CHAPTER 3

Appropriating the Healthy Child

The Child That Toileth Not and Progressive Era Child Labor Photography

Nowhere in the world is childhood loved and cherished more than in the United States.

— “Constitution and Child Labor,”

Washington Post, January 24, 1907

As the nineteenth century faded into the dawn of the twentieth, anxieties about the fate of the nation played out not only through the figure of Lincoln the “first American” but also through public deliberation about the fate of the youngest Americans. In earlier centuries Western children were conceived primarily as “faulty small adults, in need of correction and discipline”—and born in sin.1 Over time, however, a shift occurred. T. J. Jackson Lears observes that by the middle of the nineteenth century, “middle-class children were no longer ‘fostered out’ to relatives or wet nurses. Unlike their colonial predecessors, they stayed increasingly at home, shielded by their mother from the market’s corrupting influence.”² Then, between 1890 and 1920, a profound transformation occurred. Contrary to scholars who trace the origins of “modern” childhood to the 1950s, Harvey J. Graff contends that the sweeping industrial, social, and political changes of the Progressive Era had a major influence on the construction of modern views of childhood and adolescence.³ During this period, what David I. MacLeod has called the “age of the child,” middle-class Americans became obsessed with the status and quality of childhood.⁴ Childhood increasingly was framed as a preciously short time of innocence as well as a psychologically important time of personal growth and development that easily could be disrupted by the “wrong” training, or no training at all. By the turn of the twentieth century, what Viviana A. Zelizer calls the “sacralization” of childhood was nearly complete. Where in the early nineteenth century the “usefulness” of children was emphasized, toward the end of the century children increasingly came to be understood paradoxically as “economically worthless” and simultaneously “priceless.” Children became valuable for sentimental reasons, not utilitarian ones: “the new normative ideal of the child as an exclusively emotional and affective asset precluded instrumental or fiscal considerations.”5

This “normative ideal of the child” did not appear or circulate in a vacuum. Anne Higgonet writes, “Precisely because the modern concept of childhood was an invented cultural idea, it required representations.”⁶ American visual media, especially photography, not only reflected modern ideologies of childhood; they also invented them. Higgonet continues, “Visual fictions played a special role in consolidating the modern definition of childhood, a role which became increasingly important over time.”⁷ While photography long had been a part of the home environment, the arrival of George Eastman’s Kodak camera in 1888 cemented the relationship between photography and childhood, empowering a growing cadre of middle-class, camera-wielding parents to document every aspect of their precious children’s lives. In her history of Kodak advertising, Nancy Martha West observes, “To no small extent, snapshot photography gained its cultural currency from the promise that children could demonstrate for the first time in photography history all the characteristics—spontaneity, playfulness, innocence—recently discovered as uniquely their own.”⁸ West observes that images of children did not begin to appear in Kodak advertisements until 1900. By the early decades of the twentieth century, however, about one-third of Kodak’s advertising featured children. Many of these advertisements emphasized images of children in the home, outdoors, or at play, reinforcing the “leisured world of the middle- and upper-class family.”⁹ Art photographers also mobilized changing views of children and childhood in their work. Pictorialists such as Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence White emphasized a romantic, dreamy, painterly style, frequently using children as subjects—often their own or those of people they knew.¹⁰ In embracing the normative vision of the sacred child, they put forth in their photographs an “ideologically powerful concept of young people . . . as being endowed with an emotional worth beyond all materialist reckoning.”¹¹

In Photography on the Color Line, Shawn Michelle Smith shows that middle-and upper-class African American families and photographers participated in these same narratives. Smith studies photographic portraits made by Georgia photographer Thomas Askew and later displayed by W.E.B. Du Bois in his award-winning exhibit “The American Negro” at the 1900 Paris Exposition. In keeping with Du Bois’s goal to visualize “the talented tenth” in ways that “challenged conventional American ideas” about race, the images reflected middle- and upper-class norms of photographic portraiture. They worked, as Smith puts it, “within a specific register of evaluation, one that is honorific, sentimental, and often familial.”12 In the context of competing racist images and murderous spectacles of lynching, such seemingly benign images of children functioned as an important “counter-archive” for Du Bois.

A family photograph of my grandmother Isabel Chase Finnegan and her younger sister, Edna Chase Lewis, illustrates well these visual fictions. (Their parents’ overpainted wedding portraits made an appearance in chapter 2.) Undated but likely made at the turn of the twentieth century in a northern Minnesota frontier town, the studio portrait finds the Chase sisters engaged in a bit of cross-dressing and role-playing. Isabel and Edna are dressed identically in dark blouses and overalls, with white caps placed jauntily at an angle on heads full of carefully tended ringlets. The sisters share not only similar clothing but similar poses as well: each girl holds the brim of her hat and looks off to the right side of the frame, her smiling expression lit up by bright eyes. Apart from age and hair color, the only notable difference between the girls is little Edna’s coquettish embrace of the pose (indeed, she seems to anticipate Shirley Temple by thirty years). Their costumed bodies offer the viewer two beloved little girls playing dress-up, masquerading to the camera as happy little worker boys. Clearly no one is fooling anyone; one would never mistake these girls for the laborers whose costumes they have put on. Not child laborers but children dressed as laborers, in this portrait the Chase girls are playfully yet squarely positioned within the sentimental frame of the sacred child.

Such visual fictions of childhood stood in marked contrast to actual child laborers’ working bodies. In 1880 one million American children between the ages of ten and fifteen worked; this was one in every six children. By 1900 that number had nearly doubled to more than 1.75 million.¹³ The reasons for the increase are well documented. Hugh Hindman notes that children had always worked, especially on the family farm.¹⁴ But throughout the nineteenth century and especially after the Civil War, immigration and industrialization transformed the lives of American workers. The transformation of labor was perhaps most vivid in the New South, where industrial expansion occurred largely on the backs of white children who could work for low wages and had no power to organize. Between 1880 and 1890 the number of cotton mills in the South rose from 180 to 412; during that same period the amount of capital invested in cotton manufacturing more than quadrupled. Labor in these mills was attractive to native whites. Walter Trattner writes, “It was easy to persuade vast numbers of impoverished white sharecroppers, tenants, and depressed farmers to abandon the exhausted, ruined land for the bright promise of the mill.”¹⁵ Once these families arrived at the mills, it was often the children who worked; one-third of the workers in Southern mills were ten- to thirteen-year-old children.¹⁶

Isabel and Edna Chase, ca. 1900. Cabinet card by Dunn and Drysdale, Walker, Minnesota. Collection of Finnegan family.

Economic necessity dovetailed with prevailing cultural ideologies of the day. Beliefs such as “idle hands are the devil’s playground,” combined with a deeply ingrained Protestant work ethic, produced a cultural tolerance for child labor that was often difficult to counter. While reformers in the North were somewhat successful at limiting the hours children could work by arguing for the importance of education, in the South, where there was little tradition of universal public education, such appeals often fell on deaf ears. Business leaders emphasized that poor children were better off working in the mills, canneries, and agricultural fields than they were living idly, where they might fall victim to temptation and get into trouble. Child labor laws in various states were often limited to certain manufacturing sectors, conditions, or ages of children. Furthermore, these laws often failed to have real impact: “The typical child labor law . . . often contained enough exceptions and loopholes to make it ineffective.”17

Reformers sought to connect the issue of child labor to a broad constellation of Progressive Era questions about the health of the nation and the relatively new belief in the sacred status of the American child. Opponents of child labor argued for the importance of education rather than work. Freeing children from work would offset the short-term loss of the child’s wages by providing long-term gains not only for the child but for the family and society as a whole. In addition, reformers argued that the labor in which children typically engaged was physically harmful (and in some cases deadly) and would keep children from growing into physically and morally healthy adults. As the arguments went, child labor produced “degenerate” white children (for most child laborers were white); degenerate children threatened the very future of national citizenship. As this chapter chronicles, visual representations of child labor became crucial participants in these arguments, providing important rhetorical resources both for reformers and for those who opposed them.¹⁸

Writing about child labor in the North American Review in 1911, Olivia Howard Dunbar observed, “For twenty-five years or more, whether as scientists, as artists or as sentimental amateurs, we have been more or less profitably engaged in ‘studying the child.’”¹⁹ Dunbar went on to claim that no one in her right mind would dare say publicly that childhood is unimportant: “The child question, as we have slowly come to see it, is not, like the ‘woman question,’ the labor question and other hard-used subjects of dispute, debatable. Or, at least, it will never be debated publicly. It is not conceivable that orators will ever mount platforms and contend that the soundness of a nation’s children is an unimportant matter—that it is even anything less than the supremely important matter.”20 By the time of Dunbar’s writing, the status of the sacred child was so secure that she could not imagine rhetorical challenges to it. Indeed, she was largely right. Even those who argued that child labor was necessary made their arguments in the context of broader narratives about “the soundness of a nation’s children.”

This chapter examines one of those arguments, presented in a 1912 book called The Child That Toileth Not: The Story of a Government Investigation by Thomas Robinson Dawley Jr. The 490-page polemic, which contains more than one hundred photographs, was based on field investigations of child labor that Dawley conducted in Southern cotton mills while working for the U.S. Bureau of Labor.²¹ Largely unexamined and barely remembered today, The Child That Toileth Not used both words and images to refute the rhetoric of child labor reform.²² Dawley argued that children were better off working in the mills than staying on the hardscrabble mountain farms from which their families came. He contended that while life on the farm damaged children physically and morally, life in the textile mills offered children education, good health, positive moral development, and wages in exchange for what Dawley suggested was only light work. Contrary to what child labor reformers asserted at the time, Dawley argued that the mill saved children. While anti–child labor illustrations and photographs almost always depicted children at work or in the spaces of work, in The Child That Toileth Not Dawley assiduously avoids picturing children actually working. Visually emphasizing the mill town as a space of education, play, and patriotism, Dawley’s book draws attention to the ways the mill town turns children into productive, healthy citizens.

