INFORMATION to USERS This Manuscript Has Been Reproduced

INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book.

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order.

UMI University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Com pany 300 Nortfi Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600

Order Number 9825517

Showing as a way of saying: The photograph and word combinations of Lewis Hine in support of child labor reform

Iseman, Stephen Dane, Ph.D.

The Ohio State University, 1993

UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

SHOWING AS A WAY OF SAYING: THE PHOTOGRAPH AND WORD COMBINATIONS OF LEWIS HINE IN SUPPORT OF CHILD LABOR REFORM

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Stephen Dane Iseman, B.F.A., M.Ed.

*****

The Ohio State University

1993

Dissertation Committee: Approved by

Sonja Foss

James Darsey /A dvisor Paul Bowers Department of Communication Copyright by Stephen D. Iseman 1993 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My committee members all contributed substantially to the completion of this dissertation. Professor Foss provided inspiration and enthusiasm for the project from her earliest involvement; Professor Darsey invested countless hours in discussion about approach and content, and also contributed to the selection of Lewis Hine and his photograph and word combinations as a subject for study; Professor Bowers provided careful readings and many valuable suggestions. My current colleagues in the School of Journalism at Ohio State must be recognized for the opportunity they provided for me to teach as a member of their faculty during this final year of dissertation preparation, and for their interest in and support of my w ork. My former colleagues at Ohio Dominican College must be acknowledged for their willingness to provide me the flexibility I needed during the completion of the course work and the general examination for this degree.

11 My friends Phil, Ed, Pete and Jim deserve special mention. They risked their sanity and listened when I needed to ramble, and saved my sanity by providing good company when I needed diversion from my work. I appreciate their help. But perhaps most of all my parents Dane and Joy, my children Dane, Alissa and Jonathan, and especially my wife Sue must be thanked for believing that I could complete this, and then giving me the time to do it.

Ill VITA

June 21, 1948 ...... Bom, Columbus, Ohio

1 9 7 0 ...... B.F.A., Ohio University, Athens, Ohio

1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 3 ...... Assistant Director of Public Relations and Instructor of Photography, Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio

1 9 7 3 -1 9 7 4 ...... Director of Public Relations and Instructor of Journalism and Photojournalism, Upper Iowa University, Fayette, Iowa

1 9 7 4 -1 9 7 7 ...... Director of Public Relations and Director of Alumni and Parent Annual Funds, Saint Francis College, Fort Wayne, Indiana

1 9 7 7 -1 9 8 4 ...... Greenfield Grain and Hay Company and Steve Iseman, Photographer and Pup/eyor of Fine Gifts, Greenfield, Ohio

1 9 8 3 ...... M.Ed., Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio

1 9 8 4 -1 9 9 2 ...... Director of College Relations and Instmctor of Public Relations, Ohio Dominican College, Columbus, Ohio

1992-Present...... Assistant Professor, School of Journalism, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

iv FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Communication TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ii

V IT A ...... iv

LISTOPHOURES...... viii

CHAPTER I - THE PROBLEM WITH WORDS AND IMAGES...... 1 Introduction...... 1 How Visual Images Mean: A Survey...... 6 How Photographic Images Mean: A Survey...... 14 How Words Mean: A Survey 2 3 How Photographic Images and Words Together Mean: A Survey 2 7 Lewis Hine - A Case Study 3 5 Data. 4 3 Hiding Behind the Work Certificate (Figure #1) 4 5 Sources Cited 4 6

CHAPTER n - HISTORICAL CONTEXT 5 0 Introduction 5 0 Evolution of Child Labor 5 2 The Role of Religion 7 3 The Role of Education 8 0 The Role of Organized Labor 8 7 The Role of Settlement Workers 9 3 Chapter Summary 9 9 Sources Cited...... 101

CHAPTER m - LEWIS HINE CONSIDERED HISTORICALLY...... 10 5 Introduction...... 10 5

VI Early Sources of Sympathy With the Child Labor Cause ...... 109 Hine Finds His Medium and His Subjects ...... 112 Hine Finds His Audience ...... 118 The "School Camera Idea" & the Principle of Selectivity...... 120 Hine's Rhetorical Impulse and the Documentary Genre...... 126 Hine and the Photograph as Evidence ...... 132 Combining Photographs With Words...... 13 8 City of Brotherly Love (Figure #2)...... 144 Sources Cited...... 145

CHAPTER IV - LEWIS HINE’S WORK CONSIDERED CRmCALLY...... 14 8 Introduction...... 14 8 Single Photographs and Captions...... 15 4 Newberry, South Carolina (Figure #3)...... 16 9 Boys at Lehr, Economy Glass Works (Figure #4)...... 170 Budd's Bog (Figure #5)...... 171 "Time Exposures by Hine"...... 18 9 Kids and Cans Examined ...... 191 The Double Standard Examined ...... 195 Exhibition Posters...... 2 0 3 Chapter Summary ...... 21 0 Kids and Cans (Figure #6) ...... 21 2 The Double Standard (Figure #7) ...... 213 Making Human Junk (Figure #8) ...... 214 Sources Cited...... 215

CHAPTER V - REVIEW OF FINDINGS...... 217 Introduction...... 217 Findings From the Lewis Hine Case Study ...... 21 9 Other Areas for Consideration...... 226 Sources Cited...... 228

LIST OF REFERENCES...... 2 2 9

Vll LIST OF FIGURES

HGURE PAGE

# 1 Hiding Behind the Work Certificate...... 45

#2 City of Brotherly Love...... 144

#3 Newberry, South Carolina...... 169

#4 Boys at Lehr, Economy Glass Works...... 17 0

#5 Budd’s Bog...... 171

#6 Kids and Cans ...... 212

# 7 The Double Standard ...... 213

#8 Making Human Junk ...... 214

V lll CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM OF IMAGES AND WORDS

Introduction

Photographic images seem to be in the peculiar and sometimes contradictory position of being both information rich and meaning poor. In Ways of Seeing John Berger outlines the primary importance of visual images of the world around us as our base for knowing. In a later work and one more directly aimed at understanding photographic images. Another Wav of Telling. Berger and co-author Jean Mohr describe the particular position of photographic images as being one of great ambiguity:

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image. (Berger and Mohr 7)

This ambiguity of images presents both difficulties and opportunities. Lester C. Olson explored productive ambiguity in Norman Rockwell's paintings as icons in Franklin D. Roosevelt's four

1 freedoms campaign. The fact that audience interpretation of images plays a role in meaning may be used to allow different perspectives to be addressed with the same images in search of identification for the purpose of persuasion. Olson highlights the image ambiguity that is one of Rockwell's lesser known, but more valuable skills:

Rockwell fused symbols from diverse American populace, situations, and actions into each of the paintings. Although Rockwell's meticulous attentions to exact detail was well- known, perhaps not so well-known was his ability to omit detail so as to promote varied identifications. (Olson 16)

In his examination of Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," the first in the series of posters to be published in the Saturdav Evening Post. Olson points out the various meanings that can be assigned to a single one of the painting's elements—the seating:

The town meeting apparently occurs in a school room, since the background is a blackboard, a symbol of education. That the listeners hold copies of the annual report—a document that requires literacy to be understood—reinforces this education interpretation. Yet, alternatively, the meeting may take place in a church or courthouse, since the people sit in pew-like forms. Rockwell combines educational, judicial, and religious symbols into one equivocal scene, thereby broadening the potential bases for identification. (Olson 16)

The multiple appeal opportunity that is provided by the ambiguity of images must be balanced against the problem that this ambiguity can present by way of unintended interpretations and undesired persuasive communicative meaning. In this particular Rockwell work, for example, had the image of church been of primary importance for all of the poster’s viewers, the confusion that might have resulted from the ambiguity that allows for the seating to also indicate courthouse or school room could have weakened or undermined altogether the images persuasive power. But in spite of the ambiguity of images, their value in helping direct and form public opinion long has been accepted. The real world is frequently experienced and interpreted through these images of reality. As Susan Sontag notes, even among those who disapprove, the power is acknowledged, "Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image free way of apprehending the real" (Sontag 153).

Information/images brought to the brain via the sense of sight are often assigned the highest form as evidence of reality and as a base for human knowledge. Seventeenth-century epistemologists insisted that sensory data were the only basis of knowledge, and their view, really a statement of the status quo beliefs, was that which had an important role in the education and thinking of most of the nation's citizens at the turn-of-the century, when child labor reform efforts were gaining momentum. Bacon and Descartes explored the way that the senses lead us to knowing, and Locke and Thomas Reid looked particularly at vision as the sense that provided great input into the understanding of reality, not through images, but through the reality that images depicted:

It is not therefore without reason that the facility of seeing is looked upon, not only as more noble than the other five senses, but as having something in it of a nature superior to sensation. The evidence of reason is called seeing, not feeling, smelling, or tasting. Yea, we are wont to express the manner of the Divine knowledge by seeing, as that kind of knowledge which is most perfect in us. (Reid 164)

But even as the scientific way of thinking that the epistemologists proposed seemed about to overcome reliance on images in favor of the objective reality that they represented, the view of reality provided by the image was strengthened with the invention of photography. Photographs, because of their unique representational abilities, are accepted as unambiguous evidence for the existence of an objective reality. Light waves are reflected from objects to form photographic images, and those photographic images validate the object’s existence:

Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. (Sontag 154)

In a society that is becoming increasingly more visual in orientation, an understanding of the way that images, photographic images in particular, communicate becomes increasingly important. According to some experts, as much as 75% of the information entering the consciousness and being evaluated by the brain is visual. In fact, as John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing. "Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak" (Berger 7). The importance of the visual element in communication is clear. Both the epistemologists' claim that seeing is one way of knowing and Berger's idea that seeing comes before words reinforce the importance of the role of the visual. The problem in communicating with photographic images does not lie with the ability of photographs to provide unquestionable evidence. What is shown in a photograph unequivocally existed at the time the photograph was made. The difficulty in communicating with photographic images comes from understanding what that evidence- - those objects or people photographed—should mean to the viewer. Words, when combined with photographs, can help overcome tliis problem . Understanding the combination of words and images is important in order to utilize the maximum from each element in terms of meaning and power. Used as illustration for text, images lack much of their strength as objective indicators of reality. Their credibility may be limited because words already have told us what the images are going to say. Used alone, or with inadequate text to fit them into the meaning context sought, images can be confusing and ambiguous beyond control. For the greatest power from each element, a well-struck balance must be maintained. Seeing, or depending on your relationship to the image, showing, is a way of saying. This dissertation will examine images and words together as a way of saying. This dissertation will look at one particular type of image, the photograph, and the way that photographic images work with words to form powerful information and meaning rich rhetorical tools. One communicator was particularly effective in establishing balance between words and images. That communicator was the social photographer Lewis Hine. Mine’s early 20th-century photographs were made in support of the child labor reform movement. Hine was the first photographer to take advantage of a photograph's information richness and to overcome a photograph's meaning weakness through the combination of photographic images with brief written or spoken text. A case study using images and images and words by Hine will be used to illustrate the way that words and photographs combined become powerful both as tools for providing information and for providing direction for meaning.

How Visual Images Mean: A Survey

In "The Rise of Photo-Journalism in the United States," Daniel D. Mich begins his review of the importance of the picture story by revisiting the words used by Wordsworth nearly 150 years ago in an early criticism of The London Illustrated News: "Avaunt this vile abuse of pictured page! Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear Nothing?" According to Mich, "Pictures, particularly photographs, have taken their place as a vital and powerful element in the mass communication media of this and every other modem country" (Mich 202 ). Twenty years ago, in an article in the Scientific American. E. H. Gombrich outlined the current level of the importance of the image and suggested what was to come in the future:

Ours is a visual age. We are bombarded with pictures from morning till night. Opening our newspapers at breakfast, we see photographs of men and women in the news, and raising our eyes from the paper, we encounter the picture on the cereal package. The mail arrives and one envelop after the other discloses glossy folders with pictures of alluring landscapes and sunbathing girls to entice us to take a holiday cruise, or of elegant menswear to tempt us to have a suit made to measure. Leaving our house, we pass billboards along the road that try to catch our eye and play on our desire to smoke, drink or eat. At work it is more than likely that we have to deal with some kind of pictorial information: photographs, sketches, catalogues, blueprints, maps or at least graphs. Relaxing in the evening, we sit in front of the television set, the new window on the world, and watch moving images of pleasures and horrors flit by. Even the images created in times gone by or in distant lands are more easily accessible to us than they ever were to the public for which they were created. Picture books, picture postcards and color slides accumulate in our homes as souvenirs of travel, as do the private mementos of our family snapshots.

No wonder it has been asserted that we are entering a historical epoch in which the image will take over from the written word. (Gombrich 82) While words offer expression of the state of mind of a speaker, provide arousal through the stimulation of action or emotion, and provide description and information about the past, present or future state of affairs, images have as their chief strength the function of arousal (Gombrich 85). Gombrich makes clear his view that meaning in images is referential or symbolic: "What a picture means to the viewer is strongly dependent on his past experience and knowledge. In this respect the visual image is not a mere representation of "reality" but a symbolic system" (Gombrich 82). Gombrich's and Wordsworth's observations and predictions about the importance of visual images may have been offered with a trace of nostalgia for times gone by. But, as with Mich's, their observations, over and over again, have been proven true. In the fall of 1991, Sonja Foss and Marla Kanengieter presented a paper at the Speech Communication Association convention in Atlanta that reflected on the current recognition of the importance of visual images in our world. That paper, titled "Visual Communication in the Basic Course," was published in Communication Education in July of 1992. Foss and Kanengieter say;

One change that is altering our society dramatically is the increasingly visual nature of the world. We no longer live in a logocracy—a culture based on verbal texts—but in a culture characterized by omnipresent visual images in forms such as television, film, billboards, architecture, and dress. . . . The basic course, we believe, should facilitate the development of communicative competence not simply in speaking and listening but also in visual literacy. (Foss and Kanengieter 312) In their article, Foss and Kanengieter suggest that a grammar for visual images, when taught as part of the basic speech course, will allow students to develop the ability to understand what images mean to them and also what they might mean to their audiences. The visual literacy they are trying to develop to help people understand the visual image might be compared to the verbal literacy that helps people understand the spoken or written word. Given the importance of images in persuasive communication, there are several ways that should be used to examine their meaning. Since images are often produced by artists, looking at aesthetic theory provides one way of understanding meaning in images. An aesthetic experience may produce a certain sense of satisfaction. That same sense of satisfaction can be caused by a number of different conditions, according to J. 0. Unnson. For a financier, a feeling of satisfaction may be caused by a wise investment; for a member of the clergy, the salvation of a single soul may be cause for satisfaction. This sense or feeling of satisfaction is the same whatever its source. The same emotion or state-producing mechanism is activated regardless of which stimulus is at its root (Urmson 16). What distinguishes an aesthetic response from all others is not the feeling or sense of satisfaction itself, since that is always the same, but the specific source of that experience or satisfaction. Many different types of art objects can cause the same feelings since the aesthetic experience is the same from a variety of 10 different stimulations. Unnson's theory claims that aesthetic satisfaction is not object resident but resides in object or image receivers (Urmson 25). An opposite argument is made by Vincent Tomas, who discusses the location and the source of the aesthetic experience. With Tomas's theory, objects themselves are embodied with special feelings or qualities. His claim is that the aesthetic experience is determined not by its source but by its expression of these feeling or qualities. These expressions are embodied into the work of art by the artist in the process of creation. Tomas claims that, rather than causing the generation in us of a special aesthetic feeling, these expressions serve as reminders to us of experiences with which we are familiar that express the same or similar feelings. This view is also reminiscent of the symbolic or referential theories that are used to explain meaning in language. The feelings that we carry in ourselves do not have to be identical to the ones the artist who created the work carries, but if the work is successful, they should be similar (Tomas 39). The epistemological dimension of images provides another way of examining their meaning. That meaning and power are demonstrated through the visual seems to be nearly universally accepted. In all cases, what the images show is the basis for what they say. From the ancients through modem times, visual images and visual examples have provided a high level of evidence: 11

People are sexually aroused by pictures and sculptures; they break pictures and sculptures; they mutilate them, kiss them, cry before them, and go on journeys to them; they are calmed by them, stirred by them, and incited to revolt. They give thanks by means of them, expect to be elevated by them, and are moved to the highest levels of empathy and fear. They have always responded in these ways; and they still do. (Freedberg 1)

Verisimilitude and resemblance are the goals of many images created throughout history. In The Power of Images. Freedberg explains the 16th-century work at the Chapel of Varallo: "Concern with verisimilitude haunts the reproduction of the living. Produce again, not reflect, illustrate, portray, or image. The striving for resemblance marks our attempts to make the absent present and the dead alive" (Freedberg 201). The significance of the images is also related to the epistemic tradition that ties knowing to seeing and that was the common base during the 18th and 19th century:

Wise men agree, or ought to agree in this, that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature's works; the way of observation and experiment . . . it is the only one by which any real discovery in philosophy can be made . . . Newton’s regulae philosophandi are maxims of common sense, and are practiced every day in common life; and he who philosophizes by other rules, either concerning the natural system, or concerning the mind mistakes his aim. (Reid 71)

This acceptance of a pedestrian or, as Reid says, "common sense" view of reality explains how it is possible for us to feel, touch or see objects. Our behaviors support this reality; the fact that these 1 2 objects really exist seems evident in everyday life. Reid outlined a geometry of visibles designed to prove his claim for this reality. His arguments were based on input from sense data, with a particular emphasis on the sense of vision. This idea that vision, in a broader sense, is important is reflected in the seeing-is-believing metaphor. Roger Hazelton examines this tool as a way to explain how what we know is related to what we see. The thought that nothing can be in the mind that was not first in the senses seems to indicate that seeing is, indeed, the key to believing or knowing. But further study suggests that we "see one thing in terms of another through a transfer of meaning that is all the more remarkable since it is seldom deliberate or conscious of itself (Hazelton 409). A rhetorical avenue of examination for what can be seen also exists. These visual images can single out or emphasize certain aspects of a situation. The ability to co-join numerous meanings in a single communicative element is one of the strengths of visual images as rhetoric. This allows single images to praise several elements simultaneously that suggest desired behavior. Aristotle's division of proofs into artistic and inartistic illustrates the power of tangible, existing items of evidence as opposed to those things that artistic proofs created or that were invented by the rhetor (Aristotle 13). Photographic images, with their acceptability as evidence of reality, have the strength of inartistic proofs. Their built-in ambiguity, however, gives them the flexibility of artistic proofs. 13

Photographs have the potential of combining the best of both forms of proof. Cicero was known to make use of inartistic proofs in his persuasive arguments, as well. In De Oratore. he talked about the value of this kind of proof:

For what grace, what power, what spirit, what dignity was wanting to that orator, who, at the close of a speech, did not hesitate to call forth his accused client, though of consular rank, and to tear open his garment, and to expose to the judges the scars on the breast of the old commander? (Cicero 116) The use of example or concrete objects in argument is discussed in Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation under a section on "presence":

Certain masters of rhetoric with a liking for quick results, advocate the use of concrete objects in order to move an audience: Caesar's bloody tunic which Anthony waves in front of the Roman populace, or the children of the accused brought before his judges in order to arouse their pity. The real thing is expected to induce an adherence that its mere description would be unable to secure; it is a precious aid, provided argumentation utilizes it to advantage. (Perelman and Olbrechts-T y teca 117)

This value of the real thing may be extended to the believable image of reality provided by the visual, particularly when combined with verbal description. Speech textbooks also use the idea of combining sensory elements to strength rhetorical appeals. In Public Speaking. Michael Osborn and Suzanne Osborn list advantages of visual aids in giving audiences direct sensory contact with a speech 14 that include: enhanced understanding, authenticity, variety, impact, and added speaker ethos (Osbom and Oshorn 214-215). Many public relations handbooks also include endorsements of visual elements to stimulate an audience and to add interest and clarity to presentations (Wilcox, Ault and Agee 644). Visual images in general are valuable and can be understood from perspectives that include the aesthetic, the epistemic and the rhetorical. But one class of visual images has grown to have a particular advantage over all others in the matter of verisimilitude. These images are those that are photographically reproduced. Since the process that produces them with a camera was developed over 150 years ago, the correctness of perspective and the unmatched rendering of detail in these images have given them a distinctive position as powerful tools for communicating. How this particular class of images communicate is detailed in the following section.

How Photographic Images Mean: A Survey

In 1946, a little over a century after the founding of photography, John R. Whiting wrote about its usefulness:

As a means of expressing ideas and emotions as well as direct facts, photography has achieved a unique distinction: it has altered the scope of the spoken and written languages, making them partially obsolete. For example, your mind's knowledge of Abraham Lincoln's face is derived, not from written accounts, but from the photographs of Lincoln by Alexander Gardner and Mathew Brady. (Whiting 5) 15

Whiting went on to comment about the responsibility required of those who use such a powerful tool: "There is a social responsibility implicit in the use of a language with so much power. The very sharpness and verity of the photographic image leads to the use of the photograph for the significant; its inherent quality of believableness is a challenge to the user’s sense of truth. The photograph convinces and informs" (Whiting 5). Aesthetic theory applied to photographs is as varied in approach as aesthetic theory applied to any of the other arts. But there are some unique exceptions. In the earliest days, photographs were automatically considered art for the simple reason that they were made with the same tool that many accepted artists used in producing their own work, the camera obscura. Questions were never asked about the value of photographs as art, the location of expression, or the need for intent. Paintings were art and so, by association, was a photograph. Paintings of the time, particularly portraits but all subjects to some extent, sought realism. The ability to depict realistically a scene on canvas, in stone or in clay was the mark of an excellent artist. Photographs, even with what we consider today to be the rudimentary techniques of the time, had the ability to render the most minute detail in crystal-clear, totally perfect form. These photographs were accepted as art and subjected to the same theories for explaining meaning as other art forms. 16

But as time went on, the mechanical nature of the production of the image and the lack of artistic/human skill necessary to obtain fine detail, tone and shadow began to call up questions about the acceptability of photographs as art. Just because photographs were better than paintings in their ability to reproduce accurate detail was no longer enough. In the process of re-evaluating photographs as art, some critics called for the emulation of painting with the photographic image as an aesthetic requirement. Aesthetic theory, which required both the appearance of reality and evidence of the hand of the individual as artist, began a shift from the strongest emphasis on realism to one with a greater emphasis on the obvious visibility of the artist's genius and emotion in the work (Trachtenberg, Classic Essavs on Photographv 91). Many artists saw photographs as mechanically made images that were strictly objective and allowed no room for subjective interjection; for that reason, they could not be considered art. Others trained in the allegorical or pictorial school of painting maintained that, by camera or darkroom manipulation, photographs could be made to demonstrate some creative mark of the photographer. Henry Peach Robinson was one of the latter;

In the early days we were surprised and delighted with a photograph, as a photograph, just because we had not hitherto conceived possible any definition or finish that approached nature so closely, and here was something that actually had the effect of surpassing Nature on her own grounds. But we soon wanted something more. We got tired of the sameness of the exquisiteness of the photograph, and if it had nothing to say, if 17

it was not a view, or a portrait of something or somebody, we cared less and less for it. Why? Because the photograph told us everything about the facts of nature and left out the mystery. (Robinson 96)

A contemporary of Robinson's was Peter Henry Emerson. Emerson did not agree that the proper description of photography was as an art-science. He was among the first to realize that different types of photography should be assigned different styles and purposes. He recognized artistic, scientific and commercial as different types of photographic work and insisted that artistic photographs could be made that were of purely aesthetic value. Some modes of photography relied only on the epistemic strength of the image and required no attention to meaning. The personal, non mechanical, human element was reintroduced with Emerson's statement, "It is not the apparatus that chooses the picture, but the man who wields it" (Emerson 103). This statement also provides for an understanding of how the rhetorical element can function in communication with mechanically produced photographic images. The choices about what is included within the borders of a photograph and how and under what conditions that subject is recorded by the camera, all introduce opportunities for human control over what the image is designed to do. Emerson's own photographic work and writing and his work as a judge of numerous international photographic competitions influenced many other photographers. The style of seeing that he 18 developed with its focus on unmanipulated scenes and objects from nature and the acceptance of photographs grew (Trachtenberg 100). As photographers continued with Emerson’s tradition, an understanding and acceptance of the internal validity of the photographic image surfaced. This new aesthetic led in several directions. One, guided by Alfred Stieglitz, was almost spiritual in its adherence to unmanipulated photographic work; another grew out of the work of Paul Strand and his belief that the clarity of the image offered the preferred method of expression for personal vision; a third, in the tradition of Lewis Hine, valued the straight image for its connoted accuracy and social honesty. Other photographers, Moholy- Nagy for one, saw the medium as a totally nev/ method for altering conventional vision and opening new means of experience. But the important commonalty for all was the strong belief that photography was a valid and valued medium of artistic expression in its own right. Epistemological meaning in photographic images and the connoted accuracy of straight photographic images were concerns addressed by Roland Barthes, who wrote extensively about photographs. In an essay entitled, "The Photographic Message," Barthes talked about the photographic paradox, "the transmission of the scene itself, the literal reality. From the object to the image there is of course a reduction—in proportion, perspective, color—but at no time is this reduction a transformation" (Barthes 196). 19

Barthes found this lack of transformation to be a unique aspect of photographs—no other image-making form operates without a breakdown of the image into symbols and reconstruction of those symbols into meaning. To Barthes, the photographic image is so full of its denoted message that description of a photograph is literally impossible. "Connotation," according to Barthes, "the imposition of a second meaning on the photographic message, is realized at the different levels of the production of the photograph (choice, technical treatment, framing, layout) and represents, finally, a coding of the photographic analogue" (Barthes 199). The power of the photographic image and its acceptance as evidence of reality is discussed by Barthes in Camera Lucida. when he makes the claim that every photograph is "somehow co-natural with its referent" (Barthes 76). Looking at photographs, we never can deny that what has been photographed has been: "The important thing is that the photograph possesses an evidential force, and that its testimony bears not on the object but on time" (Barthes 88-89). Photographic images have the ability to present clear objective proof of the existence of certain objects, but they also present clear graphic statements about the relationships among these objects. These graphic statements may be even more easily internalized and understood than spoken or printed words. The source for these visual statements is the implied rhetor— the person behind the camera who is responsible for the production of the image, its framing and subject selection, and the other 20

rhetorical controls that contribute to the way the image is presented. The tacit auditor is whomever is looking at the photograph for information or in search of knowledge. The extra-linguistic phenomena are what which the photograph shows in an empirical manner that we all accept for real the same as we do the objects that are being photographed themselves. These visual images seem to bypass some aspects of the process that exist for the use of spoken or written language. An example comes from Berger's story about children who know and understand something of the world around them even before they know and understand words (Berger, Ways of Seeing 7). Where words are decoded and transformed or matched up with mental pictures, photographs can be assimilated more directly into the mind of the receiver. These images are rich in seen information and go more directly than word-based systems to the establishment of statements about relationships among the parts of the communication process. What is seen does not have to be encoded into a word-based form that the cognitive system digests and then reconstitutes in a word-based form for transmission to auditors that they then can decode and convert into a form that can be visualized. Both encoding and decoding steps might be eliminated, since information is transmitted directly. With the elimination of these steps, the opportunities for interference in the communication process that can add uncertainty to meaning are also eliminated to a great extent. Photographic images are ambiguous but, with direction, potentially 21 less so than spoken messages (Barthes, Responsibility of Forms Chapter 1). The direct images of reality provided by photographs may transmit information more easily and accurately than spoken or written language. The epistemologists' methods of demonstrating the existence of independent objective reality rely on experimentation and observation. Photographic images are accepted as evidence of objects and are valued the same as objects themselves. Photographic images of objects seem to contribute to our knowledge in the same way as first-hand observation of those objects photographed would contribute to our knowledge. The substitution of photographic images for personal observation—the use of photographs to record reality—is the province of documentary photography. Photographs used as evidence or proof define groups and provide them a means for self- identity; "Photographs are documentary evidence, objectified material forms, representing ideological and cultural relations" (Neumann 1). The great credibility of documentary photographs is due to the iconic nature of these images:

The quality of the image that is perhaps its most powerful, is its iconic nature. The icon immediately begins to account for the great credibility of photographic, documentary images. The ability of photographic images to accurately depict is the essence of documentation. The representational relationship that that photographs share with their referents is direct, and necessary. To qualify as an icon, an image must possess a recognizable degree of referential resemblance. (Hyatt 6) 22

Not everyone agrees with the idea that a high degree of representation or resemblance is the basis for the high degree of credibility that seems often to be assigned to photographic images. John Tagg, in The Burden of Representation, makes reference to the McCarthy period’s manipulation that photographically coupled Senator Millard Tydings to Earl Browder, implying the Senator's Communist leanings and eventually costing him his seat in the Senate. The photograph itself was not damagig—the meaning assigned to the photograph by McCarthy is what resulted in Browder’s reelection failure (Tagg 2). In the 1960’s and 1970’s, well-known photographic artist Jerry Uelsman often used his extraordinary darkroom skills to combine multiple negatives into single images that were powerful in large part because of the clash they presented with our view of photographic images as accurate representations of reality. These examples show that a variety of meanings can be assigned to existing photographs and that existing photographs may be modified to serve as strong support for a variety of causes. These examples all reinforce Kenton Hyatt when he writes, "the ambiguity of photographic images is legendary. By comparison to verbal description, visual documentation simply provides a great deal more information" (Hyatt 14). The reason why we accept these ambiguous photographs as evidence of reality and as support for meaning claims may be explained, in part, by the combination of photographs and words. 23

This combination, as explored by Lewis Hine, provides a means of lessening that ambiguity and strengthening photography's meaning component as well as continuing and relying on the strong epistemic nature of the photographic image.

