin Com- AlfredStieglitz Daughter Along portrait his son an issue of Camera and positionas an example which consciously emulates Raphael's Madonnaof clutching Work, Stieglitz's premonitory the Chair. portrait of his daughter threatened by the figure of a little Dutch girl these are burdened with a suffer- 8. For a related discussion of Hine's talk see Trachtenberg, pp. 206-9. wielding a knife, images psychological of their interior 9. International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman ing that is underscored by the murky claustrophobia House [hereafterIMP/GEH] 77:181:15. Titles and captions for Hine's settings. 26. Given that relations of are structured lines of child-labour photographs vary according to context. For the sake of power along gender and as well as it is not that the child was male or that clarity, I restrict myself to the title CarolinaSpinner when referringto this age class, surprising he his resistance as an adult. image. registered on the same as that of a 10. Lewis Hine, 'Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in 27. McCue's picture appears page similarly framed labeled as 'An The the Social Uplift,' Proceedings,National Conference of Charitiesand Correction youth Embryo Gangster.' caption appearing below both 'These are a (Fort Wayne, Indiana, June 1909), p. 356. photographs reads, eleven-year-olddelinquents

52 THE OXFORDART JOURNAL- 16:2 1993 challenge to the community.' West Side Studies, Russell Sage Founda- Press, Chapel Hill, 1989); Cathy L. McHugh, Mill Family: The Labor tion, Boyhoodand Lawlessness(Survey Associates, New York, 1914), Systemin theSouthern Cotton Textile Industry 1880-1915 (Oxford University p. 122. Press, New York, 1988); Tamara K. Hareven, Family Timeand Industrial 28. IMP/GEH (undated newspaper clipping). Time (Cambridge University Press, New York, 1982); Jeffrey Leiter, 29. See Library of Congress, MCLC Microfilm, lot 7479, nos. 4966- Michael D. Schulman, and Rhonda Zingraff (editors), Hanging by a 5008. A second case in point is a series of images of textile workers Hine Thread:Social Changein SouthernTextile (IILR Press, Ithaca, New York, produced in 1933 to illustrate 'Through the Threads: An Interpretation 1991). of the Creation of Beautiful Fabrics by the Shelton Looms,' a brochure 43. Dawley, pp. 479-80. concerned with corporate promotion and public relations. (IMP/GEH 44. Field note on the back of original Hine photograph, TheDependent Archives). Widower,Meridian, Mississipi, April 26, 1911. (IMP/GEH 77:181:33). 30. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography(Museum of 45. Lewis Hine, 'Baltimore to Biloxi and Back: The Child's Burden in Modem Art, New York, 1949), p. 171. Oyster and Shrimp Canneries,' TheSurvey (May 3, 1913), p. 170. 31. Newhall, 'Lewis H. Hine,' Magazineof Art, Vol. 31, November 46. 'The High Cost of Child Labor,' pp. 34-6. 1938, pp. 636-7. 47. She notes that Hine restores the family's proper name and, citing 32. A. J. McKelway, 'Child Labor in the Carolinas,' Charitiesand the Foucault, posits this as a necessary first step in transformingan 'object of Commons,1909, January 30. information' into a 'subject of communication.' Stange, pp. 93-7. 33. The relevant passage of Kelley's introduction follows: 48. See endnote no. 3. 49. IMP/GEH 77:181:1. With a bureau . created for the of special [. .] express purpose collecting 50. IMP/GEH 78:1016:1-28. and distributing information in the service of the children of the nation, 51. Hine's photographs of students attending the Ethical Culture the present cloud of ignorance must eventually be replaced by an alert, School and similarly progressiveeducational institutions were published intelligent public opinion valid for protecting the nation's most precious in three issues of The Craftsmanbetween 1906 and 1908. See 'Learning to asset, the young children who will be the nation when we of the present be citizens: A school where boys and girls of all creeds, races and classes generation are gone. of society work together,' The Craftsman(Vol. 9, no. 6, March 1906), Florence Kelley, Charitiesand the Commons,1909, January 30, p. 742. pp. 774-88; Peter W. Dykema, 'A lesson in the association of work and 34. Employment in the Southern textile industry was highly play: What children learn from school festivals,' The Craftsman(Vol. 12, segregated. African Americans were employed rarely and only in the no. 6, September 1907), pp. 47-55; Lewis W. Hine, 'Industrial training most arduous and low-paying jobs such as the initial processing of the for deaf mutes: A practical school where an opportunity is furnished for raw cotton upon delivery to the mill. See works byJacquelyn Dowd Hall them to become desirable, self-supporting citizens,' The Craftsman(Vol. (et al.) and Cathy L. McHugh cited in note 42. 13, no. 4, January 1908), pp. 400-8. The IMP/GEH Archives contain a 35. Thomas Robinson Dawley, The ChildThat ToilethNot:The Story of large number of prints from Hine's series on the Walden School and a GovernmentInvestigation That WasSuppressed (Gracia, New York, 1912), Ethical Culture School. p. 19. 52. For an example of this kind of analysis see John Szarkowski's 36.Ibid., p. 439. discussion of Hine's 1909 photograph of seven doffer boys working in the 37. In what ways children might be said to speak in their own voices Willingham Cotton Mill in Macon, Georgia in his Lookingat Photographs: remains thoroughly problematic given that all discourse is a function of 100 Picturesfrom the Collectionof TheMuseum of ModernArt (The Museum (adult) language. For an extended discussion of this issue see Jacqueline of Modern Art, New York, 1973), p. 60. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibilityof Children'sFiction 53. Lewis Hine, CompositePortrait (Library of Congress, NCLC (Macmillan, London, 1984). Microfilm, lot 7479, no. 3259). 38. As Richard de Lone and Kenneth Keniston have pointed out, 54. Allan Sekula has established the work of , English children have long been assigned a key role in coping with the deepest scientist and pioneer in eugenics, as the model Hine was following. See tensions of American life, including the conflict between economic and Allan Sekula, 'The Body and the Archive,' The Conquestof Meaning, political liberalism: 'the irony of liberal reform [is that it] has always pp. 367-72. counted on children to solve in the next generation the problems their 55. This representation of a group of ostensibly defective, female, parents could not solve in their own.' Richard H. de Lone, SmallFutures, adolescent mill workers was deployed in complex ways within the Inequalityand the Limits of LiberalReform (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ideological field created by the child-labour debates. In the original New York, 1979), p. ix. photograph, the young woman with slumped shoulders and dull expres- 39. The image became known to a contemporary art audience sion constituted the central figure in a line of five female workers. The through its reproduction in Americaand Lewis Hine: Photographs1904- photograph was published in 1909 as part of a child-labour reform 1940, an Aperture monograph published in 1977 in conjunction with a article in The Surveyentitled 'Southerners of Tomorrow' [The Survey, major retrospective exhibition. The photograph was reproduced in October 1909]. There the caption reads 'Some adolescents in a Georgia typical '70s formalist style: a beautiful, full-framed, one-to-a-page cotton mill. The faces indicate the need for medical inspection of school duotone accompanied by a minimal title without further specific com- children, and the consequences entailed upon the health of the future, if mentary. sub-normal girls are put to work which serves only furtherto blunt their 40. IMP/GEH 77:181:30. development.' Dawley reproduces a cropped version in which the most 41. Text and image construct a three-part argument: 1) before the engaging, normal-looking woman on the far right has been eliminated advent of cotton mills and wage labour for children, this family would [Dawley, p. 438]. He specifically contests the narrative constructed by have been provided for in more adequate ways by a rural community as Hine's 'Making Human Junk' poster, in which this image reappears yet uncorrupted by the New South's emergent industrial capitalism; 2) if once again, this time cropped still furtherand flipped, so that only three one or both of the two older children had stayed behind and worked figures on the left remain (in reverse order). In Hine's version, children, rather than going off to start families of their own, the remaining nine before they enter the Southern textile mills, are 'good material' children would have had a chance to go to school and thereby escape subsequently turned into 'human junk' in a dystopic analogue to the their present conditions of poverty and ignorance; 3) if adequate regula- mechanized processes of industrial production. Dawley's caption tions prohibited child-labor, this widow and her family would neverthe- reverses this scenario. The degraded, sub-normal, defective appearance less be provided for through the agency of 'humane and kind-hearted of these young women is attributable to the poverty and disease of their people' who remain otherwise unspecified. McKelway, 'Child Labor in rural existences beforethey found their way to the mills. Georgia' (NCLC Pamphlet,No. 138, July 12, 1910), p. 13. 56. Dawley recaptions the photograph 'Hook-worm suspects such as 42. See Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenback, Amoskeag: Dr. Stiles found.' Dr. Charles W. Stiles of the Rockefeller Hookworm Life and Workin an AmericanFactory City (Pantheon, New York, 1978); Commission became an unexpected ally against the NCLC when he Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, discovered that 'many of the cotton mill operatives, fresh from the farms Lu Ann Jones, Christopher B. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a brought the [hook-worm] infection with them,' a disease that was SouthernCotton Mill World(University of North Carolina Press, Chapel decimating the children of the South's sandy soil region. Dr. Stiles Hill, 1987);Allan Tulles, Habitsof Industry(University of North Carolina advocated 'an end to all child-labor legislation for several years so as to

