Labor
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For further details about the Labor Canteen, see the long caption for Washington Area Spark, “Social equality at the Labor Canteen,” https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/54266105006/. ↩︎
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“Welcome to All!,” color lithograph, Puck April 28, 1880, pp. 130–31, Library of Congress, PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002719044/. A high-resolution TIFF file is available for closer scrutiny. ↩︎
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Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West, “What Fools these Mortals Be!": The Story of Puck (IDW Publishing, 2014) ↩︎
- "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
- "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
- "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
- "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
- "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
Photo of 1909 Child Labor Protest
![Library of Congress summary: photograph shows half-length portrait of two girls wearing banners with slogan 'ABOLISH CH[ILD] SLAVERY!!' in English and Yiddish, one carrying American flag; spectators stand nearby. Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade in New York City.](https://eu.uploads.micro.blog/166262/2025/8714c341f0.jpeg)
Child labor protest, probably in New York City on May 1, 1909. Note the U.S. flag that the girl wearing a sash in Yiddish is holding. The girl with a sash in English seems to be holding a flag, too, albeit one in a single color, perhaps socialist red. The message on the sashes is uncompromising: “ABOLISH CHILD SLAVERY!”
Bain News photograph, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97519062.
Child Labor as 'Necessity' (1912 Cartoon)
“NEXT! From the Cradle to the Mill” Cartoon by Art Young for Puck, April 10, 1912, via Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011649137/.
Note the big shadowy black ghoul labeled “NECESSITY” leading a young girl out of a dark, impoverished room toward a factory on the right, where two other children are facing a sign at the entrance that reads, “Machinery Operated by Children” and “MEN NEED NOT APPLY.” The image of the little girl clutching her doll as she is forced to leave behind her book, paper, toys, and other small items on the floor usually a part of childhood flourishing makes this brutal uprooting from her home appear unnatural.
What’s more, the preference of the factory for cheaper children over more expensive men characterizes the practice of child labor as a vicious circle. If men are not welcome at the factory, if the lifeless woman at the table is unemployed, and if the children are not in school, the family will not be able to improve its lot, no matter how hard the children toil. This point is underlined by the cartoon’s subtitle, “From the Cradle to the Mill,” a play on the common phrase, “from the cradle to the grave.”
Women's History, Union Work, Educational Ambitions, and More in a 1942 Photo
Creek County, Oklahoma, 1942. Photograph by Russell Lee for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.
Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, writing on typewriter. Through union activities this family has developed a desire for higher education. This typewriter is to them a symbol of that education and as such is the most prized family possession.
Via NYPL Digital Collections, image id 58092147.
“Mexican miner’s wife and child are visited by another miner’s wife (Hungarian) who is interested in starting a maternal health clinic there. Scotts Run, Bertha Hill, West Virginia” by Marion Post Walcott for the Farm Security Administration, 1938. NYPL Digital Collections, image id 58749987.
Women and Children Working in New York City Tenement Homes, 1908
Photographs of women and their children doing piecework: Lewis Wickes Hine took these for the National Child Labor Committee in New York City in January and February 1908. See individual captions below.
[1] 122 Sullivan St. 2nd Floor rear. Leveroni family. Earn 4 cents a gross making violets. Can make 20 gross a day when children work all day. Father has work. Mrs. Leveroni; Tessie Leveroni, age 9; Stephen Leveroni, age 6; Margaret Leveroni, age 7; Josephine Cordono, age 10. These children work on Saturdays on afternoons after 3 o’clock, and evenings until 8 or 9.
[2] Mrs. Finkelstein, 127 Monroe St. Bessie (age 13), Sophie (age 7). Girls attend school. Making garters for Liberty Garter works, 413 Broadway. Mother, a widow, earns 75 cents a day by working all day until 12 at night. Bessie works until 10 P.M. Sophie until 9 P.M. They expected to work until 10 P.M. to finish the job, although they did not know when more work would come in. Witness Mrs. Hosford.
[3] Widow & boy rolling papers for cigarettes in a dirty N.Y. tenement.
[4] Late at night. Sewing tapes on gloves. The boy helps. Family of five sleep in room where the work is done.
These photos are part of the National Child Labor Committee Collection held by the Library of Congress.
A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.
Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.
An Example of White Terror Depicted in WPA Art
“South” by Philip Reisman. “Executed for the Public Art Works Project, 1934."*
The South here is portrayed as a place of white terror: lynching, cross burning, Ku Klux Klan. Note, too, the figures on the left: men in chains working at gun point, modern-day slave labor powering industry. The prisoner whose face is visible is Black, the armed guard white. (Click to enlarge for detail.)