How Words Mean: A Survey

There are a variety of theories to explain meaning in words, but a common starting point for most of them seems to be symbolic— words stand for or refer to objects, ideas or actions. Some theories place these objects, ideas or actions in the external world, others place them in the mind of the rhetor, and others place them in the mind of the audience. Theory that places images or ideas in the minds of rhetors or audiences is called ideational theory. One weakness is that ideational theory supposes that ideas or thoughts occur independently of language. Another problem comes from its referential base, which allows for multiple meaning for words due to multiple thoughts for words in the mind of the rhetor creating the communication or multiple words for single thoughts. Some confusion arises in theory with a referential base due to the tendency for several words of phrases to refer to the same object or event. Other words such as conjunctions, prepositions, and articles seem to have no external referent and therefore are not explained by this theory and require an addendum theory that relies on the 24

context in which these words are used to provide meaning (Cherwitz and Hikins 72). The other side of the multiple-words-for-single-objects-or- events problem is the single-word-for-multiple-objects-or-events problem. This also offers ample opportunities for meaning confusion. Bill Bryson, in his text The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, points up the problem: "Any language where the unassuming word fly (sic) signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentlemen's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled" (Bryson 11). Ï.A. Richards outlined a theory of meaning for words using perception rather than reference as a base. Sense data create an imprint on our minds of certain situations—combinations of objects and actions. This mental imprint serves as a sign for these situations and the context in which the word or symbol has been used before. The relationship between the symbol, the thought the symbol recalls in our minds, and the referent or object of that thought are diagrammed by Richards in the semantic triangle (Foss, Foss and Trapp 24). In the diagram, the three points of the triangle indicate the symbol, the reference, and the referent. A causal relationship exists between the reference in our minds and the symbol that we use. The relationship between the referent or object of thought and the reference or thought within our mind is direct if the object is being perceived at the moment or indirect if the object is not physically 25

present. The relationship between the referent and the symbol, however, is always indirect since these two points only can be connected through the thought or reference held in the mind (Foss, Foss and Trapp 24). Behavior is also used as a base for meaning in words. Stimulus-response theory claims that meaning is determined by the action that words trigger in an audience. Meaning comes from the way that words are used or from human behavior rather than from external referents or from images in the mind of either rhetors or their audiences. J. L. Austin makes the claim that words are not used just to say things but that words are used to do things. What is important is not the question of truth or fact but the performance of an act. The minimum unit of language becomes the complete utterance or speech act rather than an individual word. Meaning comes from the conditioned, learned response of the audience that is a product of where the words are used, the situation when the words are used and the action that the use of words produces (Austin 14). A relational theory for meaning in language offers yet another perspective. The relational structure is based on referential theory but incorporates many aspects of other theories to account for meaning and words. Relational theory seeks to overcome some of the problems of a strictly referential system by including aspects of context similar to Richards’ semantic triangle and language use as in Austin’s speech act theory. These aspects are coupled with the acknowledgement of relationships between objects, rhetors, and 26 audiences and objects, ideas, and actions (Cherwitz and Hikins 78- 88). Theories of meaning and words are abundant and varied and offer numerous explanations for how rhetors and their audiences use words in persuasive and powerful communication. Their referential base and their ability to suggest relationships and direct attention make words an important element in the word-and-photographic image combination that this dissertation examines. Words express meaning and contribute to powerful and persuasive communication, but the way that words function is changing. In an essay in Form. Genre and the Studv of Political Discourse. Michael Osbom talks about the value of image through rhetorical depiction: "The depiction is the key to synchronic, multiple, simultaneous meanings in rhetoric" (Osbom 80). In our image-based society, word-based depiction is being supplanted by visual depiction: "Contemporary rhetoric seems dominated by strategic pictures, verbal or nonverbal visualizations that linger in the collective memory of audiences as representative of their subjects when rhetoric has been successful" (Osbom 79). As E. H. Gombrich says, "The mind is more slowly stirred by the ear than by the eye" (Gombrich 85). 27

How Photographic Images and Words Together Mean: A Survey

Our separate reviews of meaning in images and meaning in words gives us a sense of how the two function alone. Images are referential in that they bring to mind things which have been seen before. We know that photographic realism makes photographic images even more powerful than other types of images in that specifics and details are provided in the photographic image so that this type of image provides more information than referential images which rely to some extent on recall from memory. Most explanations for meaning in words suggests that words are symbolic with particular words standing for particular objects or actions. These meanings—what words stand for—may be located either in the words themselves, in the rhetors, or in the audience. What is left to discover is how the two might work together to form communicaton units that are even more powerful than the sum of their component elem ents. Words and images have a long history. According to Richard Woodfield, writing in the British Journal of Aesthetics:

The question of the relationship between the verbal and visual arts has a long history which, in the Western tradition, originated in the classical doctrine of mimesis. Throughout the Middle Ages, in the Western Empire, the use of images was justified by the claim that they were the bible of the illiterate. (Woodfield 357) 28

The relationship of words and photographs has been examined in numerous media-effects studies. Jean S. Kerrick, looking at the influence of captions on picture interpretations in 1955, found that words can shift the meaning of photographic images. According to Kerrick, while words do contribute or direct meaning in images, they do so only so far as the words are congruent with the photograph's apparent intent (Kerrick 182). It appears that when words and images are combined, images are the dominant factors. The strong impact that photographs have also was explored by Reuben Mehling in a 1959 study on the attitude-changing effect of news and photo combinations. In addition to finding that the coupling of two people in a photograph without words can bring about attitude change, Reuben also found that the combination of photographs and words was more effective than words alone in the changing of attitudes (Mehling 189). The combination of words and photographs is examined by Alan Trachtenberg in his book, Reading American Photographs: Images as Historv Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. In a chapter entitled "Albums of War," Trachtenberg looks at Civil War photographs by Alexander Gardener and makes the claim that the "caption makes the otherwise uneventful image into a significant relic" (Trachtenberg 97). According to Trachtenberg, words also serve to reconcile anti-heroic photographs with heroic images. Words, in this case, establish the chronology and position of the photograph. Trachtenberg’s idea is that photographs must be 29 combined with context and text for the most meaning. The text serves to weave the image into the narrative. In a later chapter entitled, "Camera Work/Social Work," Trachtenberg examined the way that words and photographs were used by Lewis Hine: "Lewis Hine typically presented his pictures in The Survev and other periodicals, in bulletins and posters for The National Child Labor Committee, in the form of 'stories', linked by titles, captions and text" (Trachtenberg 176). This combination gave the images a context from which their meaning, the meaning that Hine intended them to have, could be better understood. The question of words and meaning in photographs is also examined by Jean Mohr in an essay entitled, "Beyond My Camera," in the book Another Wav of Telling, coauthored with John Berger: "I often feel the need to explain my photos, to tell their story. Only occasionally is an image self-sufficient" (Berger and Mohr 42). As part of this essay, Mohr reviews the meaning that a variety of people attach to his photographs when they are viewed. With no verbal explanation, he presented his photographs to 10 people and asked for their ideas about meaning. Mohr contrasts their responses with the situation and his thoughts at the time that each photograph was being taken (Berger and Mohr 41-49). John Berger, in an essay entitled "Appearances" in Another Wav of Telling, examines a picture of a man with a bridled horse:

The most definite information that this photograph gives is about the type of bridle the horse is wearing and this is certainly not the reason why it was taken. Looking at the 30

photograph alone it is even hard to know to what use category it belonged. Was it a family-album picture,a newspaper picture, a traveller's snap?

Could it have been taken, not for the sake of the man, but of the horse? Was the man acting as a groom, just holding the horse? Was he a horse-dealer? Or was it a still photograph taken during the filming of one of the early Westerns?

The photograph offers irrefutable evidence that this man, this horse and this bridle existed. Yet it tells us nothing of the significance of their existence. (Berger and Mohr 86)

Ambiguity in photographs—their ability to show us everything but at the same time tell us nothing about its significance—is something that can be reduced with the use of a caption. A caption or verbal element allows us to understand the significance of the event photographed;

All photographs are ambiguous. All photographs have been taken out of a continuity. If the event is a public event, this continuity is history; if it is personal, the continuity, which has been broken, is a life story. Even a pure landscape breaks a continuity: that of the light and the weather. Discontinuity always produces ambiguity. Yet often this ambiguity is not obvious, for as soon as photographs are used with words, they produce together an effect of certainty, even of dogmatic assertion.

In the relation between a photograph and words, the photograph begs for an interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words, which by themselves remain at the level of generalization, are given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photographs. Together the two then become very powerful; an 3 1

open question appears to have been fully answered. (Berger and Mohr 91-92)

There is a difference between stories and reports for Berger. Stories are narrative events that come into being through reaction to and about their subjects. His claim is that, by presenting sequences of photographs, viewers will assemble their own reality through and with the subjects of the images. For Berger, this is the "another way of telling" that the book he and Mohr wrote addresses. "Reports" is the term that Berger uses to describe what are traditionally considered picture stories—combinations of images and words. Reports are presentations that look from the outside in and represent that which photographers choose to reveal through their pictures. "Picture stories"—"reports" in Berger's terminology—that combine photographic images with text are what this dissertation will examine. These combinations of words and images that Berger calls "reports" allow for the domination of intentionality that is evident in the work that Lewis Hine produced. Roland Barthes followed a two-level approach to uncovering meaning in photographic images but with an added feature. For Barthes, as for others, the first level in finding meaning in a photographic image is denotative and deals with what is physically present in the image—that is, the information presented or described by the photograph. The second level is connotative and deals with the interpretations those things physically present suggest or imply. At the connotative level, consideration also can be given to artists' 32 intent and purpose in the creation of images. In his work, Barthes dealt with advertising photographs so that he could be sure that the images were made with intentionality. The photograph's accompanying text and the context in which the photograph is presented and the relationship between these elements is the third level for Barthes. The whole of a message from a "press photograph"—Barthes' term for a mediated photograph—contains the source of emission, channel of transmission, and medium of reception. The source is the staff who produce the photographs, the medium is the newspaper in which they are printed, and the receptor is the public who reads that newspaper. The photograph's structure includes the headlines, text, and other contextual trappings of the newspaper in which it is published (Barthes, Responsibility of Forms'). Many of the images that Barthes looked at used this additional or third element, the linguistic one made up of surrounding text and context, which further directed interpretation (Barrett 82). The linguistic element contained within or around Barthes' images seems to function in the same way that the brief text used to accompany Lewis Mine's images in directing the interpretation of photographs. In some of Barthes' analyses, the textual element is included within the photograph, but for the "press photograph," it is generally presented in the vicinity of the photograph. On occasion, a sign or handbill posted on a fence or door will be visible in a photograph by Hine, but generally, the linguistic element is the 33

written caption or story that accompanies or is in the vicinity of the im age. For John Tagg, words also play a critical role in giving photographs their power and their meaning but in a different way. Tagg suggests that the use of words can address the obvious fault in considering accurate representation the sole source of a photograph’s acceptance as evidence—the ease with which photographs can be manipulated. His explanation for the acceptance of these images as evidence of reality is based on discursive negotiation and the establishment of a hierarchy of codes in images that will allow properly conditioned audiences to accept these images as evidence. This discursive negotiation is conducted with the words that accompany the photograph (Tagg 22). In any case, showing is the first step toward saying. Once as much as possible is known about what the image contains, the meaning of that image can start to be understood. We read photographs as we read a book, but instead of words on a page creating an image in our minds and leading to an explanation of what that image means, the photograph, with all its informative and descriptive power, becomes the image we use to lead to explanations of image meaning. What the photograph is taken to mean comes from the way that its stimuli activate imagination by striking responsive chords within the mind. Meaning from photographs comes from the maker's ability to design this visual package of 34 stimuli so that "it resonates with information already stored within the individual viewer" (Berger 66). The problem is that many possible meanings can be assigned to any image. Often, clues must be searched out to identify which meaning is appropriate for a given image at a given time. But in the case of Lewis Mine's work, the ultimate clue for the meaning of his photographs was provided by his often brief but ever-present captions. These few words did more than identify the photograph’s location, time and subject; they suggested to the viewer what the information contained meant. His photographs were about something, of something, and done with a goal in mind. Gombrich claimed that "there is no innocent eye," and the saying well can be paraphrased to fit photographic images by saying that "there is no innocent camera" (Barrett 34). What may have made Hine such an important force in the development of showing as a way of saying is his understanding of the most valuable role that could be played by both photograph and text. What seems lacking in other theories is that critical explanation for how photographic images are packaged with words for greatest impact. The ways that words are integrated with a photographic image or, in Mine’s case, with multiple images are what suggest his work as significant for examination. Hine seemed to grasp the relationship between words and images, perhaps because of his training in the social sciences; but for whatever reason, this 35 knowledge and understanding make him an exemplary subject for a case study.

Lewis Hine - A Case Study

Lewis Hine was recognized in his own time, as he is today, as an important force in photography. In a 1947 article on "Photography as Social Documentation" in Journalism Quarterly. Robert E. Birvin asked several people prominently connected to the world of photography about the value of photography to social betterment. Two of those responding offered Lewis Hine as an outstanding example. Roger Butterfield, a Life staff writer who responded to Birvin’s request, thought that photography could contribute to social betterment in two ways: "by being honest and by having a heart" (Birvin 217). He went on to say, "I could cite a number of examples to prove my point, but I’ll mention only one. I am thinking of that amazing man and artist, Lewis F. [sic] Hine, who first brought a genuine social consciousness into American photography" (Birvin 217). Hine was a photographer located at the beginning of a new photographic aesthetic that used photographic images and words. In a talk, reprinted in Classic Essays on Photographv but originally transcribed for and published in the 1909 Proceedings. National Conference Charities and Corrections. Hine talked about the uplifting 36

value of photographs as evidence for the building of knowledge. According to Hine, "Whether it is a painting or a photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality. In fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated." This elimination of non-essential and conflicting interests is a clear reference to the control of the aesthetics and the rhetoric of the image: "The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration" (Hine 111). Hine, trained in social work, was past the age of 30 and teaching at the Ethical Culture School when he began to use the camera as a way to help his students better leam to experience what they saw. His first work as a photographer was in 1905 at Ellis Island, where he photographed immigrants. Three years later, in 1908, he quit teaching, "merely changing the educational efforts from the school-room to the world" and began work as a social photographer (Hine, "Notes on Early Influences" 123). He began work for the National Child Labor Committee shortly thereafter. Once Hine left his teaching position at the Ethical Culture School, he also left behind reliance on the written word: "Everything he saw, thought, and interpreted funnelled through his photographs. 'If I could tell the story in words,' he reflected in a letter to Paul Kellogg in 1922, I wouldn't need to lug a camera'" (Gutman, American Social Conscience 19). 37

For Lewis Hine, or "lewhine" as he sometimes signed letters to those he knew well, photographs were a means of studying and describing social conditions around him. He believed that pictures themselves would prove nothing; if they were to contribute to social change, the pictures first must affect the sensibilities of those who saw them. In a 1909 talk before the National Conference of Corrections, reprinted in the conference proceedings under the title, "Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift," Hine says:

Whether it be a painting or a photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality. It speaks a language learned early in the race and in the individual witness the ancient picture writers and the child of today absorbed in his picture book. For us older children, the picture continues to tell a story packed into the most condensed and vital form. In fact, it is often more effective that the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated. The picture is the language of all nationalities and all ages The increase, during recent years, of illustrations in newspapers, books, exhibits and the like gives ample evidence of this.

The photograph has an added realism of its own; it has an inherent attraction not found in other forms of illustration. For this reason the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend upon contract no bad habits. (Hine, Classic Essays 34) 38

It was clear that Hine understood what his audience may not have and that was that "photographs were subjective and, for that very reason were powerful and readily grasped criticisms of the impact of an economic system on the lives of underprivileged and exploited classes" (Newhall 235). Hine described his own works as photo interpretations and published them as "human documents." The combination of words and pictures was described by Hine as a "photo story," with the photographs never serving only as illustrations for text. Hine made every situation he photographed an individual one. He provided names for the faces and information about ages and occupations for the children he photographed. While some reformers claimed that Hine's images were not obvious enough in their depiction of the evils of child labor, Hine felt that, above all else, the primary focus of his photographs should be on the children and that through their story would be told the story about their situations. Hine's work shaped a new school of photography that he called "interpretative" but that later became known as "documentary." His work had influence on those photographers working in California as the F64 school of photography as well as photographers in Germany as part of the Bauhaus movement (Gutman, American Social Conscience 47). Hine re-defined the art form to meet his communication needs. The diffuse light and old formalities of the photo-secessionists did not work for Hine. In Lewis Hine: Two Perspectives. Judith Mara 39

Gutman described the differences between Hine's new style of work and work produced with the old photography's formulas:

Hine's passions and thoughts, no matter how personal, were far too intense to sit quietly within traditional vanishing points and frosty lighting. Hine had to re-define and re-balance groups, re-direct light and re-light interiors, re-set the vanishing point and juxtapose movement within the many planes crushing in upon the people he photographed. (Gutman, Two Perspectives 49)

Another factor relating to Hine's new aesthetic that set his work apart from that of his contemporaries is described by Gutman as she talks about "Hine's Direct Eye":

This was Hine's most social eye. It was the eye that informed a populations about conditions in mills, about children who worked in canneries, and about people who walked to work at six in the evening when all families were supposed to be sitting down to dinner. It was the eye that told people what went on inside areas of life they never experienced. But never softly. Never meekly. Meeting people head on, it confronted them and swept them over to the other side of the fence with one clear, direct stroke. It was an eye that communicated from one world to another, an eye that reached through space. (Gutman, Two Perspectives 46)

Hine used words with his Direct Eye. His photographs used captions to identify people specifically—to make people stand out. His captions provided information about who his subjects were, where they lived, what they did, their age, and their families. His photographs were full of information, and his captions directed 40

viewers where to look and highlighted contradictions within the lives and worlds of those he photographed (Gutman, Two Perspectives 48). Hine's words and images appeared in many forms—single images with identifying captions, groups of images used with text in pamphlets and journals, posters combining images and text, and in narrated lantern slide shows. Hine’s task, to reveal what he saw, was complex and did not depend on single images or images alone. His combinations of montages of images in exhibition posters and in a new presentation form that he invented called "Time Exposures" are of particular significance. The Survev published several of Hine's Time Exposures in 1914 and 1915: "Hine was one of the first Americans to experiment with photomontage, a graphic process of juxtaposing several images to achieve new depth of meaning. To complete his statement, he combined the image with a documentary text" (Trachtenberg, America and Lewis Hine 131). One Time Exposure feature in The Survey that appears under the top of the page entitled, "TIME EXPOSURES by HINE," shows three children in outline hiding behind a work certificate, flanked by two other children, one on each side. Under this graphic element combining photographs of children and the photograph of the work certificate is the caption, "Hiding behind the work certificate" (Figure #1). Below the caption is a block of text explaining the abuse of existing child labor restrictions with specific information about the worker named on the certificate who meets neither age nor school 41 requirements for its issuance. The text explains that while this child is not among those photographed, the children who are in the illustration are in working in similar situations. The text goes on to provide the specific information about those shown: their ages and occupations, length of time working in the mills and home situations. Hine believed that all visual forms relied on the elimination of the non-essential but felt that photographs had an even greater power than other visual forms because of their inherent believability:

. . . [I]ts power as a lever for social uplift is impressive. But how to draw upon this power? Here Hine takes a step toward a coherent and advanced theory of photography by placing the power for "uplift" in the effect that a verbal caption can have upon a photograph. He dramatized this effect by reading a passage from Hugo on the "dismal servitude" of children against a picture "of a tiny spinner in a Carolina cotton-mill. "With a picture thus sympathetically interpreted, what a lever we have for the social uplift." (Trachtenberg, America & Lewis H ine 133)

Although popular history claims that the photo story that combined images and text into a single unit was not invented until the 1920's and first was used in German picture magazines, Lewis Hine with his Time Exposures and photomontage posters used the narrative form of photo communication a dozen years earlier (Guimond 97). Daile Kaplan argues in the book, Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs, that the term "photo story" was used by Hine to 42 describe the work he did between 1904 and 1919. "He was the first photographer to picture the common man, women, and child in a positive light, and to incorporate their point of view, their voice, in his captions. In addition, he was responsible for developing a modem vernacular aesthetic (street photography) and a form (the human-interest photo story) that gave rise to photography as a new tool" (Kaplan 9).

From the beginning, Hine's work empowered his subjects and defused negative associations about photography. Later on, with the appearance of his photo stories, Hine disassembled the social photograph into syntactical units of picture and text, and re-organized it into a viable communication form. He produced substantive, controversial images that, nonetheless, evoked qualities easily identifiable and shared: dignity, grace, and beauty. By arranging a group of images in multipage graphic designs, he recognized the latent power of the iconological image (along with authoritative text) as an effective and compelling graphic language. (Kaplan 9)

Hine was the first photographer to appreciate the possibilities and combine the detail and information richness of the photographic image with the directive power of words to focus emphasis and supply direction for meaning. His work provides an excellent case study opportunity for exploring the concept of showing as a way of saying through the combination of words and photographic images. 43

Data

This dissertation will look at single captioned images as well as Time Exposures and posters that Hine did between 1906 and 1918, the years when he worked for the National Child Labor Committee. Much of Hine's original work is still in existence. Although Ohio State University owns some Hine photographic prints, they are not from the child labor reform period when Hine originated his combinations of text and image. A substantial collection of child labor photographs and material from the National Child Labor Committee is held at the Library of Congress. The International Center for Photography in Rochester, New York, also has a Hine collection that contains photographs and personal effects from Hine's home at the time of his death. Extensive cataloging of Hine photographs has taken place in recent years as he has been rediscovered and claimed his place in photographic history. A number of books have been published that include his photographs and captions, and some works also include his early Time Exposure picture stories. The Child Labor Bulletin from February of 1915 contains an exhibit catalog that includes reproductions of many of the Hine posters that were being exhibited as part of the National Child Labor Reform Committee's efforts. This particular issue of The Child Labor Bulletin, as well as several others from that period that contain words, pictures and word-and-picture combinations done by Hine, are in the stacks of the main library at 44

Ohio State University. Another journal that made extensive use of Hine's work was The Survey. This publication for the years being studied is available in Columbus, both at the Ohio Historical Society and in the Ohio State University main library. General visual-image-related examination tools as well as those tools particular to the photographic images that he produced will be used in the case study of Lewis Hine's work. These elements, with the direction provided by Hine with his texts, outlines and captions, can be used to examine what these photographs are saying. The case study approach is designed to explore the rhetorical element in Hine's photographic presentations. Lest these established critical tools be applied mechanically and thereby produce mechanical criticism, consideration will be given to Edwin Black's idea "that critical method is too personally expressive to be systematized" (Black x). But as Black continues, while criticism is a personal instrument, it is also a public one. "The critic does address a public and he thereby incurs public responsibilities. The critic's public should, in principle, be able to verify for itself that the critical object can be apprehended as the critic proposed without offending reason, and that the critic's way of apprehending the object yields moral understanding of it" (Black xii). What is of value in criticism is its originality and the singular way in which it allows an audience to comprehend the objects it views. Insights about the way a particular piece of rhetoric works rather than its measurement against a fixed set of standards is the goal. 45

......

Figure #1

Hiding Behind the Work Certificate - Time Exposure 46

Sources Cited - Chapter I

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. G. P. Gould. Vol. 22. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Austin, J. L. How to do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University. Ed. F. O. Urmson and Marina Sibisa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Barrett, Terry. Criticizing Photographs. Mountain View, California: Mayfield, 1990.

Barthes, Roland. "The Photographic Message." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Berger, John. Wavs of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.

Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Studv in Method. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Cherwitz, Richard A., and James W. Hikins. Communication and Knowledge: An Investigation in Rhetorical Epistemology. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Ed. Carroll C. Arnold. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986.

Cicero. Oratorum. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. G. P. Gould. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949.

Emerson, Peter Henry. "Hints on Art." Classic Essavs on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1889. 47

Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric. Prospect Heights: Waveland, 1985.

Foss, Sonja K., and Marla R. Kanengieter. "Visual Communication in the Basic Course." Communication Education. June 1992.

Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gombrich, E. H. "The Visual Image." Scientific American. September, 1972.

Guimond, James. American Photographv and the American Dream. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Gutman, Judith Mara. Lewis Hine and the American Social Conscience. New York: Walker, 1967.

Gutman, Judith Mara. Lewis W. Hine 1974-1940: Two Perspectives. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974.

Hazelton, Roger. "Believing is Seeing: Vision as Metaphor." Theologv T oday. Vol. 35, 1979.

Hine, Lewis. "Social Photography." Classic Essavs on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1915.

Hine, Lewis. "Notes on Early Influences." Photo Story: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine. Ed. Daile Kaplan. Washington D C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992.

Hyatt, Kenton. Documentary Images: Visual Information Made to Order. Atlanta: Speech Communication Association Conference, 1991.

Kaplan, Daile. Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs. New York: Abbeville, 1988. 48

Kerrick, Jean S. "The Influence of Captions on Picture Interpretation." Journalism Quarterly Vol. 32, 1955.

Mehling, R. "Attitude Changing Effects of News and Photo Combinations." Journalism Quarterly Vol. 36, 1959.

Mich, Daniel D. "The Rise of Photo-Joumalism in the United States." Journalism Quarterly. September, 1947.

Neumann, Mark A. Reading Photographic Documentary Art: The Politics of Representation in Clarke and Wackerbarth's "The Red Couch: A Portrait of America" and Avedon's "In The American West". University of Utah, 1987.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present. New York: The Museum of Modem Art, 1982.

Olson, Lester C. "Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetorical analysis of Norman Rockwell's Icons in Franklin d. Roosevelt’s "Four Freedoms " Campaign." Ouarterlv Journal of Speech Vol. 69, February, 1983.

Osborn, Michael. "Rhetorical Depiction." Form. Genre, and the Studv of Political Discourse. Ed. Herbert W. Simmons and Aram A. Aghazarian. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986.

Osborn, Michael, and Suzanne Osborn. Public Speaking. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Perelman, C. H., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1969.

Reid, Thomas. The Philosophv of Thomas Reid as contained in Inquirv into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Series of Modem Philosophers. Ed. E. Hershey Sneath. New York: Henry Holt, 1892. 49

Robinson, Henry Peach. "Idealism, Realism, Expressionism." Classic Essavs on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1869.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1977.

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essavs on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Tomas, Vincent. "The Concept of Expression in Art." Philosophv Looks at the Arts: Contemporarv Readings in Aesthetics. Ed. Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962.

Trachtenberg, Alan. America and Lewis Hine: Photographv 1904- 1940. New York: Apeture, 1977.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essavs on Photography. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1980.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as Historv Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.

Urmson, J.O. "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Ed. Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962.

Whiting, John. Photography as a Language. New York: Ziff-Davis, 1946.

Wilcox, Dennis L., Ault, Phillip H. and Agee, Warren K. Public Relations Strategies and Tactics. New York: HarperCoUins, 1992.

Woodfield, Richard. "Words and Pictures." British Journal of Aesthetics. Autumn, 1986. CHAPTER II

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Introduction

The child labor dilemma that reform efforts sought to uncover and correct did not magically appear at the turn of the century in the United States. The process of incorporation and acceptance of children into the labor force was an evolutionary one. The use of child labor developed in the United States much as it had developed in the ancestral homelands of its citizens. At its inception and through early history, the practice of children working was a positive experience. It served a valuable purpose for youth, providing a means of aiding in their development and education, and helped a growing country pull together and move forward. But, as the practice evolved, the value of work to children lessened and the purposes for which children worked and the needs of the nation changed. Gradually, the benefits of child labor, both for the children and for society, were supplanted by disadvantages. Children did not

50 51 learn from their labor, and society ceased reaping long-term benefits from the work of youthful citizens. Unfortunately, public views about child labor and its positive value to children remained long after those benefits had dissipated. Public attitudes toward children working moved slowly toward acceptance of the practice and were equally slow to move back toward its unacceptability after its relative lack of positive value was established. The gradual, almost imperceptible public attitude shifts that took place as child labor evolved following the settling of the colonies in the 1500's through the early 20th century were aided by several factors. Prime among those factors was economic necessity. As workers moved away from the independence that they had enjoyed in earlier times when their income had been more directly related to the products of their labor toward times that were more controlled by outside capital than by themselves, many found that their wages had decreased. As a result, many families were able to survive only with the contributions of an entire household full of wage earners. Other factors that influenced attitudes about child labor came from religious leaders, educators, organized labor and settlement workers. This chapter begins by sketching a broad overview of the evolution of child labor leading up to the early 20th century that is based on the role of both economic need and tradition from abroad in bringing about acceptance for the use of children as workers in industrial America. That overview is followed by a more detailed examination of the way that religious leaders, educators, organized 52

labor and settlement workers contributed to influence the nation's views about the value of child labor. This chapter will track the changes that had taken place in the United States during the years since its founding. Understanding the values that various groups held is important as a way of understanding the situation at the time of the appeals made by Lewis W. Hine and other child labor reform advocates at the turn of the century. While some group's values, those held by labor, for example, were primarily self-serving, the net result was that they did contribute to bringing about change in child labor expectations and acceptable behavior patterns for parents, employers and the U.S. government.

