Spinners and Doffers in Lancaster Cotton Mills. Dozens of Them in This Mill. Lancaster, S.C.

The growth of industry after the Civil War increased the demand for workers and pulled more and more children into the labor force. By 1910, children made up 18.4 percent of the total labor force. The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), in New York City began investigations with child labor conditions in coal mines, capitalizing on the public concern raised during the nationwide coal miners' strike of 1902. Later, NCLC investigations centered upon the glassmaking industry, textile mills-especially in the South-and the canning industry. Eyewitness accounts produced at the beginning of the 20th century detailed the kind of working conditions of child laborers that the NCLC was investigating and publicizing. One account, taken from Al Priddy's Through the Mill (Northwood, Massachusetts, 1911), describes conditions in a cotton mill: The mule-room atmosphere was kept at from eighty-five to ninety degrees of heat. The hardwood floor burned my bare feet. I had to grasp quick, short gasps to get air into my lungs at all. My face seemed swathed in continual fire.... Oil and hot grease dripped down behind the mules, sometimes falling on my scalp or making yellow splotches on my overalls or feet. Under the excessive heat my body was like a soft sponge in the fingers of a giant; perspiration oozed from me until it seemed inevitable that I should melt away at last. To open a window was a great crime, as the cotton fiber was so sensitive to wind that it would spoil.... When the mill was working, the air in the mule-room was filled with a swirling, almost invisible cloud of lint, which settled on floor, machinery, and employees, as snow falls in winter. I breathed it down my nostrils ten and a half hours a day; it worked into my hair, and was gulped down my throat. This lint was laden with dust, dust of every conceivable sort, and not friendly at all to lungs. In 1908 the NCLC hired Lewis W. Hine to investigate and to photograph the conditions of working children.

Text adapted from “Three Photographs of Children At Work, Circa 1908” in the February 1982 National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) publication Social Education.