When I was 10, admittedly older than that, my friends and I took corn from a corn field and made a corn cob pipe, and put some stolen parental tobacco in it.
Nobody told us you don't simply burn things in raw corn cobs - there's some treatment involved before you can. I don't know if it was the tobacco, or the charring corn cob itself that made us gag most.
Yea, one of my high schools had a smoking area as well. Two actually - the official one, and the one on the opposite side of the parking lot where all the metalheads hung out.
I thought it was weird that the other high school didn't have a smoking area, because we were in a tobacco farming town, and a huge number of teens worked in the tobacco industry.
I attended middle school in the early 1980s and we didn’t have anything like that. My siblings attended middle school in an entirely different state, and neither did they. Nor high school. When you say “not that long ago”, precisely how long ago are you talking?
I think the 80s were an inflection point. It was pretty rare by 90s/200s. In 1986 apparently only 26% of (high?) schools still had smoking sections and 9% allowed smoking indoors[1]. I'd guess that the breakdown will vary drastically state by state but I haven't bothered to dig deeper :)
In 1987 my high school had a smoking area for students 17 years old or older.
And of course, the teachers lounge was always smoke filled, walking in there was like walking into a bar at time, the air had a visible haze of cigarette smoke. I don’t know how the non smoking teachers could handle it.
There were formal smoking-cessation programmes in, of all places, Germany of the 1930s, on health grounds. Among other distinctive characteristics of the country at the time, it lacked a substantial domestic tobacco industry, or tobacco-growing colonies, to oppose such policies, as was the case in the US and UK well into the 1980s and 1990s.
Formal medical epidemiological determination of a link between smoking and specific diseases wouldn't come about until the 1950s or so, but a substantial factor here was simply the development of modern concepts of disease causation and correlative demonstration of these. Common wisdom acknowledged the connection long before then.
Most people who would be concerned about this would understand that a child who was forced to do that kind of work probably wouldn't make it to the age where smoking tobacco would kill them.
There was a series of photos taken of actual children at work in factories that is directly responsible for inciting the public backlash against child labor. Especially below market rate labor which undermines adult wages. Those photos and the journalism that framed the situation were pivotal at the time. I don’t remember the photographer or journalist at this moment but I’ll try to look it up later.
These articles are meant to attack the validity of photos of children working of the era to undermine the historical establishment of child labor laws at a time when the same laws are under modern threat.
I don’t believe it is normalizing child labor. If you read the article in its entirety it does talk about children working in mines and photos like these help establish child labor laws.
However this piece should have added more context. It could use statistics on how many children worked in mines, what happened to them in later life, how it affected their growth and development.
I think it’s just substandard low effort piece of journalism.
Guessing you're prepared to provide some sort of proofs of this happening in Utah then, besides what is already outlined in the article?
> It was common in the area for children to work in mines, he said. The mining companies did a lot of recruiting before and during World War I, encouraging people to immigrate to the U.S. to escape war, hunger and other hardships. As a result, all members of a family would end up working in the industry.
> Boys would work in the mines from as young as 8, but not as miners. Instead, they picked impurities out of the coal, such as dirt or sharp pieces of slate, with their bare hands as it came by on a conveyor belt. These boys, who worked in dust-choked gloom, were called “boneys” — a local term for what was known as a breaker boy on the East Coast. Once they got older, they would work with their fathers underground.
Why would I be? Like you said it's already outlined in the article.
I'm just saying it's kinda weird to write an article about "okay yeah lots of children worked in mines, but this specific child probably wasn't at the time of the photo" it's also kinda weird that it's written as if being a "miner" requires swinging a pick axe rather than working in a mine.
The background context of the joke photograph is deeply horrifying. Many of the children who worked in these mines would die before 18. The rest ≥75% of them would develop black lung & die before their 30s. Others would die crushed between equipment. There would be daily mutilations and fatalities.
Wikipedia has a great summary of extant literature, more resources below,
The work performed by breaker boys was hazardous. Breaker boys were forced to work without gloves so that they could better handle the slick coal.[11][12][14] The slate was sharp, and breaker boys would often leave work with their fingers cut and bleeding.[11][12][14] Breaker boys sometimes had their fingers amputated by the rapidly moving conveyor belts.[6][10][11][15] Others lost feet, hands, arms, and legs as they moved among the machinery and became caught under conveyor belts or in gears.[6][10][11][15]
Many were crushed to death, their bodies retrieved from the gears of the machinery by supervisors only at the end of the working day.[6][10][11][15] Others were caught in the rush of coal, and crushed to death or smothered.[6][10][11][15] Dry coal would kick up so much dust that breaker boys sometimes wore lamps on their heads to see. Asthma and black lung disease were common.[4][6][10][11][14] Coal was often washed to remove impurities, which created sulfuric acid.[18][19] The acid burned the hands of the breaker boys.[20]
I don't want to be a killjoy, but we find it funny because it's cute. They found it funny because it was dark humor. Somewhere along the way, the core got lost, i.e. children were losing body parts, limbs and their lives on a daily basis for the crime of being born poor.