Evolution of Child labor

In the preface to Crusade for the Children. Walter Trattner makes the claim that an excellent measure of human progress is the extent to which the rights of children are protected. Trattner holds children to be a nation's most valuable resource. For Trattner, the best thing that can be done for children is also the best thing that can be done for the nation—provide the children the opportunity to complete their education (Trattner 9). Few today could disagree that the education of youth is the best insurance that the nation of tomorrow will have citizens who will be ready and able to provide responsible leadership for government. However, today's common sense view contrasts 53 dramatically with the view held less than a century ago when "the labor of young children in factories, mines, streets, and Gelds, which aborted healthful growth, schooling, and self-fulfillment, was not only condoned but approved" (Trattner 9). Among the explanations for why child labor was so readily accepted in the United States, a nation bom of a desire for individual freedom and opportunity, was the prevalence of child labor in England. History shows that children labored there even from the earliest, pre-industrial times. Their labor was valued both for its contribution to the greater good, and for its value as a means of educating and socializing children:

Children have always worked. During early human history, the young of wandering tribes shared in hunting, fishing, and trapping animals. Later when tribes and clans separated themselves into families, children continued to work with their elders in the woods and fields and in caring for crops and animals. (Trattner 21)

Although child labor in England is often viewed as a phenomenon caused by the industrial revolution, some historians make the claim that child labor existed long before modem industrial machines. While it is tme that some factories designed equipment to a scale specifically for operation by small children and that many abuses of child labor came about during this time, a more accurate charge against industrial barons was that they were responsible for the expansion of child labor, not its origination (Trattner 22). 54

In a 1990 book titled. Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution. Clark Nadinelli presents the argument that child labor was utilized on a much smaller scale in England than most previous accounts would indicate. Economic history suggests that there were good reasons for the lower use of children in industrial labor. While that may have been true in the United States as well, many children, in fact, did work in industrial labor, maybe numbering into the millions. An even earlier precedent for the use of child labor was the medieval apprentice systems that allowed for the indenturing of children to a master for the purpose of learning a trade. As medieval society broke down, capitalism and nationalism grew. Rather than the indenture or employment of children primarily for the purpose of learning trades, English statutes were written to provide for the use of public funds to employ children to "accustom them to labor" and "afford a prophylactic against vagabonds and paupers" (Trattner 22). The feudal system encouraged the participation of whole families in labor in England. The English poor law of 1601 continued the tradition of keeping children at work for purposes other than education and the development of skills. The 1601 poor law encouraged public officials to pay the keepers of houses of industry or spinning schools to take responsibility for the children entrusted to public care. While the guise was to combat unemployment and discourage vagrancy, the real intent of the law more accurately may have been to provide a 55 source of cheap labor by which private citizens could profit. At the same time that private industry was making a profit from their youthful workers, the 1601 poor law was relieving the state of the financial responsibility for their care (Trattner 22). While it is likely that America’s earliest attitudes about children and their labor came partly from the European precedents and customs the first settlers were fleeing, those attitudes also came partly from the settlers’ own religious and social world-views about the way life should be lived and the duty of human to God. An appreciation of the virtue and value of hard work came to the United States with its first settlers. The Puritans believed in the frequent, long and hard labor of all human beings: ’’The Puritan’s new light on God’s will argued that men must be diligent in business and that, if they were among the predestined saints, their business ventures would thrive” (McLoughlin 27). The tradition of children working that came from Europe meshed well with the American emphasis on independence and self- reliance. During the process of becoming independent and self- reliant, many settlers found that the participation of entire families was required for the clearing and cultivation of land and for the construction and manufacture of needed supplies, foodstuffs, and tools. Men, women, and children all worked together for the common good of the family. A strong emphasis on land ownership and agrarian enterprise not only encouraged but virtually required the labor of children and all family members for success. Common law 56 viewed children as small-size adults. A Virginia statue from 1646 made clear the beliefs about the value of work held by early lawmakers in the colonies, such work was designed "for the better educating of youth in honest and profitable trades and manufactures, as also to avoid sloth and idleness wherewith such young children are easily corrupted" (Felt 2). This desire to prevent idleness that had allowed pauper children to be apprenticed since 1598 in England and since 1646 in the colonies was echoed not long after the establishment of the United States. New York State enacted a law that sanctioned that practice in 1826 (Felt 2), and a figure as notable as Alexander Hamilton had endorsed the manufacturing system on the very grounds that it would provide early opportunity for employment of children (Felt 2). Isolated instances of revolt against the use of children as labor did arise in colonial times. The demand for workers was so great in the colonies during the late 17th century that orphaned children in England were routinely rounded up, loaded aboard ships and transported to the new world. In fact, the term kidnapping was coined to describe the method by which many of these children were solicited. Although the practice was common, apparently the line between voluntary and involuntary service was crossed too often in the case of a pair of Virginia Company ships that were discovered loaded with children '"Cryinge and Mourning for Redemptions from their Slavery.' The Privy Council ordered that those detained against 57 their will--'a thinge so barbarous and inhumane, that Nature itself much more Christians cannot but abhor it'—should be released at once" (Dulles and Dubofsky 5). But as a general rule, the employment of children in the colonies from the earliest times was a common and correct practice:

The introduction of children into our early factories was a natural consequence of the colonial attitude toward child labor, of the provisions of the early poor laws and of philanthropic efforts to prevent children from becoming a public charge, and, above all, of the Puritan belief in the virtue of industry and the sin of idleness. Industry by compulsion, if not by faith, was the gospel preached to the young as well as to the old, and quite frequently to the children of the rich as the poor. (Abbott 3)

Many of Benjamin Franklin's oft-repeated sayings from Poor Richards Almanac reinforced the belief that not only was the labor of children necessary but it was good. Maxims such as "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealth, and wise," and "one today is worth two tomorrows" reinforced the belief that the best use of minds and hands was in work. It can be said that the great American success ideal encouraged early, hard, and frequent labor. By implication, industriousness and attention to regular work could only increase the chance of cashing in on the unlimited possibilities open to individuals in this growing land of opportunity. The sure road to improvement was to start work at an early age, to do hard work and to stay at work for long hours. Gradually, the reality of the agrarian ideal moved into the realm of myth. Farmers worked hard and long hours and for little 58 reward. Their only accumulation of cash generally had to be reserved for the acquisition of more land as the fertility of their soil played out and its ability to produce crops diminished. There was no accumulation of funds that could be used for enjoyment or for discretionary purchases. While subscription to the agrarian ideal partially explained the farmer's self-reliance, it was also partially due to the isolation and poor transportation system that prevented farmers from getting off the farm to purchase any goods easily. While the myth that life in the country was life as it should be lived continued and was accepted by many, many others found the ideal intolerable in actual practice. Success formulas added drive and provided hope to those moving from the realm of agricultural self-employment, which fed on the agrarian success myth, to the realm of wage labor. The agrarian success myth was gradually replaced in literature with novels of success and adventure about working children out on their own, like those written by Horatio Alger, which glorified hard work and self-improvement. Sometimes, as this passage from The Telegraph Boy shows, that hard work was considered better than the benefit of education:

It was a serious question with our hero whether he would continue his studies through a collegiate course. He finally decided in the negative, and accepted a good position in the mercantile establishment of Mr. Hartley. Here he displayed such intelligence and aptitude for business that he rose rapidly, and in time acquired an interest in the firm, and well in time obtain a junior partnership. It must not be supposed that all 59

this came without hard work. It had always been Frank's custom to discharge to the utmost of his ability the duties of any position in which he was placed. To this special trait of our hero, most of his success was owing. (Alger 254-255)

As more and more goods were manufactured in the United States, the growth of an artisan class provided for and encouraged the acceptance of children into the work force as apprentices and helpers. Opportunities for advancement through hard work from an early age multiplied. Often, this early beginning of labor was seen as, and indeed was, an important part of the educational process for these youthful workers. However, as children moved from working with families in family environments to working for non-family wage payers, that portion of the work experience that had served to bind the family closer together and to provide for the continuation of commonly held values ceased to exist. A good example is provided by the early shoe workers of Lynn, Massachusetts. The craftsmen of Lynn took pride in the involvement of their families in their "ten-footer" enterprises. The "ten-footer" name recognized the small physical size of most of these shops. These "ten-footers" were generally located adjacent to the homes of their owners. Children started as helpers and workers in these early family businesses and could progress through apprenticeships and become masters, like their fathers. These "ten-footers" served as educational, social and cultural centers for families:

In the master shoemaker's household the work team normally included non-related journeymen and apprentices, plus wives. 60

daughters, and sons. Thus the household brought together children and apprentices assisting on minor tasks, women binding the uppers, and journeymen and masters cutting out the pieces of leather, tacking uppers and soles to a last, and sewing uppers and soles together. (Dawley)

The shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, also provide a good example of the way that the growth of manufacturing led to the breakdown of the self-reliant craftsman system. Initially, shoes were made on order as they were needed. Little inventory was maintained by the artisans, and little capital was required for the operation of his "ten-footer." But as markets farther and farther away from their shops were serviced and new methods of distribution for their products were developed, shoes had to made in advance rather than on order, and the need for capital to pay for stockpiles of finished goods and of raw materials increased. This capital often came from outside sources. With the influx of this outside capital, the independence and self-reliance of the workers decreased. Rather than being considered and often treated the same as family members, workers became employees. This contributed to the continuing breakdown of the family as a source of values and to the growing acceptance of the need for family members, including children, to move into the workforce. Increased demands for labor and the uncertainty of farm income caused more and more of the nation's journeyman farmers to leave their land and move into the cities until, in the mid 1800's, the nation had become more and more urban in composition and less and 61 less agrarian. While many citizens continued to live in small towns and in rural areas, population was increasingly growing in the cities and shrinking in the countryside. This internal migration of citizens moving from jobs as farm owners/operators to the city as wage labors brought about acceleration in the need for manufactured products as fewer and fewer citizens remained self-reliant and able to produce all that they needed themselves. To service this multiplying need for products, an external migration took place that provided work opportunities for immigrants to meet the growing demands brought about by the industrial age's need for laborers. These immigrants often had no understanding of the language or culture of the United States and had no conception of the American ideal and the need for citizen participation in the operation of the democratic government. In fact, many of them had a fear of organized government and preferred to work in a more personal and less institutional way to meet their needs for jobs, security, happiness and safety. Many lived in ethnic neighborhoods in the cities and did not become socialized in American traditions. This influx of immigrants and their imported view of the acceptability of child labor served to facilitate the flow of children away from the home and into the factory. The founders of The National Child Labor Committee would likely have agreed with Franklin’s ideals, as would many of those immigrating to the United States, although their thought would have been that these ideals properly should have been applied to adults. 62

not to children. But in 1904, when the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was chartered, there were no differences between adult and child regulations related to work. There was no base- social or legislative—for protecting children. There was no common recognition or agreement that the use of child labor was a problem, so there was no universal agreement that children needed protection. Reform-minded individuals like those who founded the NCLC sensed that a national treasure was being lost as a generation of youngsters missed out on their youth and on the accompanying opportunities for education and growth. But the larger public either had no knowledge of child labor, or had the perception was that there was no problem with child labor, and where there was no problem, no action towards providing a solution was necessary:

Ten-year old boys were commonly found in the blinding dust of coal breakers, picking slate with tom and bleeding fingers; thousands of children sweltered all night for a pittance in the glare of the white-hot furnaces of the glasshouses. Young girls toiled in damp, dust-laden cotton mills for long hours, six days a week. Unsanitary factories and tenement sweatshops, canneries, and the street trades, including the night messenger service, all took their toll from the home, the schoolhouse, and the playground while most Americans looked on with approval or indifference. Child labor had few effective opponents. (Trattner 11)

While belief in the existence of a child labor problem may not have been widespread, and therefore support for solutions not universal, the idea of change itself was not unpopular. Tura-of-the- century America was ripe for revolution and revision. 63

The Greenback Labor Party of the 1870's, the Farmer’s Alliance of the 1880's and the Populists of the 1890's all had contributed to making the early 20th century the era of the progressives. Those who once had been a force for the continuation of the status quo of the agrarian system of the country's founders became a force for change once anomalies illustrated that the agrarian system's reality had moved into the realm of myth. No longer were families working the land together for the common good and benefiting from the sweat of their brow. Work now took children off of the farm and away from the family and the opportunities for the development of values that the home-based work experience had provided in earlier times. While traditional political parties may have continued for the short term with their appeals to the public based on the agrarian ideal, change was imminent. The old philosophy of hands-off individualism was growing more and more out of place. Government, originally of and for the people, was now perceived by many to be government of and for the crooked corporations. The robber barons seemed immune to punishment and, indeed, seemed to be rewarded for their misdirected efforts, while common citizens suffered from low wages and precious little control over their lives. While it can honestly be said that people living in America in the early 1900's were better off than their relatives across the sea, the nation was not nearly as much better off as the democratic potential of its founding and its abundant natural resources should have made it. (Bailey 659) 64

The nation's growing progressivisna made Americans more and more willing to address and atone for sins of the past. All across the land, voices were being raised in opposition to low worker wages and poor working and living conditions. Social injustice was recognized and highlighted. Some citizens began began asking why so much inequity existed between the haves and the have-nots of the world and why so much work produced so little return. Even before the beginning of the 20th century, individual crusaders had contributed to the literature of reform. In 1890, Jacob Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun, authored the book. How the Other Half Lives, a revealing, illustrated documentary account of life in the tenements and slums of New York. Riis particularly influenced Theodore Roosevelt, who became a champion of reform. Roosevelt was known as the trust-busting President who wielded the big stick, both abroad, in his interpretation of the Monroe doctrine, and at home, in his work against the abuses of monopolistic corporations (Bailey 650). Reformed-minded journalists joined the turn-of-the-century crusade begun by Riis's book: "By 1902-1903 a group of 'Muckrakers'—flaming young reformers with prickly pens—had embarked on a determined campaign to lay bare the muck of iniquity in American society" (Bailey 660). These progressive writers, called "Muckrakers" by President Roosevelt, after the man in Pilgrim's Progress who was so intent on raking the muck that he could not see the crown above, were catalysts for change. The 65

Muckrakers' included Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair and others. Through popular newspapers and magazines like McClure's. Cosmopolitan. Collier's and Everybody's, the Muckrakers gradually brought about a reformation. The existing images the members of the general public held in their minds of conditions under which these urban labors, young and old, were often forced to live and work were being changed. The Muckrakers journalistic work brought to light the striking comparison that existed between the life styles of the laborers and their families and the life styles of the wealthy who owned the industrial organizations that employed those laborers. In his novel. The Jungle. Upton Sinclair provides a graphic description of the conditions and the hopelessness Jurgis and Ona faced in their lives in Packingtown:

There were many such dangers, in which the odds were all against them. Their children were not as well as they had been at home; but how could they know that there was no sewer to their house, and that the drainage of fifteen years was in a cesspool under it? How could they know that the pale-blue milk that they bought around the comer was watered, and doctored with formaldehyde besides? . . . How could they find out that their tea and coffee, their sugar and flour had been doctored; that their canned peas had been colored with copper salts, and their fruits and jams with aniline dyes? And even if they had known it, what good would it have done them, since there was no place within miles of them where any other sort was to be had? (Sinclair 79) 66

Contrast this life style with that Jurgis discovered on Lake Shore Drive after becoming an accidental Good Samaritan to Master Freddie Jones, son of the packer for which Jurgis once labored:

He stared and little by little he made out the great apartment with a domed ceiling from which the light poured, and walls that were one enormous painting—nymphs and dryads dancing in a flower-strewn glade—Diana with her hounds and horses, dashing headlong through a mountain streamlet—a group of maidens bathing in a forest-pool—all life-size, and so real that Jurgis thought it was some work of enchantment, the he was in a dream palace. Then his eye passed to the long table in the center of the hall, a table black as ebony, and gleaming with wrought silver and gold. In the center of it was a huge carven bowl, with the glistening gleaming of ferns and the read and purple or rare orchids, glowing from a light hidden somewhere in their midst. (Sinclair 235)

The Muckrakers, through articles and novels like The Jungle, brought about knowledge of the widely divergent lifestyles of the workers and the owners and were important to the beginning of a broad social betterment effort that included recognition of the welfare of children. Attention was given to moving orphans from almshouses and the streets of the cities to farms and homes in the country. Better schools were established with compulsory attendance laws enacted to ensure that children attended. Parks and playgrounds were built to provide places for children to play and learn. Eventually, regulation of child labor conditions was also addressed (Trattner 12). John Spargo's book. The Bitter Crv of the Children, was published in 1906 and cast light upon the abuse and plight of child laborers. 67

Children, in many respects, represented the best opportunity for bringing about change and social improvement in society. The phrase that John Spargo used as the title of his book. The Bitter Cry of the Children, describes the appeal that the plight of these youngsters had for even the most hardened and apathetic adults. A rapidly declining birth rate led to speculation about the possibility of "suicide of the race" and the bleak future the nation faced if its children were not allowed to develop the strength of mind and body necessary for the continuation of the republic (Trattner 12). Revolution in the way that child labor was viewed required knowledge and recognition of the fact that child labor was problematic. In England, Charles Dickens, through his novels, made great strides in calling public attention to the plight of child workers. In Oliver Twist he recounted the ease with which children, particularly orphans, were apprenticed. Children were treated like property to be used in whatever manner benefited their owners best. Dickens' orphans, while considered expendable, received treatment no worse than many other children at the time. This passage from negotiations between the child welfare board responsible for his care and the chimney sweep Gamfield, who needs a boy, describes what sort of working life was likely for a child like Oliver Twist:

"It's a nasty trade," said Mr. Limbkins, when Gamfield had again stated his wish. 68

"Young boys have been smothered in chimneys before now," said another gentleman.

"That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make 'em come down again," said Gamfield; " that's all smoke, and no blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is wery obstinit, and wery lazy, gen'lmen, and ther's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down vith a run. It's humane too, gen'lmen, acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves." (Dickens 16)

Despite the recognition gained in other places for both the evil and the scale of child labor, most people in the United States did not recognize it as a problem that required their attention. Americans certainly did not see child labor as a problem in the United States on the scale and of the severity which they believed existed in England. While members of the National Child Labor Committee in the United States knew that awareness of the problem was important, they also understood that more than awareness was required for a solution to the problem: "Idealists who supposed that if the people realized the truth about child labor they would forthwith abolish it, have learned that public knowledge is not sufficient until it is fired with enthusiasm and guided by active leadership" (Markham, Lindsey and Creel 9). The first step to firing people with enthusiasm is building awareness. Compounding the widespread tacit acceptance of child labor as something not altogether bad was the fact that much misinformation existed about the numbers of children in the 69 workplace, about the types of jobs they were doing, and the conditions under which they were working. In Hostages of Fortune. Jeremy Felt talks about the misinformation problem in New York state:

In 1880 the highly conservative Tenth Census reported over 60,000 children between the ages of ten and fifteen at work in the state at occupations ranging from agriculture to mining and from manufacturing to personal services. Yet, at the same time, Charles Loring Brace of the Children's Aid Society told the New York Times that at least 100,000 children between the ages of eight and sixteen worked in New York City alone. Moreover, only about 35 per cent of the state's youngsters between the ages of five and twenty-one attended public school. Most of the remainder worked. (Felt 1)

In addition to the commonly held belief that not many children were working was the belief that those children who were laboring were doing so to help their families overcome financial hardship and that their labors were necessary for the support of widowed mothers or disabled fathers or for the support of younger brothers and sisters still at home. A study of Chicago workers in 1907 adds support to the argument that children at work did make an important contribution to their families. Almost 50% of the families surveyed were either in debt or living constantly on the edge of debt:

[F]or males eighteen years and over, 73.1 percent of foreign- born males, 60.7 percent of native-born males of foreign fathers, and 57.1 percent of native-born males of native fathers earned less that $600, at a time when the minimum 70

family income necessary for subsistence was estimated to be $780. (Hogan 102)

However, not all accounts are in agreement about the real need of families for income from child labor. In fact, some experts claim that this income, not the lack of it, was the very factor that served to break down rather than maintain traditional family patterns and responsibilities. Felix Adler, writing for the Annals of the American Academy in 1905, refuted the humanitarian argument for child labor:

Economically it is brought home to us, that the wage earned by children in not really an increase of the family earning; that where there is competition between children and men the wages of the men are thereby reduced; so that a family in which man, woman, and child are breadwinners, may not earn more—sometimes earns less—that the income gained by the man when the man alone was the breadwinner. (Adler 21)

The deterioration of wages caused by having children in the work force was a problem but not the only problem families suffered by the use child labor. According to Owen Lovejoy:

Doubtless many social evils threaten the integrity of the home, but when we remove the economic foundation on which the home stands—the ability of the parents to provide for their children during their growing period—we reverse the evolutionary process in human development and condemn the family to inevitable disintegration. This is what the American people are doing when they promote, or tolerate, the premature employment of children. (Lovejoy 83) 71

Despite the deterioration of wages, the growing number of children working and the general breakdown of the family structure, the earliest days of the 20th century and the later decades of the 19th century were known as the "gilded age." The reason was that coal and iron were the keys for the industrial age and during these years, Americans first realized that their nation possessed both minerals in almost unlimited amounts. Some, but not all Americans benefited from these plentiful resources:

[B]y the end of the century the machine age for America had come into being. Primitive technology had become developed technology. Small business had become big business. The old- time entrepreneur, who worked shoulder to shoulder with his help, had been replaced by the large corporation as the significant factor in industrial and commercial advance. (Gabriel 144)

This move from an equal shoulder-to-shoulder relationship between labor and owners to a management/capital-versus-labor situation went along with increasingly polarized income strata in the United States. While this increasing lack of equality for all might have brought about cracks in public support that would have led to questions about the industrial system that continued to grow and continued to employee children in its manufacturing processes, strong arguments for the continuation of that system were presented by the day's leading citizens. One example of a philosophy created to justify this disparity that was growing in a land of opportunity for all and to justify the accumulation of great wealth was offered by 72

Andrew Carnegie in a North American Review essay, entitled, "Wealth"; he outlined the benefit to the world provided by the centralized production that led to the accumulation of wealth. This essay sought to show that an increased standard of living for all was the result of the industrial process. Carnegie's essay went on to explain that the accumulation of massive worth by a limited few was a necessary, indeed unavoidable, result of such a system. For individuals with talent to do less than the most that they were able to do would be unacceptable in God's eyes. Besides, according to Carnegie, there was no acceptable means of avoiding the accumulation of wealth that did not undermine the capital-intense system of manufacture and its attendant good for humanity. The responsibility Carnegie's gospel of wealth demanded of those who were able to accumulate was that they share their wealth with those who could not:

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of Wealth: First, to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves. (Carnegie 662) 73

Much of this wealth came as a result of extremely rapid industrialization. This rapid growth, combined with early beliefs about the good benefit of work, brought continually increasing numbers of children into the work force. An understanding of the beliefs about the treatment of children, children’s work, education, and the relationship of children with their families and with God helps set the stage for the work done by the National Child Labor Committee in the early part of the 20th century. Players in the child labor arena included religious leaders, educational leaders, labor leaders, and settlement-house workers.

The Role of Religion

Religious beliefs were important forces behind the way that childhood and children were viewed in colonial America. Jonathan Edwards called upon members of his congregation as children, strengthening the view of the family unit as all-powerful, to take advantage of their opportunity for salvation. The all powerful relationship between God's power over his children here on earth through the ministry, his representative in this world, and the power of parents over their children is clear;

And now you have an extraordinary opportunity, a day wherein Christ has flung the door of mercy wide open, and stands in the door calling and crying with a loud voice to poor sinners; a day wherein many are flocking to him and pressing into the Kingdom of God. Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many, that were very likely in the same 74

miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him that has loved them and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the Glory of God. (Edwards 43)

Humans were by nature sinful but, would they simply bend their wills to the wishes of God, they would be guided and rewarded. By the same token, children should bend their wills to the wishes of their parents for the best chance of happiness here on earth and in the hereafter. God-like terms were used to describe both the authority of the supreme being and that of the head of the family unit here on earth. The relationship between the family and God in the early days of American history, particularly in regards to raising children, is made clear in this passage from William McLoughlin's Revivals. Awakenings, and Reform: An Essav on Religion and Social Change in America:

Parental (usually "paternal") child-rearing practices in the eighteenth century were fair but firm. Fathers and mothers took very seriously their duty to exact obedience even from infants — for their own sake, not simply for that of the parent. God commanded parents to break their children's wills: Spare the rod and spoil the child. Spoil the child, and one had sinned in one's duty to God, the child and the community. (McLoughlin 48) Work outside the home that came with child labor during the industrial revolution was one reason for the weakening of the parental bond. Another even earlier explanation may come from the gradual expansion westward in search of space as New England 75

became more and more populated. As the parental bond weakened, so did the family traditions and training that might help guarantee the continuation of the ideals on which the United States had been founded (McLoughlin 56). Later generations of children, perhaps as a result of this tendency for migration and the loosening of family ties that it brought, had different feelings toward their parents than did those of earlier generations:

Apparently the generations that came of age after 1800 felt less awe and fear of their parents, more love and respect. Parents evidently treated their children in a less arbitrary fashion, perhaps because nuclear families encouraged voluntary' cooperation from their children lest they take off for the West or go to sea. (McLoughlin 115)

Whether from love or respect, families did play an important role in decisions relating to child labor in 19th-century America. These decisions were based on both economic and cultural factors, but cultural concerns seemed to dominate:

The participation of women and children in a collective family effort was sanctioned by the cultural values that immigrant workers brought with them to the United States from their pre-migration communities. Even under conditions of economic marginality, the strategies of immigrant families were guided by their cultural values, which were sometimes in conflict with middle-class values in the dominant culture. (Hareven 117) 76

These family held values and the endorsement of parental authority by organized religion fortified the ability of the family to make these work related decisions:

The decision to send a child into the labor force was primarily, if not entirely, a parental one. Collective family values dictated that children follow their parents' decisions; however, the very dependency of the family on the earnings of children gave the latter considerable maneuverability in implementing these decisions. (Hareven 118) Other changes in child-rearing practices that came with the growth in outside-of-home wage labor by fathers that may have had an effect on child labor practices was a reassignment of the responsibility for the teaching and training of children: "Children were tender rosebuds from God, and mothers must assume a sacrificial role in cultivating these buds. The wife's sacrifices for husband and children paralleled in symbolic ways the sacrifices of the Son of God to his Father" (McLoughlin 120-121). By the early 1800's, churches had become concerned about the lack of education for children. Their belief that conununication with God was possible only through first-hand knowledge of the Bible required that youngsters be able to read. The fact that many children were spending most of their waking hours working prevented their proper education. Even those who did not subscribe to the belief in a religious need for education felt that the preservation of independence and the republic, even the survival of democracy, relied on a well-educated population (Trattner 28-29). 77

By the late 19th-century members of protestant churches accounted for nearly 20% of the United State’s total population. Protestant churches backed public schools as the way to both educate and socialize the nation. These churches: "believed that such institutions could contribute significantly to the molding of a more homogeneous people, socializing and Americanizing those from many immigrant backgrounds and providing them with a set of moral values" (Handy 285). But, even with agreement on the need for education, the way that this education was to be accomplished was not always easily decided on. The transfer of responsibility for education from the family to the state was an uneasy one. The acceptance of the school’s disciplinary policies was a concern for many parents, but was mitigated to some extent by the fact that educators were not major shareholders in the community power structure, and therefore parents’ demands were not often ignored (Hareven 122). However, recognition of the need for education and the reassignment of responsibility for that education from parents to schools, did not eliminate the use of children in the work force. Another area of important contribution made by religion to reform in America was in the number of settlement workers who were influenced by churches: "In 1905 William Dwight Porter Bliss, Christian socialist and reformer, polled 339 settlement workers and discovered that 88 per cent were active church members; furthermore, nearly all admitted that religion had been a dominant 78 influence on their lives" (Davis 27). In The Age of Reform. Richard Hofstadter goes even farther in assigning the settlement workers' sense of social justice to their acceptance of Protestant guilt for the sins of their generation and generations of the past:

Here it was that a most important aspect of the Protestant personality came into play: its ethos of personal responsibility. American life and American mythology had been keyed to the conditions of rural simplicity and village neighborliness under which personal responsibility for the problems—and the morals—of others could in fact often be assumed. (Hofstadter 2 0 4 -2 0 5 )

According to Hofstadter, the more the Muckrakers did their job of creating awareness for the deficiencies and lack of equality in society, the greater the burden of guilt that Protestant America felt. Settlement workers shared with all Protestants a sense of moral indignation that was more often directed at themselves than at others. Protestants provide leadership in the move "to use the powers of the democratic state for the public good, with particular attention to the underprivileged" (Handy 290). While Catholics, Jews and people with no church affiliation support this social gospel, protestant leaders were at its forefront (Handy 289). But not all religious efforts during the late 19th century were aimed at helping advance the cause of social reform. One of the most influential evangelists of the late 1800’s and early 1900's was Billy Sunday. He represented a return to an emphasis on free will and the moral responsibility of individuals for their own well being. While 79

Billy Sunday may never have attacked humanitarian reformers like Jane Addams directly, he disdained the growing attention toward social uplift practices at the expense of saving souls: "The trouble with the church, the YMCA, and the Young People's Societies is that they have taken up sociology and settlement work but are not winning souls to Christ" (Billy Sunday quoted in McLoughlin 148). Sunday believed that the way to end crime and poverty was to return to the principles of the Protestant ethic so that welfare aid, which he saw as taxing the hard-working middle class to support the shiftless poor, would not be needed. Contemporaries of Sunday's did not necessarily disagree with his Protestant ethic but sought to move it from an individual to a group application. This social gospel or progressive wing of Protestantism taught that Jesus promoted a doctrine of community and fraternity:

The social gospel movement got its name because it rejected individual salvation as the beginning and end of Christ's message and because it argued that men must come to God not as discrete, atomistic individuals, pure only in and or themselves, but as parts of the brotherhood of man, in which each is spiritually and ethically united to his neighbor. (McLoughlin 171-172) 80

The Role of Education

Child labor leaders early stated their position with respect to education. In 1905, in an article entitled, "School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor," James H. Kirkland expressed that position:

But we take the position that an opportunity must be given to everyone, and that every child must have Üie privilege of working out his own life, of developing the best that is in him— and therefore we believe that every child must have the chance of an education. We are opposed to child labor because it shuts out that opportunity, and make education impossible.

Therefore no legislation on this subject can be satisfactory if it ignores the educational requirements of the child...... Our problem is not merely to keep the child under sixteen out of the factory or mine, but to keep the child at work in school. (Kirkland 87)

Kirkland continued with the enumeration of three contentions that should be considered. First, all child labor laws must contain a definite educational requirement, an educational requirement that shall be of primary importance, not secondary after work or other obligations. Second, those with an interest in education should be involved in the execution of child labor laws. Notaries and even parents may have a vested interest in the gainful employment of a child and should not be entrusted with enforcement of the educational component of child labor laws. Third, better schools and more of them should be a focus of all child labor reform efforts (Kirkland 88-89). 81

The nation’s first settlers recognized the importance of education: "The early New England Puritans, many of them graduates of Cambridge and Oxford Universities, were thoroughly interested in education, placing the schoolmaster’s vocation second only to that of the ministry" (Williams 80). Boston had established a Latin School in 1635, and in 1636, Harvard University was founded. An inscription on the west gateway of Harvard Yard reads:

AFTER GOD HAD CARRIED US SAFE TO NEW ENGLAND AND WE HAD BUILDED OUR HOUSES PROVIDED NECESSARIES FOR OUR LIVELIHOOD REARED CONVENIENT PLACES FOR GOD’S WORSHIP AND SETTLED THE CIVILL GOVERNMENT ONE OF THE NEXT THINGS WE LONGED FOR AND LOOKED AFTER WAS TO ADVANCE LEARNING AND PERPETUATE IT TO POSTERITY DREADING TO LEAVE AN ILLITERATE MINISTRY TO THE CHURCHES WHEN OUR PRESENT MINISTERS SHALL LIE IN DUST (Tyler 227)

That emphasis on the importance of learning for the future was not limited to the education of ministers. From the beginnings of the new nation, education was seen as a national priority: "During the period of the American Revolution statesmen turned their attention to the problem of educating those upon whose shoulders would fall the burden of making a success of the new republican form of government (Tyler 230). Many of the nation’s founding fathers understood well the importance on an educated citizenry. In a letter that he wrote to 82

George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson expressed his thoughts on education:

Preach my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. . . .The tax which will be paid for this purpose, is not more than the thousandth part of what well be paid to kings, priests, and nobles, who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance, (quoted in Padover 75-76)

While early leaders had an understanding of the importance of education and called for the establishment of ways to educate the populace, little was accomplished toward this goal until the mid 1800's: "No reform of the 1830's and 1840's aroused greater interest than did that of education, and the champions of its cause were prolific in schemes and methods of curing its ills" (Tyler 233). During this time, common people became aware of the value of the education of which they had been deprived and determined to use their power at the polling place to ensure that their children received the education they deserved and needed. Early attempts at providing for public education had been less than successful. In 1642, a compulsory education law was enacted and placed on the Boston books. Parents were required to furnish information about the number and ages of their children to officials and could be punished for not sending their children to schools. But since the law provided funds for neither school construction nor school staffing, the law was unenforceable. The first general school 83 law in American history was enacted in 1647 to overcome these shortcomings. The law, known as "the old deluder law" begins:

It being one chief object of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded by false glosses of Saint-seeming deceivers, that learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers in the Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors .... (Williams 81)

The law continues with its requirements that townships must appoint teachers to be paid by the parents or masters of the children and that, as towns grow, school buildings must be erected to house these students and their teachers. This law made schools compulsory but not school attendance or maintenance and had no provision for free schools for those who could not afford to pay. The law also operated on the assumption, accurate at the time, that all citizens lived in or close to towns. That was less and less the case as the United States expanded westward and the population became more and more decentralized. One of the leaders in making the public aware of the shortcomings in existing school systems and for suggesting ways that educational goals might better be realized was Horace Mann. For 12 years, beginning in 1837, he worked as the Superintendent of Education in Massachusetts. Each year he produced an annual report that was a battle in the campaign to provide better schools. 84 textbooks, libraries and equipment. Education reformers like Mann strongly believed that compulsory-attendance laws should be enacted and enforced. It should be noted that even a hundred years after Mann's time, compulsory school attendance laws in the South were still problematical. A study done by the National Child Labor Committee in 1922 showed that a major factor in school absence in rural areas was that schools were located to far away. For example, children in West Virginia were covered by compulsory attendance laws only if schools were located within two miles of their homes. Even those students who were fortunate enough to have schools located within two miles of their homes often found those schools poorly equipped and lacking good teachers and good community support. In addition, these schools were only in operation about 6 1/2 months per year (Clopper 94-139). But at the turn of the century, family income needs were often placed before individual educational needs, and parents were often guilty of ignoring or bypassing compulsory education laws. Evidence gathered in the early 1900's disputes the claim that poverty was the compelling force that drove children out of the classrooms and into the work rooms:

The present need of poor families, rather than the future needs of their children, is so often invoked as an excuse for home work that it is of special interest to note that among 521 families visited only 12 per cent, had widowed, separated, or deserted mothers; only 2 per cent, had invalid fathers; and only 1 per cent, had incapacitated fathers. Four per cent, of the 85

widows had no children under 16. (Markham, Lindsey and Creel 256)

Educators were often lax in demanding enforcement, perhaps for good reason. School facilities in New York were estimated to be capable of holding only a fraction of the youthful population that should be attending. According to the state superintendent of public instruction, about 644,000, or approximately one-third of New York's school-age children, were receiving no education at all (Felt 25). At the same time, the average size of a New York primary-school teacher’s class was 70 children. Not surprising, then, is that school officials were less than diligent in identifying and forcing more children into the classrooms. Besides, school officials were reluctant to intervene and supplant the authority of parents over their own children. Coupled with lack of facilities, lack of teachers, and lack of parents or educators willing to enforce compulsory laws when they came into effect was the simple fact that most children felt that schools did not meet their needs. Helen Todd, a factory inspector in Chicago, conducted extensive questioning of children and their em ployers:

In 1909 I took 500 children out of twenty factories in all parts of Chicago, and asked them this question: If your father had a good job, and you didn’t have to work, which would you rather do—go to school or work in a factory?’