While the previous chapter examined multiple responses to one photograph of Lincoln, in this chapter I examine one response—Dawley’s—to a popular media narrative opposing child labor. That popular media narrative, circulated widely in relatively new national magazines with mass circulation, posed serious reading problems for Dawley. Those who so powerfully visualized an anti–child labor position synecdochically related the health of the child to the health of the nation, performing early twentieth-century anxieties about national identity, anarchy, and “race suicide.” Such rhetoric tapped directly into the growing belief in the sacredness of the American child and the importance of childhood as a protected space where well-off, white proto-citizens could learn and play free from adult cares or concerns. Yet Dawley’s political commitments required him to devise ways to visualize working-class white children as worthy of citizenship too. Dawley appropriated elements of these illustrated, widely circulated essays in order to construct his own, pro–child labor position. In responding to visual narratives about child labor produced by Lewis Hine and others, Dawley is both a critical viewer of images and a cunning producer of them. Thus he constitutes something of a departure from photography’s viewers as we have encountered them up to this point. In the previous two chapters, photography’s viewers exercised their agency primarily through textual commentary. Dawley’s book, by contrast, functions as a single, extended example of one polemical viewer’s exercise of verbal and visual agency. By appropriating the structure, style, and strategies of a decade-old, multimodal narrative opposed to child labor, Dawley repositions the working child as the apotheosis of the values of citizenship rather than their denigration. Treating Dawley’s book as a type of viewer response that qualitatively differs from others I take up in this project, this chapter offers an example of how the line between viewer of images and creator of them sometimes blurs.

The argument of The Child That Toileth Not is grounded in Dawley’s recognition that photography and related media of visual culture offer powerful rhetorical resources for appropriation. While the term more frequently is invoked than defined, appropriation is recognized by scholars of rhetoric and literary studies as a key resource for communication.23 Angela Ray defines appropriation as “the adaptation and reuse of forms originally produced and used by others” and observes that “its cultural valence varies depending on interpretations of the appropriated action.” For Ray “appropriation is typically viewed as either direct quotation (re-citation) or creative transformation (parody), depending on the degree to which the original form is altered and the purposes to which this alteration is put.”²⁴ As Ray points out, appropriation has a lot in common with parody, especially theories of parody that treat it as broader than ridicule or mocking.²⁵ For her discussion of appropriation, Ray relies in part on Linda Hutcheon’s useful framing of parody as “repetition with a difference.”²⁶ Like parody, appropriation is double-voiced in the Bakhtinian sense in that it invites simultaneous attention to the new work and to the work that has been appropriated.²⁷

Appropriation operates on multiple levels, which we might describe as those of structure, style, and strategy. Hutcheon acknowledges the structural and stylistic levels of appropriation when she writes that parody is a “mode of thematic and formal structuring” that “marks the intersection of creation and re-creation, of invention and critique.”²⁸ That is, one invents a new work by appropriating structural themes and conventions that are then put on display in order to facilitate what Robert Hariman calls “collective reflection.”²⁹ Stylistic appropriation, for its part, operates by replicating or reproducing formal or aesthetic components of a work in the new work; examples that Hutcheon offers include composers’ and painters’ musical and visual quotation of the masters.³⁰ Stylistic appropriation “replicates some prior form and thereby makes that form an object of one’s attention rather than a transparent vehicle for some other message.”31 Finally, what we might term strategic appropriation operates in a narrower range; where structural appropriation happens at the level of conventions and social norms, and stylistic appropriation works in the middle space of the formal or aesthetic, strategic appropriation operates in a more situated and instrumental sense. Helene Shugart articulates this approach to appropriation when she defines appropriation as “any instance in which means commonly associated with and/or perceived as belonging to another are used to further one’s own ends.”³² Two terms are key here: “means” and “ends.” For Shugart and other scholars who emphasize strategic appropriation, it is best understood as an instrument used to further one’s immediate persuasive goals.³³ When used strategically, Shugart writes, appropriation is a often a “means by which the referenced ‘other’ is challenged.”³⁴ As I will show in this chapter, Dawley finds in visual representations of child labor more generally, and anti–child labor photography specifically, ample resources for structural, stylistic, and strategic appropriation. Such resources enable him to refute the visual rhetoric of child labor reform while at the same time advocating, in Dunbar’s terms, for the supreme importance of “the soundness of a nation’s children.”

My argument in this chapter unfolds in the following manner. First, I explore early federal efforts in child labor reform in order to explain how T. R. Dawley came to conduct the fieldwork on child labor that led to his book. Then I elaborate the structural and stylistic features of the popularly circulated anti–child labor narratives that Dawley appropriated. The rest of the chapter then illustrates how The Child That Toileth Not activates appropriation to disrupt reformers’ concerted attempts to contrast child labor with visual fictions of the sacred child. Dawley’s appropriations of anti–child labor reform rhetoric invite the reader to contrast the working child not with the sacred child, but with the “mountain child,” who lives an animal-like, unhealthy, uncivilized existence that only access to child labor can improve. While to twenty-first-century audiences such arguments may seem ethically dubious, to say the least, we shall see that they did have rhetorical traction in the early part of the previous century.

Early Child Labor Reform Efforts: The NCLC and Beveridge’s Bill

With child labor reform efforts already under way in several states, the National Child Labor Committee formed in 1904 to consolidate reform efforts taking place in individual states. The NCLC was the first federal body dedicated to the issue of child labor.35 Yet it is important to note that terms like “national” and “federal” do not mean governmental; the NCLC was what today we would term a nongovernmental organization, or NGO. In its statement of purpose the NCLC made clear its goals by declaring its desire to “be a great moral force for the protection of children.”³⁶ The NCLC framed children as a special class of workers who needed zealous moral guardianship on the part of reformers: “It should be plainly said that whatever happens in the sacrifice of adult workers, the public conscience inexorably demands that the children under twelve years of age shall not be touched; that childhood shall be sacred; that industrialism and commercialism shall not be allowed beyond this point to degrade humanity.”³⁷ The NCLC’s purpose, in short, was to save children—indeed, childhood itself—from industrial capitalism.

NCLC leaders believed in the methods of social science grounded in the collecting and reporting of “social facts.” The agency produced volumes of material for public distribution; in one year alone almost two million pages of printed material came out of the committee’s offices.³⁸ Press coverage rose exponentially as a result of the committee’s efforts; while few articles on child labor appeared before 1905, between 1905 and 1909 more than three hundred of them were indexed in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.³⁹ Magazine coverage of child labor was particularly influential. When the federal child labor debate heated up in Congress in early 1907, several authors of these popularly circulated articles would find their work quoted directly.

That debate began in earnest on January 23, 1907, when forty-four-year-old senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana rose in the Senate chamber to present HR 17838, a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would regulate child labor in the District of Columbia.⁴⁰ While he supported the modest bill, Beveridge argued that the real problem of child labor lay far outside of the district; he offered an amendment to the bill that would address “the condition of the employment of young children in the factories, the mines, and the sweat shops of this country.”⁴¹ For the first time, federal legislation would address child labor on a national scale. Beveridge began his speech by noting that he did not oppose farmwork for children, for “where children are employed within their strength and in the open air there can be no better training.”⁴² He then offered a few statistics on child labor but noted that numbers were not necessarily the most persuasive evidence in this context: “if I were merely to say that so many children were employed, that would give no idea of what this evil is. Figures can not, of course, describe it.” Instead of offering numbers to illustrate the extent of the child labor problem, Beveridge proclaimed he would “describe it. I propose to show to the Senate and the country precisely what it [child labor] means, and I shall do this by the description of these children at work, of how their work is conducted, of its effect upon them, and in each instance by the testimony of eyewitnesses who have personally investigated this matter.”43 On January 23 and for several hours across two additional days thereafter, Beveridge did just that. Mobilizing a formidable array of evidence, including signed affidavits, charts, and photographs, Beveridge built a dramatic, seemingly never-ending case against the evils of child labor in the United States. Writing of the speech the following day, the Washington Post reported, “When the senior Indiana Senator rose to address the Senate the three desks immediately in front of him were piled high with books and exhibits to be used in his remarks. The array resembled a small improvised fort.”⁴⁴ Other newspapers that reported on the speech similarly highlighted Beveridge’s impressive array of evidence. The Chicago Tribune noted Beveridge’s “photographs illustrative of the inhumanity of the child labor system.”⁴⁵ The Atlanta Georgian and News, which called Beveridge’s speech “brilliant” because it illustrated the threat of child labor to white Southerners’ education and development, reproduced images it said were “copies of . . . pictures showing children who work in mines and mills” that “were submitted to the senate by Mr. Beveridge.”⁴⁶ After the first day of Beveridge’s speech, the Washington Post commended his dramatic and descriptive approach, opining, “Nowhere in the world is childhood loved and cherished more than in the United States. The people need only to be made aware of the injustice done to children in order to do away with it. Public opinion is particularly powerful in all that relates to family and to children.”⁴⁷

Beveridge built this fortress of evidence to support three primary claims. First he asserted that child labor of the sort he described was not unusual, but in fact typical in both the northern and southern sections of the United States. Responding to a colleague’s objection to his narrative, Beveridge observed, “The Senator says—and I want his attention—that these are ‘isolated’ cases. On the contrary, they are typical cases.” Offering statistics to illustrate the scope of the problem, Beveridge concluded, “Does the Senator think that 30,000, does he think that 60,000 child slaves are ‘isolated’ or ‘occasional’?”⁴⁸ Beveridge supported his claims about typicality by quoting extensively, almost always verbatim, from published anti–child labor accounts and by producing charts that illustrated the scope of child labor.

