‘Child Slaves of the Cotton Mills’ by Carrie W. Allen from International Socialist Review. Vol. 11 No. 9. March, 1911.

THE shrill scream of the factory whistle smites the chill morning air at the dawn of each new day, and obedient to its hideous call, a ghostly array of anemic children, rudely awakened from sleep, gulp down a bit of food and stumble sleepily to the factory door.

This pitiful multitude of children, whose days are completely swallowed by the cotton mills, keep up their incessant dance from one spindle to another, or from one loom to another, dizzily watching the ten, twelve or fifteen shuttles play hide and seek among the labyrinth of threads.

So much has been written about these youngest victims of capitalist greed, the children of the cotton mills, that were we not misery hardened, were we not blinded by brutal toil, long ago an awakened working class would have united to wipe this iniquity out.

And yet, the workers are not to blame that the forced struggle for existence has limited their vision and stupefied their imagination.

One little child set in the midst of a crowd, because in his person misery is visualized, makes a more eloquent appeal than the story of all the thousands of children whose lives are crushed by the cruel millstones of industry.

While the laws of most of the northern states place the legal working age of a child at fourteen, the last Senate report on Women and Children Wage Earners in the Cotton Industry shows that 34.8 per cent of the factories investigated in New England employed children under the legal age.

In at least four of the New England states, tiny children, frail and undeveloped, are on the pay-rolls of the cotton mills, some of them apparently not more than eight years of age.

An effort is always made to shift the responsibility of these little ones from the shoulders of the employer of their labor to the parents of the children. “We cannot help it if the parents tell us the children are older than they are,” say the manufacturers. “We are in business, first of all, to make money.”

That is the key to the situation. The manufacturers are in business to make money. As the children are cheap, and more profit may be squeezed out of their labor, they are claimed by the mill.

Many people excuse the indifference of the manufacturer on the ground that many of the children are foreigners, as though it were less a crime to injure a child of foreign parents than one of native blood. A child is a child, regardless of color or race.

In the Southern cotton mills, where more terrible wrongs are perpetrated against the children than in any other part of the country, this excuse cannot be offered, for the children are, without exception, American. The people of the mill villages are the purest American blood that we have, many families having come from the mountains of Tennessee and the Carolinas.

From time to time, smooth-tongued agents are sent into these regions to scatter cleverly worded dodgers about, and to visit the hill people in their homes, for the purpose of finding fresh material as grist for the remorseless mill.

Frequently the agent finds a large family living in a wretched shack of one or two rooms, dragging out a meager existence on a worn-out patch of ground, scarcely knowing the color of a dollar, and with no advantages of any sort for their children.

It is not a difficult matter to convince the father of the advantages to be gained by a move to the mill village. The family have nothing to lose and everything to gain. It will cost them nothing, for the money will be advanced to move them all. Work will be given to all of the family, and even the little ones will be able to earn from fifty cents to a dollar a day.

Or, if the children wish to go to school, and this appeals most strongly to the mother, the children will have a chance for a good education, and all the other advantages her bare life has so cruelly lacked.

A chance of an education for her girls. A chance in life for her boys. In addition to this, the dollar-earning capacity of the group during the months of vacation makes an eloquent appeal to the parents, who have only known privation throughout their barren lives. The tickets are sent, and the family, with hearts full of expectant hope, move as soon as possible to the hideous mill town.

When the father enters the mill he is obliged to make affidavit as to the ages of his children, and they are greedily watched, the mill owner regarding them as perfectly legitimate grist for his mill. Apropos of the claim that the mill owners are not to blame, the government investigators into the conditions of the children in the cotton mills make some very incriminating statements.

When the children are not forthcoming, the mill superintendents frequently go into the homes of the mill workers, demanding that children of nine and ten be sent into the mill, threatening the father with discharge and the family with eviction in case the children are withheld.

“They just keep at a person until they have to let them work, whether they want to or not. I don’t want them to know I’ve got another gal, or they’d have her right in that mill,” said a South Carolina woman, speaking of her little girl of nine.

A mother in North Carolina pleaded with the mill superintendent not to compel her to take her two boys, eleven and fourteen, from school, but decided to do as she was told when her husband was threatened with the loss of a job.

When the government investigator went to the mills, as happens with all inspectors, an alarm was given, and the children sent home or hidden in waste boxes or closets. In one of the North Carolina mills the superintendent was boasting, “We haven’t got a lot of babies in our mills,” when his attention was called to a tiny girl of six who was trying to reach the frames.