Of 500 children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen, 412 said they would rather work in a factory than go to school. 86

These astonishing and unlooked-for statistics bewildered me. (Markham, Lindsey and Creel 373)

The reasons the children gave provided insights into the unpleasanmess of school life due to verbal and physical abuse. Other reasons pointed at the seeming lack of relationship between education and higher income: "That boy can't speak English, and he gets six dollars. I only get four dollars, and I’ve been through the sixth grade" (Markham, Lindsey and Creel 374). "Oncet I worked in a night school in the Settlement an’ in the day school too. Gee, I humped myself. I got three cards with ’excellent’ on ’em,. An’ they never did me no good. My mother kept them in the Bible, an’ they never did her no good, neither. They ain’t like a pay envelope" (Markham, Lindsey and Creel 375). Members of the National Child Labor Committee saw it as their duty to make sure children who were freed from the constraints of factory labor took advantage of the opportunity and continued with their education. The NCLC also underscored that education must be so constructed as to meet the needs and hold the interest of these children if this goal was to be accomplished: "Children needed schools to receive them and teachers to instruct them. But they also had to have a curriculum adapted to their needs and their interests— vocational, recreational, and social” (Trattner 156). 87

The Role of Organized Labor

While the churches and their ministers were important in developing attitudes toward child rearing and education played a role in reform, organized labor was also an important group that recognized the need for regulation of child labor in this country. Labor unions played a key role in the development of awareness of the widespread existence of child labor in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century, although settlement houses rather than the organized labor movement itself were the primary instigators of reform for child labor. To organized labor's credit, an examination of the history of both the child reform movement and the labor movement suggests that, had early social reformers not taken up the cause, it is likely that it would have been adopted by labor unions at a later time. The agenda for organized labor during the 1880's and 1890's was dominated by issues related to its own survival and growth. Child labor regulations, minimum-age and educational requirements for children, and other issues of social significance did surface as early issues for organized labor, but they did not consistently occupy places of high priority on union agendas. Organized labor played a part in early attempts at recognition of the evil of child labor. At its convention in 1832, the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics and Other Workingmen condenmed child labor not for religious reasons and not because of 88 the interference that labor at an early age wrought on the educational process but because of the evils of the child labor system itself: "Children should not be allowed to labor in the factories from morning till night, without any time for healthy recreation and mental culture . . . for it endangers their . . . well-being and health" (Trattner 29). The first real idea of the magnitude of child labor in the United States came with the census of 1870. This census, the first to make note of the number of children workers, prompted publication of several books that served to begin the consciousness raising of the American public. The first, entitled. The Dangerous Classes of New York, was authored in 1872 by Charles Loring Brace and was devoted, in part, to an examination of child labor and the factory system. The second was a sequel to How the Other half Lives by Jacob Riis and was entitled. Children of the Poor. This book dealt with the wholesale evasion of child labor laws in New York. The attention brought about by the 1870 census and by these two books, preceded the involvement of organized labor and political parties in the effort to recognize and resolve the child labor issue. The Knights of Labor adopted two strong policies in their constitution regarding child labor. First, wording was added to their constitution that prohibited the labor of children under the age of 15 in shops, mines, and factories (Schnapper 131). Second, the minimum age for entrance to the Knights of Labor was set at 21 years (Recommendations and Principles 1). 89

While both of these policies were powerful in theory, the commitment demonstrated by the Knights to their first policy on minimum age for workers appears somewhat diluted by the fact that the minimum age was consistently lowered throughout the history of the organization. The second, the membership age for the Knights of Labor, was lowered from 21 years to 18 years in 1882 by Master Workman Terrence V. Powderly. While a reduction in the minimum age for membership may have reflected the reality of the labor marketplace and indeed resulted in more workers being eligible for the benefits provided by the Knights, the lowering of the minimum acceptable age for workers set by the constitution is not so easily explained. The Knights also called for compulsory school attendance for children between the ages of 7 and 15 years for 10 months each year and for free textbooks for these children (Readings 69). Other labor organizations joined with the Knights during the late 1800’s to recognize and speak out against the dangers of premature employment. The Prohibition Party included a clause in its national platform condemning child labor—the first political party of any consequence to take such a stand. In 1876, the Working Men’s Party, a radical labor union, proposed laws barring the employment of children under 14 in industry. Despite these initiatives, by 1880, when a new census was taken, 1 out of 6 children between the ages of 10 and 15 were in the work force (Trattner 32-33). 90

One problem with much of the support offered by labor unions in their early backing of child labor reform was the perception that their efforts were self-serving. In fact, this appearance of service to self rather than to the cause of the children could not help but have affected the credibility of organized labor's efforts. John Spargo had been involved with an agitation in Pennsylvania during the early 1900's involving members of the Cigarmakers' Union in a protest against child labor:

The labor unions have always opposed child labor, for the reason that they know from experience how its employment tends to displace adult labor and to reduce wages. In the case of the Cigarmakers' agitation the chief grievance was the fact that children were making for $2 and $2.50 per thousand the same class of cigars as the men were paid from $7.50 to $8 per thousand for making. (Spargo 193)

While this effort was not aimed primarily at helping the child labor cause directly, it did have significance for child labor reform and did suggest that child labor did not have the strong support it once had enjoyed. Much of the involvement in child labor reform by organized labor came as a secondary concern. A cigarmaker of some prominence, Samuel Gompers, assisted the child labor reform cause in just such a secondary way. By attempting to outlaw tenement manufacturing in New York, Gompers hoped to improve conditions and wages and to be able to organize these tenement workers more easily. In the process, he discovered that nearly 50% of the cigars 91 manufactured in New York were made in tenement houses. Of the 10,000 workers in the tenements, over 2,000 were children. His efforts were not specifically aimed at the cause of the child workers, although the children did benefit. One of the disadvantages to union involvement in issues like tenement work was that the unions viewed these issues as only the concern of labor, thereby not utilizing the full force that might otherwise have been marshalled to help. Had the child labor component of the effort been recognized separately, more involvement by other groups could have been brought to bear on resolving the problems (Felt 10-11). Another boost to the cause of child labor reform provided by organized labor was the establishment in 1883 of a state bureau of labor statistics in New York. Data about what was going on were essential, both for the cause of organized labor and for the cause of child labor reform. The first study by the newly established bureau proved to be worthless. Requested by the New York Workingman's Assembly, the count showed that less than 261 workers were under the age of 14. The rather conservative Federal census of 1880 had given a higher count to child labor. In fact, two years later, one inspector discovered that the Harmony Cotton Mills alone employed 200 children under the age of 13 (Felt 14). Labor’s incidental help cannot be discounted, but credit cannot be given organized labor during this period for taking much independent initiative on behalf of child labor reform: 92

While organized labor was represented on the committee by Samuel B. Donnelly, of the Central Federated Union of New York City, labor was by no means a dominant factor within the committee. Nor was the new group in any sense an extension of the state federation of labor. Labor did at times provide valuable assistance to the committee, and as the state federation grew more powerful, its support for child labor bills was of great importance to the committee in Albany. But labor almost always had to be asked; it was the committee or some other private group such as the Consumer’ League that took the initiative. (Felt 47)

Organized labor played a role in the first National Child Labor Committee. This committee was organized in New York in 1904. Edgar E. Clark, Grand Chief Conductor of the Order of Railway Conductors of America, was a charter member. Clark, however, was unable to attend the Committee's first annual assembly and sent a letter of support instead. The letter that he provided to explain his absence gives some telling recognition to the concerns that had been expressed by others about organized labor's involvement with child labor reform:

Organized labor, wherever it has got on its feet with sufficient security to permit of its giving thought to any subject aside from its own immediate struggle for existence, has raised its voice in opposition to child labor. This is not, as some charge, indicative of selfishness or desire to promote self-interest on the part of the working men. (National Child Labor Committee Proceedings 157)

Labor organizations in later years took a stronger stand against child labor. During the 1922 hearings before the House Judiciary committee, Samuel Gompers, then President of the American 93

Federation of Labor, testitied on behalf of the child labor reform cause:

If I cannot speak in the name of the ladies and gentlemen with whom I am joined here this morning, I can speak for labor: I can speak for the men and women that toil as I express my own deep convictions that it is a crime against civilization and a blot upon our claim to progress and civilization, if the government of our country, the most wonderfully developed country in industry and commerce, and standing as one of the greatest nations on the face of the earth, permits the labor of the young for the purposes of profit and exploitation. (Johnsen 3 1 4 -3 1 5 )

The evidence seems to show clearly that labor unions did, indeed, play an important role in the building of awareness of the extent to which child labor was used in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The support of organized labor, particularly in the political battle for legislation, was certainly important, but the labor movement itself was not the primary cause or impetus for reform. That distinction must go to the settlement workers and reformers for the efforts they contributed in organizing and propagandizing the issue for the American public.

The Role of Settlement Workers

Support for workers and families in America’s urban industrial settlements took many forms. Both the paternalistic approach used by benevolent employers which may have been somewhat self- serving as a strategy to undermine the formation of labor unions. 94 and the self-help societies that were the core of many early community and labor organizations demonstrated recognition that problems for American workers existed. Ironically, the one solution that may have been the most effective in helping working women and children came from the same society that exported to early America its positive views on the acceptability of child labor. England was the site of the world's first settlement house:

On Christmas eve 1884, two Oxford University students slept in a half-completed building in the slums of East London. They did not come for a brief visit to an exciting underworld, nor did they intend to dole out charity to the needy. They expected to become residents of the neighborhood, and to learn as well as to teach. They were the first settlement workers, and the half completed Toynbee Hall, the first settlement. (Davis 123)

The settlement movement was bound up in romanticism and humanism in a world dominated by materialism and urban industrialism. In this country, settlement workers were often strong supporters of organized labor but probably contributed little of substance to organized labor's course. In other areas, though, settlement workers were more influential:

Much more important in the long run were their attempts to aid working women and children, who were usually more desperately in need of help and more willing to accept aid than were the men. The settlement workers often co-operated with organized labor, but reformers, rather than labor leaders, led the fight to abolish child labor and to regulate and improve the conditions of work for women. Settlement workers helped to organize the National Child Labor Committee and the National Women's Trade Union League. (Davis 123) 95

Jane Addams was the founder in 1889 of Hull House in Chicago, America's oldest settlement house. The preface to 100 Years at Hull House quotes historian Charles Beard: "Although its influence cannot be measured, the guess may be hazarded that no other single institution of the period did as much to counteract the dogma of individualism and restore the social principle to thought about civilization" (Bryan and Davis ix). Robert Morss Lovett, writer and social commentator, says, "The beginning of Miss Addams' and Miss Starr's residence among the poor of Chicago marks the beginning of the modern social movement in the United States" (Bryan and Davis ix). Settlement houses differed from charity organizations in several ways:

To begin with, charity workers emphasized the individual causes of poverty, while settlement workers stressed the social and economic conditions that made people poor. Charity organizations sought primarily to help paupers and the unemployed; settlement workers, on the other hand, believed that they could work best with the working class above the poverty line. It was not so much the poverty of clothes as the poverty of opportunity that concerned settlements. (Davis 18)

The early documenter of life in the slums, Jacob Riis of New York City, compared the efforts of charity organizations with a coal chute that provided a conduit for feeding needed items to the poor but that left conditions as they were. He saw settlement houses as bridges that provided avenues for poor families to cross over to the side of self-reliance. Supporters of charity organizations did not all 96 agree with Riis’s assessment: "One compared the settlement worker to a man who found a drunkard lying in the gutter and said to him, I can’t help you my friend, but I will sit down in the gutter beside you'" (Davis 20). This differences in philosophy provided different results. Charity organizations resulted in philanthropy, while settlement houses aimed at reform. In 1902, Robert Hunter, an itinerant political radical who lived in settlements while working for charity societies, observed:

The charity worker was hesitant about becoming involved in reform: he had a philosophy of "don't, don't" and was constantly troubled by the kar that relief would destroy the independence of the poor. By contrast, the settlement worker was more often the victim of unbounded enthusiasm rather than of moral questioning. (Davis 19)

Reform-minded people, high with enthusiasm and not limited by the "don't, don't" view, joined Jane Addams at Hull House over the years. Florence Kelley came to Hull House in 1891 and brought with her an interest in research and reform. The immigrant families who lived in the surrounding neighborhood always had been a concern of Jane Addams', and Florence Kelley took up their cause with a particular interest in the thousands of women and children living and working in the neighborhood's tenement houses. During her first year of residence, Kelley conducted a door-to-door census in the one square mile area surrounding Hull House and discovered families of 18 different nationalities working in sweatshops and tenement 97 occupations of all sorts. The results of this census led to the appointment of an Illinois legislative commission of inquiry into the employment of women and children in manufacture. Kelley and another Hull House resident, Mary Kenney, served as guides (Bryan and Davis 26). Concerns about the health of young workers was the focus for this effort at reform. Contamination of garments from tenement house manufacturers contributed to the spread of small pox and other diseases among the general public. The efforts of Florence Kelley and Hull House led to an Illinois State law that provided for the destruction of contaminated garments on the spot, the maintenance of distribution records for tenement goods, and the establishment of a State bureau for inspection and enforcement. While the legislation was very progressive and surpassed laws existing in other states, the degree to which enforcement was possible was disappointing:

My first effort to apply the penalty for employing children below the age of sixteen years without the prescribed working paper, led me to the office of the district attorney for Cook County. This was a brisk young politician with no interest whatever in the new law and less in the fate of the persons for whose benefit it existed. The evidence in the case I laid before him was complete, an eleven-years-old boy, illegally engaged to gild cheap picture frames by means of a poisonous fluid had lost the use of his right arm, which was paralyzed. There was no compensation law and no prohibition of work in hazardous occupations. There was only a penalty of twenty dollars for employing a child without tiie required certificate. The young official looked at me with impudent surprise and said in a tone 98

of astonishment: Are you calculating on my taking this case? (Kelley 28)

Florence Kelley reflected the thoughts of most settlement house workers when she called for a minimum work age of 16, compulsory school attendance through age 16, factory inspectors and truant officers, and ample provisions for accommodations for children during the years when they are in school. The key was school attendance, which required making "our public schools not class institutions, but in deed and in truth the schools of the people, by the people, for the people" (Bryan and Davis 39). Settlement workers had a direct effect on legislation aimed at bringing about improvement in child labor conditions. They differed from their English counterparts. The view that reform must start with the individual was held by English settlement-house workers. American settlement house workers felt that the change must come first in the social environment (Davis 16). An early story tells of the unsuccessful efforts of Hull House residents to interest neighborhood children in candy at Christmas time. In fact, many of the neighborhood children could not even stand the sight of candy. Perplexed, the residents investigated and discovered that these children were working six days a week in a candy factory and associated the sweets with their labor. Others worked in even more dangerous and demanding jobs. According to Jane Addams, "It was perhaps inevitable that efforts to secure a child labor law would be our first venture into the field of state legislation" (Davis 124). The 99 efforts of two Hull House residents, Florence Kelley and Alizina Stevens, led to the first child labor law in Illinois, the Illinois Factor}' Act of 1893, "which provided for factory inspection and prohibited the employment of children under fourteen at night, or for longer than eight hours during the day" (Davis 125). On their own scale, these efforts had an effect, but legislation was of little value unless it resulted in laws that could be enforced. Unless laws met a need to which the majority of the population could relate, they were not likely to be effective. Laws, regulations and rules that were not fully endorsed and understood by the citizens could have little ultimate effect on working conditions for children.

Chapter Summary

The years between the end of the Civil War Reconstruction and the end of the First World War represent a search for order of an enormous magnitude. Robert H. Wiebe, in his book The Search for Order, characterized this period, the years between 1877 and 1920, as one of massive growth in reform movements and one that represents a fundamental shift in American values. Old values could not account for changes that came with the staggering growth in population and diversity and the move from a rural, agriculture based society to an urban, industrial one. During this period of searching for order, a new middle class emerged and with it a new set of values for American life. 100

Reformers surfaced on many levels. Some took on the government and attempted to streamline and modify it to serve the needs of a newly reformulated nation with a radically different population and different social needs better. Others looked toward the slums with an eye to giving attention to public health, factory and housing conditions for city residents:

If humanitarian progressivism had a central theme, it was the child. He united the campaigns for health, education, and a richer city environment, and he dominated much of the interest in labor legislation. Female wage earners—mothers in absentia—received far closer attention than male, movements for industrial safety and workmen’s compensation invariably raised the specter of the unprotected young, and child labor laws drew the progressives' unanimous support. The most popular versions of legal and penal reform also emphasized the needs of youth. Something more than sympathy for the helpless, or even the powerful influence of women in this portion of progressivism, explained that intense preoccupation. The child was the carrier of tomorrow’s hope whose innocence and freedom made him singularly receptive to education in rational, humane behavior. Protect him, nurture him, and in his manhood he would create that bright new world of the progressives’ vision. (Wiebe 168-169)

With influences from religious leaders, educators, organized labor and settlement house workers, tum-of-the-century America was a time of receptivity for great change. Moving the issue of child labor reform onto the public agenda and crystalizing a view of the desired changes in the existing system in the public’s mind were the goals of the National Child Labor Committee. This is the committee that engaged Lewis Hine and his photographic eye. 101

Sources Cited - Chapter II

The Annals of the American Academy: National Child Labor Committee Proceedings. 1905.

Abbott, Edith. "Early History of Child Labor in America." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1908.

Adler, Felix. "Child Labor in the United States and Its Great Attendant Evils." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1905.

Alger, Horatio Jr. The Telegraph Boy or Making His Wav in New York. Chicago: M.A. Donohue, 18—.

Bailey, Thomas A. The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1956.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, and Allen F. Davis, ed. 100 Years at Hull- House. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Carnegie, Andrew. "Wealth." North American Review. New York: No 391, June, 1889.

Davis, Allen F. Spearheads for Reform. The Urban Life in America Series. Ed. Richard C. Wade. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Dawley, Alan. Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Dickens, Charles. The_Oxford Illustrated Dickens Oliver Twist. London, Oxford University Press, 1949. 102

Dulles, Rhea Foster, and Melvyn Dubofsky. Labor in America: A History. Fourth Edition ed. Arlington Heights, Dlinois: Harlan Davidson, 1984.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." American Literature. Scribner Literature Series. New York: Scribner Laidlaw, 1741.

Felt, Jeremy P. "Children at Work." The Underside of American History. Ed. Thomas Frazier. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Felt, Jeremy P. Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965.

Folks, Gertrude H. "Rural School Attendance." Rural Child Welfare. Ed. Edward N. Clopper. New York: Mcmillan, 1922.

Gabriel, Ralph Henry. The Course of American Democratic Thought: An Intellectual History Since 1815. Ronald Series in History. Ed. Robert C. Brinkley and Ralph Henry Gabriel. New York: Ronald Press, 1940.

Handy, Robert T. "Protestant Theological Tensions and Political Styles in the Progressive Period." Religion & American Politics From the Colonial Period to the 1980*s. Ed. Mark A Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Hareven, Tamara K. "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change." The American Historical Review. Vol. 96, 1991.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. New York: Vintage, 1955.

Johnsen, Julia E. Selected Articles on Child Labor. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1925.

Kelley, Florence. "Tenement House Manufacture." 100 Years at Hull- House. Ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. 103

Kelley, Florence, and Alizina P. Stevens. "Wage-Earning Children." 100 Years at Hull-House. Ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Kirkland, James H. "School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters' Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1905.

Lovejoy, Owen. "Child Labor and Family Disintegration." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: TH. W. Wilson, 1906.

Markham, Edwin, Benjamin B. Lindsey, and George Creel. Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor - its Causes, its Crimes, and its Cure. New York: Hearst's International Library, 1914.

McLoughlin, William G. Revivals. Awakenings, and Reform: An Essav on Religion and Social Change in America. 1607-1977. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Padover, Saul K. Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942.

"Readings." History 689.01 The Ohio State University. Course Copy: Spring 1989.

"Recommendations and Principles of the Chicago Knights of Labor. " Chicago Dailv Inter-Ocean. March 27, 1884.

Schnapper, M B. American Labor: A Pictorial Social History. Washington D C.: Public Affairs, 1975.

Spargo, John. The Bitter Cry of the Children. New York: Macmillan, 1907. 104

Trattner, Walter I. Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970.

Tyler, Alice Felt. Freedom's Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944. CHAPTER in

LEWIS HENE’S WORK CONSIDERED BIOGRAPHICALLY

Introduction

The history of child labor in the United States illustrates the evolving views that set the stage for change on the American scene. Unrest among churches, schools, organized labor and settlement- house workers brought about pressure on the issue of child labor. Some form of response was called for, but the form that response would take was unanticipated and unprecedented. Earlier revolutions in thought and deed had been carried out by soldiers with swords, orators with speeches, or writers with printed tracts. This time, a major element in the response was made by an unassuming man who was mastering a relatively new weapon along the way—the photographic process. Lewis Hine was that man, and, in the course of fashioning a response to meet the challenges of the time, he defined a new genre in photography. Hine was the progenitor of the picture story, a communication form that combined groups of images and words so

105 106

that they worked together. Hine's photographic work was done early in the 20th century, concurrent with the development of the technology that made the direct reproduction of photographic images in the mass media possible. He became the first in a long and continuing progression of practitioners of photojournalism. Photojournalism, the combination of words and images, takes us where we would not normally go, to see things that we would not normally see, to help us develop a way of understanding and explaining the world. According to the authors of Documentary Photographv. "With Lewis Hine, documentary photography moved out of the slums of New York and across the country—wherever contemporary reform movements led the way" (Kismaric and Horan 56). In The History of Photography, photo-historian Beaumont Newhall describes Hine as greatly concerned with the welfare of the underprivileged. Hine found the camera to be both a powerful research and communication tool:

Hine realized, as Riis had before him, that his photographs were subjective and, for that very reason, were powerful and readily grasped criticisms of the impact of an economic system on the lives of underprivileged and exploited classes. He described his work as "photo-interpretations." The photographs were published as "human documents." (Newhall, The History of Photographv 235)

Hine understood that photographers could exercise control over the unique characteristics of photographs to make them serve their 107 needs. Although photographs were representations of reality, the reality that they depicted could be controlled easily and selectively by the photographer. In 1903, after his 30th birthday, Hine was introduced to photography. His first camera was a 5 x 7 inch graphic, a tool that today would be considered unwieldily and far from well suited for the type of candid, slice-of-life photography that Hine practiced. The man who was to become the nation's foremost social photographer took his first photographs as school photographer for the Ethical Culture School in New York, where he was employed as an assistant teacher of nature study and geography. As a teacher, Hine understood the value of words in communicating ideas. His very livelihood depended on his ability to use words well. As his understanding of photography grew, he began to discover the value of photographs in the learning process. Lewis Hine was a pioneer in the use of photography as an educational tool, as is demonstrated by turn of the century articles he published in both The Elementary School Teacher and The Photographic Times. As Hine's skill with both the camera and pen grew, so did his understanding of the potential for persuasion that the combination of the two—words and pictures—offered. Hine combined words and pictures in several ways. First were his simple captioned photographs, then came the word-and-picture combinations that Hine called "Time Exposures," then his brochures and posters in support of child labor reform, and finally the 108 combinations of words and pictures that he labeled "picture stories" and published in The Survey. Examination shows a clear progression in his use of images and words together. Hine's contribution to photographic communication was based on more than his ability as a technician. In fact, many photographic historians classify Hine's technical skills as little more than adequate. His prints suffer from lack of finished processing and seldom, if ever, did he crop an image—even when the improvement in the image brought about by a change in framing was obvious. The key photographic ability for Hine was his way of seeing and organizing the story that he had to tell. The clear vision and empathy for humanity that allowed Hine to understand the issues he illustrated were nurtured through his personal experiences early in life. Hine understood the relative unimportance of camera technique to what he was trying to do. In a 1909 talk before the National Conference of Charities and Corrections he said, "better a little technique and much sympathy than the reverse . . . . " (Hine in Trachtenberg Classic Essays 112-13). In preparation for a through examination of his photographic work, this chapter will look at the early experiences in Hine's life that prepared him for his child labor reform efforts and his discovery of the medium of photography and the subjects for his photographs. His identification of an audience for his work, thoughts on the nature of photography as a teaching tool, pioneering work toward the new genre of documentary photography, views on the 109 value of photographs as evidence and ideas on the combination of words and pictures also will be examined.

Early Sources of Sympathy With the Child labor Cause

Lewis Wickes Hine was bom in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. His mother was Sarah Hayes Hine. His father was Douglas Hall Hine, an Easterner from Cairo in upstate New York who had settled his family in Oshkosh in 1871 after a five-year stint on a coffee plantation in Costa Rica. Lewis was the only son and the youngest of three children. In 1892, his father was accidentally killed, and Lewis, who had just graduated from high school, assumed the role of man of the house. One older sister was married, and the other was employed as a teacher at the local elementary school. Lewis took a full-time job at an upholstery factory, where he learned first hand of the rigors of sweatshop labor by working 13-hour days, six days a week, to earn his salary of $4. This early personal exposure to child labor is perhaps what allowed Hine to understand the conditions and life of children who worked. This first-hand understanding of the life of child workers was undoubtedly of great value when Hine begin to photograph for the National Child Labor Reform Committee 16 years later in 1908. Although in later life Hine joking referred to Oshkosh as "saw dust city" in deference to its position somewhat off the beaten path, Oshkosh was not so remote as to be immune to the country's 110 prevailing sentiment about child labor. The fact that this mood of the day was clear even in "saw-dust city" is apparent in an editorial that the Oshkosh Labor Advocate published in 1893:

Even in these dull times, with the mills running about half time and with half a force, there are children working at many machines. The city is so full of idle men that when the street car company reduced the already slender pay of their drivers and brought on a strike, there were two or three applicants for each vacant place. And yet with the army of idle men in our midst, children who ought to be in school are doing factory w ork.

This state of affairs is a disgrace to Oshkosh. The little work there is to be had should be done at decent prices and the little ones sent to school. Put men to work and let babies go home. (Curtis and Mallach 20)

The feeling in Oshkosh at this time as reflected in this editorial, demonstrated some receptivity to change in the way that child labor was viewed. The economic-need argument for child labor seems weakened, and the value of education seems to have become more generally recognized. Labor unrest hit Oshkosh hard in 1898, the year the woodworkers stuck against the Paine Lumber Company. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow came to town to defend the leaders of the strike against conspiracy charges. One well-publicized complaint against the lumber company by the strikers was that it was systematically replacing male adult workers with women and children, who were paid lower wages (Curtis and Mallach 20). Ill

Hine's ability to keep working did not seem to be affected, though. During the first few years after his high-school graduation, he worked a series of menial factory and retail jobs while enrolled in classes in sculpture, drawing, and stenography at the State Normal School in Oshkosh. Hine claimed that his career in Oshkosh peaked when he "had risen up the ranks to become supervising sweeper in a local bank" (Kaplan 15). Daile Kaplan characterizes Hine during this period as "diffident though not timid, serious though a perpetual punster, self-effacing but confident" (Kaplan 15). During these years, Hine either sought out or was discovered (both versions of how they met have been reported) by Frank Manny, a professor of education and psychology at the State Normal School in Oshkosh. Manny encouraged Hine to continue his studies, and in 1900, Hine left Oshkosh and enrolled at the University of Chicago to study education. In 1904, Hine returned to Oshkosh to marry Sara Ann Rich, who had graduated from the Oshkosh Normal School and was working as a teacher. The couple returned to New York, and in 1912 a son, Corydon, was bom. In 1917, the Hines moved to a house they had built in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. The Hines remained together until Sara's death on Christmas Day in 1939. Sara and Corydon both worked at various times with Hine and accompanied him as witnesses or assistants on his travels. 112

Hine Finds His Medium and His Subjects

During Hine's time in Chicago, reform was beginning on several fronts. In education, John Dewey was perfecting his ideas about child development and the role of schools in preparing children for productive adult life. Dewey implemented his ideas in classes in the University of Chicago's experimental lab school. In social advocacy, Jane Addams, along with her associates at Hull House, was becoming well known for work in the city with the laboring classes. It is unclear whether Hine studied under Dewey, although he may have, or whether he knew Jane Addams during his student days, although he later visited and photographed at Hull House. Hine continued his study in Chicago until 1901, when Manny, who had accepted a job as superintendent of the Ethical Culture School in New York, invited him to join the faculty there. Hine accepted the job of, as he described it, "polishing brains at the Ethical informary" (Kaplan 16), at a salary of $425 per year. The Ethical Culture School had been founded by the Ethical Culture Society, which was under the direction of Felix Adler, a reformer who later would champion the cause of child labor reform as the Chair of the National Child Labor Committee. The Ethical Cultural Society was concerned with the process of Americanization for the waves of immigrants who were pouring into the country. The school, founded with an enrollment that was made up mainly of first-generation Jewish immigrants, "was modeled on 113 principles espoused by the Transcendentalists, and it emphasized development of human values like individualism as well as instilling a firm sense of community responsibility" (Kaplan 16). During 1904, with the Ethical Culture School as a base, Hine reached several milestones that brought about important changes in his life. In that year, he was both introduced to photography and began the first in a series of noteworthy photographic projects. Hine always considered himself to be a teacher, not only during his years at the Ethical Culture School, but throughout his life. The Ethical Culture School as envisioned by Felix Adler was "intended to contribute to the solution of the great social problems by means of a profound reformation of the system of education" (Kaplan 16). The school offered, in addition to a standard curriculum in academic subjects, courses in trade skills, handiwork, art weaving, and shop. Part of the reformation of the system if which Adler spoke, was seen by Manny to include the new art/science of photography. To that end, Manny assigned Hine, then in his second year as a teacher, to be school photographer and to teach a course in the new discipline of photography. Although at the time of his selection, Hine was not familiar with cameras or photography, Manny later justified his choice of Hine as photographer and photography teacher saying, "I had long wanted to use the camera for records and you [were] the only one who seemed to see what I was after" (Kaplan 17). 114

At the suggestion of Manny, Hine also embarked on another major undertaking in 1904—this one photographic. The project was to record in pictures immigrants coming through Ellis Island, and it provided Hine a perfect opportunity to sharpen his compositional skills in arranging individuals and groups of people and the use of flash powder to supply light: "His photographs of those wide-eyed, frightened, but hopeful faces have become important historical documents of the era. Like New York police reporter Jacob Riis, who photographed New York slums in the 1890's, Hine understood that photographs could be valuable tools for social reform" (Kemp 7). There is no evidence that Hine was influenced by Riis, and the differences in their approaches seem to verify that Hine's vision was of his own creation and not modeled on someone else's work. Manny not only encourage Hine to participate in the Ellis Island project but he accompanied Hine on many of his trips to the Island and acted as his photographic assistant. Manny saw an important unifying element between those immigrants coming to the United States through Ellis Island at the turn of the century and those who had come before:

Manny's decision was motivated by several factors including the xenophobic fervor rampant throughout the country, the eastern European backgrounds of many of his students, and a historical link he recognized between families who fled England in the seventeenth century because of religious persecution and immigrants who fled pogroms in the late nineteenth century. (Kaplan 19) 115

In interviews with Elizabeth McCausland many years later, Hine indicated that his desire to photograph the immigrants was based on news value and humanitarian interest. Whatever the reason, "his urge to photograph 'foreigners' was unprecedented during a time when photographers avoided making social images" (Kaplan 19). In fact, the very immigrants that Hine was photographing as he developed his simple compositions and direct eye-to-eye style with his subjects were blamed by many as the cause for all of the ills that afflicted tum-of-the-century America. James Guimond contrasts the sentimental "American Dream" view of immigrants that surrounded the re-development of Ellis Island as an American shrine in the 1980's with the more commonly held tum- of-the-century view:

There was widespread belief among natives that earlier generations of immigrants from Ireland, England, or northern Europe, most likely including their own parents and grandparents, were fine people. But these "old" or "desirable" immigrants were often contrasted unfavorably with the millions of "new" immigrants who arrived from eastern and southern Europe starting in the 1890's. These immigrants— particularly the Jewish, Slavic, and southern Italian—were accused of virtually every form of moral and social depravity; and these accusations were made not only by unwashed bigots but also by well-educated and prestigious white gentlefolk. (Guimond 59)

In a Guggenheim Fellowship application that he filed in the 1930's, Hine claimed, "Much emphasis is being put upon the dangers inherent in our alien groups, our unassimilated or even partly 116

Americanized citizens—criticism based upon insufficient knowledge. A corrective for this would be better facilities for seeing, and so understanding, what the facts are" (Hine in Guimond 61).