Beveridge’s second claim was that state laws currently in place did not go far enough, or often were flouted entirely, hence the need for federal action. Here, too, he relied extensively on published accounts, which he read into the record, especially those accounts that emphasized the gap between law and practice. Manufacturers, parents, and local governments, Beveridge explained using several examples, had interest in skirting the laws in order to employ children, producing a situation of “universal nonenforcement of law.”49

Beveridge’s final argument highlighted the “American” character of child laborers, by which he meant primarily their race. Most child laborers were white. Beveridge argued that child labor was producing “a deterioration of the race” similar to what happened in Great Britain in the early 1800s: “The lowest estimate now is that we are pouring into American citizenship every year at least 200,000 London ‘Hooligans,’ boys and girls, who are broken in body and stunted in mind and soul, and who know it, and who are living engines of hatred toward society.”⁵⁰ These broken and stunted “hooligans” were not merely lost citizens, Beveridge argued, they were the enemies of citizenship itself. The engine metaphor signaled that the very labor to which children had been made subject was transforming their bodies into dangerous machines: they would grow up and they would lash out. Offering up a classic early twentieth-century fear appeal—the threat of racial degeneration—he asked of his colleagues, “Had we not better do something to stop the production of that ‘lower class,’ that ‘dangerous class’?”⁵¹

Beveridge used as his primary evidence a collectively constructed, multimodal narrative about child labor that had been circulating in the American press since the turn of the century. That narrative, produced by social workers, labor activists, and crusading correspondents, trafficked in first-person accounts of child labor in the mines, mills, and factories and combined vivid textual description with the presentation of visual images in order to make child labor dramatically present to readers. Beveridge relied especially on accounts of child labor recently published in American magazines. Reflecting on the role of magazines in the anti–child labor effort, Beveridge observed that, unlike newspapers, “the magazines find it possible and profitable to take up one subject and keep hammering at it for months, and years. So the men and women who want to make the Nation better, and who have time for the work, have found in the magazines the means by which the people may be thoroughly educated upon any question of national interest.” He added, “It was thus my own attention was first called to our terrible national sin of child slavery and child murder.”⁵²

Despite voluminous and vivid evidence, opponents of child labor did not unanimously support Beveridge’s bill. When in late 1906 Beveridge began to speak of a federal child labor bill in Congress, he sought the support of the National Child Labor Committee. Up to this point the NCLC had focused on legislation at the state level.⁵³ Some in the NCLC feared angering Southern reformers, who did not want federal intervention; indeed, when the NCLC eventually pledged its support for the bill, it lost some key Southern supporters.54 Ultimately, while the Beveridge bill left many particulars unanswered, the NCLC saw the opportunity to expand discussion of child labor nationally and elected to support it.⁵⁵ But President Theodore Roosevelt recognized that neither Congress nor organized labor would support the bill, and he questioned its constitutionality.⁵⁶ In response to Roosevelt the NCLC shifted its own position, proposing instead “a large-scale federal study of the child labor problem.”⁵⁷ Despite Beveridge’s objections, in January 1907 Congress approved a federal study by the Bureau of Labor and appropriated three hundred thousand dollars for it.⁵⁸

While ineffective in terms of accomplishing Beveridge’s short-term goal of advancing federal child labor legislation, Beveridge’s speech continued to resonate in public conversations about child labor. It was reintroduced to the public about five years later when one of those hired to conduct that Bureau of Labor study wrote a tell-all book about his experiences.

T. R. Dawley and Beveridge’s Speech

T. R. Dawley was an unlikely child labor investigator. The exact circumstances that led him to take a job with the federal Bureau of Labor are unknown. He is more accurately described as a freelance journalist or foreign correspondent than a social worker or bureaucrat. Sixty-eight years old when he died, Dawley was described in a 1930 New York Times obituary as an “author, publicist, and war correspondent in the Spanish-American war.”⁵⁹ The obituary briefly noted his work on The Child That Toileth Not—“in which he pointed out that the [child labor] situation was not as bad as had been anticipated”—but devoted the bulk of its space to describing Dawley’s early years as a foreign correspondent.⁶⁰ The account describes a busy career, noting Dawley’s “thrilling adventures” in Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century and describing him as a “close friend of President [Theodore] Roosevelt.”⁶¹

Dawley’s “thrilling adventures” in Cuba may be traced to the period just before the beginning of the Spanish-American War. In a series of stories published in Harper’s Weekly and recirculated in other print outlets, Dawley presented firsthand accounts of meeting military leaders, described the arrival of Spanish soldiers in Havana, and told the tale of his own brief imprisonment in Cuba.⁶² In a narrative strategy to be echoed later in The Child That Toileth Not, Dawley claimed to be beholden to no man nor institution. Yet his dispatches from Cuba during this period reveal him to be a willing, even driving participant in the coalescing ideology of empire that led to the Spanish-American War. Using both text and photographs, Dawley’s dispatches valorized the Cuban “insurgents” and their “liberating army.”63 In hiring Dawley, then, the Bureau of Labor probably thought it was hiring an experienced (if crusading) correspondent with extensive experience gathering evidence and reporting it. What it got was something a bit more complex—and more vexing.

Topping out at nearly five hundred pages, The Child That Toileth Not is based upon two congressionally funded field investigations that Dawley conducted in Southern textile mills on behalf of the Bureau of Labor. Dawley’s book opens with a chapter titled “Beveridge’s Speech,” in which Dawley produces a critical reading of Beveridge’s speech in order to critique typical descriptions of child labor. Yet Dawley’s critique is not so much of Beveridge, but of his “improvised fort” of sources. Dawley emphasized the powerful “word pictures” and “representations” created by magazine stories and reports that Beveridge quoted: “Little children were represented as working in dyehouses in vats of poisonous dyes”; “These child toilers, as represented, were the ‘infant factory slaves’”; “It was represented that capitalists . . . were little less than human monsters”; children “were pictured as beginning their labors in the mills as young as four years.” Beveridge and his child labor reform friends “presented a word picture of the children in the mills,” Dawley concluded, that was seductive but skewed.⁶⁴

Dawley reports early in the book that upon completion of his first field investigation, he encountered resistance to his findings in Washington: “I was told to write a report, but upon starting to write that report, my findings respecting child labor and the improvement of the families at the mills, were met with protests.” Dawley suggests that the Bureau of Labor had launched its investigation with a set of assumptions firmly in place: “I was told that it was an established fact that factory employment was detrimental to the employed, that the captains of industry who employed the children, never worked a day in their lives and that they exploited the lives of the little children whom they employed, for their own personal gain.”⁶⁵ In writing The Child That Toileth Not, Dawley sought to publicize what he believed to be his suppressed conclusions and to refute an activist narrative that he believed had been swallowed whole by the federal government.

The Anti–Child Labor Narrative in Popular Media

In 1912 the most potent rhetorical weapon in that narrative was photographer Lewis Hine.⁶⁶ From 1908 to 1918 Hine traveled the country as an investigator for the NCLC. He documented working conditions of women and children, from the city streets to the cannery, coal mine, and cotton mill.67 Working under the auspices of the NCLC, Hine made thousands of photographs, assembled them into lantern slide shows, wrote and illustrated reports, and created exhibit posters made up of what he termed “time-exposures,” images paired persuasively with text.⁶⁸ His images circulated in NCLC publications and in magazine articles on child labor, many of which Hine wrote himself.⁶⁹ He mixed photographs with textual reports of his investigations because he knew that images alone would not be enough: “Sociologically, Hine learned that not truth but self-interest moved ‘the authorities’ and that only irrefutable truth, delivered in a package of photographic image and data [dates, places, names, ages, heights, hours of work, daily earnings] would appeal to the sole force capable of moving them: public opinion.”⁷⁰ Of the impact of such work, Kate Sampsell-Willmann argues, “By the end of the 1910s, [Hine] was among the nation’s leading social critics, and his expertise was such that he could testify directly to Congress about his work with the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC).”⁷¹ Owen Lovejoy, who hired Hine at the NCLC, remarked years later in a letter to the photographer, “‘In my judgment the work you did under my direction for the National Child Labor Committee was more responsible than any or all other efforts to bring the facts and conditions of child employment to public attention.’”⁷²

No one mobilized and challenged the visual fictions of the sacred child better than Lewis Hine. But while the plainly composed, skillfully executed photographs produced by Hine served as poignant evidence in Progressive Era debates about citizenship, work, health, and the changing nature of childhood in the early twentieth century, Hine had important predecessors that scholars have largely ignored. The early twentieth century brought the rise of muckraking journalism, in which self-styled crusading journalists sought to expose large-scale corruption in economic, political, and social institutions. The Child That Toileth Not appropriated these structural conventions. Fueled by progressive fervor and supported by editors of popular magazines such as McClure’s and Cosmopolitan, muckrakers typically aligned themselves with broad federal efforts at social reform.⁷³ What we remember today as the most famous muckraking efforts, Lincoln Steffens’s “Shame of the Cities” series (1902–1903) and Ida Tarbell’s exposure of the corruptions of the Standard Oil Company (1902), relied upon extensive field research as well as articulation of a moral dimension to reporting.⁷⁴

Child labor was a common topic for magazines of the period; in fact, the first decade of the twentieth century was rife with magazine offerings on the evils of child labor. Essays with titles such as “The Child at the Loom” and “Little Slaves of the Coal Mines” dramatically described the experiences of child laborers and utilized what became the patented muckraking style: vivid descriptions of conditions, emphasis on visual illustrations, direct address to the reader, and rhetoric designed to shame.75 Matthew Schneirov describes such efforts: “This was the ‘new realism,’ which sought to ‘speak not the pleasant but the true.’ But speaking the truth did not mean separating facts from advocacy of a position. Instead, facts were to be exposed precisely to open the public’s mind to the need for reform.”⁷⁶

Both popular and specialized magazines produced vivid, multimodal accounts of child labor, most of them negative. NCLC historian Walter Trattner describes such stories as “a series of well-meant but inaccurate magazine articles” and notes that some of the stories were built on exaggerations that embarrassed the NCLC, which preferred a more social scientific approach.⁷⁷ The magazine accounts published during the five years or so before Beveridge’s speech are remarkably similar, constituting a set of structural conventions to which subsequent accounts needed to conform and which later opponents like Dawley appropriated. Child labor narratives of this period offered statistical information on the scope of the child labor problem across the United States, emphasized that the conditions described were not rare but in fact typical, challenged Americans to reject industry’s excuses for child labor, proposed the need for national legislation to control and limit child labor, and often featured a focus on the laboring child’s poor health and lack of education. As these stories circulated in popular media of the early twentieth century, and influenced others who came after—most notably Lewis Hine—they tended to mobilize a relatively stable set of stylistic strategies. First, child labor stories usually featured an author who offered firsthand observation and accounts of child labor. Second, the stories favored a multimodal approach combining textual and visual narratives. Finally, these multimodal, firsthand accounts relied heavily on vivid description to present the reader with dramatic details about child labor. Using examples from the same sources Beveridge cited in his 1907 speech (sources that, as we have seen, Dawley later criticized), I will examine each of these in turn.