THE OXFORDART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993 53 encourage the movement of the poor farmer to the mill towns where it 'self-contained indifference' of the middle-class mother and child with would be easier to treat cases of hookworm.' See Walter I. Trattner, respect to the photographeras opposed to the 'vulnerabilityof the widow Crusadeforthe Children:A Historyof theNational Child Labor Committee and and her family who [. . .] are lined up as if for investigation or display.' the ChildLabor Reform in America(Chicago, 1970), p. 103. Stange, p. 95. 57. Rexford Guy Tugwell, Thomas Munro, and Roy E. Stryker, 59. The IMP/GEH collection includes a number of images of what AmericanEconomic Life and the Meansof Its Improvement(Harcourt Brace looks to be the same child as appears in the 'comfort group' photograph, and Company, New York, 1925), p. 35. Tugwell went on to become the two of which are inscribed on the verso with the name 'Cordy.' [See head of Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration. He hired Stryker, IMP/GEH: 78:1057:43, 48, 91, 182, 195.] Photographic historian, who had collected the many Hine photographs used in American Naomi Rosenblum, has confirmed the identities of mother and child as EconomicLife, to head its photographic division. Stryker became Sarah and Corydon Hine as has Kitty Hobson, Curator of the Oshkosh legendary as the guiding force of social documentary photography in its Public Museum, repository of Hine's personal papers [personal heyday during the . See Stange, p. 92. correspondence]. 58. Stange astutely discerns the oppositions involved between the 60. Stange, p. 96.

54 THEOXFORD ART JOURNAL - 16:2 1993