Hine's position in relation to these Ellis Islandimmigrants was shown in the approach he used to make his photographs. His images clearly show the foreignness of the people’s dress, but the promise of their expressions is dominant and leads the viewer to the belief that these people, without a doubt, will make a positive contribution to American society. The people look alert and normal and not in any way defective or criminal (Guimond 62). This hope for the future and dream of better life for themselves and their children that Hine saw in the eyes of his Ellis Island subjects was reflected later in the images that he made for the National Child Labor Committee, which showed that the reality of these immigrants' dreams often had become a nightmare. Hine had no hesitation about photographing immigrants on their way to a new life. Hine's courage and willingness to challenge the status quo by his actions was typical and surfaced again and again throughout his life. Noted photographer Paul Strand was a student at the Ethical Culture School during 1908 and was introduced to photography by Hine. In the preface of Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience. Gutman recalls a conversation with Strand about Hine: "Strand reminded me that when nobody else dared, Hine photographed conflict. Photographing child labor. 117

especially in the South, was akin to entering an armed camp. Strand continued" (Gutman 9). Although contrary to popular subjects at the time, according to Jonathan L. Doherty, author of Lewis Wickes Hine's Interpretive Photography: The Six Early Projects, the Ellis Island photography was the first major project Hine undertook. Another early Hine project was the Pittsburgh Survey, done in 1908 and 1909. The Pittsburgh Survey and the Ellis Island project both seem to have played a major role in the development of Hine's aesthetic sense. During his work on these projects, he began to develop a way of seeing that carried forward into most of his later work. This way of seeing might be described as a straightforward view of life that allowed Hine to engage his subjects rather than merely record them. This straightforward approach presented his subjects very directly and might be characterized as an honest and open view. Other major photographic undertakings, all of which reflect the vision that Hine developed at Ellis Island and in Pittsburgh, included the Child Labor Series from 1909-1915, the Army and Navy Camp Series during 1917, and the American Red Cross War Relief series in Europe in 1918. These early photographic projects, were followed by 11 additional major photographic projects culminating with his Men at Work project that captured the construction of the Empire State Building. 118

Hine Finds His Audience

In 1905, Hine received a Pd.M. degree in Sociology from Columbia University in New York city. During his years as a student at Columbia, Hine met Arthur Kellogg, who was a doctoral student in the school of social philosophy; "Arthur, Hine recalls, introduced him to social welfare, then to his brother Paul; and with Manny on the one hand and the two Kelloggs on the other, Hine entered the New York city world" (Gutman, American Social Conscience 18). While the Kelloggs were not part of all 17 of Hine's major photographic projects, they were connected to many of them. Between 1907 and 1935, Paul was involved in several organizations that used Hine's photographs. He was the Director of the Pittsburgh Survey, served as secretary to a a commission seeking a U.S. Commission of Industrial Relations, was a bureau director for the American Red Cross, and was Vice Chairman of the President's Committee on Economic Security. But Paul Kellogg's position as editor of Charities and Commons, later to become The Survey, then Survey Graphic, may have been the most influential in bringing Hine's work before its ideal audience. Jonathan Doherty credits Paul Kellogg with being both the driving and directing force behind much of Hine's work:

It is perhaps more than a coincidence that the two men were affiliated in a number of common causes, for Kellogg may have been the driving force behind Hine, the man who identified for Hine the important directions. This is to take nothing from 119

Hine himself, however, for it was he who made the extremely sensitive photographs and wrote the poignant comments on their backs. Nevertheless, Kellogg's influence on Hine was apparently enormous, simply because of the scope of the causes he espoused and the significance of these causes in the early twentieth century. In addition, Kellogg’s positions enabled him to provide a forum for Hine's creative endeavors. (Doherty vii)

Regardless of whether it was Manny or Kellogg who was his primary mentor, Lewis Hine's work as a social photographer was done within the framework of the progressive movement. Like other progressives, his aim was not to bring about revolution but to bring about change. Hine supported and worked for legislative change "fostered by an enlightened and activated public opinion" (Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs 166). In 1906, Hine left his teaching position at the Ethical Culture School to make his way full time as a social photographer. Hine saw the change from teaching at the Ethical Culture School to working as a social photographer not as one of substance but one of scale. In a 1906 letter to Manny about his decision to work for Paul Kellogg at Charities and Commons magazine he wrote: "I was merely changing the educational efforts from the classroom to the world" (Rosenblum, N. 16). That same year, Hine began doing free-lance work for the National Child Labor Committee and, by the following year, he was also making photographs for the National Consumers League and beginning his work for Paul Kellogg on the Pittsburgh Survey. Many of the agencies and publications for which Hine worked were housed 120 on different floors of the same New York city building. Many of the contacts that he made had ties to one or more other agencies, and many of his employers reached a common audience. This network of outlets to his audience provided him with the connections he felt he needed to generate adequate income from the practice of social photography.

"The School Camera" Idea and the Principle of Selectivity

The value of the camera to the process of education was something that Hine had thought about from the beginning. In 1906, he wrote of the uses of photography as a teaching tool in The Elementary School Teacher. In the piece, entitled, "The School Camera," Hine reviewed the current uses of photography for newspaper and magazine illustration, for cost-reduction study in manufacturing, and for scientific research. His overriding concern, however, was with education and the ability of the camera to help students develop a selective sense of vision that would let them shift focus from the vast range of all that they experienced to that which was most fundamental of their experience:

The value of bringing back from an excursion views of points visited and regions explored for nature-study, geography, and history is not realized fully until actually tried. This is of great assistance to both teacher and pupils in selecting the salient features of the trip; the central thought is emphasized and the relative values are brought out, thus teaching the selection of 121

fundamentals which is so difficult and so vital to the work. (Hine, "The School Camera" 344)

This selectivity of vision was a crucial element in Hine's later work making photographs for the National Child Labor Committee. The ability to eliminate the unessential from each view added strength and focus to what was for Hine most important. In another article he authored in 1906, this one for The Photographic Times. Hine talked again about the isolation of the essential in the photographic image and added his thoughts on the interpretative abilities of the photograph:

The beginner finds he must make haste slowly; that he must leam to select, from the heterogeneous mass of objects around him, a few that will tell a story, that he has found hidden in nature or Man, to some one else by means of the photographic print.

A good photograph is not a mere reproduction of an object or group of objects,—it is an interpretation of Nature, a reproduction of impressions made upon the photographer which he desires to repeat to others. (Hine, "The Silhouette in Photography" 488)

A key for those "just setting out upon the enchanting journey to the land of the camera" is to be selective and concentrate on the simple and most basic:

It is especially necessary, from the start, to realize that every photo should be a study in relative values,—that the important things are to be emphasized while the unpleasant and non- essential are to be minimized. (Hine, "The Silhouette in Photography" 488) 122

A hallmark of Hine photographs is their simple, direct composition and their ability, though the use of strong line and masses of light and dark, to minimize what does not contribute to the story being told. Hine’s understanding of this and of the compositional tools and their deliberate use is clear from his caution to beginners;

To make genuine progress, therefore, the novice should select the simpler stories or compositions and seek, by the arrangement of lines and masses of light and shadow, to re-tell some of these emotions he has experienced. The reason so many fail is that they become confused by the number of details in a composition too elaborate for them to represent at first. (Hine, "The Silhouette in Photography" 489)

The camera as a tool for bringing those not present into touch with a scene was important to Hine's work in making the general public aware of the evils of child labor. Even when speaking before groups without the benefit of photographs to show, Hine thought visually. In a talk he gave at the Tenth Annual Conference on Child Labor held in New Orleans, Hine told the group, "I wish I could give you a bird's-eye view of my varied experience" (Hine, "The High Cost of Child Labor" 63). Later in that same talk, he painted a word picture to help his audience visualize and thereby understand better the scale of the child labor problem: "The procession of working children in the United States would take five years to pass a given point if the children appeared at the rate of one a minute day and night. It would represent hundreds of different industries: poling 123

logs for a Texas sawmill; making baskets for an Indiana factory; toting dinners to fathers in the Georgia cotton mills" (Hine, "The High Cost of Child Labor" 65). Hine seemed to understand the importance of emphasizing his use of the camera and the evidence of reality that it could present even when his photographs were not shown. It almost seemed that, for Hine, the indication that he photographed a scene carried the same weight as evidence as the actual photographs he produced. The beginning of another of Hine speech's this one entitled, "Tasks in the Tenements," given before the 1914 New Orleans Child Labor Conference, uses the following description:

The task of treating the Tasks in the Tenements is one that is truly Herculean. The subject always makes me see red — not merely because it raises memories of twenty-four hour shifts tripping up and down the tenement stairs, six or seven flights of them (for the good things are always at the top), loaded down with several tons of camera equipment; neither is it because in these same tenements I have a number of times been very near getting what has been long coming to me from those who do not agree with me on child matters—those are only trifles." (Hine, "Tasks in the Tenements" 95)

The permanence of the photograph also allowed it to serve as a means of keeping an image active in viewers' thoughts and reminding them time and time again as they viewed it of the situation that needed to be addressed. This staying power of Hine's image and word combinations was essential to the success of his photographic work: 124

After a while they realize that impressions of their excursions are often fleeting, and thus leam the value of the photograph to refresh the memory during the review that follows the trip- -that it is a record for future use, and, best of all, that it enables them to share with other pupils and other grades, that have not participated, the enjoyments and benefits of these experiences. (Hine, "The School Camera" 345)

In addition to honing a sense of the essential, the camera was a most effective tool for bringing scenes from life to those not there. Whether it enabled students who could not participate to take field trips by proxy or provided the student's parents or other visitors an overview of the school's activities or allowed those who had not experience child labor first hand to do so, Hine saw photography as a way to involve and explain:

Perhaps the greatest value of the school photograph as a record has been in giving to parents, visitors, teachers, and others interested in the school a brief but comprehensive view of the school activities which otherwise would not be preserved. (Hine, "The School Camera" 344)

Through photographs, visitors with a limited amount of time could be given a thorough overview of the year's activities and some direction for which areas might be of greater interest for further exploration. Photographs also were used as a means of reinforcing written descriptions of school events and programs. This sense of the value that the combination of photographs and words could have and that the two could be made to work together was an important insight for Hine that would surface later as he developed a whole new way of photography. 125

What his experiences at the Ethical Culture School taught Hine about the socialization process and the use of the camera to influence and persuade stayed with him even after 1908, when he traded teaching for full-time work as investigator and photographer for the National Child Labor Committee: "The camera was Hine's eyes, ears, heart and mind. He felt that the photograph was his best weapon, one that would convince the forces in society to make change" (Suntop 75). Hine had seen the benefit of photographic communication in his work at the Ethical Culture School and knew that the camera could be useful as he began the process of producing his human documents in support of child labor reform. He understood the ability of a camera to record a scene selectively and how this selectivity, the ability to remove the unnecessary from a scene, could add directness to his communication efforts. History shows that he was right. At a 1929 exhibition on illustration in social-work publicity, Hine was the guest of honor. Owen Lovejoy, director of the NCLC during Hine's time there said of him, "he was the first person to focus the camera intelligently, sympathetically and effectively on social work problems." According to Lovejoy, until Hine, those problems were "intellectually but not emotionally recognized" (The Survey 236). Lovejoy later wrote, "In my judgment the work you did under my direction for the National Child Labor Committee was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts and conditions of child employment to public attention" (Stange 65). 126

Hine's Rhetorical Impulse and the Documentary Genre

Hine’s first major introduction to sociological photography came through his involvement in the Pittsburgh Survey under Paul Kellogg. Hine's work exemplified the shift in sociological study from moral judgements to clear scientific inquiry. Hine used selectivity in his photographs to show what was there that contributed to the study. His photographs, rather than depicting the horrors that often laced other child labor rhetoric, were limited to showing the reality of the situation as Hine saw it. His photographs, with their strong evidential base, were a natural support for the scientific approach used in the Pittsburgh Survey. Hine’s work allowed for interpretation and humanized or made real what the numerical data collected for charts and graphs as part of the survey approach left anonym ous. The work Hine did preceded common use of the term "documentary" but, indeed, was one of the earliest examples of that approach to photography. In a 1938 article in Parnassus. Beaumont Newhall illustrates what he calls documentary photography through a series of photographs that Le Secq made in 1852 during the construction of Chartres: "Le Secq’s photographs are a sympathetic interpretation of Chartres. They are a direct record, not only of the carved stones, but of the photographer’s emotion in viewing them" (Newhall 3). According to Newhall, the word "documentary" was first commonly used in reference to photographic images produced as 127

cinema. John Grierson, a social scientist turned film maker, was one of the early promoters of the term and applied it to the kind of film making that he and his followers did in Britain in the 1930's. In a review that appeared in The New York Sun on February 8, 1926, of Robert Flaherty's poetic, "Moana," Grierson introduced the term "documentary" to the American public: "Of course, "Moana" being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value" (Grierson 25). He continued: "The basic force behind it [documentary] was social not aesthetic. It was a desire to make drama from the ordinary" (Grierson 72). Flaherty's early film, Nanook of the North, an account of everyday life in an Eskimo family, is largely credited with being the first documentary work. Rather than imposing drama on the subject, in Nanook of the North drama was derived from the subject: "Discovering the essential drama within the material itself became the method that created the prototype of documentary film and established its tradition" (Jacobs 9). The documentary school of film making that emerged in the 1920's and 1930's was one that had a clear social purpose and that dealt with real people and real events. Earlier films were based on imaginary characters, fictional stories, and staged studio scenes. What Robert Flaherty did in 1922 with Nanook of the North was to begin the documentary tradition in the movies. That tradition, unnamed at the time, was what Lewis Hine began with his 128

still camera through his child labor photographs beginning in 1908. His scenes of children working at their machines, the conditions under which their labor was performed, and brief notations about their ages, situations, education and income provided testimony that built on the drama contained within the subject. Hine was particularly sensitive to the need for complete honesty in his work. He wrote, "All along I had to be doubly sure that my photo-data was 100% pure—no retouching or fakery of any kind. This had its influence on my continued use of straight photography" (Hine in Trachtenberg, "Ever-the Human Document" 119). What Hine called "straight photography" was the direct, unmanipulated style that later was called "documentary photography," and that became the model the famous Farm Service Photographs under the direction of Roy Stryker in the 1930's and for generations of photojoumalists whose work filled the pages of photo magazines such as Look and Life. The same courage that Paul Strand commented on in Hine's willingness to photographic controversial subjects also played a role in the way these child labor photographs were made. Much of the photography of Hine's time followed the romantic-modem lead of Alfred Stieglitz. Indeed, at the time that Hine was traveling the country for the National Child Labor Committee, Stieglitz was operating his 291 Gallery, which was the mecca for contemporary photographers with an interest in art, and publishing Camera Work. which was the journal for photographic artists. But Hine took a 129 different path for himself and his work: "He saw himself not as an individual genius breaking convention, but as a working photographer performing a certain kind of cultural (and political) labor; he focused his work not on the photograph in exhibition but on the published image—not the single photograph as a fine print (its tonal values intact), but the reproduced image within an ensemble of images and words" (Trachtenberg, Reading 168).

Hine's stance towards America was critical but hopeful—critical of social and economic injustices in view of conventional American values of common sense and fair play. His typical method was to show contradiction between the rhetoric and the reality of American life—in regard to children, for example, or mothers, or working people. (Trachtenberg, Reading 166- 67)

What Hine seemed to be trying to do was replace existing views of child labor and the American way of life by illustrating the discrepancy between what really existed and the reality that most Americans believed existed. His photographic communication tools were designed to do just that. The differences between photographs made by Stieglitz and Hine is examined in a 1920 Literary Digest review of a Hine show entitled, "Treating Labor Artistically":

The writer compared a picture of Hine showing an open hearth—the picture identified by the commonplace title "Handling Hot Metal in a Pennsylvania Shop"—with the famous Stieglitz picture "The Hand of Man." The picture by Stieglitz, the reviewer wrote, "was an adoption of principles employed by Whistler .... The subject is comparatively nothing [the 130

image shows a railroad yard, dark and smoky, from a distance], and the treatment all." Hine did not aim at such "artistic" results, the reviewer pointed out, but often achieved just as compelling an artistry. Then, with a quote from Hine himself, the article explained the real and primary purpose of Hine's industrial pictures; "to show the meaning of the worker's task, its effect upon him, and the character of his relation to the industry by which he earns a living." Photographing workers on the job, Hine told the reviewer, was "a new development in the movement to study the human problem of men and women in modem industry. (Trachtenberg, America and Lewis Hine. 136)

Hine's work was of a different genre than the work being done by Stieglitz and the other members of the photo-secessionist movement that was developing during the turn of the century. The photo-secessionists were primarily concerned with the aesthetic quality of their work. Hine was primarily concerned with the sociological quality of his. Hine did not care what the critics said about his photography; their views did not influence the views of the audience for which his work had been created:

Mr. Hine has a prejudice against the phrase "art photographer." Nor is he, in any sense of the word, a commercial photographer. The effect of a picture as a compositional study does not interest him consciously. Its value as a survey of a human phase of industry is what he is after .... Into all his work Mr. Hine gets an interpretive angle. Indeed, he terms himself an "interpretive photographer." A picture which has beauty without significance means little to him. ("He Photo-interprets Big Labor" 42)

Estelle Jussim authored an article for the winter, 1978, issue of The Massachusetts Review entitled "Icons or Ideology: Stieglitz and 131

Hine" that laid out the basic differences in the two men's approaches to photography. Stieglitz believed that the masses were incapable of seeing beauty and was repelled by them. Hine on the other hand sought out the working class and believed that, despite their struggles, ignorance and lack of appreciation for "art," they had intrinsic value. Stieglitz strived to have photography accepted as equal with the other fine arts. Hine strived to use photography as a tool for social reform. Stieglitz thought individuals could bring about change in society’s vision, Hine believed that the masses, working together, could help society achieve change (Jussim 680). Although Hine and Stieglitz followed separate paths until near the end of Hine's life, perhaps the two were not as far apart in substance as initial examination may make them appear. Stieglitz was concerned with meeting humanity's inner needs though artistic expression; Hine was concerned with meeting humanity's social needs through communication. Both were ultimately concerned with meeting human needs through freedom and with humanitarian goals—one for the satisfaction of the sense that allows for the freedom of intellect and the other for the satisfaction of the basic needs that mark us all as human. si

132

Hine and the Photograph as Evidence

The lack of imposition of external drama or, for that matter, of external influence of any kind on the photographs he produced and published was a Hine trademark. He knew that photographs could be made to lie, but he consciously determined that the work he produced would be that of an honest photographic investigator. Hine understood that the public reserved for photographs a special kind of acceptance as evidence of reality. In 1909, Hine was invited to give a talk entitled, "Social Photography, How the Camera May Help in the Social Uplift," to the National Conference of Charities and Corrections. The published conference proceedings reprinted this talk, in which Hine commented on his views on the value of honest, unmanipulated photography:

Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend upon contracts no bad habits.

Not long ago, a leader in social work, who had previously told me that photographs had been faked so much they were of no use to the work, assured Editor Kellogg that the photographs of child labor in the Carolinas would stand as evidence in any court of law.

Moral: Despise not the camera, even though yellow- photography does exist. (Hine, "Social Photography" 111-112) 133

The reference to yellow photography was made to the earlier use of photographs by the Muckrakers in their practice of sensational, so-called yellow journalism. An example of this less- than-reputable use of pictures was the set of photographic portraits that accompanied Ida Tarbell's series on the Rockefeller family and fortune that was published by McClure's. These pictures were used to discredit prominent business leaders and did not take advantage of the social aspect of photography in which Hine was primarily interested. Although Hine took every care to make sure that his photographs did not distort the reality he sought to show through them and although he avoided at all cost any tampering with his images before or after they were created so as not to compromise their honesty, the situations under which the photographs had to be made sometimes required the use of some forms of deception. After the Pittsburgh Survey was published, many mill owners and child labor employers became extremely reluctant to admit to the use of child labor—one of the keys to their profitability—and refused cooperation of any kind with field reporters or investigators. Hine and his colleagues were forced to develop new techniques to gain access to the factories and mills they needed to investigate. An interesting insight into Hine's methods is related by Walter Rosenblum, who knew Lewis Hine during Hine's later years when he would visit New York's Photo League each day during his largely futile journeys into the city to find an outlet for his photographs. 134

Rosenblum, an aspiring photographer who worked as a janitor for the Photo League, relates the following about Hine's ways of making photographs where he found himself unwelcome:

To gain entry into mines, mills, and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. His students at the Ethical Culture School had known him to be a marvelous actor who would amuse them on nature walks by becoming a wayward tramp or an itinerant peddler. When he photographed for the NCLC, his repertory ranged from fire inspector, post card vendor, and Bible salesman to broken down schoolteacher selling insurance. Sometimes he was an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. He would set up to photograph a loom, then ask a child to step into the picture so that he could get a sense of scale. Hine knew the height from the floor of each button on his vest so that he could measure the child standing alongside him. Hidden in his pocket was a little notebook in which he wrote vital statistics such as age, working conditions, years of service, and schooling. When he failed to gain admittance to a factory, he would often visit homes in the early morning and wait outside to photograph the children on their way to a long day's work.

It is indeed ironic that Hine was accused of being dishonest and his results judged suspect because he was forced to use deception to document the facts or conditions of child workers. The NCLC reassured the public that his results were always checked, and Hine made certain to document his photographs with specific proof. He was a skilled writer, too, and for many years his notes were used as field reports for the NCLC. (Rosenblum 12)

In addition to Hine's attempts to make sure his photographs were honest, the NCLC also took its own measures to ensure the accuracy of all of its reports. Normally, a staff of three was sent on field visits to work places: an investigator, who was in charge of 135 asking the questions and completing detailed reports; a photographer, who also sometimes served as investigator; and a witness, who would sign a sworn affidavit after the investigation was completed to testify to the accuracy and truthfulness of what was reported (Kaplan 42). For those members of the public who may have been reluctant to accept the photographic evidence as genuine, the extraordinary attention to uniformity and accountability in field reports done by the NCLC added to the credibility and the persuasive power of Hine’s work. Despite the great attention Hine gave to accountability and preserving believability in his documentation, problems still existed for documentary photographs. Beaumont Newhall discussed one of these risks in a 1938 article in Parnassus. Documentary images seen by moving-picture photographers and by still-picture photographers are similar. Both media use a straight-forward, slice-of-life approach. Both essentially record what is before the camera. Both stay away from bringing anything to bear on the image presented that is not contained within its borders. The essential difference between motion pictures and still pictures, according to Beaumont Newhall, is one of presentation:

But there is a profound difference between still and motion- picture photography. The former is primarily a spatial art; the latter a temporal one. The film is always seen as a unit; the sequence of images is prescribed, and remains uniform except for skillful cutting by exhibitors for moral or economic reasons. The still photograph, however, is seldom seen twice in the 136

similar manner. It may be reproduced together with any other photograph, and with any caption. (Newhall 4)

Hine understood that if his photographs appeared in different contexts with different words, their credibility as documents could have been compromised. Throughout his life, Hine was sensitive to maintaining control over what words accompanied his photographs and where these photographs were published. He became upset even when his old friends at The Survev neglected to credit his work properly in a 1934 issue: "I'd expected Morgan and His Men to be unwilling to acknowledge that those five studies were mine but I am surprised that some Survey keen eye did not notice that there was considerable Hine accent about them" (Hine to Florence and Paul Kellogg, reprinted in Kaplan, Photo Storv 67). Some writers speculate that his desire to maintain control over his work may have been at the root of his slight by Roy Striker when he assembled the Farm Service Administration photographers in the 1930's (Kaplan, Photo Story xix). Despite the fact that many of the Farm Service Adminstration Photographers emulated Hine's photographic style in their own work, the master himself was not invited to participate in this documentary project. What is important about Hine's work studied in this dissertation is that, at the time when he was making these images, he provided substantial direction about the way they were produced and the context in which they were used. As early as the work he did for the Pittsburgh Survey, the words that accompanied his 137 photographs, the arrangement of the pictures on the page and the relationship among the pictures themselves and between the pictures and the words were directed by Hine:

In the halcyon, post-Survey issues, the editor-photographer relationship between Kellogg and Hine continued to grow. Together they further explored the potential of Progressive journalism and presented human-interest stories in novel ways. Hine wrote of "the value of the photographic appeal . . . to help the workers to realize that they themselves can use it as a lever even tho [sic] it many not be the mainspring of the works. He developed photo stories, picture essays, and Time Exposures in which the photograph became increasingly prominent. According to John Whiting, The Survev "broke journalistic ground" in January of 1910 with a sixteen-page photo insert Hine collaborated on with Lillian Wald, Frances A. Kellor, and Mary Dreier about the state construction camps in Ashokan, New York. (Kaplan 36) In work like the Ashokan photo insert done for The Survey, the graphic language combining words and images that Hine had developed with the blessings of Paul Kellogg was apparent:

They worked together as a team, collaborating on the process of editing, arranging, and combining photos with informative texts. In subsequent years The Survey would feature work Hine produced for the National Child Labor Committee as well as essays about tenement homework (for the Consumer's League), "street" life, and illiteracy—issues that would continue to unfold in the "story in pictures." (Kaplan, Lewis Hine 36)

In addition to the required sociological perspective, and the use of the drama within a subject rather than imposition of drama on the subject, and use of actual people and places as opposed to fictional characters and stage sets, for still photographs to function as 138 powerful documents with specific meanings, attention must be given to their presentation: "The photograph is not valid as a document until it is placed in relationship to the beholder's experience. It is paradoxical that, although a photograph may be better than a thousand words, the addition of one or two words makes it even more concrete and forceful" (Newhall, Parnassus 6). At the same time that Hine was developing an understanding of photography, its epistemological claims and its techniques, he was also sharpening his skill with words as a vehicle for placing his photographs "in relationship to the beholder's experience" and to controlling the context in which they were "read".

Combining Photographs With Words

In tum-of-the-century America, photography was a relatively new art and the process of using it to communicate with mass audiences was just being introduced. But even at this early time, it had been demonstrated that photographs could lie. This early deceit was clumsy and somewhat obvious but played on the innate believability by the general public in the reliability of the photographic image. An early example of how photographs could appear to lie is illustrated by the "composograph," a crudely made montage of several pictures pasted together to resemble a single image. An example of the composograph is a spectacular illustration published in the New York Evening Graphic, which was inspired by 139

the story of a wealthy man, "Daddy," who wanted to leave his 15- year-old wife, "Peaches," because of her insistence that her mother live with them. The illustration showed "Daddy" and "Peaches" cavorting in a bedroom, with "Peaches'" mother eavesdropping outside the door. While the illustration was certainly sensational, the public knew well what was going on as shown by their nicknaming of the Evening Graphic as the Pornographic ("Reporter with a Camera" 17). Hine understood the importance of words and the added value that accrued to both images and words when the two were combined: "Trained as an educator, Hine brought to photography both visual and textual skills" (Kaplan 32). In his earliest combination of words and pictures for the National Child Labor Committee, the photographs were presented in a simple, sequential arrangement. A brochure, entitled "Night Scenes in the City of Brotherly Love" (Figure #2), uses nine individual panels, each of which contains a single photograph of a child or group of children and brief descriptive caption that either describes the action through Hine's own impressions or, on some panels, uses the words of the children themselves. The story this brochure told was like early documentary films in that it followed a narrative "day-in-the-life-of" form that progresses from a beginning though a middle section to a climactic end. The words supplied the timeline with each page or panel label with the time beginning at 8 p.m. and continuing at hourly intervals through the closing panel. 140 which was labeled "4 a.m." Hine's choice of words and his arrangement of those words supply meaning for the photographs. In his work as investigator and photographer, Hine was uniquely able to supply, from a highly credible perspective, the orienting information for his photographs of child workers. So presented, his photographs and words together served as reaffirmation and evidence of his verbal and visual claims. The addition of this orienting material allowed his viewers to roam his photographs for other information of their own discovery and gave them direction about where to look and about what they might find. For example, in some of the photographs used in the City of Brotherly Love brochure, viewers may find that the harsh lighting caused by the use of magnesium flash powder serves as additional evidence that these images were indeed made after the sun had gone down. On the closing panel of the brochure that contains the words, "Four A.M. The Last Act.' The Peaceful End of an Exciting Night of 'Street Life.' Near Ninth and Market Streets—November 4, 1906," viewers note that the youth is sleeping over a street grate. This unspoken visual clue reinforces the information about the date given by the text—November nights in Philadelphia can be cold (Kaplan, Lewis Hine 40-41). In exploring the use of groupings of photographs, Hine illustrated the effectiveness of claims made by Newhall. In addition to suggesting the addition of words as captions to help still photographs meet the documentary requirements of moving 141

pictures, in his Parnassus article, Newhall calls for the use of groups of pictures: "A better way to give this orientation is by a series of photographs, which when properly presented approach the cinema. This is the richest manner of giving photographs significance, for each picture reinforces the other" (Newhall, Parnassus 6). Photographers should be involved in the entire process; not only in the production of pictures but in their planning and presentation if they are to be truly considered the creators of their images. In her 1942 article in The Complete Photographer. Elizabeth McCausland wrote of the importance and origination of the photo story form that combined pictures with short captions to tell a story:

But the photo story is not new. Thirty years ago it was being told by a man who ranks high among American documentary photographer—the late Lewis W. Hine, who died November 30, 1940. Intuitively he anticipated the current trend for a closer liaison between photographer and writer. (McCausland 1979)

In her description of Hine's work as "Pioneering Picture Stories," McCausland describes Hine's intent: "When Hine started photographing, he did so with a purpose. He was not just a hobbyist, pleasing himself. He was a reporter in pictures, a visual educator awakening people to real life" (McCausland 1979). The newness of Hine's enterprise and the fact that he recognized that what he doing was unlike what any of his contemporaries was doing is evident by his need to create a language to describe his work: 142

In his career as a photographer and writer, Hine joined pictures and words into a new graphic language. The novelty of Hine's work is demonstrated by the fact that, creating his own photographic lexicon to describe these formulations, he coined such phrases as "human document," "interpretative photography," "work portraits," "picture-serial," and "time exposure." In 1914, nearly eight years after he first conceived of the form, Hine used the term "photo-story" to describe his sequencing of photographs and captions. (Kaplan," The Fetish" 9)

While the use of photographs was growing with advances in reproduction technology, Hine maintained his position as total controller of his picture-text assemblages. For Hine, pictures were never relegated to the role of illustrators of words; pictures and words were made to work together:

Hine's articles during the teens articulated not only a "social photography," but also what we might today call "visual Literacy." As he exhorted social workers in 1909, Hine's earlier publications in educational and photographic journals asked progressive educators to consider "whether we are taking advantage of the many opportunities which the pictorial art offers to increase our efficiency by appealing to the visual sense and recording for mutual benefit, the school work." Pointing out that "the modem newspaper and magazine" have come to rely on photography's "wealth of material and realistic illustrations" as "indispensable" ways of "reinforcing and varying the written explanation. (Stange 91)

Hine, through his single images and brief but direct captions, and the "Time Exposures" he made for The Survey Graphic, and the exhibition posters he made as part of his work for the National Child Labor Committee combining multiple images with words, met 143

Newhall's requirements for documents. As investigator and photographer, Hine explored the scene, selected the best photographs to tell the story, collected and provided the words that would orient the viewer and participated in the placement and design of the pages and posters used by the National Child Labor Committee in their persuasive communication efforts. 144

f.- fe-.

