Photos from early 1900s spurred child-labor laws

He arrived at the coal mines, textile mills and industrial factories dressed in a three-piece suit. He wooed those in charge, asking to be let in. He was just a humble Bible salesman, he claimed, who wanted to spread the good word to the laborers inside.

What Lewis Hine actually wanted was to take photos of those laborers — and show the world what it looked like when children were put to work.

In the early 1900s, Hine traveled across America to photograph preteen boys descending into dangerous mines, shoeless 7-year-olds selling newspapers on the street and 4-yearolds toiling on tobacco farms. Though the country had unions to protect laborers at that time — and Labor Day, a federal holiday to honor them — child labor was widespread and widely accepted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed.

Hine’s searing images of those children remade the public perception of child labor and inspired the laws to ban it. Today, the Library of Congress maintains a collection of more than 5,000 of Hine’s photographs, including the thousands he took for the National Child Labor Committee.

“It was Lewis Hine who made sure that millions of children are not working today,” said Jeffrey Newman, a former president of the New Yorkbased committee.

Hine’s photos showed the price of child labor: unsafe working conditions, dangerous machinery and business owners who refused to educate the children or limit their working hours.

Though there had been investigations that attempted to expose these circumstances in the past, “The industry simply dismissed those reports as — the term they would use today is — ‘fake news,’” said Hugh Hindman, a historian of child labor. “When Hine comes along and supplements the investigations with pictures, it creates a set of facts that can’t be denied anymore.”

Taken with a heavy Graflex camera, Hine’s photos were paired with captions and stories from his interviews with the children, who would tell him their ages, backgrounds and working conditions.

Hine’s affinity for telling the stories of the downtrodden probably came from his own start in life. At 18 years old, he began working at a Wisconsin furniture factory after the death of his father. It was up to Hine to keep his family financially afloat.

According to the International Photography Hall of Fame, Hine worked 13 hours a day, six days a week until he could move on to a seemingly better job — as a janitor in a bank. He began taking college courses on the side to become a teacher.

One of Hine’s mentors encouraged him to move to Manhattan and begin his teaching career in one of the city’s private schools. It was there that Hine picked up photography. In the hope of teaching his students to respect the new wave of immigrants coming into the city, he began visiting Ellis Island and photographing the new arrivals.

Hine’s work attracted the attention of National Child Labor Committee, a private nonprofit organization that had been founded in 1904 with the mission of ending child labor.

Today, the use of photography as a tool to expose wrongdoing is hardly revolutionary. But in Hine’s time, when newspapers were just beginning to incorporate photos into their daily product, it was nearly unheard of. Hine is credited with inventing the term “photo story” and for popularizing a style of portraiture in which the subject looks straight into the camera.

The National Child Labor Committee published Hine’s photos in its publicity material, trying to influence lawmakers and power players to address the injustice being done. Exhibits, newspapers and progressive media outlets picked up his outrage-inspiring work, ensuring it was seen across the country.

The Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that would prohibit most employment of minors, wasn’t passed until 1938. Hine died two years later — long before his work would be recognized for the impact it had.

Now Hine’s photos appear in museum exhibitions, are sold at auctions for upward of $5,000 apiece and are credited with influencing generations of documentary photographers.

But the effort that funded and published Hine’s work, the National Child Labor Committee, is no longer continuing his legacy. In 2017, it shut down without announcing its closure. Its website disappeared. Its phone number still rings, but no one answers.

Newman, the former president, said the organization simply ran out of money and had trouble paying its debts. In its final years, the threat of child labor didn’t have the fundraising power it once did. In the rare instance in which an organization dedicated to a social ill had worked itself out of a job, the National Child Labor Committee board decided to “declare victory and just move out,” Newman said.

“There may well come a time when the [organization] may need to be reinvented and started up again,” he said.