Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor Book

Russell Freedman is one of my favorite non-fiction authors for young people. His best books use vintage photography to explore the themes of a time period, and his writing is clear and concise enough to get his message to his readers. Some of his best include Lincoln: A Photobiography, Children of the Great Depression, and his latest was The War to End All Wars. All are wonderful.

One of the first of Freedman's books I read was Kids At Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor. I got to revisit that book this month with some teachers, and I re-read the book as a refresher. Lewis Hine was a schoolteacher and photographer in the early 20th Century, appalled at the conditions he saw children working in. Despite these harsh conditions, Hine believed that people were basically good.

"Seeing is believing, said Hine. If people could see for themselves the abuses and injustices of child labor, surely they would demand laws to end those evils."

This faith in the American people pushed Hine to con his way into the factories, and mines, and schools and tenements, doing what no one had done before'looking at the children of America and becoming a crusader for their cause.

The photographs in Kids at Work high quality, with wonderful composition and detail. Many of them are either posed or staged to great effect, but others seem to be true candids. Some have criticized Hine for his staging, but he wasn't making anything up, he was trying to get the best photograph possible for each subject. Photojournalism was still a new field, and he was pioneering the best way he knew how.

More than anything, these photographs aim for your heart. They include girls working in mills, tending machines bigger than the homes they live in; boys in a glass factory; breaker boys in a coal mine; a seven year old girl who's "an experienced oyster shucker." While many of the pictures are portraits of misery, there are many others where the children seem happy, or at least satisfied. And while they were certainly being exploited by the corporations who were employing them, they were exemplars of a society that didn't yet have any framework to help the immigrants, the poor, the victims of industrialization. Do we today?

The book interweaves Hine's own biography through that of his subjects, and looks at the difference that one man was able to make. He died penniless and unknown, and yet his photographs prompted a seismic shift in how we treat children in this country. There are still massive inequalities, still social injustice, but Lewis Hine was a force for good in a world that was crueler than the world we live in now. This book left me with one final question'how can I do the same?