Z u.

ua -i f % IE, 4

F igure #2

City of Brotherly Love - Brochure 145

Sources Cited - Chapter III

Curtis, Verna Posever, and Stanley Mallach. Photography and Reform: Lewis Hine & The National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984.

Doherty, Jonathan L. Lewis Wickes Hine’s Interpretive Photography: The Six Earlv Projects. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Grierson, John. "Flaherty's Poetic Moana." The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock. Ed. Lewis Jacob. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971.

Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Cultural Studies of the United States. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Gutman, Judith Mara. Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience. New York: Walker, 1967.

"He Photo Interprets Big Labor." Mentor. Vol. 14, 1926

Hine, Lewis W. "The School Camera." The Elementary School Teacher Vol. 6, March 1906.

Hine, Lewis W. "The Silhouette in Photography." The Photographic Times Vol. 28, November 1906.

Hine, Lewis W. "The High Cost of Child Labor." The Child Labor Bulletin Vol. 3, May 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "Tasks in the Tenements." The Child Labor Bulletin Vol. 3, May 1914.

Jussim, Estelle. "Icons or Ideology: Stieglitz and Hine." The Massachusetts Review. Winter 1978. 146

Kaplan, Daile. Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs. New York: Abbeville, 1988.

Kaplan, Daile. "The Fetish of Having a Unified Thread: Lewis W. Hine's Reaction to the Use of thePhoto Story in Life Magazine." exposure. Vol. 27, 1989.

Kaplan, Daile. Photo Storv: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Kemp, John R., ed. Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor in the New South. Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Kismaric, Carole, and Anne Horan, ed. Documentary Photography. New York: Time-Life, 1972.

McCausland, Elizabeth. "Portrait of a Photographer." Survey Graphic Vol. 27, 1938.

Newhall, Beaumont. "Documentary Approach to Photography." P arnassus. Vol. 10, 1938.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present. New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1982.

"Reporter with a Camera." Photojournalism. New York: Time-Life, 1971.

Rosenblum, Naomi. "Biographical Notes." America & Lewis Hine: Photography 1904-1940. Ed. Walter Rosenblum. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Rosenblum, Walter. America & Lewis Hine: Photography 1904- 1940. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 147

The Survey. November 15, 1929. New York: Survey Associates.

Suntop, Lionel. "Lewis Hine 1874-1940." Creative Camera International Yearbook 1976. London: Coo, 1975.

Trachtenberg, Alan. "Ever-the Human Document." America & Lewis Hine: Photographv 1904-1940. Ed. Walter Rosenblum. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as Hi storv Mathew Bradv to Walker Evans. New York: Noonday, 1989. CHAPTER rV

LEWIS HINE'S WORK CONSIDERED CRITICALLY

Introduction

Many factors came into play both in the individual photographs and in the groups of photographs that Lewis Hine produced between 1908 and 1917, the years during which he worked as photographer, field investigator and exhibition director for the National Child Labor Committee. Although statistical evidence existed even during Hine's time to show that child labor was detrimental to the nation, to industry, to the family, and to the child, that was not the commonly held belief. Most people of the time believed that work was always something to be valued. The sooner work was started, the harder it was done, and the longer it lasted, the better for all. Hine's background provided him a unique perspective from which to view child labor. His personal experience as a hard working, low-paid child laborer allowed him to see the futility and empty future that working children often faced. His role as youthful man of the house for his mother and sisters in Oshkosh after the

148 149 death of his father provided him a sense of how the need for income was a factor for many working children and their families. The opportunity, encouragement and education that he received but that many of his peers did not opened his eyes to a future that generally remained unseen by other child workers. Finally, Hine’s early photographic assignments on Ellis Island enabled him to contrast the hope for a better life that he saw in the eyes of the many of the immigrants that he photographed with the reality that faced in them in a world of low pay, long hours, and shattered dreams that held little hope for a brighter future. All of these factors came together to play a role in Hine's photographic work for child labor reform. He was an insider to those working children and their families. As a former child worker himself, he was able to look at the world on the same level as those children he photographed. His early experience allowed him to have great empathy for his subjects and the conditions under which they lived and labored. At the same time, he was an outsider in that he knew what lay beyond the borders of his subjects' experience. Hine had advanced through his education and through his exposure to the world beyond that known by most of his subjects. The challenge for Hine was to find a way to conununicate what he knew and saw with his insider's vision to those on the outside who could not see what he saw but who had the power to bring about change. As he had learned early in his exposure to photography, the camera could be used to bring those not present into close contact 150 with a scene. As a social photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, his camera proved to be the tool that Hine needed to bring those not present in the life of the child laborer into close contact with the world he knew and could see as an insider. The camera could produce photographs that not only provided evidence of the existence of that world but, when properly used, served as a way to bring others, if only for a moment and to only a limited degree, inside that world. This chapter examines the ways Hine constructed and used his photographs and text to bring outsiders into the world of child labor. Hine's use of photographs to help develop an empathy for or understanding of the wrongs of child labor evolved through three forms during his years as staff photographer, photographic investigator, and exhibition director with the National Child Labor Committee. The earliest form was similar to the photographs done at Ellis Island that Hine made to accompany text written by others. From there, he moved to the production of photographs to be coupled with his own text and from there into the production of units that combined words and images together into a single persuasive tool. The first form he used after moving away from producing photographs to be used with words written by others became Hine's most common form. That was the use of photographs he took along with simple captions he wrote to serve as evidence of the existence of children in the work force and as a method of documenting, in a way accepted as very real by members of his audience, the 151 conditions under which these children worked and lived. To be most effective as evidence, these photographs were dependent on the viewer's knowledge of textual claims made in the articles or surveys that the pictures were designed to accompany. Although sometimes the text was written by others, often it was written by Hine himself as he traveled the country conducting child labor investigations. Hine's second form for the use of photographs involved the creation of a separate, autonomous structure that allowed the photographs, along with small blocks of text that he wrote, to be packaged together as complete rhetorical units. These self-contained photo-text units, "Time Exposures," offered two distinct advantages over the single photographs and captions that he had done to accompany his and others' articles. The "Time Exposure" format was effective for editors because it allowed for the use of child labor material with great ease on any page in any space available in their magazines and journals. His "Time Exposures" were also effective for the audience because they allowed for easier consumption of child labor material. These photo-text units did not depend on reading the longer surveys and articles for audience understanding. "Time Exposures" could be absorbed and understood quickly and easily by members of the audience. The photographs, with their ability to bring the viewer into the scene being photographed, coupled with the words, with their symbolic base that provided an element of consistent meaning, worked together to form stronger communication units than either alone could have formed. 152

Hine's third form of photographic communication was the exhibition panel, which was a logical outgrowth of his second form— the "Time Exposures." These exhibition panels shared many of the same ideas that were used in the "Time Exposures" but used briefer text blocks, relying instead on headlines and graphic elements such as lines and arrows to lead the viewer through the story being told. The exhibition panels were aimed at a broader audience that included those whom Hine might not otherwise have reached with his child labor messages. These exhibition panels often were printed as posters for even broader distribution and frequently were reproduced in exhibition catalogs that were published alone or in the pages of the Child Labor Bulletin. These panels, as did the "Time Exposures," relied on the synergism from the combined strengths of words and photographs for their power. Hine was not simply an illustrative photographer who took others' concepts and provided a graphic element. Hine was an active participant in shaping the ways in which his photographs were used. Hine worked as an investigative reporter collecting data, both visual and verbal, then "synchronizing" this information into word-text units; "Hine recognized the latent power of the iconographical image (along with authoritative text) as an effective and compelling communications tool" (Kaplan, Photo Story xx). The base for the word photography comes from the Greek words photos, which means light, and graphos. which means to write. From the etymological perspective "photography" literally means to 153 write with light. The way that this writing takes place, the elements involved and the ways that these elements are combined, coupled with the linguistic directions provided by Hine's captions, are what provide his photographic images with their rhetorical dimension. These image-word combinations reflect and utilize in every sense the ability of photographs to work, along with words, to make showing a most effective way of saying. In an article entitled, "He Photo Interprets Big Labor" published in September, 1926, in Mentor. Hine, although talking about his work in building employee-employer relations, expressed ideas about the power of words and pictures that were consistent with what he demonstrated through his child labor photographs:

I try to do with the camera what the writer does with words. People can be stirred to a realization of the values of life by writing. Unfortunately many persons don't comprehend good writing. On the other had, a picture makes its appeal to everyone. Put into the picture an idea and, if properly used, it many be transferred to the brain of the worker. . . . Interpretive photography, properly used, will do that, I know, for it has been done. ("He Photo Interprets Big Labor" 43)

Hine's publicity efforts combining words and photographs, brought about a modification in the approach used to influence others by those interested in bringing about change in child labor conditions. Prior to Hine's employment, most of the National Child Labor Committee's publicity work either had not been illustrated at all or, if illustrated, used drawings, charts, maps and statistics to depict visually what was said verbally or numerically with the words 154 and data collected by the committee through its field investigators. What Hine did with his pictures and words was to make child labor real—to provide a picture with meaning to go along with the phrase "child labor" in the minds of his audience. With his photographs, he personalized the facts and figures that were presented by the NCLC. In addition to adding the human element to an otherwise lifeless presentation, his "photographs presented incontrovertible evidence that child labor existed; his captions complemented the action of each photograph" (Kaplan, Lewis Hine in Europe 39). By the time Hine left his post with the NCLC, 40 out of 48 states had laws on their books prohibiting child labor. The value of Hine's contributions may be understood best through the words of a letter dated July 21, 1938, to Hine from Owen Lovejoy, the man who had been chair of the National Child Labor Committee during Hine's tenure as an employee:

In my judgment the work you did under my direction for the National Child Labor Committee was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts or conditions of child labor employment to public attention. The evils inherent in the system were intellectually but not emotionally recognized until your skill, earnestness, devotion, vision and artistic finesse focused the camera intelligently, sympathetically and effectively on social problems involved in American industry. (Kaplan, Photo Story 10, American Archives of Art)

Single Photographs and Captions

Life for many of the tum-of-the-century children that Hine photographed in this country held little promise. Many of the 155 children of immigrant parents, like those in the imm igrant families that Hine had photographed on Ellis Island, found their lives beyond their control and being used up in the process of survival. For many of these children and their families, there was inadequate food, clothing, and housing. The search for money for their survival and for that of their families meant there was also little or no time for play, no time for school, no time for church—indeed, no time for childhood and the development and socialization that childhood fosters. The result was a generation of youth that had no time for the adequate education and intellectual development of their minds and the healthy development and growth of their bodies that would enable them to become the strong, well-educated citizenry needed to carry forth the traditions and governance of the very nation to which their parents had come in search of a better life. This was the tragedy to which Hine’s work was responding. The future of the United States rested squarely on the shoulders of these children, and these children were not being well prepared for such responsibility. The progressives with their calls for reform and Hine with his camera were operating in a situation that was primed for change. One approach to bring about change was to focus on what was wrong with the growing number of unhealthy and uneducated children who worked and on how they were different from those who did not. Jacob Riis, a crusader and newspaper reporter, did that with his book. How the Other Half Lives. Riis showed what conditions were like for those different 156

from himself and his audience and what was wrong with many of New York City’s poor. Riis's look at social conditions was that of an outsider looking in and relaying what was seen to other outsiders. Another method, the one chosen by Hine and for which he was uniquely qualified, was to use the camera to show situations as they existed with the insight of an insider and to focus more on what was right with these people. Hine took the view that what was wrong was the situation in which his subjects found themselves, a situation that was, in most cases, clearly beyond their control. Hine's photographs accurately portrayed the circumstances under which many of these children worked. In the text that accompanied his images, Hine provided information about these children's ages, educational levels and health from his own conversations with them and often in their own words. Many of Hine's subjects, although shown in hopeless situations, maintained expressions that revealed much about their dreams and desires and the hope that they clung to for a better life. Hine's photographs clearly were designed to appeal to the people holding the status-quo position on child labor; those were the people who had views that needed changing in order to bring about reform. While many of Hine's photographs of paper boys, messenger boys, and boys and girls working in tenements were taken in the cities of the Northeast, a substantial number of photographs were also made of the children who labored in the urban and rural South. In fact, one of Hine's first traveling assignments for the National 157

Child Labor Committee was to photograph workers in the textile industry in the South. The South was both ripe for and resistant to change in that many Southern leaders during the late 19th century had taken strong anti-progressive stances. Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution long had preached the credo of the "New South" that called for the salvation of the Southern states by following the model of industrial development used in the Northeastern states (Kemp 8). This willingness to industrialize, coupled with the weak post reconstruction economy and the availability of abundant natural resources and cheap labor brought about a massive geographic shift in the textile industry. The number of cotton mills in the South increased from 180 in 1880 to over 900 in 1904. While this movement of the textile industry from the North had reduced the number of children labouring in Northern states, it brought about increases in the number of child labors in Southern states: "By 1900 the census revealed that 25% of all workers in Southern mills were children between the ages of ten and sixteen" (Kemp 8). While Southern boosters like Henry Grady took this increase in industry in the South as a positive sign and pushed for more of the same. Southern progressives like Edgar Gardner Murphy saw this growth in the number of child workers as unacceptable and took efforts to organize reform movements. Progressives recognized the child as the key to the future and thought that by protecting children, they could reshape and reform the industrialized world. 158

According to historian Robert Wiebe, "The child was the carrier of tomorrow’s hope whose innocence and freedom made him singularly receptive to education in rational, humane behavior. Protect him, nurture him, and in his manhood he would create that bright new world of the progressives' vision " (Wiebe 169). In 1901, Murphy formed the Alabama Child Labor Committee to work for passage of child labor laws in that state. In 1904, he and Alexander J. McKelway of North Carolina helped form the National Child Labor Committee to lobby for child labor reform nationwide. The enemy they faced was misinformation, misunderstanding and indifference on the part of mill owners, the government, parents and communities. Into this onerous situation Hine journeyed with camera, paper and pencil on several trips during 1908 and 1909. In reports he filed with the NCLC after one trip, he commented on the great indifference on the part of the local citizens to the use of child labor and the conditions in which these children often lived and worked:

I was stuck by the fact that, so far as I have observed, there is a larger percentage of very young children in the cotton mills of Georgia than in either NoAh or South Carolina. In spite of that fact, I have found it difficult to convince some of the inhabitants of Augusta and Macon (persons that ought to know better, if community pride had not blinded them) that children are working in the mills. (Hine, NCLC Papers "Georgia Investigations" January 1909)

Child labor laws, although weak, were on the books in some Southern states during this time, but most were not adequately 159 enforced. However, some brief flashes of the reform spirit were surfacing in Southern political circles and contributed to the growth of the child labor reform movement in the South. The Southern States Child Labor conference was held in New Orleans in the spring of 1909. While governors from Texas, North Carolina and Alabama refused to attend on the grounds that child labor laws in their states were perfectly adequate and needed no revision, the governor of Louisiana did attend and called for the enactment of uniform child labor laws for the protection and betterment of womanhood and childhood. In Georgia, Hine talked with L. J. Kilbum, a one-time important figure in the child labor reform movement, who told him that labor conditions in the Georgia mills were among the best in the South. Hine responded that photographs of child laborers in the Macon mills "would give lie to such a statement." In the face of photographic evidence, Kilbum backed down from his claims saying, "Child labor reform is a great joke. I worked night and day for years trying to do something that would result in some kind of reform, but I had to give it up. We cannot fight the money of the mill men" (Hine, NCLC Papers "Georgia Investigations" January 1909). In general, reformers were looked on with suspicion. The sentiment of many was that child labor advocates like Hine were trying to do something for children in the South that their families and, indeed, the children themselves and did not want. The feeling of many was that the children were happy with their situations and 160

should be left alone by outside agitators. The superintendent of the Munford Cotton Mill in Alabama bragged to Hine that "he always makes a special effort to get workers in families because he had a greater hold on them" (Hine, NCLC Papers "Alabama Investigations," 1910). In Birmingham, Hine stopped to photograph children working at the Avondale Mill, which was owned by Alabama Governor Braxton Bragg Comer. While waiting in the mill office to meet with the manager. Comer's son, Hine slipped through a back door and into the mill where he made photographs of the lint-covered children before returning to the office. When the manager finally did appear to meet with him, Hine presented himself as a postcard photographer and sales representative and asked to photograph the workers. Comer declined, claiming that the workers were dirty and not pretty to look at. When Hine persisted. Comer’s real reason for not wanting photographs made surfaced: "There are persons who come around here getting material for an Anti-cotton Mill crusade" (Hine, NCLC Papers "Alabama Investigations" 1910). But the situations in the states of Georgia and Alabama were not the worst that Hine uncovered in the South. Another state. North Carolina, was the subject of a presentation he gave before the National Child Labor Committee's 11th Annual Meeting in Asheville in 1915:

There has been marked improvement in the general situation during the last five years, but very young children are working today in North Carolina mills. I found two little sisters spinning 161

whose grandmother told me they were only six and seven years old. I found two boys under twelve whose hands had been mutilated in the mill. And I found any number of ten- and eleven-year-old children working an eleven-hour day (during the school term) at tasks involving eye strain and muscle strain. Is it any wonder, therefore, that I found a whole family, mother and five children, the oldest of 17, of which not one could write his name." In Alabama mills, things are considerably better than in North Carolina because of [sic] a live wire of an inspector is on the job enforcing the 12-year age limit. But I found a few youngsters below that age in the mills and scores of nine-, ten-, and twelve-year-old children illegally working as cash girls, messengers, soda clerks, theater ushers, delivery boys and newsies. (Asheville N.C. News. January 6, 1915, Scrapbook 52 NCLC Papers)

Into this resistant, covert, often pro-child labor territory, Hine carried his camera and the bag of tricks he was forced to use to gain the trust of employers and entrance for himself into work places where children could be found. The visual results of his investigative work for the NCLC can be seen by reading a typical Hine photograph taken in a South Carolina textile mill during one of his Southern trips. The photograph, titled "Newberry, South Carolina, December 1908" (Figure #3), is representative of the style of much of his single-image with caption work during his years with the National Child Labor Committee. While the locations, ages of the workers, and industries represented in his photographs varied, the simple, direct approach used in this photograph was common in much of Hine's work. Two other picture- text combinations (Figures #4 and #5) from different industries and locations that exhibit these same qualities and approaches are 162 provided to show that the "Newberry, South Carolina" example is typical of Hine's work. The "Newberry, South Carolina" photograph has strong contrast, but the light illuminating the subject is soft. The central image is of a small girl looking toward the camera. Without some knowledge of the circumstances in which this photograph was made, the picture might have been taken for nothing more than a snapshot of child. While not really frightened, the girl does seem to be a bit timid, although perhaps she is doing nothing more than playing shy with a stranger. The outside shape of this photograph is rectangular, a shape that is frequently thought to suggest a feeling of stability, honesty and workman-like quality (Berger 42). This solid, substantial feeling that is taken from the outer shape is contrasted with the triangular shape formed by the areas of light above and the areas of dark below the little girl. Often, triangular shapes like these can suggest tension, action or excitement; this is certainly something that is reinforced by the weaving machines to the little girl's right and left, which seem poised as if waiting for something to happen. The feeling of tension suggested by these triangular shapes also might be taken in a forboding sense that might indicate some evil lurking somewhere nearby, just outside of the photograph's frame. This photograph is situated carefully on the point between formal and informal balance and might be read either way. Formal balance is often viewed as stiff or static in nature, while informal 163 balance generates visual tension or excitement (Berger 47). The formal aspect of this photograph comes from the equal distribution of weight in tone, space and subject on either side of an imagined center line or fulcrum, but an informal balance is suggested by the subtle differences closer examination reveals between each half of the photograph. The right half of the picture contains the head of another figure, this one an adult, peering out around the comer of a machine. The left half of the photograph is slightly softer in tone and focus than the right side and contains a portion of a weaving machine that is unequal to the portion of the weaving machine that is shown on the opposite side of the picture. The informal balance this closer look suggests may favor a reading of excitement and visual tension. This reading of informal balance seems consistent with the reading suggested by the triangular shapes examined earlier and is easily acceptable. However, this informal balance also might be read as providing a feeling of forced or uncomfortable position. Even if the reader opts for the view of informal balance, what that informal balance contributes to the photographs meaning is somewhat unclear. The lighting in this photograph seems natural and not at all contrived. The shadows are strong, and the highlights are clear. Lighting of this type, referred to as "chairoscuro lighting," is powerful and emotional (Berger 50). Association plays a big role in the effects that lighting ratios suggest to viewers. Lighting of the type used in this photograph of the little girl prompts a feeling of reverence 164

similar to what might be suggested by the lighting found in a cathedral. This gentle reading of the lighting in this photograph seems to be consistent with the feeling generated by the reading given the other elements examined so far in this analysis. However, if our reading of these earlier elements were to shift, this high- contrast lighting then might become more associated with the high- contrast lightening that has been used for many years in the theater in a more dramatic way of building tension and heightening excitement. This theatrical reading could give this photograph a less gentle and altogether different meaning. In addition to the lighting ratio looked at in the previous paragraph, another aspect of lighting, color or tone may be examined. In the case of a black-and-white study like this one, the tone or intensity of the light is what must be assessed, along with the contextual differences between relative lightness and darkness of objects and their backgrounds or foregrounds. Here again, association plays an important role. White or lightness suggests good, and black or darkness suggests evil (Osborn 115-126). The lightness of the white bobbins on the machine, which lead the eye toward the small girl's light-toned face easily may be seen as suggesting good or innocence. But the shadows and darkness in portions of this photograph seem to suggest an evil connotation. If the less kind clues for lighting ratio as well as the more sinister readings possible from the shapes contained in this image are 165

accepted, then the reading of this photograph seems less likely to provide an innocent interpretation. Scale, or the relative size of different objects contained in the photograph, can contribute to meaning. Scale can add power to the larger of the objects in a photograph and, by the same token, reduce in importance the smaller ones. The emotional impact of scale may make the smallest of a set of objects seem insignificant (Berger 44). In the case of this photograph, the young girl is by far smaller than the machines that surround her, but due to the gradual tapering of those objects toward her center position in the photograph, importance can be added to her diminutive size. Either reading might be reasonably made, with each having a different effect on m eaning. Related to scale is the concept of spatiality. As an indicator of the sense of openness or lack of openness in a scene, spatiality calls to mind some associations that can have an impact on the meaning we read from a photograph. Openness suggests a feeling of upperclass or success, while a cramped, crowded feeling comes from a lack of spatiality (Berger 44). The angle of the machinery leading away from the girl, coupled with her small size and the empty floor space in the foreground may be seem as adding a sense of openness to this particular image. An alternative reading may take into account the crowdedness and confusion that is added to the image by all of the overhead cables and belts. Reading the photograph using 166 the latter set of clues leads to a much more cramped and undesirable feeling. Camera position also plays a role in the meaning that viewers might get from this simple photograph. An angle higher than the subject would suggest that the photographer (and, through the photographer, the viewer) feels somehow superior or that the subject is somehow inferior. An angle lower than the subject might give the feeling that the subject was somehow to be revered by the viewer or that the viewer was of less than equal standing with the photographer (and the viewing audience). In this photograph, the camera is positioned at or near eye level with the subject. This same-level view suggests a certain honesty and promotes the feeling of equality between the subject shown and the viewer (Berger 71). However, this honesty could provide either a positive or a negative view of what is going on in this photograph. A sense of honesty could be taken either in support of or against child labor reform depending on the viewer's position. The angle of the subject to the camera is another contributor to meaning. Subjects positioned looking down or away from the camera might indicate guilt or dishonesty. This away-from-camera view also may be a way of saying that the viewer should see the subject as object rather than as human. Subjects that are positioned, like the little girl in Figure #3, looking directly into the camera lens show good eye contact between subject and photographer and suggest both honesty and a strong human connection between viewer and subject 167

(Berger 71). Here again, this honesty serves primarily to reinforce or legitimize the view provide by other visual signs and does not in itself really provide a favorable or unfavorable impression of what is being shown in the photograph. This again depends on the viewer's existing view. The distance of the photographer from the subject photographed determines the type of shot produced. An extreme close-up of a portion of a person's face is a highly personal and intimate way of giving viewers insight into the personality of the subject photographed. The normal close-up is not quite so intense but still includes only the fact and little else. A medium shot generally includes the head, shoulders and torso but still offers little information other than clues about the person's stance or clothing and appearance. Long and extremely long shots each show progressively more of the surroundings in which the person photographed was situated (Berger 72). These shots provide more information than can be included in closer views. As shot distance increases, viewer involvement with the subject decreases. In this photograph, a medium shot is used that is close enough to make the little girl's expression clear but far enough that some of her surroundings are included. From what is seen, this little girl may be an industrious child who takes to heart the old adage that hard work is the key to success. She also may be an unfortunate waif who, for whatever reason, is being compelled to work in a factory rather than being allowed to attend school and participate in play with other 168 children of her own age. Using only the visual clues, which meaning the maker desired is unclear. Taking in each case the first reading, the little girl's innocence and softness, as revealed by the light used in this photograph, along with the excitement and visual tension generated by the shapes formed by the lines and position of the objects used and the work setting all provide for a pleasant and favorable reading of this photographic image and a reading that provides a reasonable explanation for the meaning of this photographic image. Taking the alternative reading that is present from each of the visual elements examined, it is clear that this image also might have been reasonably read with an entirely different meaning. This pair of disparate readings from the same photographic image reinforces the view that photographs can be ambiguous. The problem with these interpretations, as with any interpretations based solely on the visual elements in a photograph, is that many equally reasonable explanations can be made, depending on which set of clues are identified and on how they are interpreted. Ironically, the root the problem of photographic ambiguity appears to be the ultra information richness of the photograph. That very aspect of the photograph that gives it its greatest power as a source of evidence— its all seeing and all inclusive nature—is what can cause it to be exceedingly ambiguous in meaning. Although Hine framed his photographs carefully, selective vision while a valuable tool, was not always enough to guarantee the desired meaning for his viewers. 169

Figure #3

Single Image and Caption

Newberry, South Carolina. Another of the many small children working in Mollahan Mills, Newberry, S. C. Witness Sara R. Hine 170

Figure #4

Single Image and Caption

Boys at the Lehr, Economy Glass Works. Morgantown, West Virginia, October, 1908 171

Figure #5

Budd’s Bogg - Single Image and Caption

Rose Oquoto, 6 years old, and Flora Oquoto, 7 years old live a 837 Kimball St., Philadelphia, Pa. Picking cranberries at Theodore Budd's Bog at Turkeytown, near Pemberton, N.J. This is the fourth week of school in Philadelphia and people will stay here two weeks more. Witness E.F. Brown. 172

Modem day theorists have tried to deal with this tendency for ambiguity in photographs in several ways. Both Arthur Berger, in his book. Seeing is Believing, and Terry Barrett, in his book Criticizing Photographs, suggest a two-step approach, description followed by interpretation, as a way of evaluating and understanding images. By knowing what all is contained within the borders of the photograph, judgments can be made about the relative importance of the items depicted and their relationship to other items included in the frame. The shortcoming of this two-step process for ensuring understanding of the communicative element of a photograph arises from uncertainty about whether all that was seen by the camera was also seen by the photographer and about whether judgments related to the relative importance of each item and each item's relationship to the other items included in the picture. Based solely on visual clues, the viewer can have no idea about what the intended meaning of any image is. Context plays a role in understanding, but the factor of intentionality of the photographer or producer of the image still could bring about a different interpretation. A more fruitful approach that uses the two-step method, combining it with an ambiguity reducing tool, was outlined by Roland Barthes. For Barthes, as for Berger and Barrett, the first level in reading a photograph is denotive and deals with what is physically present in the image—that is the information presented or described by the photograph. The second level is connotative and deals with the interpretations those things physically present suggest or imply. 173

In his work, Barthes dealt with advertising photographs so that he could be sure that the images were made with intentionality. Many of these images used an additional or third element, a linguistic one, that further directed interpretation (Barrett 82). The linguistic element contained within an image described by Barthes seems to function in the same way that the brief text that Hine used many years earlier to accompany his images did in directing the interpretation of his photographs. In some of Barthes' analysis, the textual element is included within the photograph, but for mediated images, it is only necessary that the text be in the vicinity of the photograph. This is the case with Hine's work. Although, on occasion, a sign or handbill posted on a fence or door will be visible in a Hine photograph, the linguistic element generally is in the caption that accompanies the single photograph. Many possible meanings can be assigned to any image. Often, clues must be searched out to identify which meaning is appropriate for a given image at a given time. But in the case of Hine's work, the ultimate clue for the meaning of his photographs was provided by his often brief but ever-present captions. These few words, many times surreptitiously scrawled with a pencil stub onto a scrap of paper hidden in his pocket and later transferred to the back of his photographic prints, did more than just identify the photograph's location, time and subject; these words suggested to the viewer what the visual information contained within the images meant. 174

Words alone described a much more horrid view of child labor that did Hine's pictures. This may be because words, lacking a photograph's strength as proof, needed to overstate the child labor reform case. By doing this, even after they were discounted due to their lack of evidential strength, a powerful message from the words would still remain. Words that were only half believed still might be convincing if what they said at full strength was strong enough. The following passage by Felix Adler from a 1905 speech in support of reform seems to paint an exceedingly harsh word picture of what life was like for many child workers shortly after the turn of the century. This description is of a man named Apsden and his seven- year-old son:

What a picture; the man rousing a child of seven from his sleep, forcing him cut of bed in the dark winter morning, trudging with him on his back across the snow, and depositing the little fellow, seven year old, to work for sixteen hours. And then another picture, for he adds: "I have often knelt at his side and given him food while he was working, because he was not allowed to leave the machine. " If you wish to realize what child labor means, think of the inmates of London workhouses systematically done to death in the Yorkshire factories. Think of Apsden and his seven-year-old boy, and then think—if you can bear to do so—of anoüier picture! (The Annals 418)

Another passage from later in the same speech also depicts some of the terrible conditions, both physically and morally, endured by child w orkers:

Children began their work in the mines sometimes as early as at five years of age. Little girls were found to make ten or 175

twelve trips a day up steep ladders to the surface, carrying heavy loads of coal in wooden buckets on their shoulders. For the development of little girls into womanhood, what an admirable device! Women and girls, half nude, worked side by side with boys and men wholly so; every consideration of human decency was flung to the winds. (The Annals 419)