In an era in which muckraking journalists rose to fame by offering firsthand accounts of complex economic and social conditions, those writing about child labor used similar tactics. Irene Ashby-Macfayden was a union operative who reported on child labor for Samuel Gompers and wrote about her experiences in periodicals such as World’s Work and American Federationist.⁷⁸ Her essays emphasized her firsthand observations: “Only a few weeks ago I stood at 10.30 at night in a mill in Columbia, S.C., controlled and owned by northern capital, where children who did not know their own ages were working from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. without a moment for rest or food or a single cessation of the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and clouded with humidity and lint.”79 Others worked similarly. In 1906 Bessie (known in print as “Mrs. John”) van Vorst dramatized child labor in a multipart series published in the Saturday Evening Post.⁸⁰ In these essays the author’s stance as a surrogate for the reader is paramount. As we saw with Oliver Wendell Holmes in chapter 1, here too such accounts constituted a pedagogy of sight as they purported to offer readers firsthand experience of the evils of child labor. Dawley later appropriated this stylistic convention in The Child That Toileth Not.

In these accounts the “truth” about child labor is uncovered not only through words but through images too. Thus a second convention of popular narratives opposed to child labor is their multimodal approach, in which authors combined the textual and the visual in their construction of dramatic narratives.⁸¹ As we saw in chapter 2, beginning in the late nineteenth century with the rise of the halftone process, popular magazines and newspapers increasingly were able to reproduce a variety of visual images, and to do so cheaply. Magazines such as McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, the Saturday Evening Post, and many others took advantage of this technology to illustrate their articles with images. Popular media representations of child labor were filled with a variety of visual images paired with texts to tell stories about child labor.

While today we tend to associate child labor reform imagery solely with photography, in the pre-Hine period it was common for magazines to use other modes of illustration. Child labor essays frequently were illustrated by well-known artists. For example, Bessie van Vorst’s Saturday Evening Post treatment of child labor was published with drawings by Guernsey Moore, a well-known magazine and advertising illustrator who was often responsible for Saturday Evening Post covers.⁸² Another multipart series published in the Cosmopolitan that same year used color-washed silhouettes by Warren Rockwell (no relation to Norman), a New York book and magazine illustrator, to illustrate articles by poet (and the magazine’s associate editor) Edwin Markham.⁸³ Markham’s essays, collectively called “The Hoe-Man in the Making” (after Markham’s popular 1899 pro-labor poem “The Man with the Hoe”), were paired with silhouettes to track child labor across four industrial settings: textile mills, glass factories, coal mines, and what Markham termed “the grind behind the holidays,” an exposé of holiday-season labor practices.⁸⁴

Despite the heavy reliance on illustration, photography was present in early child labor narratives. Some photographs, such as those published in socialist writer John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children, were similar to later photographs by Lewis Hine and others. These images depicted children in the poverty-stricken, dilapidated setting of their home or work environments. But other photographs sought to juxtapose visual fictions of the sacred child with images of child laborers. For example, union activist and writer Irene Ashby-Macfayden’s 1902 account of child labor in American Federationist opens with a studio portrait made in Montgomery, Alabama. It features an adult woman (Ashby-Macfayden herself) and three child laborers, two girls and a boy. The studio setting of the formal portrait calls to mind the playful “laborer” photograph of the Chase girls that opens this chapter. But here any sense of visual fantasy is belied by the bodies and faces of the children. The girls wear threadbare dresses and the boy wears short pants, a dirty oversized shirt, and suspenders. All of the children have bare feet. Both girls stand with their hands folded politely in front of them. Removing the children from the economic space of the mill and placing them in the consumer space of the photography studio, Ashby-Macfayden strategically appropriates the family portrait to juxtapose the laboring child to the sacred child. Appropriation, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, entails “repetition with a difference.”85 Placing child laborers into the formal, familial setting of the conventional portrait studio, Ashby-Macfayden invites—perhaps even challenges—readers to see child laborers as valuable, significant, and worthy. In doing so she bluntly reworks the geography of childhood.

Finally, these firsthand, visual accounts operated using enargia, which rhetorical scholar Richard Lanham describes as “a generic term for visually powerful, vivid description, which recreates something or someone, as if they have appeared ‘before your very eyes.’”⁸⁶ Poet Edwin Markham, whose multipart series in the Cosmopolitan mobilized so skillfully the silhouette imagery mentioned above, was particularly fond of dramatic amplification and accumulation of detail. Markham employed vivid language to invite readers to accompany him, as it were, into the literal spaces where the dramatic narrative of child labor plays out: “Let us glance into the weaving-rooms of the cotton mills and behold in the hot, damp, decaying atmosphere the little wan figures flying in hideous cotillion among looms and wheels—children choked and blinded by clouds of lint forever molting from the webs, children deafened by the jar and uproar of an eternal Niagara of machines, children silenced utterly in the desert desolation in the heart of never-ceasing clamor, children that seem like specter-shapes, doomed to silence and done with life, beckoning to one another across some thunder-shaken Inferno.”⁸⁷ Such vivid language amplifies the drama and dangers of child labor and its effects on children’s bodies in particular. The children move in “hideous cotillion” and are “choked,” “blinded,” “deafened,” and, ultimately, “silenced.”

“A Bit of Realism.” Portrait of Irene Ashby-Macfayden and child laborers. American Federationist, May 1902, 214.

Using a stable set of structural conventions that evolved through muckraking journalism, and deploying stylistic devices such as the presentation of firsthand accounts, multimodal communication, and vivid description, popular media accounts of child labor narrated and dramatized the negative effects of child labor. As a result, they made available a variety of resources for appropriation. We have already seen such appropriation in the 1907 speech of Albert Beveridge, who mobilized these narratives directly in his “improvised fort” of evidence against child labor. This same narrative figures strongly in T. R. Dawley’s refutation of child labor reform rhetoric.

Responding as a viewer to these representations of child labor, and creating polemical counter-representations of his own, Dawley appropriated the structural conventions and stylistic forms of the anti–child labor narrative. Throughout the book he emphasizes his firsthand experience doing fieldwork in the South, he combines text and image to build a detailed refutation of Beveridge and his ilk, and he deploys vivid description to tell a story of the laboring child citizen’s good fortune. In addition, Dawley finds in child labor photography, especially in the work of Lewis Hine, resources for strategic appropriation. He strategically reproduces, or directly “quotes,” several photographs by Lewis Hine in order to directly challenge what they purport to show.

The Child That Toileth Not: “I would build them a cotton mill”

The Child That Toileth Not contains 121 photographs, a clue that the images are meant to be more than mere illustration.88 Indeed, the opening pages of Dawley’s book indicate that the photographic image will have a primary role and that firsthand observation will be a dominant trope of the text. The book itself opens with a photograph. Tellingly, it is not a photograph of the conditions Dawley encountered, but a photograph of the author himself: a full-page portrait of the author captioned, “THE AUTHOR AND HIS HORSE RUBBERNECK, as he appeared in the Mountains of North Carolina on his second investigation.” The frontispiece functions as a visual epigraph, the caption situating the author within a particular space and time and hinting that he possesses firsthand experience of the conditions he will describe. Sporting the attire of a Teddy Roosevelt Rough Rider and sitting smartly astride his trusty horse, Dawley frames himself as a serious man of action. Although he is a government investigator, the frontispiece frames Dawley as the quintessential Rough Rider, evoking his earlier Cuban adventures by depicting himself as a muckraking loner seeking out the “truth.”

The overall argument of the book is that while there are differences among labor practices at various mills, children are better off working in the mills than staying on the hardscrabble mountain farms from which their families came. Such an argument was not new; indeed, supporters of child labor had made the same arguments years before Dawley’s book appeared.89 Dawley argues that life on the farm damages children both physically and morally; by contrast, life in the textile mills offers children education, good health, positive moral development, and wages in exchange for what Dawley suggests is only “light” work. Thus the mill saves children; it does not doom them. In addition to contrasting farm life with mill life, Dawley also explicitly contrasts the findings of his investigations with the reports of the NCLC, Lewis Hine, and other anti–child labor activists. Dawley argues that his investigations reveal that life in the mill is not nearly as detrimental to children as labor reformers suggest. In order to support these claims, he combines an exhaustive narrative discussion of his travels with a parallel visual argument constructed with photographs and captions scattered throughout the text. The book’s chapters alternate between discussions of conditions Dawley observed in mills and mill towns and those he experienced while traveling in rural areas among farm and mountain people. The book concludes with a passionate, polemical indictment of child labor reform politics and wasteful government bureaucracy.

The photographs in the book generally are of two types: photographs of life on the mountain farms (featuring images of destitute, unhealthy-looking children and families struggling to live on inhospitable land) and photographs of life in the mill towns. Although photographers are not identified directly in the captions, the majority of the photographs appear to have been made by Dawley himself; Dawley mentions his photographic activities throughout the book.⁹⁰ As we shall see, Dawley’s photographic response emphasizes that life in the mill town exerts a civilizing influence on children. His photographs are vital to his narrative, for they visualize the mill town as a positive influence in the lives of Southern children and thus constitute a deliberative challenge to reform narratives that would visualize children’s experiences as the opposite. Dawley’s heavy visual emphasis on the mountain farms adds something new to the debate. Most child labor reform rhetoric, especially what circulated in the popular press, emphasized the sites of industrial labor; it did not tend to picture conditions in the areas from which many child laborers came. As a result, Dawley’s book sets up a contrast between farm life and mill town life that largely is invisible in other child labor narratives.