The very little ones are not usually on the pay-rolls of the mills, the pittance earned by the little one going into the pay envelope of the mother or an older child. In some of the mills, children were found of not more than ten years of age, who were compelled to work an additional number of hours during the day, after working twelve weary hours during the night, one particular child of ten kept steadily at her task on several occasions for a stretch of twenty-four hours.

The Senate report already quoted gives this verbatim statement from one of the federal agents concerning a mill in North Carolina:

“The mill employs many children, and the smallest I have seen working in any mills. I asked five exceptionally small ones how old each was and each answered, “I don’t know.” These children, the superintendent says, work from 6 p. m. to 6 a. m. I know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that there are ten or twelve children under twelve years of age working in the mill, seven or eight of them at night.

“One of the children is an emaciated little elf fifty inches high, and weighing perhaps forty-eight pounds, who works from 6 at night till 6 in the morning, and who is so tiny that she has to climb upon the spinning frame to reach the top row of spindles.”

Instances might be multiplied of the criminally long hours these little victims are imprisoned in the mills, no sound reaching them except the racking whirr of the machinery, no air reaching their choked lungs except the fluff laden air of the dusty factory.

Is it any wonder that these poor little over-wrought beings under continuous nervous strain, frequently have their fingers and hands caught in the cruel cogs, which lacerate and tear and frequently cripple them? One hundred and twenty-two mills reported 1,241 accidents for a year, and it is known that these figures are only partial, as mill owners only report accidents when forced to do so.

Many of the children insist that they prefer night work, as the threads run so much smoother, and do not so frequently break. This saves them from the “reproof” of the overseer, and the fine that is docked from their slender pay when anything goes wrong with the work. Poor care-laden little ones, terrorized into such a condition of mind that they really prefer the fatiguing night work.

Not content with the profits which may be sweated out of the children, an additional pressure upon them by the system of premiums which is used in many mills. The tired children are already overstrained and their endurance stretched to the breaking point. It is pernicious to drive them to further exertion to add a pitiful sum to the niggardly wage.

The real object of premiums is to increase the production of the worker in order to increase the profits of the mill owner. For instance, a premium of fifty cents a week is paid to weavers who tend their looms during the lunch hour. Spoolers who spool ten boxes of cotton yarn a day are paid the price of a box, nine cents extra, and for spooling fifteen boxes a premium of eighteen cents is given. Pennies in premiums for the life energy of the children; dollars in profits for the pockets of the masters!

The home life of the mill children is barren and desolate, especially for the ones who keep up their goblin dance from one spindle to another all through the long weary hours of the night, and jaded and wan come creeping home in the gruesome dawn.

We need not wonder that the overstrained, undeveloped little ones have so little vital resistance that they early fall victims of disease. The anemic condition of the blood, the nerve-racking strain of the work, and the dust laden atmosphere close every avenue of health, and dropsy, tuberculosis and other wasting diseases claim many of the children of the cotton mills.

One of the gravest indictments of the wretched industrial chaos under which we live is the inhuman treatment meted out to the children of the nation. Every advance of modern machinery means that more and more of these helpless little ones are caught between the upper and nether millstones, and remorselessly ground into profits.

It is impossible for a nation to thrive that grinds up and destroys its children. The boys and girls are the nation’s greatest asset; they are the nation of tomorrow, and the sooner we wake up and put an end to the hideous wrongs daily heaped upon the children of the working class, the better for the race.

At the dawn of each new day, a gaunt army of half awakened children are swallowed up by the hideous cotton mills, and at night, weary and wan and joyless, they are spewed forth again. Spindles must be kept running, profits must be made, even though pale-faced children droop and wither and die.

The International Socialist Review (ISR) was published monthly in Chicago from 1900 until 1918 by Charles H. Kerr and critically loyal to the Socialist Party of America. It is one of the essential publications in U.S. left history. During the editorship of A.M. Simons it was largely theoretical and moderate. In 1908, Charles H. Kerr took over as editor with strong influence from Mary E Marcy. The magazine became the foremost proponent of the SP’s left wing growing to tens of thousands of subscribers. It remained revolutionary in outlook and anti-militarist during World War One. It liberally used photographs and images, with news, theory, arts and organizing in its pages. It articles, reports and essays are an invaluable record of the U.S. class struggle and the development of Marxism in the decades before the Soviet experience. It was closed down in government repression in 1918.

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