By choice, Hine did not represent the most dislikable aspects of child labor in his photographs. His approach, rather, was to focus his camera on the hope and pride of his subjects—on what was right and should be preserved rather than on what was wrong. Hine had been a child laborer and he knew that by focusing on the worst, little would be apparent that should be saved. His images, directed with words, presented an accurate portrayal but also revealed the pride and hope that the people he photographed maintained. Photographic images that were unpleasant would not likely have been seen or accepted by those who favored the status-quo position. Not being seen, these images’ strength as evidence and their ability to suggest meaning would have been of little or no value in the crusade for reform. They would have had little impact in shifting attention away from the prevailing view about the acceptability of child labor. Instead, Hine produced images that were compelling in their simplicity and pleasing in their aesthetic approach as demonstrated by the fact that Hine’s child labor photographs now hang on gallery walls and are welcomed and valued for their haunting photographic beauty. Hine’s images had a surface message that proponents of the status quo would accept. His pictures showed industrious children at 176 work in factories and on farms. Groups of children were shown together, and although smiles were rare, looks of pain were equally scarce. The reading of the Newberry, South Carolina photograph is typical of the reading that is possible from the majority of Hine's child labor-images. Using the native ambiguousness of the photograph as part of his visual approach, Hine moved past the selective vision of those whose minds most needed to be changed. Once the images were seen, Hine's short but pointed captions directing the range of acceptable meanings for the images already had done their work. Reading the Newberry, South Carolina photograph once again, with no knowledge other than that contained in the brief caption, an altogether different picture begins to emerge. The approach Hine developed for ensuring mutually understood meaning between photographer and viewer for photographic images used as communication that he produced for the National Child Labor Committee was the accompanying text. That text determines which of the variety of interpretations that visual analysis alone might provide for this images should be used and allows for no misunderstanding about what the meaning of the photograph was for Hine and about how the visual clues leading there were to be interpreted. Hine's words were few but effective in informing the viewer that this is anything but a casual snapshot of an out-of-place little girl. The caption, although a simple one, is powerful and clearly directs the viewer toward the desired interpretation: "Another of 177

the many small children working in Mollahan Mills, Newberry, S.C. Witness Sara R. Hine" (Kemp 37). The statement given in the caption that "many children" are in the mills lets the viewer know that this is not an isolated instance that the photographer has chosen to record—that although only a single child is shown, that child is but one of many others. The word "working" directs the viewer to cast aside any thoughts about the girl being in the mill only to visit a parent or that she is only passing through the mill as part of a school field trip or any other innocent purpose. The information about the "small" size of the child makes clear that she is no adult and that she really is as diminutive as she appears; this comparison between the small child and the large equipment makes the machinery that surrounds her seem all the larger and more threatening. Hine knew that individual objects were sometimes hard to rate in terms of size unless some relative measure were provided. Hine did this and then made sure that his viewers knew about it by highlighting size with his words. This comparison of scale between machines and children made obvious the youthfulness of many of Hine's subjects. The words that disclose the name of the company, Mollahan Mills, and provide its location, Newberry, South Carolina, serve to authenticate this image. Rather than becoming just a picture in an anonymous, unnamed someplace else, this becomes a representation of a actual work place in a real town. With a name, people could identify the town from first-hand experience or at least could find it on a map. Rather than allowing 178 this mill and location to be an abstract concept for his readers, Hine used his words to suggest that this place really did exist. The use of these words added realism to the photograph in much the same way that the photograph added the human element to the words. Perhaps the most telling feature of the text in this simple photo-text unit is its last line. Apparently, so much importance is attached to this word and picture combination that Hine felt the need to add the words, "Witness Sara R. Hine." The identification of a witness implies that the photograph will be thought unfavorable by someone and the authenticity of the picture is likely be challenged without the added weight of someone who was present at the time and could corroborate when and where the picture was made besides the photographer. In this photograph, the textual element, both for what it says and by its very presence, contributes substantially to m eaning. With the textual (linguistic) clue provided by the caption giving direction, the visual aspects of the photograph become much easier to interpret and point toward a much less pleasant view than a reading based on the surface exposure to the photograph might suggest. The picture is of a young girl who is positioned a bit to the left of the center of the image. Knowing from the information in the caption that something in this photograph may not be right, this particular positioning of the girl is just enough to give the photograph a slightly off-balance feel. This delicate shift in the way 179 the balance is read in the photograph moves the viewer away from the solidness of formal balance toward the visual tension or excitement that comes from informal balance. This informal balance in this photograph of the girl and the machines reinforces the textual message that something is not right in this photograph, that something is out of balance in this situation. The way this informal balance is to be taken is addressed quickly by the textual element that lists the wimess. Knowing that some point of disagreement may surround this photograph leads to a more somber sense of tension or anticipation. Having already crossed the line from formal to informal balance in the photograph based on its visual elements, Hine continues use of that compositional component. The converging lines formed by the machines meet directly behind the child's head at an unseen point that is also slightly off center. No clear horizon line can be seen in the jumble of hard light and dark shapes receding into the background. These factors all contribute to the feeling viewers of the picture have that something is amiss about this scene that is suggested by the text. A sense of foreboding is beginning to surround this image. The elimination of a clear horizon line is unsettling to the emotions. Scenes with a clear horizon line seem open, grand and even ennobled (Berger 56). Views like the one presented in this Hine photograph that don't permit the viewer to see a horizon line often bring a feeling of uneasiness or uncomfortable containment to an image. Once again, this is a 180 message closely related to that contained in the text. As shown earlier, without direction from the text a different meaning could easily be assigned to these visual clues. In any image, as a general rule, the eye starts in the upper left hand comer and moves, as directed by lines and shapes, around a composition. This movement within a composition is caused by vectors. According to Herbert Zettl, a vector equals a force with magnitude and direction. This direction can be used to focus attention on textual or pictorial information either within or adjacent to an image that might contribute to an image's message (Zettl 147). While photographs are stop-action, two-dimensional representation of a given point in time, the use of vectors can give photographs powerful life (Berger 50). A compelling force in this photograph comes from the vectors the high contrast lighting, with the deep shadows that it brings, helps to form out of the machine shapes on the left and right of the girl. The vectors, made from lines and shapes, are what Hine uses to move our eyes around and through his photograph. Clues about the unsettling nature of this situation come from the text and bring about a closer examination of the way the vectors used in this photograph work. These vectors cause the eye to start well within the borders of the photograph rather than in the more traditional and therefore more comfortable upper left-hand comer. The youngster is framed on the top and left side of the photograph by overhead pipes that run to the machinery. The child is contained within the confines of this very industrial environment. 181

Once again, working with the text, the photograph gives the sense that something is out of balance or not right about what's going on in this situation. Hine's young worker is standing up and looking at the camera. Our new awareness of the significance of the girl's size based on the text adds emphasis to the girls smallness compared to the large size of the machinery. That judgement of scale is assured when notice is taken of the larger adult-size figure peering over the comer of the machine in the upper right-hand quarter of the picture. Hine photographs frequently paired a child with an adult to make this comparison of scale. Despite the appearance of this other figure, the scene has a feeling of isolation and shows no human contact—only contact between the girl and her machine. A child-like smile on is on this girl's face, her right foot is angled slightly away from her body, and she is wearing a simple dress covered by a smock. These qualities reveal an innocent, lithesome mood. The tediousness of the work and the repetitious shapes and lines receding into the depths of the image and on toward infinity, suggest that this innocence will not likely last in this industrialized factory life. The information that this girl is working in the mill comes from the text. Camera position also has implications for meaning in the angle at which the subject is oriented relative to the camera. In the case of this child worker, Hine chose a view that had her oriented in a straightforward manner, looking directly into the camera. This position suggests honesty and candor. 182

Photographs with no eye contact may treat their subjects as objects to be looked at rather than as people with whom to connect. Photographs with good eye contact may show the human connection between photographer and subject (Berger 71). The human connection, so obvious in this photograph, was ever present in most of Hine's child labor work. Hine could identify and comfortably photograph his child workers on their own level as one of their own. While the fact that the text calls for a witness suggests controversy, Hine's honest connection with his subject from the visual clues serves to place him on the side of truth. Even though the child is small and occupies little space, the machinery crowding in from every side makes this scene look cramped and cluttered, an environment that seems poor or lower class. This lack of spatiality is troubling since the area where the machinery and the girl is located appears huge. The feeling of lower class often brought about by a crowded appearance is used in this photograph well in this image. The textual clue that this girl is "another of the many" works to reinforce this crowded visual reading of the photograph. The lighting of the photograph is very telling. Of course, without light, nothing can be seen, so it is a most important element. Association also plays a role in what different types of lighting effects will suggest to viewers. A feeling of reverence in a cathedral, for example, or the sense of fear during a horror film might be based on our association of certain types of light with certain situations. 183

Flat lighting reveals much that the object illuminated contains but with little impact for the viewer (Berger 50). In the photograph of this small worker, the lighting in the environment is high contrast. This type of lightning is called "chiaroscuro lighting" and features strong and high contrast with bright lights and deep darks. Chiaroscuro lighting is powerful, emotional, and perhaps tragic. In contrast to this overall lighting in the photograph, the light falling on Hine's small subject is flat and somewhat softer than that in the rest of the scene that is recorded by the camera. This softer somewhat flattering lighting with strong lights and weak shadows suggests rationality and knowledge, two characteristics worth preserving in the nation's youth. The brief text that accompanies this photograph helps the viewer determine which of the meaning options carried by the light are to be applied by clearly presenting the photographer's intention in making the photograph. Lights and darks also play a role in saying what this photograph of the small worker is all about. The brightness of the child's upper body is emphasized and made even more intense by the shadowed darkness of her lower body. By association, the blackness of the space in front of the girl portrays little but evil in her future, while the lightness of the area behind her suggests the good that she may have left behind. When objects reflect most of the light that strikes them, they are seen as white in color or light in tone. When objects absorb light, they appear black in color or dark in tone. Brightness or darkness is a measure of the intensity of an 184 image. Light objects shown against a dark background seem even more intense and more prominent than when presented against a light background, dark objects in dark environments seem subdued and even darker than they really are. While the text does not give specific direction to support this light versus dark reading, words have influenced the reading of other visual elements and those elements in turn support this light versus dark reading. The eye-level position of the camera relative to the child promotes honesty and a feeling of equality with the subject, the angle at which the child is oriented to the camera is a straight forward one and is a sign of honesty and candor both on the part of the photograph's subject and the photograph's maker, this honesty, visually suggested through the photograph, adds credibility to the message in the text. The eye contact the child has with the camera lens seems to humanize the episode even more, the eye-level camera angle selected for this photograph, the angle commonly used by Hine, did much to promote honesty and demonstrate this equality with the subject and position of empathy for child workers. Once again, this visual reading of honesty serves to position Hine on the side of right in the controversy hinted at by the text. The sharp focus on this youthful worker implies accuracy. Sharpness makes the photograph seem all the more real and life like and separates the photographic image from other types of images. This separation moves the photograph away from the copy of reality status held by paintings or drawings and toward acceptance as 185

reality. Another characteristic of photographic sharpness is related to depth of focus. Depth of focus refers to the range of things within the image that are in sharp focus. While our eyes tend to make instantaneous adjustments so everything we see, regardless of how close or far away, tends to appear sharp, photographs as frozen moments in time are not able to make that continual focus shift. By controlling the size of the aperture in the lens, the photographer can control the range of things that will be seen sharply. A small lens aperture will result in everything from the very closest to the lens to the farthest away appearing sharp. A large lens aperture shrinks the range of things that are sharp. This photographic control can be used to multiply the sense of isolation or separation of visual elements in the image. By contrast, universal sharpness in a photograph serves to tie visual elements more closely together. In the photograph of the small girl in the mill, the extended depth of focus Hine used tended to integrate rather than separate the child from the machines. This use of universal sharpness suggests a molding of girl and machine into a single, mechanical unit. The accuracy this sharp focus suggests, coupled with the specific details like location and company name that Hine provided in his text, seem to support the truthfulness of the photograph and text unit. This photographic text unit serves as an example of the amount of information contained in a visual image and of the way that Hine's use of identifying words directed the meaning suggested by the visual elements. This image is typical of many of the single image 186 photograph and text combinations that Hine used in his quest for moving his audience from the status-quo position that child labor was all right to the revolutionary position that the use of children in the labor force was an evil that required action for change. Many of Hine's child labor photographs used these same themes and showed small children in scenes with large, looming, industrial-looking machinery. When adults were included, their functions seemed to be to add further visual evidence of the small size of the child workers or to make the children somehow seem subservient to the adult, almost in the manner of a slave-master relationship. In a country that not many years before had fought a bloody war to insure the elimination of slavery, the sort of relationship implied by the positioning of adults in photographs in this way could be seen as very menacing. By focusing on this individual working child, Hine makes clear the arguments of the child labor movement in support of child labor reform. Although he did much surreptitious work to gain access, in both exterior and interior shots, Hine took great care to ensme that the data he obtained once he was able to focus his camera on a subject were 100% correct. Captions under these groups sometimes included, in the children’s own words, their ages, education levels and descriptions of the jobs they did. The deception to which Hine sometimes resorted in order to gain access with his camera sometimes worried him. He knew that his credibility as an honest investigator could be challenged and thereby the value of his 187 photographs and texts as evidence when the dishonesty of his method of gaining entry was revealed:

More significant, however, was one thing that made me extra careful about getting data 100% pure when possible. Because the proponents of the use of children for work sought to discredit the data and especially the photographer, we used—I was compelled to use—the utmost care in making them fireproof. One argument they did use, "Hine used deception to get his child labor photos; naturally he would not be relied upon to tell the truth about what he found," so the Committee had to assure them & the public that they, in turn, always checked up on Hine to make sure he could be relied upon — all they could say. (Hine, 1938 letter to Elizabeth McCausland reprinted in Kaplan Picture Story 128)

Through the combination of visual and textual elements, Hine seemed able to strengthen the believability and credibility of both text and photographs. His text made claims and revealed new levels of meaning for viewers of his photographs. His photographs, thereby understood in the new light of his text, served as evidence and added strength to the claims made with his words. Looking at a number of different Hine photographs with their accompanying captions shows that the word-and-photograph combination examined here is typical of much of his work. For example. Figure #4, which is captioned, "Boys at the Lehr, Economy Glass Works. Morgantown, West Virginia, October, 1908" (Curtis and Mallach 50), shows three young workers toiling in the white hot heat of the furnaces. The use of the ultra bright light from the furnaces and its obvious implication of heat and use of shapes to show the 188 repetitious and unchanging nature of the work that the boys are performing, and the use of scale to illustrate the inconsequential view of the boys when compared to the massive furnaces in front of which they are working are all visual tools whose desired meaning becomes apparent after reading the words Hine selected to accompany the picture. The words, brief though they are, make certain that his message was clear to the viewer. The overall lightness of this photograph coupled with the date, as revealed in the caption, indicate that school is in session, yet these boys are at work during hours when the daylight is bright. Information about company name and place also help clarify and make real what the photograph claims. Another sample of Hine's work is shown in Figure #5 and is entitled, "Budd's Bog." This photograph is accompanied by these w ords:

Rose Oquoto, 6 years old, and Flora Oquoto, 7 years old, live at 837 Kimball St., Philadelphia, Pa. Picking cranberries at Theodore Budd's Bog at Turkey town, near Pemberton, N.J. This is the fourth week of school in Philadelphia and people will stay here two weeks more. Witness E.F. Brown. (Curtis and Mallach 61)

The picture shows a large group of people at work in the bog, including these two small children. Here again, examination shows that words limit the meaning that viewers can read from this photograph. Readings similar to those done for the Newberry South Carolina photograph in Figure #3 could be done for Figure #4 and 189

Figure #5 both with and without words to illustrate the nature of Hine's communication methods.

"Time Exposures by Hine"

All of Hine's child labor photographs seemed either to ask or answer questions. As his worked progressed, his text and image combinations were modified and began to appear under a new title. "Time Exposures by. Hine " was the heading used over this new form of photographic communication developed by Hine and published in The Survey. Some of these "Time Exposures " used a single photograph, although on many occasions two images were used—one inset into the other—or even three images—one on either side and one at the top forming a frame for the text. Generally, more words accompanied this new form than were used in most of Hine's single image presentations, but not always. Most "Time Exposures" included two or three paragraphs of tightly written copy in addition to the visual component, although a few used only a single line of copy. Any "Time Exposure" that used more than one photograph generally used the additional image to serve as a way of making a visual contrast between existing situations and desirable situations. One photograph would show what was acceptable, and the other would show what was unacceptable about child labor. The 190 photographs set the parameters of the argument, which was presented in the story told with the text that followed. Whether they contained single images or multiple images, brief captions or more extensive copy, these "Time Exposures" functioned as stand-alone units and did not rely on or illustrate the main text or the articles that surrounded them. Under the "Time Exposure by Hine" heading, these units were enclosed in a ruled boxed. The photographic portion was at the top. A headline or title line that asked a question sometimes was used below the photograph(s). The text block followed under the visual element but was still contained within the ruled box. A complete story was presented in each "Time Exposure." Reproductions of two "Time-Exposures by Hine" are included with this document (Figure #6 and Figure #7). The first (Figure #6) contains a single illustration with but a single line of text. This "Time Exposure" parallels Hine's familiar single image-text combination but, due to the manner of presentation, is detached from the surrounding material and does not rely on this surrounding articles for meaning. It is a complete self-contained communication unit. The second "Time-Exposure" uses two images and four paragraphs of copy and is more typical of this genre. However, both seem to follow the same format, with the illustration serving as answer to the question asked by the words—either text or title. Both of these examples seem clearly intended to present only enough information to cause readers 191 to stop and think. The conclusions to be drawn from this reflection seem obvious after viewing the "Time-Exposure." These "Time-Exposures" follow Hine's pattern of using simple and direct visuals that, by their very treatment and appearance, are straightforward and honest. This way of seeing became a Hine hallmark. Beaumont Newhall, who only became fam iliar with Hine's work late in Hine's life, wrote the photographer about his photographic style in 1938; "As to the photographic end, I feel that I can be of some value. Your work strikes me of excellent quality, possessing that straightforward, clean technique which I believe to the only valid photographic style" (Kaplan, Picture Story. 107, reprint of a letter from Beaumont Newhall to Lewis Hine, dated 1938). The simple photographs used in "Time-Exposures," like other Hine photographs, were often engaging to the viewer. "Time Exposures " seem to deal with the broader social welfare problems of education and the importance of childhood as well as directly with child labor.

Kids and Cans Examined

The first "Time Exposure" examined is very similar to the single image and text combinations that Hine had used from the beginning. This picture and text unit was published on page 192 of the May 16, 1914, issue of The Survev. The articles around this picture and text unit deal with issues not related to child labor reform. One story is 192 about the rejuvenation of a small town through the construction of a public library. The facing page carries an article about an exhibit of paintings, etchings and sculptures at New York's University Settlement. The photograph in this "Time Exposure" shows two small children standing in the street in front of a collection of trash cans. The child on the left appears to be a young girl and is wearing a white shift. To her right stands the other child—perhaps her sister since there is some similarity in features—wearing dark-colored clothing. A fence of some sort is visible in the distance behind the children on the right side of the picture, with the side of a dark brick building or grate visible in the background on the left. The trash cans inunediately behind the children are overflowing onto the street. The small child in white is wearing no shoes. The other child is wearing shoes and appears to be somewhat younger. As with many of Hine's images, a reading of this photograph based on the visual clues alone quite easily could lead to the conclusion that the picture is nothing more than a snapshot of a couple of kids standing in the street, perhaps just outside the door of their home. The children's expressions and position relative to the camera suggest a level of comfort or even familiarity with the photographer that reinforce the view that this is only a keepsake for the family photo album. Maybe the photographer was a friend or even a family member. Viewers may feel that it was unfortunate that these children were posed in front of those cans full of trash, but 193 then an emphasis on the primary subjects of the photograph, the children themselves, tends to minimize this poor choice of background. Here again, the words that Hine used very effectively set the stage for reading this photograph in in a manner that leads to the intended meaning. The title line under the picture is "Cans and Kids," and the only line of text used with this "Time-Exposure" is immediately below the title. It asks the question, "Is the street big enough for both all day?" As with other Hine images, the text as used here brings about a shift in meaning in the visual so that what appears to be a simple snapshot of two children in the street, in reality, becomes a powerful tool to stimulate thought on the broader issue of childhood and the importance of clean, airy, healthy places to play. The words that Hine used with this image provide the necessary direction to make his use of visual elements clear and this "Time-Exposure" even more powerful than a surface reading of either the image or the words alone are able to. The highlights on the children's faces and the light color of the older girl's dress make these, the only human elements in the photograph, stand out even more than their position in the foreground, in front of the trash cans, does. The dark, somber tones of the background leave a sinister feeling and naturally seem to recede. The bright tones in the one girl's shift and in the highlights of both girls' faces make them project from the picture and draw attention to these children. This 194

brightness suggests both innocence and hope. The simple line of text, "Is the street big enough for both all day?" sets up the dichotomy that one element belongs on the street and the other does not, at least not at the same time. Vectors created by the lines delineating the trash cans from the street on which they rest intersect at the children's feet to form the point of an inverted triangle. This triangular shape creates a certain amount of tension in a photograph that has basically symmetrical balance, particularly when coupled with the question asked by the text. Although different in tone—one is light and the other is dark, and slightly different in size—the two children are positioned one on each side of the center axis of the photograph so that they almost mirror each other. The strong vertical lines formed by the ribs of the trash cans and the fence in the background seem almost to imprison the children. The feeling of compression is heightened by the presence of a pair of grooves running around each of the cans visible just to the side of each child. The grooves seem to be pushing inward against the children. This feeling is amplified by the direction provided through the time frame set with Hine's words, "Is the street big enough for both all dav" (emphasis added). This sense of compression provided by the visual elements becomes all the more oppressive with the knowledge that this is not a short-term or temporary situation lasting only long enough for the photographer to take a snapshot after which the children will return to their nearby 195 homes or school, but a day-long containment and one that may go on day after day. Since the contrast between two or three images is not used in this "Time-Exposure," the contrast between what is contained within its single photograph's borders becomes more important. Scale plays a role in this photograph, as it does in many Hine images. The largest of the two children is barely a head taller than the trash cans behind. The use of conunon objects for which the viewer has a sense of size and that are clearly identified in the caption adds emphasis to the fact that the largest of these children is indeed small and that the maker of the picture was indeed conscious of the trash cans in the background. The smaller of the two, by comparison to the other and to the trash cans, seems even smaller. The contrast between the cans and the kids, both that read from the visual clues and that taken from the question asked by the text, leads the viewer to see that only one answer exists: No!

The Double Standard Examined

The second "Time-Exposure" (Figure #7) is a diptych, a text and image combination that uses two photographs. In this case, one photograph is inset into the other. This particular combination of two images with words into a single unit is entitled, "The Double Standard," and plays on a frequent Hine theme. In his work, Hine often asked why what is the standard in one place for one group of 196 child workers is not the standard in another place for another group of child workers. By pointing out this discrimination or "double standard," Hine engaged in bringing this question of fairness to the forefront and in creating dissatisfaction within the status-quo. As agents of change, Hine and the NCLC were most interested in creating a shift away from the acceptance of child labor as okay and toward the view of child labor as unacceptable. Wherever controversy could be created or highlighted to help weaken the status-quo and strengthen the position for change, it was used. For Hine and other child labor reformers, issues even unrelated to child labor, such as the difference between the treatment of black children and white children in the South, which could be used to create disunity and a division in the forces in favor of the status quo were used. Some of Hine’s double standards related to the difference in wages paid for the same work done by men and boys. Others related to the disparity in acceptable quality of educational facilities for blacks and whites or for those in the North and those in the South.

Still other double standards related to the inconsistency in m inim um work ages and in weekly working hour limits for Northern children and Southern children laboring in the same industry—in this particular case, not only children working in the same industry but children working for the same employer, the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. This picture and text unit has the heading "TIME EXPOSURES by HINE," which was common to most of Hine's multiple-image 197

presentations during the period. This particular "Time Exposure" was published on page 5 of the April 14, 1914, issue of The Survey. The material on the page facing the one where this "Time Exposure" appeared was related to topics other than child labor reform. Articles included one about good housing standards, another about a self-governing welfare league for prisoners, and a third about vandalism that had been done to a Survey exhibit. Sharing the page with this "Time Exposure" was an article about proposed old-age pensions in Canada. Contained within the ruled box surrounding the "Time Exposure" heading are two photographs followed by a headline and four short and well directed paragraphs of copy. The background photograph in this "Time Exposure" shows two women walking from left to right across the frame toward a building surrounded by a high wooden picket fence. A gate is in the fence towards which the two are walking. Next to that gate stand two children; the smaller of the children is clasping with both hands the hand of the older child. The women are looking down as they walk, and the two children are also looking towards the ground and not at the approaching women. Lighting is harsh in the photograph, with the midday sun casting the short, distinct, dark shadows of the children and the women on the ground. The inset photograph is placed slightly above and to the left of the physical center of the background image. It uses round comers as opposed to the square comers used on all the other graphic 198 elements in this "Time Exposure" and is outlined by a white rule rather than the black rule used to outline the other images and the text block. Two boys are shown in the inset photograph. Both appear to be happy—the one in the foreground is looking directly into the camera lens and smiling broadly, and the other, larger boy, standing to the left and slightly behind, is looking off toward something to his right that is out of the frame; he is grinning a little. His eyes are concealed by the shadow cast by the bill of his cap. Several readings could come from this pair of photographic images. Perhaps the building in the background of the larger image is a school house with a fenced playground for the protection of the children. The two youngsters outside the fence by the gate may be waiting for their mothers to pick them up after their lessons for the day have been completed. Or, as the strong but short shadows from the sun might suggest, these boys may be waiting for their mothers to walk them home for their lunch. The downward tilt of the heads of these two fellows might alternatively lead to the assumption that they've been chastised for their behavior in school and are being sent home early by their teachers. That seems to support this reading that the children are leaving school before the end of the day for some reason. Maybe the boys are looking toward the ground because they feel badly about the pranks that they have pulled in school and are less than anxious to see their mothers approaching. The informal balance of this visual scene, both in the background photograph alone and in the off-center placement of the inset 199 photograph, gives us a feeling that tension is coming from something that is going on, and this seems to reinforce our reading of boys in trouble at school. The triangular shape formed with the women on the left making one comer of the base, the young boys on the right making the other comer of the base and the boys in the inset photograph completing the shape as the third comer or top of the triangle seems to support the idea that there is some sort of relationship between these elements and that, as with the clues that give this photographic set its formal balance, something is somehow amiss here. The smaller, inset photograph easily could be read as supporting some of these possible meanings for the larger background image. Maybe the photographer's idea in the inset photograph to say something about what the boys remaining in the schoolhouse were like. The happy expressions on the faces of the two boys in the inset might have been caused by their recollection of the shenanigans pulled by their two classmates, who now have the misfortune of being sent home and not being allowed to continue a their school day with the others. Or maybe the two boys in the insert, who appear older because the body size shown in their photo is larger than the body size of the two boys outside, are just the next class of more advanced students that is meeting in this building. Maybe they are shown happy and smiling as a way of encouraging the younger boys to stay in school to enjoy the good times of leaming 200 and playing yet to come. Any number of possible readings might reasonably be made from this combination of photographic images. But any ambiguity about how this "Time Exposure" was to be read ends with the four short paragraphs Hine chose to include in this "Time Exposure" box in The Survev:

The two youngsters at the mill gate assured Mr. Hine they were 12 years old. Twelve is the meager minimum working age fixed by Alabama law. "Pinky" was particularly sure of it and his mother bore him out. But the school record, disconcertingly enough, showed him barely eight.

Other school records, family Bibles and life insurance policies in Huntsville testified to five children of 8 and 10 years at work; to 13 who had started to work before they were 12.

The bigger boys in the panel work for the same company. But they are in its mill in new England where the minimum age is 14 and most of the children, Mr. Hine found, are 16 or over.

Both pictures are of employes [sic] (thediminutive form of em ployes [sic] has not yet been coined) of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company which [sic] has mills at Huntsville, Ala., and Lowell, Mass. (April 14, 1914, The Survev. 5)

Looking at the images once again with the benefit of the direction Hine provided with his words, we see an altogether different set of pictures and one that gives us an altogether different meaning from this photograph and text communication unit. The first line of text makes obvious that the initial readings of the structure as a schoolhouse and the fence behind it as surrounding a playground for the children were very wrong indeed. Working children have little opportunity for schooling, and this building is a 201 mill where young children work. The overhead light, which may mistakenly have been taken to indicate mid-day and time for a lunch break at the school, now clearly shows these boys to be working in the mill during that part of the day when children of their ages could be working at furthering their education. The fence that surrounds the building is not there for the protection of the children but is more likely in place to shield what goes on inside the mill from the eyes of passersby on the outside. The two women approaching the factory gate from the left in the photograph may or may not be the mothers of the two boys shown waiting by the gate,;the text doesn't tell us that much. An innocent reading may place them as women coming for their turn to work in the mill, but if indeed these women are the mothers of "Pinky" and the older lad waiting by the gate, our reading becomes more sinister. Hine's text tells us that "Pinky's" mother testified to his age as 12 despite the fact that the family Bible and school records "showed him barely eight" (April 14, 1914, The Survey. 5). A mother who would lie about the age of her son in order to put him to work in the factory, probably more for her good than for his, is not likely to be thinking of her child's welfare in other instances, either. The young men in the inset photograph, who might have been schoolmates still inside the building the younger boys are leaving, now are revealed to be the older, stronger boys who work in the Merrimack Manufacturing Company's other mills. These older, happier boys, as the text makes clear, are working in the Northern 202 mills in Massachusetts, in contrast to the smaller, down-looking boys who work at the company's Southern mills in Alabama. Their ages and the sizes of these Northern boys makes them better suited for work than their smaller Southern counterparts. Visual clues that relate circular shapes to softness and protection come into play in the round-cornered box that surrounds this inset photograph with the help of the knowledge provided by Hine's text that these boys are protected by better child labor laws than their Southern counterparts, who are in the photograph enclosed with a square-cornered box. The white color of the box around this inset photograph and the black color of the box surrounding the background picture serve to highlight the difference between the good situation represented by the boys in the inset photograph and the evil situation of the boys shown in the background picture. Our reading of the tension contained within this scene from the informal balance set up by the juxtaposition of the inset photograph and the placement of the pair of women and the placement of the pair of boys in the background image is correct buy misdirected in the original reading without the benefit of Hine's textual clues. The same might be said for the ideas about the significance of the triangle shape formed by these three elements. The visual contrast between good and evil and the clear photographic evidence that such differences existed between workers for the same company in the North and in the South, 203 coupled with Hine's persuasive text, leaves readers with but a single answer for the disparity. That is that a double standard really does exist in the world of child labor and that corporations like the Merrimack Manufacturing Company will get away with any sort of treatment of child workers that the citizens and the government perm it.