I’ve always avoided posting such images, but the history whitewashing of the current administration is making me think differently. This art, at least, is respectful. It depicts the humanity of the victims, unlike the grizzly souvenir postcards circulated by the terrorists.
* Source: NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179787.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
Photo of Mixed Race Sociability in Jim Crow Washington, DC, 1944
Pete Seeger at twenty-five entertaining federal workers, sailors, and soldiers with a banjo and song at the opening of the Labor Canteen in Washington, DC, on February 13, 1944. This unsegregated place in a Jim Crow city was sponsored by the Federal Workers of America and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.1 Note First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying herself in the mixed race and sex audience. On the wall behind the merrymakers are sketches of a hapless character undergoing physical training, perhaps Private Snafu.
Source: Office of War Information, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017864322/
“One of the many young newsboys selling late at night…, November 1912” by Lewis Wickes Hine for the National Child Labor Committee.
Via New York Public Library, image 464486.
“What Is Salting, the Organizing Tactic Spicing Up the Labor Movement?” by Kim Kelly www.teenvogue.com…
Poster from 1919 Advocating American Citizenship
The notice in the bottom-right corner reads “Copyright 1919, The Stanley Service Co.” According to the Library of Congress Copyright Office’s Catalogue of Copyright Entries for that year, the company in question was the Stanley Industrial Educational Poster Service in Cleveland, Ohio. This provenance suggests to me that employers were being offered this messaging for their workers, even if the artist portrayed the immigrants as fresh arrivals.
Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95507947/
Photos of Children Working in Textile Mills, 1908–1914
The textile industry was long a stronghold of child labor. More than 75,000 children 10 to 16 years were employed in textile mills in 1910 – the census did not count those under 10 years.
– Lewis W. Hine in a photo study for the National Child Labor Committee, The New York Public Library.
Images from a photo study by Lewis W. Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, The New York Public Library. Linked captions lead to their respective image pages.
Photos of a Vigilante Deportation in 1917
I was quite startled by these and related images from 1917 because they show a lot of men being rounded up for removal in box cars in the hot dessert sun. It turns out that this was the Bisbee Deportation of IWW strikers in 1917. Some 1,300 people were kidnapped and put on a train in the summer heat by a 2,200-man posse. The action, ordered by Phelps Dodge, was illegal but supposedly not covered by federal law, only state law, and the state never prosecuted. In fact, one photographer, Dix, saw a money-making opportunity in the forcible removal of workers from Arizona to New Mexico. The Library of Congress holds the first, darker image below as a photo print, whereas it has the other three lighter images by the same photographer as postcards, suggesting the existence of at least a local market for souvenirs.
“Marching From Lowell [Ariz.], Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917."
“July 12, 1917, Deportation of I.W.W.s, Marching Down R.R. Track from Bisbee."
“Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917, Guards around Ballpark at Warren."
“Deportation of I.W.W.s, July 12, 1917, Marching Men to Train from Warren Ballpark."
“Oakies” by Stuart Davis, ink and black crayon on paper, captioned “In a Florida Auto Camp: ‘Don’t cry baby, popper’ll sell the spare tire, and we’ll look for a new boom somwhere else’”, in New Masses, vol. 1 (May 1926), p. 6. Repository: Library of Congress.
'Welcome to All' (1880 Cartoon)
This Puck cartoon from 1880 portrayed immigration in positive terms.1 Uncle Sam stands at the entrance to a wooden “U.S. Ark of Refuge,” a U.S. flag to the side. The image offers a strong contrast to the ramparts Uncle Sam stands at in 1903 and behind in 1916. Beside him is a list of “free” things offered by “U.S.”
FREE EDUCATION
FREE LAND
FREE SPEECH
FREE BALLOT
FREE LUNCH.
U.S.
The meaning of “free” varies here. Sometimes it has to do with “liberty” (free speech and the secret ballot), and other times “no cost.” If public (“free”) education is an achievement some in our own time wish to destroy, its existence was bound up with both senses of “free.” No tuition was required, sure, but it was also a precondition for a free people and for making Americans. “Free land” in this list would have meant federal lands according to the terms of the various Homestead Acts. But “free lunch”? What was that about?