Dawley begins by contrasting child laborers not with images of the sacred child, but with mountain children. Indeed, the sacred child appears nowhere explicitly in Dawley’s book, though it hovers like a ghost above the whole proceedings. The largest number of photographs in the book visualize the lives of the “mountain people.” Dawley photographs the environment in which farm families live and work, emphasizing the dilapidated buildings and hardscrabble land. The often sarcastic captions accompanying these photographs link the physical devastation of the land with the physical and moral “degeneration” of its people. Here is how Dawley captions a photograph of an abandoned farmer’s shack: “GONE! GONE TO THE COTTON-MILL; It is from such productive farms that the special interests claim that our splendid mountain people go the mills to be ruined.”91 Dawley sarcastically uses the caption to suggest that the real life of mountain people is decidedly not “splendid,” but something from which they need to be rescued. Indeed, Dawley’s photographs of mountain people, along with their captions and Dawley’s extensive documentation in his text, work to dismiss the myth of the healthy yeoman farmer and replace it with images of “decadent” people doomed to ill health and moral decay.

One photograph of a farming family in the mountain area is a multigenerational family portrait. Ten family members, including two young boys and a baby, stare into the camera, unsmiling. The caption reads: “PRODUCTS OF ISOLATION, IGNORANCE AND VICE. A poor family in Madison County without the advantages presented by a cotton-mill. Old Aunt Polly, some of her children and grandchildren. All were said to be illegitimate. At the time the picture was taken, another daughter was ill with pneumonia and was without medical attendance. Neighbors said their corn had given out and they had scarcely anything to eat. Such conditions as these existed in the hills of New England before the establishment of cotton-mills.”⁹² Dawley positions the family in explicit contrast to mill culture, for this family is “without the advantages” of the mill. The caption provides a context that is not locatable in the photograph itself, suggesting that the family is unhealthy both physically and morally. In both the text and the captions, Dawley emphasizes families with illegitimate children, implying that the people of the mountain farms are immoral and uncivilized. Dawley claims that this would change if they were living in the morally healthier culture of the mill.

It is also worth noting that “Old Aunt Polly’s” family members in the picture are framed by Dawley as “products of isolation, ignorance and vice.” The rhetoric of “product” is not accidental here. Dawley appropriates the term “product” from anti–child labor rhetoric that explicitly described sick or injured children as victims of an industry that was more committed to products than to those who produced them. Where Dawley’s labeled “special interests” argued that the mills and industries produced bad products in the form of deformed and uneducated children, Dawley suggests that it is really uncivilized life on the farm, full of “isolation, ignorance and vice,” that produces families like this one: poor, unhealthy, immoral—and, even animal-like. In a photograph captioned “A CHILD OF THE MOUNTAINS,” Dawley features a small, squinting girl with long, wavy hair grown down to the middle of her back; she stands uncomfortably for the camera in front of a small mountain cabin. The caption quotes one of Dawley’s informants, who observed of children like this one, “In the summer they live on berries like bears; in the winter they get nothing but corn meal. ‘Thar ain’t enough cotton-mills for them.’”⁹³ In contrast to the animal-like existence of this “wild child,” Dawley suggests the potential salvation of the mill.

“Products of Isolation, Ignorance and Vice. A poor family in Madison County without the advantages presented by a cotton-mill.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 131.

Dawley’s captions often invite the viewer to look for evidence of degeneracy in the pictures themselves; in this way the photographs do not merely illustrate the claims made in the text, but become constituted as objects for analysis by the reader. For example, one photograph features a family of girls and women. While an older girl looks out the window of a dilapidated cabin directly at the photographer, a mother poses in front of the cabin with her family of five daughters, lined up in descending order of height, left to right. The caption is headlined “FIVE LITTLE SISTERS ON THE FARM” and continues, “Note the fat and healthy appearance of the youngest one, the gradual deterioration of the others and finally the aged appearance of the mother at thirty-five.”94 Dawley invites the viewer to read the image in a way that suggests that, over time, life in the mountain areas breaks people down and eventually leads to their “deterioration.” Furthermore, the deterioration is not just what happens when a woman becomes a mother and raises a family; rather, it is “gradual,” and the only girl who is spared is the youngest, “fat and healthy” daughter, whose sealed fate is illustrated by the predictably deteriorating bodies of her sisters. The photograph itself, however, does not seem to show such a progression; indeed, the four youngest girls have healthy-looking, round faces quite similar to that of the youngest girl. In order to support his argument, however, Dawley needs to read this image and others like it as examples of the unhealthful effects of mountain life. The implication is that not only is life in the mountains unhealthy but also that it always has and always will be; the only way to avoid such physical and mental disabilities is to get to children early and remove them from the farm to the mill.

“A Child of the Mountains.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 244.

“Five Little Sisters on the Farm.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 449.

Dawley’s verbal and visual depictions of the “mountain people” do not suggest that they are inherently degenerate so much as they are “products” of an environment that inevitably makes for degeneration. While Dawley frames adults as largely lost to health and civilization, those white children who leave the farms for the mill will gain “advantages” that those who stay behind lack. Thus for Dawley the farm families constitute an uncivilized citizenry needing redemption, not vilification; the wild child merely needs to be tamed. As descendants of white, Anglo-Saxon yeoman farmers of the century past, such families represent the foundation of the American nation. Describing an encounter with “Vicie,” a divorced woman with children of questionable paternity, Dawley writes, “Like the oak that abounds in her forest, she was solid all the way through. How unlike the many expensively veneered creatures of our effete civilization, with all their advantages of wealth, culture and education. She presented that hardy type of our ancestral race that by its very rudeness and virility gave backbone to a nation.”95 Here Dawley’s framing echoes the narrative of “the first American” we encountered in chapter 2, whose rude and rugged ways formed the backbone of the pioneer nation’s identity. By suggesting that such “hardy types” are more American than the “veneered creatures of our effete civilization,” Dawley echoes the period’s critiques of upper-class “civilized” culture that highlighted the psychological, physical, and moral weaknesses of the very wealthy.96 In doing so, Dawley opens up a space between the abject poverty of the white mountain farmers and “effete civilization,” a space into which the rising classes (such as the mill workers) may insert themselves. The mill town enables the uncivilized to rise while still upholding American values of work. As Dawley writes of the mountain people, “If I were a Carnegie or a Rockefeller seeking to improve the conditions of our poor mountain people, I would build them a cotton mill.”⁹⁷ By suggesting that it is in fact through child labor that children may rise to a healthy, educated, middle-class existence, Dawley articulates a vision of the child-citizen that is not only purportedly healthy for the individual child but healthy for the nation as well. Child labor is thus redeemed from the hands of the reformers and their “exaggerated” claims.

Healthy Proto-Citizens: Dawley’s Class Pictures of Mill Children

Throughout the book, photographs of life in the mill towns situate children’s bodies in the contexts of school, play, and patriotism rather than work. In offering these alternative images of child laborers, Dawley attempts to replace the powerful visual narrative of Hine and his predecessors with one that dissociates the body of the child from the body of the laborer. Anti–child labor activists argued that if children were working long hours during the day, they could not possibly be receiving a proper education. In an attempt to refute this argument, Dawley includes photographs of life in the mill towns that show large groups of children gathered together in school settings. Adults are always nearby—not hovering threateningly, as in many of Hine’s child labor images, but as figures of benevolence. Dawley’s class pictures serve two functions. First, they are meant to counteract Hine’s and others’ often poignant images of individual child workers or small groups of children. By offering photographs of very large numbers of children, Dawley suggests that the majority of children in the mill towns are healthy and educated. Furthermore, the spaces in which groups of children are photographed highlight not the mind-and-body-numbing labor typically depicted in the narratives of those who are against child labor, but instead the benefits of education, exercise, and training in patriotism.

Dawley’s images of a cotton mill in Pelzer, South Carolina, for example, seek to refute the idea that Pelzer is run by a despot. Dawley’s photographs frame this company town as a welcoming haven for children who would otherwise have little access to education or training. Where “special interests” have condemned Pelzer for exploiting the labor of women and children for profit, Dawley visualizes paternalistic beneficence. In a photograph of students in a cooking class, for example, a group of girls and their teachers pose in the school kitchen with the tools of their trade: bowls, brooms, stove, and pots and pans. The girls are clean and well dressed, if simply so; a few have fashionable bows in their hair. Dawley’s image suggests that these girls have not been unsexed by mill culture; to the contrary, they are being taught the middle-class arts of domesticity. Dawley observes in the caption, “Children of mill operatives as they were with their teacher in their cooking class at the time of our investigation. Of course children thus trained make more efficient operatives, better housekeepers and better mothers.”98 Dawley assures the reader that these girls will be productive citizens in all of the ways expected of middle-class girls—and that they can do all of this while still functioning as “efficient” workers in the mill. The two jobs are not incommensurate.

Dawley observes that this cooking class is merely one example of the range of community activities available to children at such mills. It “was a part of the welfare work paid for and maintained by the corporation, as well as the lyceum, library, reading-room, park, swimming-pool, and everything else established for the improvement of the community.”⁹⁹ All of these spaces in the company town, Dawley implies, enable children to develop themselves as healthy, educated citizens. Indeed, corporate-sponsored places of play figure prominently in Dawley’s photographs. A photograph made in Georgia shows between thirty and forty small children gathered with their teachers outdoors in a fenced-in play area. The children display themselves for the photographer in a more or less orderly fashion, despite the fact that many of them are positioned somewhat uncomfortably on playground equipment. Two barefoot boys share a swing, while in the background little children are stacked like sardines on a slide, the boy at the bottom bracing his arms and legs as if to avoid being crushed by the flood of children behind and above him. Four teachers, all women, pose with the children, who appear clean and well-behaved despite their young ages. Trees are visible in the background of the image, as is a broader expanse of sky, suggesting something of the health of the outdoors. The photograph is a prototypical image of childhood, a “class picture” in both senses of the term. Children are gathered outdoors, under watchful but caring adult supervision, getting exercise and having fun. They are not working or suffering.¹⁰⁰ Suggesting that the “special interests” believe that such children really work in the mills, Dawley’s caption observes, “The above was taken at the Eagle & Phenix Mills, Columbus, Ga., where such children are represented by special interests, as marching in daily procession into the yawning mill.”¹⁰¹ The caption emphasizes that the playground photograph is a direct visual contradiction of evidence offered by “special interests.” If there are children at the mills, Dawley implies, they are not hidden, but rather they are here, outdoors and in plain view in the healthy space of the playground.

“Such Children Were Found in the Mill Kindergartens and Play Grounds.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 290.