"While 8 year olds did work cleaning coal at the time, they did not go underground with their fathers as actual miners until they were older, he said."
That would tragically sometimes be 4 years later, at 12
For those interested in film, Andrzej Wajda's "The Promised Land"[0] has a few gruesome scenes[1][2] (warning: graphic) involving factory accidents. In general, a very good and highly recommended film set during the industrial revolution and centered on 19th century Łódź.
Here in the Netherlands kids worked in glass factories etc. Handling hot glass. Around 1901 there was a law that made kids go to school instead of working.
Of course, it's reasonable to be horrified by what child laborers endured and the reasons why we created laws to send kids to school instead and outlawed child labor of this sort, but to this day most American public schools have spring break and summer break as artifacts inherited from a time when most people were farm workers and children only attended school when their labor wasn't needed for planting in spring and harvesting throughout the summer.
Average age of education for women when Lincoln was president was 2nd to 4th grade.
The GED was created by the military because dropping out of high school to go to work was common.
Farm workers frequently stopped attending school after 8th grade.
In the Deep South, with segregated schools, there sometimes weren't local high schools for Black students. Kids sometimes repeated 8th grade so they could stay in school until the family moved to a northern city where it was possible to attend high school.
Currently, we have a great many people saddled with college student loans and it's an excessive burden. It's a real problem and it needs to be solved, but it grows out of the idea that if you complete college, you are practically guaranteed to have a good career making good money and so we let people borrow to get the good life and now so many people have college some are waiting tables because there aren't enough jobs in their field.
In another 100 years, maybe having a doctorate will be some kind of default norm and hopefully we will have solved the problem of how to make ends meet when that doctorate doesn't get you a spiffy career and you are still waiting tables.
Progress is a wonderful thing -- real progress, I mean, and never mind the growing pains involved in raising our expectations when things don't turn out like we imagined. I hope we continue to grow.
But historically child labor was somewhat necessary to human survival. And given the apparently growing problem in the US with homelessness, I'm not sure it's reasonable to look back on this and feel morally superior.
> In the mid-1930s, a swimming coach from Colgate University decided to take his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand-new Olympic-size pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. The idea clicked with other college swim coaches and soon the spring training migration became an annual tradition for swimmers nationwide. Now, spring break is an academic tradition in various mostly western countries that is scheduled for different periods depending on the state and sometimes the region.
That's college spring break, not spring break for minors attending K-12. The first public school in the US colonies was established in 1635, roughly 300 years before that.
I'm not readily finding a nice, neat blurb that literally says "spring break in elementary school/K-12 was so kids could help plant on the farm" but my understanding is that is correct.
They are both a form of human suffering and hardship which can reasonably be traced back to cruelty or callousness by other people. If we could arrange society to send kids to school instead of the mines, we can arrange society to provide adequate housing for all instead of claiming it's a personal problem and they are all just crazies and junkies -- as if crazies and junkies just want to be that way and it's not a hard problem to solve, and never mind it's not even true that homeless are just junkies. Lack of affordable housing is the real root cause.
You seem to have fallen for the "is/ought" fallacy. You provide several examples of child labor occurring, but then conclude in the final sentence that "child labor was somewhat necessary to human survival".
Similarly, if I listed several previous wars, that wouldn't prove that "war was somewhat necessary to human survival".
When I was a toddler, I was a freight train engineer. Well, OK, my parents dressed me in pinstriped overalls and cap and staged a series of portraits. There was a miniature railroad in the park nearby that you could ride around for fresh air (with a whiff of gas) and scenery. Then later, my grandfather, who was a pipe fitter for the railroad, built for us an impressive model railroad setup in a spare bedroom, which occupied most of my playtime before Atari took over.
Then when I reached high school, my so-called girlfriend discovered the toddler photos and made humiliating jokes about them. I suspect that my mother also had a difficult relationship with her father, and so that would explain so much.
42 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadNobody told us you don't simply burn things in raw corn cobs - there's some treatment involved before you can. I don't know if it was the tobacco, or the charring corn cob itself that made us gag most.
I thought it was weird that the other high school didn't have a smoking area, because we were in a tobacco farming town, and a huge number of teens worked in the tobacco industry.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/30/nyregion/school-smoking-b...
And of course, the teachers lounge was always smoke filled, walking in there was like walking into a bar at time, the air had a visible haze of cigarette smoke. I don’t know how the non smoking teachers could handle it.
