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Exhibits |
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The
lucky ones swept the trash and filth from city streets or stood for hours on
street corners hawking newspapers. The less fortunate coughed constantly
through 10-hour shifts in dark, damp coal mines or sweated to the point of
dehydration while tending fiery glass-factory furnaces - all to stoke the
profit margins of industrialists whose own children sat comfortably at school
desks gleaning moral principles from their McGuffey Readers.
By and
large, these child laborers were the sons and daughters of poor parents or
recent immigrants who depended on their children's meager wages to survive. But
they were also the offspring of the rapid, unchecked industrialization that
characterized large American cities as early as the 1850s. In 1870, the first
U.S. census  to report child labor numbers counted 750,000 workers under the
age of 15, not including children who worked for their families in businesses
or on farms. By 1911, more than two million American children under the age of
16 were working - many of them 12 hours or more, six days a week. Often they
toiled in unhealthful and hazardous conditions; always for minuscule wages.
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