In another photograph of play, Dawley presents a group of about a dozen young boys, perhaps nine to twelve years of age, posing outdoors amid tall pine trees. One of the boys holds what looks to be a long wooden bat. Dawley identifies the boys as “doffer boys who were playing ball between doffs” and suggests that boys like these “play two-thirds of the working day.”102 While the children in the playground or on the ball field may be current or future workers, Dawley suggests both in the text and with this image that their labor does not get in the way of healthy play. His emphasis on playground images may be understood in the context of early twentieth-century beliefs about childhood health. The playground movement, begun in the late nineteenth century in the United States and in full force by the time of Dawley’s writing, argued that increasing urbanization made children of the industrial age particularly vulnerable to ill health and disease.103 The construction of healthy play spaces, reformers argued, would enable exercise and foster good health, especially important in the confining spaces of industrial America. The existence of such spaces in the mill town implied that the corporation was both attentive to the health needs of the children and philanthropic in making these spaces available. Dawley’s photographic emphasis on play is thus meant not only to counter images of children at work but also to tie corporate interests to progressive movements designed to help, not hurt, children.

In emphasizing school and play, Dawley did not deny that children worked, but he denied that this was all that they did and that it was difficult work that would damage their health. Furthermore, Dawley claims that even the labor children do is part of their education; throughout the book he offers examples of mill supervisors (all men) who started out as children and worked their way up into management positions.¹⁰⁴ Thus it was that Dawley would write of a mill in Tennessee, “There were sixty thousand spindles there. Sixty thousand educators for the poor children of the mountains.”¹⁰⁵ Later, writing of another mill, he again personifies spindles as “child educators,” emphasizing that the labor children were doing in the mill was teaching them the art of hard work and good citizenship.¹⁰⁶ Indeed, if life in the mills afforded children education and healthy exercise, as Dawley’s images and text claim, then the mills were in effect creating just the kind of citizens early twentieth-century progressives desired. It was through child labor, not in spite of it, that lower-class whites would rise in society.

As we have seen, Dawley’s book may be read as one excessively partisan viewer’s extended rhetorical response to the child labor narratives circulating in the period. He appropriated child labor accounts’ emphasis on firsthand observation; use of textual and visual evidence; and dramatic, vivid descriptions of conditions. In doing so, Dawley countered child labor reform critiques, especially those articulated by Beveridge and advocated by the NCLC and its investigators. Yet Dawley responded to this narrative not only by producing his own illustrated text with dozens of his own photographs but also by appropriating the photographs of others. In these moments of strategic appropriation, he mobilized these latter images in ways that enabled him to refute common anti–child labor arguments. George Dimock discusses a few appropriations of Hine in Dawley’s book, describing Dawley’s appropriations as “visual rebuttals” designed to ascribe “the sorry condition of the mill children not to the ruinous effects of wage labor but rather to the poverty, ignorance, malnutrition, and disease endemic to a prior rural life.”¹⁰⁷ While Dimock is generally correct in emphasizing the refutational qualities of Dawley’s arguments, there is much more to say on this point. Dawley uses strategic appropriation to rebut quite specific claims about child labor made by his opposition. For starters, he uses strategic appropriation to refute claims to representativeness or typicality. At least three Hine images in the book are drawn from an article by the NCLC’s Southern assistant secretary, Alexander McKelway. Published in the January 30, 1909, issue of Charities and the Commons, the piece was later lightly edited and released separately as an official publication of the NCLC called Child Labor in the Carolinas.108 Twenty pages long and illustrated with twenty-six photographs made in the field by Lewis Hine, the pamphlet presented visual and textual evidence of conditions for child labor in the cotton mills of the Carolinas. The Charities piece and the pamphlet opened by describing Hine’s work: “In November, 1908, he [Hine] went to Charlotte, North Carolina, the center of the cotton mill region of the South. Over 50 per cent of the cotton spindles and looms of the South are within a hundred miles of Charlotte. Mr. Hine visited 19 mill villages and investigated 17 Mills, taking 230 photographs of the conditions he discovered.”¹⁰⁹

Beveridge and the anti–child labor narrative from which he drew emphasized that the examples they offered were not unique or isolated, but in fact typical of child labor in both the North and the South. Hine’s photos for the NCLC followed a similar rhetorical pattern. The captions accompanying his photographs in the Carolinas publications emphasized the typicality of the child workers pictured and sometimes described the children’s ages, living and family situations, and typical work hours. For example, for one image of a young girl tending looms Hine offered this caption: “Spinner. A type of many in the mill. If they are children of widows or of disabled fathers, they may legally work until nine p.m., while other children must legally quit at eight p.m., but neither closing hour is enforced or regarded in the absence of all inspection.”¹¹⁰ Reproducing and appropriating the same Hine image in his own book, Dawley retitles the photograph “A CHILD SPINNER,” the modifier added perhaps to de-emphasize the child’s role as an employee of the mill corporation. Of the photograph Dawley writes, “Such as is represented as marching in daily procession into the mills, but I find that the employment of such a child is exceptional, and then she is only employed as a ‘learner,’ and not because of any adequate returns to the mill corporation.”¹¹¹ Not a productive worker the corporation depends upon, but rather just a “learner” (a claim that may be at least partly true¹¹²), the girl is cast by Dawley as atypical of child labor practices. For Dawley she is singular, “exceptional,” not at all representative. By appropriating the photograph of the spinner, Dawley urges readers to disrupt the visual synecdoche offered by Hine and others, who framed this young girl and others like her as representative of the whole class of spinners.

“A Child Spinner. Such as is represented as marching in daily procession into the mills.” Photograph by Lewis Hine, reproduced in Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 19.

Dawley strategically appropriates another NCLC photograph published in the same pair of publications, this time to challenge an argument about what the subjects in the photograph are actually representative of. Reformers frequently argued that there was an available pool of adults who could fill the jobs occupied by child laborers if only the mills would hire them. Dawley reproduces a Hine photograph captioned in those publications as “Types of Adult Operatives.”113 Retitling the photograph “TYPES OF VILLAGE LOAFERS,” Dawley writes in the caption, “Published by the National Child Labor Committee as types of Adult Operatives, but about the only thing they ever operate is boot-leg whiskey. It is not work that affects them, but keeping as far away from it as they can get.”¹¹⁴ If these men are representative of anything, Dawley insinuates, it is vice and sloth. Throughout the book Dawley offers examples of the ways that adults shirk the responsibility of work, leaving the mills no choice but to hire children. Dawley appropriates the Hine image to refute the suggestion that there was a suitable adult labor pool from which the mill corporations might draw. In contrast to the training in citizenship and patriotism that Dawley argued the mill towns fostered, these adults who had not had the benefits of such an “education” were unreachable and therefore unemployable. It was thus best to begin with children, who could be “brought up” in the system and later perform well as adults.

In addition to challenging arguments about representativeness, Dawley also directly charges Hine with deception. He appropriates another Hine photograph, this one of a very small boy standing in the work space of the mill with a spool in his hand. Titling the photograph “HOW THE CAMERA LIES,” Dawley writes in the caption, “Photographed by Lewis W. Hine and represented as a child worker in the mill. The child never worked and the photograph was obtained by deception.”115 In the publications from which Dawley likely drew the photograph, Hine and the NCLC did not explicitly represent the child as a worker. There, the photograph is identified as having been made at the Daniel Manufacturing Company of Lincolnton, North Carolina, and in both publications is captioned, “Six years old. Stays all day in the mill where his mother and sister work. Is beginning to ‘help’ a little and will probably soon be regularly at work, though his name may not appear on the payroll.”¹¹⁶ Contrary to Dawley’s assertion, Hine and the NCLC did not claim the child worked, but rather pointed out that the child was in the mill because he accompanied family there. In their oral history of Southern mill towns, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, and their colleagues report that this was in fact a routine practice: “Adult women workers would sometimes bring their babies to the mill if there was no one else to care for them.”¹¹⁷ In addition to misrepresenting Hine and the NCLC’s framing of the little boy, Dawley also fails to elaborate what he means when he says the photograph “was obtained by deception.”¹¹⁸ But simply retitling the picture “HOW THE CAMERA LIES” shifts readers’ attention from the child to the camera as a tool of the photographer. By introducing the idea of deception and implying that the image cannot be trusted, Dawley’s strategic appropriation encourages readers to question the practices of photography that produced the image and the evidence that the photograph purports to show.

In addition to appropriating Hine photographs, Dawley juxtaposes others’ photographs with his own in order to intensify his attempts to contrast farm life with life at the mill. For example, he describes an encounter with the eldest daughter of a farm family of seven children living in poverty; Dawley is surprised to learn that while the girl does not read very well, her younger sisters do. When he asks her why the younger ones are better readers, she replies, “‘They learned down at the cotton-mill.’”¹¹⁹ Dawley claims that because of new laws barring young children from working, the family left the mill town after ten months and returned to the farm. According to Dawley, when he paused to make a photograph of the children for his report, he was informed by the older girl that they had another family photograph from their time at the mill:

“How the Camera Lies.” Photograph by Lewis Hine, reproduced in Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 113.

The little girl brought forth the photograph, and there were the happy faces of those children, with their father and mother, and a relative, as they were, a united and happy family at the cotton mill.

There was a story told on that bit of pasteboard. It needed no argument. Bright faces, good clothes, shoes and stockings, and a warm house to live in. These were the children at the mill to whom the law had said, ‘Thou shalt not toil,’ and as a consequence had driven them back to their miserable abode of hunger, ignorance, and squalor.120

Reproducing both photographs in the book, on consecutive pages, Dawley invites the reader to read the photograph explicitly in ways that project the family’s cotton mill and mountain farm experiences into them. Claiming the photographs “needed no argument,” Dawley instead invited readers to privilege narrative: to consider a story in which the family had moved from “hunger, ignorance and squalor” to “united and happy” and then descended back into squalor.

