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Group of Breaker boys. Smallest is Sam Belloma.
Pine Street, 1911.
Pine Street, 1911.
Original by Lewis Hine.
This guy.
In the early 1900s, Hine traveled across the United States to photograph preteen boys descending into dangerous mines, shoeless 7-year-olds selling newspapers on the street and 4-year-olds toiling on tobacco farms.
Though the country had unions to protect laborers at that time — and Labor Day, a federal holiday to honor them — child labor was widespread and widely accepted.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed.
Hine’s searing images of those children remade the public perception of child labor and inspired the laws to ban it.
