When I see someone selling the Contributor, I think of Lewis Wickes Hine’s time in Nashville.
Hine (1874-1940) is remembered for the photos he took of children working in factories and mines all over the country. For several years, he took pictures for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), which wanted children to attend school rather than work in factories.
Hine took photographs of children working in clothing factories in North Carolina. He captured images of kids laboring in cotton mills in Pennsylvania. He took photos of kids working in coal mines in West Virginia.
“If I could tell the story in words,” Hine said, “I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.”
He also came to Nashville around 1910, which gets me back to the Contributor. Here, Hine took photos of so-called “newsies” — small boys who were selling newspapers on the streets and sidewalks downtown.
These photos paint a picture of a side of Nashville few people acknowledge today.
They can be found on the website of the Library of Congress, with the notes that Hine jotted down when he took them.
One of the photos shows a boy selling a paper to a man while a policeman stands nearby.
“A young truant newsie, during school hours,” Hine wrote.
A second of the photos shows a group of boys in an alley, most of them with newspapers under their arms. “Group of Nashville newsies. In middle of group is 7-year-old Sam. Smart and profane. He sells nights also.”
A third photo shows two boys carrying newspapers under their arms and leaning against a mailbox on a downtown street. “Two 7-year-old newsies, profane and smart, selling Sunday,” Hine wrote.
A fourth photo shows two more boys — the bigger one carrying about 30 newspapers and a burlap sack. “Philip Weinstein, 8 year old, and an older boy who uses him a decoy. Philip sells until 10 & 11 pm sometimes. Photo taken at 11 a.m. Philip said he player [sic] hookey a week and they fired him. A good many young truants on the street those days.”
To be honest, the photos of boys selling newspapers on the sidewalks of downtown Nashville didn’t shock anyone or result in any self-reflection at the time. But the hundreds of photos Lewis Hine took of children working in factories made Americans confront the idea of child labor. Selling a newspaper as an adult with the choice to do so is employment, but children were often in positions of limited choice.
When the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution gave women the right of universal suffrage, it was predicted that the next amendment would address child labor. However, the Child Labor Amendment was only ratified by 28 states — eight short of the number needed to pass.
Nonetheless, the use of child labor in the United States was largely done away with by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. And the photos of Lewis Wickes Hine had everything to do with it.