Dawley’s comparison of the two photographs of the same family invites attention to health. While he claimed children were healthier at the mill, a common theme of anti–child labor discourse was “testimony from physicians on the physical effects of certain types of work.”121 In another strategic appropriation of a Hine photograph, Dawley invites his readers to attend to visual evidence of health in a picture of four hunched-over, unsmiling, forlorn girls and then juxtaposes it with one of his own.¹²² It is likely that Dawley drew the Hine photograph from a 1911 NCLC publication called “A Great National Problem,” which cropped off a fifth girl at the right, who was smiling, and captioned the photograph a bit differently: “You can see in these faces the serious effects of premature toil upon growing girls during this critical period of their lives. The wrinkled faces, the careworn expression, the stooped shoulders, and tired looks all tell the tale of overwork and loss of strength and vitality.”¹²³ Highlighting the physical effects of toil visible in their faces, the caption encourages the viewer to read the photograph as evidence of the damage child labor does to the child’s body at a crucial time of physical development.

Dawley retitles the photograph “HOOK-WORM SUSPECTS SUCH AS DR. STILES FOUND.” He writes in the caption, “Reproduced from one of the National Child Labor Committee’s publications in which such types are represented as products of the mill.”¹²⁴ Dawley refers here to Dr. Charles W. Stiles, a public health researcher who had explored the effects of hookworm on the area’s rural people through his work with the Rockefeller Hookworm Commission. Stiles found that many new arrivals to the mills came from the farm infected with hookworm. As a result, he argued for the continuation of child labor, because he believed the disease would be easier to treat if rural people continued to move to the mill towns.¹²⁵ As with the earlier image of the child spinner, Dawley does not challenge the fact that these girls work in the mill or that they may be ill. But by suggesting that these girls are like those studied by Stiles, he challenges the representation of them as specific “products” of the mill and suggests instead that they are recent, unhealthy arrivals from the farms.

To drive the point home even more forcefully, in his layout Dawley places the image of the girls with hookworm on a page opposite one of his own photographs, which features a smiling, round-faced, apple-cheeked young girl standing outdoors. She is drawing water from a faucet; her feet are barefoot, but she is clean and smiling. The caption reads, “A TRUE PRODUCT OF THE COTTON-MILL. She is a spinner at the Graniteville Mills. Note her robust form, strong limbs and bright and smiling countenance. The cotton-mill has done for her and her generation what it has done for hundreds of others from the poor farms of the sterile sections.”¹²⁶ In offering the girl at the water faucet as a kind of celebratory “after” to the depressing, hookwormed “before” of the previous page, Dawley uses juxtaposition to drive home the charge of deception and recontextualize the image of the hookworm-afflicted girls as illustrative of the problems of the farm, not the mill.¹²⁷ Indeed, that the mill girl has running water is not a minor visual detail in the context of a disease that results from poor sanitation.

“Hook-Worm Suspects Such as Dr. Stiles Found” (photograph by Lewis Hine). Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 438.

Ultimately, Dawley uses strategic appropriation to represent Hine’s and others’ photographs as examples of the benefits of child labor rather than the ills. The family returned to the farm from the mill is depicted as clean, healthy, and well-dressed in the mill town. The mill girl at the water pump is the picture of youthful health. In these examples and throughout the book, Dawley encourages readers to scrutinize the photographs themselves for evidence of health. In this way he frames the photograph as a valuable, if contestable, form of documentary evidence. Advancing a body rhetoric that reflects the contemporary culture’s valuing of child health, Dawley appropriates and rereads Hine’s and others’ photographs to suggest that the evidence they offer is in fact precisely the kind of healthy bodies reformers claim to want.

“A True Product of the Cotton-Mill. She is a spinner at the Graniteville Mills.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 439.

Child Health and the Healthy Citizen

The child labor debate was infused with the assumption that, in Olivia Howard Dunbar’s terms, “the soundness of a nation’s children” was of supreme importance because the health of the child constituted the health of the nation. Such discourse expressed a range of anxieties about children, citizenship, and the danger of “degeneracy.” As we have seen, both those who opposed child labor and those who supported it made arguments about health. If the nation produced unhealthy children, as the argument went, then those children would grow up to be not only physically but also morally degenerate citizens. These rhetorics of national health, offered by elite reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Beveridge, and NCLC president Felix Adler, and echoed in Dawley’s refutations, all constructed children as “products” in needing of “right training” and equated physical “degeneracy” and moral “degeneracy” in order to support arguments that the telos of the American republic should be the achievement of a “pure” national “manhood” and “womanhood.” For Roosevelt, Beveridge, and others child labor damaged those products; for Dawley it produced them. In both cases what was at stake was the future of white citizens of the nation.

In 1911 former president Theodore Roosevelt addressed a child labor conference in Birmingham, Alabama. The speech, titled “The Conservation of Childhood,” argued that child labor was “one of the great, fundamental questions of our citizenship in this republic.”128 Ironically, Roosevelt used metaphors of the industrial age to argue that children should be protected from industry: “I want you to take pride in getting the very best machinery. . . . In the same way it is even more important to have the right kind of man behind the machine than it is to have the right machine. And you can not have the right kind of man unless you have the child trained in the right way, unless you have the child brought up amid right conditions.”¹²⁹ For Roosevelt children were “products” and child labor was a practice that damages the goods. After making a plea for the passage of specific legislation for working women and children, Roosevelt concluded by invoking another metaphor, that of “conservation,” a term strongly associated in the public mind with his presidency: “Remember, that the human being is the most important of all products to turn out. . . . If you do not have the right kind of citizens in the future, you cannot make any use of the natural resources. Protect the children—protect the boys; still more, protect the girls; because the greatest duty of this generation is to see to it that the next generation is of the proper kind to continue the work of this nation.”130

What kind of citizenship, exactly, was Roosevelt encouraging? A gendered one, certainly, as he urges “still more” protection of girls, who will be responsible for the “proper” production of the next generation. In addition, the language of “machinery,” “product,” and “natural resources” emphasizes the cultivation and training of future workers. But note further that Roosevelt uses “work” in another sense here, the “work of the nation.” The “greatest duty” is for adults to see that children, the next generation, are “of the proper kind to continue the work of this nation.” The telos of citizenship is in fact the production through “proper” means of the “right” kind of citizen.

A parallel case is made in a time exposure created by Lewis Hine, who invokes not the metaphors of industry but those of agriculture as he admonishes viewers, “We must not grind the seed corn.” Children are the seeds of national citizenship; to “grind” them down is to ignore one’s duty to turn out a good product. Not all children, of course, get to be seed corn; seed corn is made up of only the best seeds, those reserved for planting and producing future generations of good quality crops. Behind this rhetoric of product, whether industrial or agricultural, was intense anxiety about “degeneracy.” Hine, the NCLC, and other reformers consistently emphasized the very real physical damage that child labor could do. Addressing the annual convention of the NCLC in December 1906, its president, Felix Adler, explicitly connected physical health to morality: “This premature toil . . . physically and mentally and morally . . . lowers the standard of civilization. . . . This next generation will become degenerate, and the standard of American civilization will be lowered.”¹³¹

In his January 1907 speech before the Senate, Albert Beveridge mounted a vigorous challenge to child labor and emphasized its threat to white citizenship. In an earlier speech delivered during his Senate campaign, Beveridge stated that through child labor children’s “bones are made crooked, their backs bent with the stoop of age, their minds stunted, their characters malformed.”¹³² Degeneracy was a moral problem that inevitably would produce what Beveridge called the “social and political poison” of criminality and anarchism. When such children grow up “they feel that they have been robbed . . . of intellect, health, character, of life itself. And so they become, all over the land, living engines of wrath against human society itself. When the lords of gold tremble for the safety of their widespread investments, let them remember that child labor is daily creating an element in this republic more dangerous to their physical property itself than ever was packed in dynamiters’ bombs.”¹³³ Concluding that “this making of possible anarchists and degenerates in America has got to be stopped,” Beveridge explicitly tied the “degeneracy” of child laborers to that of society as a whole, using the threats of anarchism and “dynamiters’ bombs” along with disease metaphors (“poison”) to cultivate fear.¹³⁴

“Every Child Should Work . . . We Must Not Grind the Seed Corn.” Lewis Hine, Child Labor Bulletin, February 1915, 41.

The image of the physically and morally degenerate child contrasted with what many political elites believed should be the telos of American politics. Beveridge began his 1906 speech by invoking this telos: “The purpose of this republic is to make a better type of manhood and womanhood”;135 later he asked of American values such as liberty, “What do all these things mean, if they do not mean the making of a splendid race of clean, strong, happy, noble, exalted charactered men and women.”¹³⁶ Similarly, the NCLC’s Felix Adler echoed, “If we continue to sanction premature child labor we not only degrade and lower the standard of citizenship, but we prevent that future growth, that development of American civilization, that new type of manhood which we must give to the world in order to contribute to the world’s riches. We prevent the evolution of that type; we cut off that dream.”¹³⁷ As we saw in the previous chapter, the language of “race,” “type,” and “evolution” needs to be understood quite explicitly here; Beveridge and Adler are not speaking metaphorically. In a period when discourses of eugenics and racial purity dominated public conversations about national identity and morality, the rhetoric of child labor was not merely about social justice for children but also about a national morality that would degenerate if the “race” did not evolve “purely” and “cleanly.”¹³⁸ T. J. Jackson Lears observes that the political and social upheaval of the period (immigration, labor disputes, anarchism) contributed to cultural anxiety about the potential “degeneracy” of the “Anglo-Saxon” race: statisticians warned that “Anglo-Saxons were being replaced by inferior immigrant stock”; immigration rhetoric was dominated by racist rhetoric of biological essentialism, and Theodore Roosevelt himself famously warned middle- and upper-class white Americans that they were committing “race suicide” if they chose to limit the size of their families.¹³⁹ Southern child labor historian Shelley Sallee argues that reformers’ anxiety about “degeneracy” appeared to be about class but was also very much about race.¹⁴⁰ For example, in its story on Beveridge’s 1907 speech the Atlanta Georgian and News published a related article with the headline “Negro Children, Senator Says, Are Being Strengthened.”¹⁴¹ While white children were heading off to work in the mills, the story stated, black children were instead going to school and getting educated. Fear that educated African Americans were “being strengthened” prompted whites to argue more vociferously for the end of child labor and to argue that the South in particular should support such efforts.

