Suffer The Children: Child Labor Reform In Alabama Story Told In Alabama Heritage Magazine

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — At the turn of the century, places like Merrimas Mills in Huntsville and the Alabama Canning Company in Bayou La Batre seemed to be plucked straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Young children — some barely what we would call school-aged today — with soiled faces and ill-fitting clothes could be seen working alongside adults, working machinery or shucking oysters for 10, 12, and even 14 hours a day, their movements and gazes too mature for their years.

It was the work of a few forward-thinking reformers, writes Paul Pruitt in the fall 2000 issue of Alabama Heritage magazine, that changed all that, altering the shape of industry and the role of children in Alabama forever.

Irene Ashby, a young Englishwoman, had made quite a name for herself as a reformer in her own country and, by 1900, had turned her attention toward social reforms in the United States. Upon meeting with Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, the two decided to direct her energies toward publicizing child labor reform in the South. Though she encountered roadblocks of the legislative and social variety, she did much to shape the debate on the issue in the early stages of the movement.

Edgar Gardner Murphy took up the mantle from there. Born in Texas in 1869 and educated at Sewanee, Murphy was an Episcopal clergyman with a direct tie to the South and, more importantly, an understanding of the machinery behind the legislature in Alabama. He sought, first and foremost, to keep the issue alive in his various writings-articles and newspaper opinion pieces. He also did much to frame the debate in regionalist terms. Child labor excesses in Alabama, Murphy trumpeted, were the result of the greed of Northerners who owned factories and mills throughout the Southland.

When photographer Lewis Hine, a reformer in his own right and a staffer of the National Child Labor Committee, hit the scene, he provided exactly what Murphy and his loosely formed coalition, the Alabama Child Labor Committee, needed: images. Eloquent, incendiary prose aimed at Northern industrialists was one thing; widely disseminated pictures of young children with faces soot-stained and hardened from long hours and too many adult concerns was quite another.

By 1911, a ground swell of public opinion was brewing. Laws were on the books by 1915 limiting the extent of child labor, and then, in 1919, with the national lens starting to focus on the issue, reformers were able to lobby the Alabama legislature for a comprehensive law they could truly abide. By the early 1920s, if Lewis Hine had visited one of Alabama’s cotton mills, his camera would have caught far fewer stunned-looking faces.

Paul M. Pruitt Jr. is assistant law librarian and curator of special collections at the Bounds Law Library, University of Alabama. His previous contributions to Alabama Heritage include articles on Julia Tutwiler (AH 22 and 23) and “The Killing of Father Coyle” (AH 30).

Alabama Heritage is a nonprofit quarterly magazine published by The University of Alabama and the University of Alabama at Birmingham. To order the magazine, write Alabama Heritage, Box 870342, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0342, or call 205/348-7467.