This last item was initially a head scratcher for me. I thought it might be a comment or joke about immigrant expectations, but it seems the saying “no such thing as a free lunch” only gained currency during the middle decades of the twentieth-century. In fact, American saloons were offering free lunches at the time of this cartoon, so there really was such a thing for those who liked their beer and whiskey. Given the loads of correspondence and rumors between Europe and the United States, this kind of knowledge would have filtered through, too.
Because saloons are the context of these lunches, it is tempting to gender these free lunches “masculine” and assume the existence of a social critique of intemperate immigrant men. The image, however, shows heterosexual couples in the prime of life, suggesting that such gendered moralizing was not part of the artist’s intention. Moreover, Puck had begun its life as a German-language publication in the previous decade, and the artist-publisher Joseph-Keppler had immigrated from Austria.2
Highlighting the list of attractions on the door is the metaphorically clear sky over the “ark.” Behind the migrants, to the east, are dark storm clouds with black carrion-seeking scavengers in them. The clouds themselves are monsters labeled “WAR” and “DISTRESS.” War entailed not only destruction but also mandatory military service of varying terms. Distress, in this context, probably meant economic distress. Europe was in the middle of a long depression, while it was continuing to experience great socio-economic changes in the course of its ongoing industrialization.
Adding more economic and political arguments to the mix, more liberty, a sign in the middle advertises more benefits to life in the United States:
NO OPPRESSIVE TAXES
NO EXPENSIVE KINGS
NO COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
NO KNOUTS [OR] DUNGEONS.
The cartoon’s pairing of dark and light, of the prospects of distress or prosperity, represented what migration discourse in our own time refers to as push and pull factors. Beneath the cartoon is a quote from the N.Y. Statistical Review that highlights the cartoonist’s main interest: “We may safely say that the present influx of immigration to the United States is something unprecedented in our generation.” The detailed cartoon offered a context for this rise.
UPDATE: On Bluesky, @resonanteye.bsky.social reminded me of the Page Act of 1875, which excluded Chinese women. That made me think of the two single men at the end of the line in this cartoon because one of them appears to be Chinese. It is likely that this represented an acknowledgement of the Page Act. It also seems possible that the inclusion of this figure amounted to a critique of it. Here's our exchange—unfortunately, her settings require one to be logged in to see her posts.
Winslow Homer, 'Bell-Time' (1868)
I used to occasionally run across Winslow Homer’s wood engravings of the American Civil War, which were widely circulated in Harper’s Weekly, but this is the first work of his I’ve seen that deals with immigrant factory workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Note the mix of genders and ages, including the presence of young children. This was not work that could feed a whole family. No matter the difficult pecuniary circumstances of his subjects, however, Homer portrayed them with dignity.
Credit: “Bell-Time” by Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, July 25,1868, via Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Talking about some other kid, the bagger asked the cashier, “How old is he?” “Fourteen,” she replied. “Fourteen?” “Yeah, same grade as me.”
I had to ask them how old you have to be to work at Market Basket. “Fourteen.” And to my follow-up, “No,” no permission by a parent was required.
Russia lets African migrant laborers enter on tourist visas. From there, they can look for work, but sign a contract that lands them on the front lines in Donbas. The Kyiv Independent has excerpted interviews with two African POWs held by Ukraine. https://youtu.be/PM9DnRxxWC0 (12 min)
Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40
I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.
Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.
Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.
These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.
My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.
I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.
This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.
Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.
Fairness and Dignity
Lawrence O’Donnell had some tough words for his media colleagues yesterday on MSNBC. Journalists pretended to ask questions at a supposed news conference, broadcast live, while Trump pretended he was answering them. Throughout the charade, they gave him and his torrent of semi-coherent lies a pass, like they always do, most fatefully in 2016. Then O’Donnell showed a longer segment by the one candidate who actually had something to say yesterday, but whose talk had not been deemed worthy of a live broadcast on any network: Kamala Harris.
The vice president spoke to the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Her message was not a simple repeat of her Philadelphia speech the day before. In this smaller, more focused setting, she talked about the importance of collective bargaining for achieving a fair result. What’s more, she tied the term “collective” as used in an organized labour context to the community theme that figured so prominently in her Philadelphia speech. She linked the hard work of collective bargaining and of organizing politically to love of country, and she spoke of the dignity of labor.
Fairness and dignity. That’s a message Americans need to hear about. What they got, instead, was an impotent rehash of the same old resentments, lies, and insecurities. I’m not much for television news and opinion, but this 25-minute video (available on YouTube) is important. Broadcast and print media, take note. Your country deserves better.