As a result, both Southern and Northern reformers invented “fictions of whiteness” to create solidarity among Southern whites and between Northerners and Southerners during a period when the “spirit of regional reconciliation” was deemed politically expedient and racial segregation was the law of the land.142 This rhetoric separated the poor white child from identification with the white lower classes, the so-called cracker families: “Reformers removed children from categories such as poor whites, mountain whites, low whites, and crackers—terms that increasingly dubbed them inferior—and began referring to ‘our pure Anglo-Saxon stock.’”¹⁴³ The image of the child played a crucial role in the construction of these fictions of whiteness. Such images indexed not merely the good or ill of child labor but the good or ill of civilization itself. As George Dimock and Stanley Mallach have observed of Lewis Hine’s photographs, they enabled “middle-class viewers to look through unfamiliar and sometimes brutal activities and surroundings to see that the children of the poor were not unlike their own.”¹⁴⁴

Dawley occupies a fascinating place in the context of these arguments because he appropriates the same argument structure to argue the opposite conclusion. He brings poor Southern white children into the fold not by arguing they are like everyone’s children, but by arguing that in fact they are different. For Dawley poor white children will never be the sacred children of the reformers’ romantic imaginings, but they can become useful citizens. We see this most clearly in a final set of photographs from the book. The children of the mill, Dawley argues, are in fact the ideal future citizens that progressives wish to create. On this point Dawley is not subtle. In yet another class picture he depicts what looks to be more than one hundred children gathered outside the local school at the Pelzer mill. The large, modern-looking school building dominates the right-hand side of the frame, competing for the viewer’s attention with an equally tall flagpole near the center of the image. An American flag waves in the breeze, fluttering over the large group of children and adults assembled below. Though they are not individually recognizable, the students appear well-behaved and orderly. They pose for the camera with their hands grasped firmly in front of them or held stiffly at their sides. Above all, this is an image of order, control, and tidiness, the upright stiffness of the children’s bodies echoing the clean lines and rectangular linearity of the windows on the school building. Dawley’s caption reads, “ONE OF THE RESULTS OF PELZER AND ITS DESPOTISM. In searching for the awful conditions of woman and child labor, we find the cotton-mill children going to school at the expense of the mill corporation. At the closing exercises for the day, they are preparing to sing our National Anthem around the flag.”¹⁴⁵ Sarcastically refuting those who would condemn the mill owners for their exploitation of workers, Dawley suggests that the mill cultivates in its youngest charges the positive values of patriotism. As if the image and its caption were not obvious enough, in the text he waxes eloquent about this scene: “As we stood looking at them, a group of younger ones went dancing around the pole which bore aloft that emblem of liberty which they never would have seen, perhaps, had those little doffer boys and child spinners of the previous generation been barred from the cotton-mill. As I, too, looked up at the flag, I thought what a cruel mockery of that liberty were those misrepresentations by paid agents seeking to bar children from coming down from their isolated mountain homes.”146 Dawley concludes his recounting of this patriotic scene by noting, “The childish voices burst forth singing our National anthem.”¹⁴⁷ Life at the mill has not only saved these lucky children from the sure doom of illness and degeneracy borne of “isolated mountain homes”; it has also produced patriotic citizens. In contrast to what “paid agents” have described as the “‘lint-laden atmosphere of the cotton-mill,’” Dawley finds “the living proof of the actual result, half a thousand ruddy-faced, well-dressed school-children performing their evening exercises before going home.”¹⁴⁸ The “real” result of child labor? Healthy children spontaneously bursting forth in patriotic song.

Dawley further suggests that such patriotism, fostered in the worker-child by the benevolent corporation, will pay off for society later. Presenting a photograph of a rifle company of the South Carolina National Guard, Dawley tells the reader that this group, “made up of the very mill boys whom, the Socialistic reformers and labor committees tell us, are being stunted in growth and ‘murdered,’ present as fine a type of young manhood ready at their country’s call as may be found anywhere, and I doubt whether many of our Northern cities present any better.”¹⁴⁹ The photograph features maybe fifty or sixty older teenage boys, dressed in uniforms similar to those of the Rough Rider or the Boy Scout. They pose outdoors in an empty field, lined up as if for military review, each one standing with a rifle at his side. Dawley’s caption says it all: these fine young men, so orderly and alert, so ready to work on behalf of their country, are “one of the results of child labor.”¹⁵⁰

Dawley appropriates the structural relationship between child health and the health of the nation to illustrate the ways child labor produces, not inhibits, good citizens. He writes:

Children who had toiled not, and who were growing up in idleness to become vagabonds of the future, arriving at the mills, in many instances bare-footed and in rags, were put to work spinning and doffing, learning to make money, and learning its value and what it would bring. They were given better houses to live in than they had ever seen; their parents were shown how to take care of them and keep them clean; they were provided with better food than they ever had before, and were provided with schools and churches. Ministers and teachers came in, whiskey and murder went out, and a great wave of industrial prosperity and education began sweeping over the entire country.¹⁵¹

“One of the Results of Pelzer and Its Despotism.” Dawley, Child That Toileth Not, 106.

Money. Housing. Hygiene. Food. Education. Religion. These are the things that produce good citizens, and these are the things Dawley argues child labor provides the children of poor white Americans.

Appropriating Visions of National Health

Perhaps predictably for such a polemical work, Dawley’s book was both reviled and appreciated for offering an alternative to the dominant media narrative opposing child labor. The New York Times review of the book noted that its presentation of evidence tended to force its conclusions in only one direction, but granted the book some value, concluding that Dawley’s arguments “are certainly worthy of close examination, and if they cannot be refuted, of frank acceptance by those interested in sociology.”152 Similarly, the Washington Post praised Dawley for his “frankness” and argued that while children in general should be in school, those without access to education might be better off in the mills: “Mr. Dawley shows that the evils of idleness, drinking, and sloth in the mountains where most of the mill children were born were far worse than the employment of these same children in clean surroundings, at light work, and with facilities for education and a chance to earn money for their own support.”153 For this reviewer, at least, it seems as though Dawley’s emphasis on the figure of the poor white mountain child was effective.

Not all reviews were positive. Though he did not mention Dawley’s book specifically, Owen Lovejoy of the NCLC criticized the New York Times for giving space and attention to Dawley and other critics of child labor reform. According to Lovejoy, the issue was not whether the mill child was better off than the mountain child, but “whether the mill child is really in the way of the best possible preparation for life.” Answering this question in the negative, Lovejoy challenged the rhetoric of “efficiency” and “product”: “If the point is to make a perfect ‘efficiency machine,’ the cotton mill is a suitable school for efficiency in the mechanical dexterity of cotton-mill processes.” “But our campaigns,” Lovejoy insisted somewhat disingenuously, given the ongoing rhetoric of “product” proffered by Roosevelt, Beveridge, and others, “have been based on the principle that in a democracy mind and imagination must be trained, and that literacy is at least as important as dexterity.”¹⁵⁴

Concurring with Lovejoy but engaging Dawley’s book more directly, The Independent, a weekly magazine published in New York, argued that “Dawley’s “‘facts’ are not very convincing. . . . The book is largely a panegyric on the beneficence of the cotton mill as a civilizing agent. . . . The ‘investigator’ does not seem to have found a single fact or condition that could not be construed as ideal or at least favorable.”¹⁵⁵ Writing in the American Journal of Sociology, Roy William Foley described the book as “an unjustifiable attack upon recent child labor legislation.” Foley stated that the book was not worthy of attention by academics and observed that “its chief purpose seems to be to create public opinion in favor of child labor for cotton mills, and to thwart governmental action which may result in further prohibition of child labor.”¹⁵⁶ Finally, perhaps embracing the truism that there is no such thing as bad publicity, Dawley’s publisher took out an ad in the New York Times book review section that quoted from a hotly negative review by the Hartford Courant. Titled “That Amazing Book,” the ad read, “Either the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor and the conduct of his bureau should be put on examination at once, or Mr. Dawley should be prosecuted for libel and denounced as an unparalleled liar. He is, if untruthful, at least a fertile, ingenious, humorous writer of most captivating fiction.”157 Faint praise, but perhaps sufficient for selling a controversial book that Dawley’s critics charged was embraced by Southern textile interests, who invited him to speak at their annual meetings and, according to the NCLC, hired him as a paid operative.¹⁵⁸

Historians have tended to dismiss Dawley’s efforts as merely “transparent” propaganda designed to serve the interests of mill owners.¹⁵⁹ Certainly one way to read The Child That Toileth Not is as the excessively partisan work of a political gadfly. Yet Dawley’s arguments about child labor offered not entirely unreasonable challenges to the idea of child labor reform as well as to the practice of social reform photography. Lewis Hine and the NCLC knew that poignant images of child laborers would be interpreted by Progressive Era audiences in the context of a visual culture that romanticized and idealized childhood. Yet it certainly was not the case that all children “protected” from child labor would be in any economic or social position to become those idealized, precious citizens. Despite Lovejoy’s assertions that literacy was valued over dexterity, even NCLC historian Walter Trattner acknowledges that many of the period’s arguments in support of child labor were “plausible defenses” of a system that seemed to many preferable to a difficult life of poverty on the farm.¹⁶⁰ Dawley’s attempt to reframe the norms of middle-class visual culture to include the image of the child laborer offered an alternative, if problematic, view that appropriated beliefs about childhood and “right training” to recognize that for some children the mill might be the best they would get. Furthermore, Dawley’s challenges to Hine’s photographic practices encouraged viewers of Hine’s photographs, and social documentary photography more generally, to be critical and skeptical of what those images purported to illustrate.

I noted at the outset of this book that I am interested in exploring how Americans constituted themselves as agents of photographic interpretation in times of anxiety and crisis. Photographs shape citizens’ experience of national life and are routinely mobilized by citizens as resources for public argument. As a critical consumer of the multimodal anti–child labor narrative, Dawley found a way around the reading problems posed by that narrative: he activated photography’s capacity for appropriation. In a time of industrialization and rapid social change, Dawley sought to quell national anxieties about the future of white citizenship by shifting the terms of the argument that equated the health of the child to the health of the nation. Contesting the visual fictions of the sacred child through the figure of the mountain child, Dawley rhetorically situated the mill child in a middle space between these two extremes, recognizing the value of appropriation for arguing for the value of child labor in upholding “the soundness of a nation’s children.”