Congressional testimony from 1917: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Select_Committees_on_Ci...>
And discussion (and cartoon) from a fictional treatment, also in 1917, The Academy for Princes by Olaf Morgan Norlie: <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Academy_for_Princes...>
There were formal smoking-cessation programmes in, of all places, Germany of the 1930s, on health grounds. Among other distinctive characteristics of the country at the time, it lacked a substantial domestic tobacco industry, or tobacco-growing colonies, to oppose such policies, as was the case in the US and UK well into the 1980s and 1990s.
Formal medical epidemiological determination of a link between smoking and specific diseases wouldn't come about until the 1950s or so, but a substantial factor here was simply the development of modern concepts of disease causation and correlative demonstration of these. Common wisdom acknowledged the connection long before then.
Google's Ngram viewer shows many instances of "coffin nails", again, commonly associated with cigarettes, dating to the 1820s: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=coffin%20nails...>
This is also the time when the typical portion of wine was 1 bottle per person per day, everyday.
These articles are meant to attack the validity of photos of children working of the era to undermine the historical establishment of child labor laws at a time when the same laws are under modern threat.
> It was common in the area for children to work in mines, he said. The mining companies did a lot of recruiting before and during World War I, encouraging people to immigrate to the U.S. to escape war, hunger and other hardships. As a result, all members of a family would end up working in the industry.
> Boys would work in the mines from as young as 8, but not as miners. Instead, they picked impurities out of the coal, such as dirt or sharp pieces of slate, with their bare hands as it came by on a conveyor belt. These boys, who worked in dust-choked gloom, were called “boneys” — a local term for what was known as a breaker boy on the East Coast. Once they got older, they would work with their fathers underground.
I'm just saying it's kinda weird to write an article about "okay yeah lots of children worked in mines, but this specific child probably wasn't at the time of the photo" it's also kinda weird that it's written as if being a "miner" requires swinging a pick axe rather than working in a mine.
Wikipedia has a great summary of extant literature, more resources below,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_boy#Use_of_breaker_boy...I don't want to be a killjoy, but we find it funny because it's cute. They found it funny because it was dark humor. Somewhere along the way, the core got lost, i.e. children were losing body parts, limbs and their lives on a daily basis for the crime of being born poor.
https://njdigitalhistory.org/jane-addams-child-labor/index.p...
https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-child-labor-committ...
https://www.loc.gov/resource/nclc.01131/
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/child-miners-lewis-hine/
That would tragically sometimes be 4 years later, at 12
https://usminedisasters.miningquiz.com/saxsewell/children.ht...
[0] https://a.co/d/2LVULyb
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aykwhZpHB6A2
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqtpNWbekF4
Average age of education for women when Lincoln was president was 2nd to 4th grade.
The GED was created by the military because dropping out of high school to go to work was common.
Farm workers frequently stopped attending school after 8th grade.
In the Deep South, with segregated schools, there sometimes weren't local high schools for Black students. Kids sometimes repeated 8th grade so they could stay in school until the family moved to a northern city where it was possible to attend high school.
Currently, we have a great many people saddled with college student loans and it's an excessive burden. It's a real problem and it needs to be solved, but it grows out of the idea that if you complete college, you are practically guaranteed to have a good career making good money and so we let people borrow to get the good life and now so many people have college some are waiting tables because there aren't enough jobs in their field.
In another 100 years, maybe having a doctorate will be some kind of default norm and hopefully we will have solved the problem of how to make ends meet when that doctorate doesn't get you a spiffy career and you are still waiting tables.
Progress is a wonderful thing -- real progress, I mean, and never mind the growing pains involved in raising our expectations when things don't turn out like we imagined. I hope we continue to grow.
But historically child labor was somewhat necessary to human survival. And given the apparently growing problem in the US with homelessness, I'm not sure it's reasonable to look back on this and feel morally superior.
I mean those are common almost everywhere and a quick search indicates another reason for their origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_break
> In the mid-1930s, a swimming coach from Colgate University decided to take his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand-new Olympic-size pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. The idea clicked with other college swim coaches and soon the spring training migration became an annual tradition for swimmers nationwide. Now, spring break is an academic tradition in various mostly western countries that is scheduled for different periods depending on the state and sometimes the region.
https://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/spring-break/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_...
I'm not readily finding a nice, neat blurb that literally says "spring break in elementary school/K-12 was so kids could help plant on the farm" but my understanding is that is correct.
Similarly, if I listed several previous wars, that wouldn't prove that "war was somewhat necessary to human survival".
Then when I reached high school, my so-called girlfriend discovered the toddler photos and made humiliating jokes about them. I suspect that my mother also had a difficult relationship with her father, and so that would explain so much.