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Working as an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Lewis Hine (1874-1940) documented working and living conditions of children in the United States between 1908 and 1924. The NCLC photos are useful for the study of labor, reform movements, children, working class families, education, public health, urban and rural housing conditions, industrial and agricultural sites, and other aspects of urban and rural life in America in the early twentieth century.
Founded in 1904, the National Child Labor Committee set out on a mission of "promoting the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working." Starting in 1908, the Committee hired Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940), first on a temporary and then on a permanent basis, to carry out investigative and photographic work for the organization. The more than 5,100 photographic prints and 355 glass negatives in the Prints and Photographs Division's holdings, together with the often extensive captions that describe the photo subjects, reflect the results of this early documentary effort, offering a detailed depiction of working and living conditions of many children--and adults--in the United States between 1908 and 1924.

Hine later referred to his photographic work for the NCLC as "detective work." Photo historian Daile Kaplan offers this picture of how Hine conducted his work, which was frequently regarded with suspicion by business owners, supervisors, and workers:

Nattily dressed in a suit, tie, and hat, Hine the gentleman actor and mimic assumed a variety of personas--including Bible salesman, postcard salesman, and industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery--to gain entrance to the workplace. When unable to deflect his confrontations with management, he simply waited outside the canneries, mines, factories, farms, and sweatshops with his fifty pounds of photographic equipment and photographed children as they entered and exited the workplace. (Photo Story: Selected Letters and Photographs of Lewis W. Hine. Ed. by Daile Kaplan. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992).

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Jacob Riis was a journalist and social documentary photographer. He was born in Denmark in 1849 and immigrated to the US as a young adult (21 years old). "Like the hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who fled to New York in pursuit of a better life, Riis was forced to take up residence in one of the city's notoriously cramped and disease-ridden tenements. Living in squalor and unable to find steady employment, Riis worked numerous jobs, ranging from a farmhand to an ironworker, before finally landing a role as a journalist-in-training at the New York News Association." His most notable work "How the Other Half Lives" was published in 1890. He wrote about and photographed slum conditions of immigrant workers in New York City.

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As governor of New York, Riis’s friend Theodore Roosevelt (future president of the US) appointed a Tenement House Commission, which led in 1901 to the creation of the Tenement House Department, headed by another Riis friend, Robert de Forest of the Charity Organization Society. Riis and this circle of municipal citizen-reformers, which included social welfare activists Josephine Shaw Lowell and Lillian Wald, worked to gather statistical evidence and raise public awareness. They advocated for new housing designs to ease crowding and improve fire safety, sanitation, and access to air and light.

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John Spargo was born in England in 1876. He became a Methodist minister and immigrated to the US as an adult in 1901. He settled in New York and began preaching. He spent his life helping the working class poor of New York city. He established a "settlement house" to provide social and economic support to new immigrants. Spargo was shocked by the living and working conditions of the poor, especially children. Spargo was a founding member of the American Socialist Party and published several works including: "The Bitter Cry of the Children" 1905, "The Underfed School Children" 1906, "The Common Sense of the Milk Question" 1908.

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"The Bitter Cry of the Children" 1905 John Spargo

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"The Bitter Cry of the Children" 1905 John Spargo

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“The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as cut, broken, or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery. . . . Clouds of dust . . . are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundation for asthma and miners’ consumption.”

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In 1912, the National Child Labor Committee succeeded, and Congress created the U.S. Children’s Bureau. In 1916 Keating-Owen Act was passed, which set the minimum working age at 14. However, it unfortunately had many loopholes and helped less than 4% of the children working. It wasn't until the Great Depression in 1938 with the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor was finally ended i in the US. This was long after the Progressive Era. The Fair Labor Standards Act prohibited children under 18 from working dangerous jobs and children under 16 from working during school hours.

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"Work in the coal breakers (processing plant) is exceedingly hard and dangerous. Crouched over the chutes, the

boys sit hour after hour, picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the

washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and

bent-backed like old men. When a boy has been working for some time and begins to get round-shouldered, his

fellows say that “He’s got his boy to carry round wherever he goes."

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Upton Sinclair was a famous novelist and social crusader from California, who pioneered the kind of journalism known as "muckraking." His best-known novel was "The Jungle" which was an expose of the appalling and unsanitary conditions in the meat-packing industry.

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“There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax [a white powder made from boric acid, used in detergents, flame retardants, and disinfectants] and glycerine [a chemical compound used in foods and medicines], and dumped into the hoppers [containers for mixing], and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit. . . . There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers [containers] together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one—there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”

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“...There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scare a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person.  Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world [lead to his death]; all of the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one.  Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef boners and trimmer, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it.  The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or trace them.  They would have no nails, - they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan.  There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour.  There were the beef luggers, who carried two hundred pound quarters into the refrigerator cars, a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years…”

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When The Jungle was published, the nation reacted in horror. After reading the novel, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an immediate investigation into the meat industry, though privately he told Sinclair that he disliked the Socialist polemic near the end of the novel. Within months, two pieces of legislation resulted from Sinclair's novel: The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both signed into law on June 30th, 1906. Sinclair was an instant celebrity and a Socialist hero, and was finally financially stable. He lamented the fact that the nation focused only on the unsafe food handling aspect of his novel, and ignored the problem of labor exploitation. He famously quipped: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

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In 1912, Congress created the U.S. Children’s Bureau. In 1916 Keating-Owen Act was passed, which set the minimum working age at 14. However, it unfortunately had many loopholes and helped less than 4% of the children working. It wasn't until the Great Depression in 1938 with the passing of the Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor was finally ended i in the US. This was long after the Progressive Era. The Fair Labor Standards Act prohibited children under 18 from working dangerous jobs and children under 16 from working during school hours.