Exhibition Posters

In addition to single images with captions that were published either alone or along with essays or articles written about child labor reform and the "Time Exposures" format that he developed, Hine sometimes used his photographs coupled with words in another way — as exhibition posters and panels. These posters were used by the National Child Labor Reform Committee to capsulize and simplify the argument against the use of children in the labor force and were used both as displays and as published material in exhibition handbooks. As part of its publicity efforts aimed at bringing about a shift in public opinion about child labor, the National Child Labor Committee provided exhibition panels on request to groups interested in helping spread the word about child labor reform. An advertisement that promoted ways of highlighting the child labor reform cause offered numerous ideas for ways that citizens could bring the issue before the public. One ad, in the May, 1916, Child 204

Labor Bulletin, suggests the use of a lawn party, a tea, or a child labor pageant (for which the script would be provided) for the benefit of the National Child Labor Committee. Other ideas in the advertisement included the presentation of a child labor slide show or the display of a child labor photography exhibit. A notation at the bottom of the ad indicated that the photographic material would be supplied free except for the cost of transportation (May 1916, The Child Labor Bulletin 79). One large-scale use of these exhibition panels was provided by the 1915 Panama Exposition, which was held in San Francisco. Working for the National Child Labor Committee, Hine prepared a new 25-panel exhibit for display at this exposition. The themes of the exhibit were "The High Cost of Child Labor" and "What Are We Going To Do About It?" According to an article in The Child Labor Bulletin. "The exhibit handbook, amplifying the statements of the panels, which is reprinted in this Bulletin will be for sale" (February 1915, The Child Labor Bulletin 7). In exhibits like the one in San Francisco, Hine took the complex issues involved in the child labor reform argument and condensed them into even more simple visual and textual statements. These statements used a combination of images as evidence in support of very limited verbal claims. These exhibition panels differed somewhat from his "Time Exposures" in that they were less obtuse in approach than his other text-and-photograph combinations, used fewer words, and used more graphic devices to tie the photographic 205

and textual elements together. The posters and exhibition panels that Hine made typically allowed for less easy alternative readings since the words, though fewer in number, were set in larger and bolder type and made the intention of the presentation more immediately obvious to the viewer. The primary difference in this form may have been that it allowed Hine to reach yet another audience with the National Child Labor Conunittee's child labor reform messages. In looking at an exhibition panel (Figure #8) and taking away the words, it is clear that the photographs considered alone may tell several stories. The first of the images is of a group of children standing shoulder to shoulder. The photographer has framed this picture so that the full top-to-bottom image may be seen. No background or environment is visible, so this framing must not have have selected to provide clues about the situations of these children. The only other apparent reason to show these children full length seems to be so that the sizes of these small children would be obvious to the viewer. The lighting on the faces of these children is soft. Their expressions are serious, and all of the children are facing the camera. This positioning suggests openness and honesty, maybe even a degree of innocence. A photograph like this one easily could be taken to be a picture of a school class or maybe a church group. The second major image on this poster is of a solid looking building with an impressive tower on the front and a chimney reaching skyward from the back. Given the reading of the preceding 206 group photograph, a reasonable interpretation of this second picture would be that this building is a school. The structure is three stories tall and appears to be built from brick with a somewhat institutional look. Joining this image to the group picture above and suggesting once again that this building might be a school, are the cutout images of several children following along a hand-sketched path or road that leads to the picture of the building. Leading out from the front of the building is a pair of hand-sketched roads along which several more school age children are walking. So far, this visual presentation seems to support the idea that children are going to school. The third major photograph is really three separate photographs of children that are presented in a form suggesting a single group photograph. This was likely done order to parallel the opening image on the poster, a group photograph. The children in this picture, from the order of images presented, have been photographed after they have left the school building shown in the second photograph. Reinforcing that reading is the fact that these children do indeed look somewhat older and seem larger in size than those in the first group. These children are shown with higher contrast lighting than those in the earlier picture, which gives these children a harsher, less-soft look, but still they share the straightforward view toward the camera and the same trusting openness as the children shown earlier. It is true that this second set of children has more serious and less hopeful expressions that the set of youngsters in the first image, but then doesn't the age and wisdom 207 that comes from leaming the ways of life always bring out the more serious side in people? The only cause for unease is the photograph that is inset into this final series. It is positioned in the lower right- hand comer and shows the rear of a building and a pile of junk. This photograph doesn't seem consistent with the other images. While this inconsistency might give the viewer something to ponder, a possible explanation might be that education has two sides, the positive being the development of older, wiser youths and the negative side being that this development brings about the loss of childish innocence. This loss of innocence or trading of innocence for wisdom and maturity is something that all of us do at some point during our lives and is therefore an explanation that reasonably could have been read from these seemingly inconsistent images by their viewers. But, as in every case with Hine, meaning for this exhibition poster comes not from words or photographs alone but from the combination of words and photographs together. With the direction provided by Hine's words, this typical exhibition poster takes on a meaning for the viewer that is infinitely more focused in support of the child labor reform arguments. This poster is headed with the phrase "MAKING HUMAN JUNK," which leaves little doubt as to the perspective from which it views the relationship between child laborers and their employers. The opening photograph is positioned at the top left of the poster immediately below the "MAKING HUMAN JUNK " heading. The 208 photograph is of a collection of small children standing in rows arranged as if taken as a school picture—something with which Hine was certainly familiar after his years of teaching and photographing at the Ethical Culture School. The children seem alive—they are neat and clean, orderly and seem full of the hopes and promises of the future. Their eyes are open and childlike and look into the camera with the innocence and faith that only children can have. Contained within the photograph is a poster that says, "SMALL Girls and Boys WANTED." These words, along with the visual evidence provided in the photograph by the full-length framing, shows these children to be just what they appear to be, small boys and girls. Immediately to the right of this photograph is another line of text. This phrase, which reinforces what the photograph seems to show, is "GOOD MATERIAL AT FIRST." Leading from the opening photograph down and toward the right side of the poster are two wandering lines forming a connecting path or road. The cutout images of children on this walkway are shown under the smaller heading "High Wages" and over the larger heading, "THE PROCESS." The photograph to the right, seen with the benefit of the clues provided by the words, lets us know that the building that this road leads to is a factory or industrial building. The building and its tall, dark smokestack, emphasized by the outline presentation of the photograph, extends upward from the center of the building. Several additional cutout images of children are shown 209

leaving this building by way of a pair of hand-drawn paths that leads to the final set of photographs on the poster. This last picture, really a set of three pictures presented to appear as a group picture, are displayed under the heading, "THE PRODUCT." The more haggard look of these children which might have been mistaken for wisdom and experience, is now seen in the context provided by the words as illustrative of the tired products of work in the factory. The closer framing makes these children look larger and adds intensity to their faces. The scale of the pictures and their tighter cropping makes the viewer focus in on the fact that, instead of being a picture of older retirement-age adults, this haggard shop-worn looking group is really just depleted adolescents. Under these three separate photographs, grouped as one, is the descriptive line, "No future and low wages." The inset photograph that, with the surface viewing and without the benefit of words, at first seemed explainable but somewhat inconsistent now has real meaning. The single word under the picture of trash is "Junk." This is what remains at the end of the process illustrated with this exhibition panel. This is the end of the road for these children. The final set of words asks a question that the National Child Labor Committee wanted all viewers to think about "SHALL INDUSTRY BE ALLOWED TO PUT THIS COST ON SOCIETY?" Little doubt could be left after viewing this panel that the question is, who is going to pay the price of a system that allows young children to be converted to human junk? Little doubt also 210 could be left that the preferred way of resolving the problem was to prevent it.

Chapter Summary

Hine's approach of combining photographs and texts is a synergistic one that makes the combination stronger than the sum of its individual parts. This becomes clear after doing alternative readings of his photo-text units based on only the visual information, on only the textual information, and on both visual and textual information combined. The text Hine provides is not as radical or inflammatory as that used by some child labor-reform advocates. Hine's text makes simple claims and provides bare-bones information about the times, locations, and situations photographed. The words that accompany his photographs generally contain only statistical types of information and claims, although on occasion Hine did use the words of his subjects to add authenticity to his images. The quotations from his child workers often add to the sense of innocence of these little ones, although in some cases, they serve to illustrate how hardened and unlike children these children had become as a result of their early introduction to the work level of adult life. The photographs that Hine used gave an accurate representation of what he witnessed with his camera. These pictures showed children, often of very young ages, working in mills and 211 factories and on farms and in homes. The primary use of these photographs, though, was as a form of evidence. These photographic images provided incontestable proof that child labor did exist. For all the information that they contained, what the photographs did not, perhaps could not, provide was direction about how this highly believable information should be interpreted—what it meant. With his understanding of the power of the photograph to prove when properly directed, Hine made a leap forward in the use of images as communication tools by seeing them not as alternatives to words but by combining them with words, in a manner that would take advantage of the individual strengths of both. 212

F igure #6

Cans and Kids - Time Exposure 213

TIME EXPOSURES ^ HXNE

Aey were î2 years _ Iqr Alabama law. tore him o at. But the in Himtsvaie ie stS iK ^ i ^ who had started to work W< .'•Tl^iSBoi . . Bat diey are in its .liSt: and most of the chBdreo,^^^ Eitx!ve^dCorm-of^ has aot yet been coined) wbtdi has miQs at BimtsMlIe.\Ak^

F igure #7

The Double Standard - Time Exposure 214

m m psfeT

m m #

SHALL W DüSTR^lfEip T H f s c o # m #

F igure #8

Making Human Junk - Exhibition Panel 215

Sources Cited - Chapter IV

Barrett, Terry. Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield,1990.

Berger, Arthur Asia. Seeing Is Believing. Mountain View, CA. Mayfield, 1989.

The Child Labor Bulletin. New York: National Child Labor Committee. Vol 5, No. 1, May 1916.

Curtis, Verna Posever and Mallach, Stanley. Photography and Reform: Lewis Hine & the National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984.

"He Photo Interprets Big Labor." Mentor. Vol. 14, 1926.

Hine, Lewis W. "The High Cost of Child Labor." The Child Labor Bulletin. New York: National Child Labor Committee. Vol. 3, No 4, February 1915.

Hine, Lewis W. "The Double Standard." The Survey. New York: Survey Associates. Vol. 32, April 4, 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "Cans and Kids." The Survey. New York: Survey Associates. Vol. 32, May 16, 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "Alabama Investigation." National Child Labor Committee Papers. Washington D.C.: Library of Congress. 1910.

Hine, Lewis W. National Child Labor Committee Papers, Washington D C.: Library of Congress. 1909.

Hine, Lewis. "Boys at Lehr, Economy Glass Works." Photography and Reform: Lewis Hine and the National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984.

Hine, Lewis. "Budd's Bog." Photography and Reform: Lewis Hine and the National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984. 216

Kaplan, Dalle. Picture Storv: Selected letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1992.

Kemp, John R. Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor in the New South. Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

National Child Labor Committee Papers. Scrapbook #5. Library of Congress. Washington D.C.

"Newberry South Carolina." Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor in the New South. Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Osbom, Michael. "Archetypal Metaphor in Rhetoric: The Light and Dark Family." Ouarterlv Journal of Speech. Vol. 53, April 1967.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order: 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Zettl, Herbert. Sight. Sound. Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1973. CHAPTER V

REVIEW OF FINDINGS

Introduction

Visual communication has become a dominant form for transmitting information throughout society (Berger, Ways of Seeing. 7 and Whiting 5). Understanding the way that visual images come to have meaning helps to explain their power both to inform and to persuade. From the user-friendly-on-screen icons that provide a guide for use of the Macintosh computer on which this document was written, to the universally understood graphic-based highway safety signs that guide the writer from Ross County to the Ohio State University campus, images of all sorts are present in everyday life. This dissertation has focused on images of a particular type used in a particular way—photographs combined with words. There are two main reasons for looking only at photographic images in this dissertation. Number one is that, while all information communicated to the brain via the sense of sight has been assigned a high value as evidence of reality (Reid 164), photographs, due to

217 218 their extraordinary representational ability, historically have enjoyed special status for their believability (Sontag 154). The second reason is that with ever-improving technology, photography has become a common, inexpensive, easily done, point-and-shoot means of producing images for use in visual communication- The continually increasing reliance on visual means of communicating, coupled with the inherent acceptability of photographs as evidence of reality and the ease with which anyone can produce them, makes the study of why photographs work and how they can be most effectively used valuable. Through gaining an understanding of photographic communication, we can gain useful insights into the possibilities of visual communication. Photographic images are not without problems when used as communication tools. A primary difficulty is the inherent ambiguity of any image that is as information rich as a representational photograph (Hyatt 14, Berger and Mohr 7). Which of the numerous elements contained within any photograph's borders are important to its intended meaning? In what order should those elements be examined to produce the intended understanding? What meaning should be attached to the relationships between elements? While there may be other ways of answering these questions related to photographic meaning, the hypothesis suggested in this dissertation is that a highly satisfactory way to overcome and indeed harness the photograph's tendency toward ambiguity is through the use of words 219

to provide direction to make certain the audience gains a clear interpretation of the visual image and its intended meaning.

Findings From the Lewis Hine Case Study

One communicator stood at the forefront of the movement toward the use of the combination of words and photographs as powerful communication tools—Lewis W. Hine. His work, shortly after the turn of the century as a photographic investigator for the National Child Labor Committee, was the first attempt at using the combination of words and photographs as powerful information and persuasion tools. Hine s work was done at about the same time as the development of a means for directly reproducing photographic images for mass distribution. Prior to Hine's time, visual images of all sorts, including photographs, were re-created by engravers prior to publication. This re-creation, and its accompanying imposition of a an additional human-controlled step in the process, served to lessen the credibility of the photograph when published. Much of a photograph's strength as a conununication tool came from its believability, and this believability was in part dependent on its appearance as a direct transformation from reality. The hand of the engraver was immediately obvious to the viewer and opened many doors for the questioning of the accuracy of the published photograph. 220

Hine's work took advantage of the development of a direct means of transforming the photograph from original to mass- produced image. He understood the strength of the photographic image as evidence of reality and the strength of words as ways to provide meaning. At a time in history ripe for change and with an issue in need of reform, Hine's combination of photographs as proof with words to direct their interpretation was a giant leap forward. The situation and the issue called for a response, and Hine's background made him an ideal candidate to provide one. His empathy and understanding for child laborers and his progressive approach to the resolution of problems all came together perfectly for the time and situation. This is not to say that Hine's photographic communication was accomplished as a result of chance coincidence in time and place. A strong rhetorical base for visual communication does exist. Visual images can single out or emphasize certain aspects of a situation and, as the case study illustrates, Hine was very conscious of what he was including in his photographs and the results that he desired from his audience. The ambiguity of Hine's photographs also was used to advantage. This built-in ambiguity worked effectively in bridging divergent audience views—viewers can see whatever they want to see in a photograph. This ability to co-join numerous meanings in a single communicative element was one of the strengths of Hine's photographic rhetoric. 221

The way that Hine used this image ambiguity was to bring viewers into his photographs with a surface appeal. The real nature of photographs became apparent only after the linguistic element was considered. In doing this, Hine was really using two approaches to persuade his audience, one designed to capture its emotions and the other aimed at its intellect. Both Aristotle's artistic (created) and inartistic (existing) forms of proof were at work in Hine's word-and- picture combinations (Aristotle 13). Each form was used in a way that took advantage of its greatest strength. The power of existing evidence, as shown by the photographs, and the ability to direct or create meaning in these photographs with words are successfully joined into a single unit in Hine's photograph-and-word combinations. Hine brought his audience into his appeal with the visual and then, with the words he used, assigned meaning to the images that they already had received. For Hine, words alone, although meaning rich, were not always strong enough evidence to bring about change. He also understood that the visual appeal provided by his child labor photographs alone could not provide convincing support for reform arguments. For Hine, the combination of the two was the key. Hine's audience accepted the photographs of children working as evidence, just the same as they would have accepted first-hand observation of children working as evidence. While the photographs alone were of limited value for determining meaning, the strength of the photographs as evidence was shown time and time again as cases 222 of conflict between employer and child-labor-reform advocates were resolved when photographs were introduced as evidence. Hine's word-and-photograph combinations were designed to work together. Much of the ambiguity of photographic images comes from an audience's inability to determine which elements to consider. Hine showed the power that control over the creation of photographs, the selection of words used with them, and often the layout and design of presentations has on these text and photographic image units. Each of these aspects of photographs worked to guide the audience through the process of gaining meaning. Each portion was prepared in anticipation of the other. The words Hine wrote as part of his "Time Exposure" form were thought through in order to work best as direction for his photographs. The words that he used were written to accompany particular photographs. These photographs were selected on the basis of their ability to provide the strongest evidence for the claims that the words made. The unity that Hine saw between photographs and words is illustrated by the fact that, during his investigative trips for the National Child Labor Committee, he carried both a pad and pencil and a camera. Hine allowed what he saw and photographed to determine what words he used. He conducted photo-investigations into child labor, then selected the words to help position his audience relative to what they saw in his photographs in the same way that he was positioned relative to his subject when the photographic evidence was recorded. 2 2 3

The opening line of the text that Hine authored to accompany each image or combination of images established for the viewer which visual element was primary to the photo and text unit's meaning. For example, in the photo text unit shown as Figure #3, the first line of the text Hine wrote to accompany the photograph reads, "Another of the many small children working in Mollahan Mills, Newberry, S. C." The small size of the child is immediately brought to the forefront of the viewers attention. The comparisons of size between the child and the machinery, the child and the adult peering into the photograph from the right side, and the child and the huge space—undefined with a horizon line of any sort, in which all is located provide the viewer with information about which elements are most important and which should be given attention first. With the relationship between these key elements established, the issues of balance and lighting that in this photograph might otherwise be accurately read in some other way fall into place for Hine's intended m eaning. Hine's positioning of photograph(s) above or around the text was a sign that the visual was of the greatest importance in telling his story, and that the words, the element of his photo and text units which was evidentially the weakest, were secondary. While other communicators might have given words priority and used photographs as a means of support, for Hine, the value of words was only in their use for direction for ways that his visuals were to be understood. The relationship between photograph and text was 224

further strengthened by Hine's use of compositional elements to lead viewers from the photograph to the words. Using the Newberry South Carolina photograph examined in Chapter IV (Figure #3) as an example once again, these compositional elements can easily be seen at work. The lines formed by the shapes and by the lights and darks which converge to lead the viewer from the top entry point of the photograph to the small girl in the center of the image, cross each other and continue right on through this center point diverging as they move the eye to encompass the simple lines of text contained in the caption below the picture. The viewers eyes pass through the photograph for a survey examination of what is contained on their way to the text where further direction for what meaning is to be taken. What Hine pioneered with his photograph-and-word combinations is supported by public speaking tenets. In their text. Public Speaking. Michael Osborn and Suzanne Osbom list advantages of visual aids in giving audiences direct sensory contact with a speech that include; enhanced understanding, authenticity, variety, impact and added speaker ethos (Osbom and Osbom 214-215). The value of the real thing may be extended to the believable image of reality provided by the visual, particularly when combined with verbal description. In his work for the NCLC, Hine used this combination of sensory elements to strengthen his rhetorical appeals. Comparisons between interpretations of Hine's photographic work done in this case study show that a variety of meanings might 225 have been gained by those reading Hine's child-labor photographs with and without the benefit of the words that he provided to direct meaning. Looking at these images using a standard visual grammar and without the context and meaning provided by words, Hine's photographs are easily seen to have a variety of reasonable readings. While it is possible that the intended meaning could have been among those readings, it is also possible that unintended meanings could prevail. While the publications that printed them and the places that these images were displayed added context to some extent, even within that context but without the direction from words, many possible meanings still could be reasonably supported. Reinforcement of the potential for misreading the visual portion of his communication efforts and the importance of context comes from the other uses to which his images have been put to over the years since they were first produced. Even today Hine photographs are exhibited and sought after for reasons entirely unrelated to their original intent. Although Hine down played the use of words, these words are what limited the potential meanings that his audience could assign to his work. Without the photographs, the words that Hine wrote might have had no more impact than the words written by any number of other child-labor-reform advocates. The credibility for the word portion of Hine's word-and-photograph combinations comes from the evidential nature of the photographs and their unique acceptance as substitutes for first-hand observation. 226

What this dissertation shows about the relationship between photographs and the words that play a critically role in the creation of their communication value, is that words are what move a viewer into a position relative to the subject that is the same as that occupied by the photographer. Words do not reveal what is seen— that is the province of the photograph, words rather serve to prepare the viewer for what the photograph says. Words that tell or describe what the information-rich photographic image contains do little to control the photograph's meaning. Words that situate the viewer of the text and photograph combination are what adds value to the word and photograph unit. Words are what allow photographs to become effective tools for showing as a way of saying.

Other Areas for Consideration

While pioneering in nature, Hine’s work existed in a time and place much different from those in which audiences and rhetors find themselves today. While the inherent believability of the photographic image is still an element of modem audiences’ consciousness, it may not exist to the same degree now that it did in Hine’s time. Rapid advances in our ability to manipulate images challenge the special status of photographs as sources of highly credible evidence. Although the technological base is new, the criticism that photographs can be made to deceive is not. Beaumont Newhall 227

offered an indictment of the still photograph’s weakness in a 1938 article in Parnassus. Newhall cautioned, accurately, about the ease with which still photographs could have their original intent subverted. As an example, over the years since they were produced, Lewis Hine’s photographs have been used both credited and uncredited, in many contexts far removed from that for which they were originally intended. An area for additional study suggested by this examination might be Hine's simultaneous understanding of the value of the producer ethical stance and denial of the opportunity for ethical input into his word and photograph combinations. Hine presented his photo and text units to the viewer as incontestable evidence at the same time that he was exercising substantial control over the selection of information to be included within the photograph’s borders, the direction for its interpretation through the text he provided, and the importance of each image to the other and to the material surrounding it by his control over the layout and assembly of his text and photo units. As the means for perverting the photograph’s value as evidence of reality become more flawless and easily used, the role that words play in the conununication process may move away from providing direction for the interpretation of the image and towards use as a way of maintaining the photograph’s credibility. 228

Sources Cited - Chapter V

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. G. P. Gould. Vol. 23. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.

Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Hyatt, Kenton. Documentarv Images: Visual Information Made to Order. Atlanta: Speech Communication Association Conference, 1991.

Newhall, Beaumont. "Documentary Approach to Photography." Parnassus Vol. 10, No. 3, 1938.

Osbom, Michael, and Suzanne Osbom. Public Speaking. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Reid, Thomas. The Philosophy of Thomas Reid as contained in Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Series of Modem Philosophers. Ed. E. Hershey Sneath. New York: Henry Holt, 1892.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1977. LIST OF REFERENCES

The Annals of the American Academy: National Child Labor Committee Proceedings. 1905.

Abbott, Edith. "Early History of Child Labor in America." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1908.

Adler, Felix. "Child Labor in the United States and Its Great Attendant Evils." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1905.

Alger, Horatio Jr. The Telegraph Boy or Making His Way in New York. Chicago: M.A. Donohue, 18—.

Aristotle. The Art of Rhetoric. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. G. P. Gould. Vol. 22. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926.

Austin, J. L. How to do Things With Words. The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University. Ed. F. O. Urmson and Marina Sibisa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Bailey, Thomas A. The American Pageant: A History of the Republic. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1956.

Barrett, Terry. Criticizing Photographs: An Introduction to Understanding Images. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield,1990.

Barthes, Roland. "The Photographic Message." A Barthes Reader. Ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

229 230

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Beardsley, William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C. "The Intentional Fallacy." Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Ed. Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner's, 1962.

Berger, Arthur Asia. Seeing Is Believing. Mountain View, CA. Mayfield, 1989.

Berger, John. Wavs of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1972.

Berger, John, and Jean Mohr. Another Way of Telling. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Black, Edwin. Rhetorical Criticism: A Studv in Method. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, and Allen F. Davis, ed. 100 Years at Hull- House. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Bryson, Bill. The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Carnegie, Andrew. "Wealth." North American Review. New York: June, 1889.

The Child Labor Bulletin. New York: National Child Labor Committee. Vol. 5, No. 1, May 1916.

Cicero. Oratorum. The Loeb Classical Library. Ed. G. P. Gould. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. 231

Culbertson, Hugh. "The Effect of Art Work on Perceived Writer Stand" Journalism Quarterly. Vol. 46, Summer 1969.

Culbertson, Hugh. "Words vs. Pictures: Perceived Imapct and Connotative Meaning" Journalism Ouarterlv. Vol. 51, Summer 1974.

Curtis, Verna Posever and Mallach, Stanley. Photo graph v and Reform: Lewis Hine & the National Child Labor Committee. Milwaukee: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1984.

Davis, Allen F. Spearheads for Reform. The Urban Life in America Series. Ed. Richard C. Wade. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Dawley, Alan. Class and Communitv: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Dickens, Charles. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens Oliver Twist. London: Oxford University Press, 1949.

Doherty, Jonathan L. Lewis Wickes Hine's Interpretive Photographv: The Six Early Projects. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Dulles, Rhea Foster, and Melvyn Dubofsky. Labor in America: A History. Fourth Edition. Arlington Heights, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1984.

Edwards, Jonathan. "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." American Literature. Scribner Literature Series. New York: Scribner Laidlaw, 1741.

Emerson, Peter Henry. "Hints on Art." Classic Essavs on Photographv. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1889.

Felt, Jeremy P. "Children at Work." The Underside of American History. Ed. Thomas Frazier. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. 2 3 2

Felt, Jeremy P. Hostages of Fortune: Child Labor Reform in New York State. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1965.

Folks, Gertrude H. "Rural School Attendance." Rural Child Welfare. Ed. Edward N. Clopper. New York: The McMillian Company, 1922.

Fosdick, James A. and Tannenbaum, Percy H. "The Encoder's Intent and Use of Stylistic Elements in Photographs." Journalism Ouarterlv. Vol. 41, Spring 1964.

Foss, Sonja K., Karen A. Foss, and Robert Trapp. Contemporarv Perspectives on Rhetoric. Prospect Heights, 111: Waveland, 1985.

Foss, Sonja K., and Marla R. Kanengieter. Visual Communication in the Basic Course. Communication Education. Vol 41, July 1992.

Freedberg, David. The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gombrich, E. H. "The Visual Image." Scientific American. September 1972.

Grierson, John. "Flaherty's Poetic Moana." The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock. Ed. Lewis Jacob. New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971.

Guimond, James. American Photographv and the American Dream. Cultural Studies of the United States. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991. 2 3 3

Gutman, Judith Mara, Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience. New York: Walker, 1967.

Gutman, Judith Mara. Lewis W. Hine 1874-1940: Two Perspectives. New York: Grossman, 1974.

Handy, Robert T. "Protestant Theological Tensions and Political Styles in the Progressive Period." Religion & American Politics From the Colonial Period to the 1980's. Ed. Mark A Noll. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Hareven, Tamara K. "The History of the Family and the Complexity of Social Change." The American Historical Review. Vol. 96, 1991.

Hazelton, Roger. "Believing is Seeing: Vision as Metaphor." Theology Todav Vol. 35, 1979.

Hine, Lewis W. "The School Camera." The Elementary School Teacher Vol. 6, March 1906

Hine, Lewis W. "The Silhouette in Photography." The Photographic Times Vol. 38, November 1906.

Hine, Lewis W. "The High Cost of Child Labor." The Child Labor Bulletin Vol. 3, No 1, May 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "Tasks in the Tenements." The Child Labor Bulletin Vol. 3, No 1, May 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "The High Cost of Child Labor." The Child Labor Bulletin. New York: National Child Labor Committee. Vol. 3, No 4, February 1915.

Hine, Lewis W. "The Double Standard." The Survey. New York: Survey Associates. Vol. 23, April 4, 1914.

Hine, Lewis W. "Cans and Kids." The Survey. New York: Survey Associates. Vol. 23, May 16, 1914. 234

Hine, Lewis W. "Alabama Investigation." National Child Labor Committee Papers. Washington D C.: Library of Congress. 1910.

Hine, Lewis W. National Child Labor Committee Papers, Washington D C.: Library of Congress. 1909.

Hine, Lewis. "Social Photography." Classic Essavs on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island Books, 1915.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Brvan to F.D.R. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

Hyatt, Kenton. Documentary Images: Visual Information Made to Order. Atlanta: Speech Communication Association Conference, 1991.

Johnsen, Julia E. Selected Articles on Child Labor. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1925.

Johnson, Brooks. "Lewis Wickes Hine: American, 1874-1940." Photographv Speaks: 66 Photographers on Their Art. Norfolk: Aperature/The Chrysler Museum. 1989.

Jussim, Estelle. "Icons or Ideology: Stieglitz and Hine." The Massachusetts Review .Winter 1978.

Kaplan, Daile. Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1988.

Kaplan, Daile. Picture Storv: Selected letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Kelley, Florence. "Tenement House Manufacture." 100 Years at Hull- House. Ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis. Bloontington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 235

Kelley, Florence, and Alizina P. Stevens. "Wage-Earning Children." 100 Years at Hull-House. Ed. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan and Allen F. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Kirkland, James H. "School as a Force Arrayed against Child Labor." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters' Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1905.

Kismaric, Carole, and Anne Horan, ed. Documentarv Photography. New York: Time-Life Books, 1972.

Kemp, John R. Lewis Hine: Photographs of Child Labor in the New South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

Kerrick, Jean S. "The Influence of Captions on Picture Interpretation." Journalism Quarterly Vol. 32, No. 1, 1955.

Leff, Michael C. and Kauffeld, Fred J. Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric. Hermagoras Press: Davis, CA: Hermagoras, 1989.

Lovejoy, Owen. "Child Labor and Family Disintegration." Selected Articles on Child Labor. Ed. Edna D. Bullock. Debaters" Handbook Series. Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1906.

Markham, Edwin, Benjamin B. Lindsey, and George Creel. Children in Bondage: A Complete and Careful Presentation of the Anxious Problem of Child Labor—its Causes, its Crimes, and its Cure. New York: Hearst's International Library, 1914.

Marks, Robert W. "Portrait of Lewis Hine." Coronet. February 1939.

McCausland, Elizabeth. "Portrait of a Photographer." Survey Graphic Vol. 27,.No. 10, 1938.

McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essav on Religion and Social Change in America. 1607-1977. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 236

Mehling, R. "Attitude Changing Effects of News and Photo Combinations." Journalism Ouarterlv Vol. 36, No. 1, 1959.

Mich, Daniel D. "The Rise of Photo-Joumalism in the United States." Journalism Quarterly. September 1947.

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work & At Play. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

National Child Labor Committee Papers. Scrapbook #5. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.

Newhall, Beaumont. "Documentary Approach to Photography." Parnassus Vol. 10, No. 3, 1938.

Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present. New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1982.

Olsen, Lester C. "Portraits in Praise of a People: A Rhetorical analysis of Norman Rockwell's Icons in Franklin d. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" Campaign." Ouarterlv Journal of Speech Vol. 69, February 1983.

Osbom, Michael. "Archetypal Metaphor in Rhetoric: The Light and Dark Family." Ouarterly Journal of Speech. Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association. Vol. 53, April 1967.

Osbom, Michael. "Rhetorical Depiction." Form. Genre, and the Studv of Political Discourse. Ed. Herbert W. Simmons and Aram A. Aghazarian. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986. 237

Osbom, Michael, and Suzanne Osbom. Public Speaking. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Padover, Saul K. Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942.

Perelman, C. H., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1969.

"Readings." History 689.01 The Ohio State University. Course Copy: Spring 1989.

"Recommendations and Principles of the Chicago Knights of Labor." Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean. March 27, 1884.

Reid, Thomas. The Philosophy of Thomas Reid as contained in Inquirv into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Series of Modem Philosophers. Ed. E. Hershey Sneath. New York: Henry Holt, 1892.

Robinson, Henry Peach. "Idealism, Realism, Expressionism." Classic Essavs on Photography. Ed. Alan Trachtenberg. New Haven: Leete's Island, 1869.

Rosenblum, Naomi. "Biographical Notes." America & Lewis Hine: Photographv 1904-1940. Ed. Walter Rosenblum. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Rosenblum, Walter. America & Lewis Hine: Photography 1904- 1940. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Schnapper, M.B. American Labor: A Pictorial Social History. Washington D C.: Public Affairs, 1975.

Scriba, Jay. "They Led Child Labor Cmsade." The Milwaukee Joumal. Wednesday, September 21, 1968. 238

Smith, C. Zoe. "An Alternative View of the 30s: Hine's And Bourke- White's Industrial Photos." Journalism Quarterly. Vol. 60, Summer 1983.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1977.

Spargo, John. The Bitter Cry of the Children. New York: Macmillian, 1907.

Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America 1890-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Suntop, Lionel. "Lewis Hine 1874-1940." Creative Camera International Yearbook 1976. London: Coo Press, 1975.

The Survey. November 15, 1929. New York: Survey Associates.

Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Tomas, Vincent. "The Concept of Expression in Art." Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Ed. Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1962.

Trachtenberg, Alan, ed. Classic Essavs on Photography. New Haven: Leete’s Island, 1980.

Trachtenberg, Alan. "Ever-the Human Document." America & Lewis Hine: Photography 1904-1940. Ed. Walter Rosenblum. New York: Aperture Monograph, 1977.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Noonday, 1989.

Trattner, Walter I. Crusade for the Children: A History of the National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970. 239

Tyler, Alice Felt. Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History to 1860. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944.

Urmson, J.O. "What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?" Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. Ed. Joseph Margolis. New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1962.

Whiting, John. Photography as a Language. New York: Ziff-Davis, 1946.

Woodfield, Richard. "Words and Pictures." British Journal of Aesthetics. Vol. 26, No. 4, Autmnn 1986.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order: 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

Zettl, Herbert. Sight. Sound. Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1973.