Essay Sample on Lewis Hine: Champion of Child Welfare

Introduction

Lewis Hine was the most important photographer during America's progressive era. Hine had a regular job in the National Child Labor Commission (NCLC). His photography was driven by that organization's goal of promoting child welfare. He had a duty to use photography as a way to educate the public about the plight of children in the workplace. The photographs made Lewis Hine one of the leading proponents for child labor to be made illegal.

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Revealing the Harsh Reality: Hine's Captivating Images

The subject matter of most of their photos are children in the workplace or leaving the job site. For instance, in "The Mill," children are seen climbing onto a factory machine. Hine focuses on their bare feet while the photo caption reads, "Some boys and girls were so small they had to climb up on to the spinning frame to mend broken threads and to put back the empty Mill No. 1. Macon, Georgia." The photo educated the audience that children were not safe in factories as they were used to fix or operate machines that could kill or seriously injure them. In another famous photo taken in the mines of South Pittston Pennsylvania, boys are shown working in the mines with an overseer reminiscent of southern plantation slaves.

The fact that the NCLC was created to lobby the federal government to end child labor, Hine's photography had a bias as an employee of NCLC. This obvious bias raises reasonable concerns that the photos could have been staged. The claim is unfounded because Hine frequently came across hostile employers, forcing him to take photographs of child workers surreptitiously.

Hine's Influence on Public Opinion and Legislative Changes

Consequently, the photos taken by Hine are an accurate portrayal of the horrifying truth about how child labor damages the welfare of children. Hine succeeded in achieving NCLC's organizational goal of getting public opinion to favor making child labor illegal. This successful shift in public opinion created the pressure needed to push lawmakers to ban child labor. Congress passed statutes in 1918 and 1922 to ban child labor that was later invalidated as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Congress proposed a constitutional amendment in 1924 that would prohibit child labor, but the States did not approve it. Things changed in 1938 when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed into law that only allowed children above 15 to work during school hours, children above 13 to do a limited range of jobs after school, and only allowed persons above 17 to do dangerous work. It is fair to say that the photography of Hine was instrumental to these legislative changes that culminated in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Conclusions

Lewis Hine was influential in getting American public opinion to see child labor as something detrimental to child welfare when laws do not regulate it. They succeeded by taking over 5,000 photos on behalf of NCLC. It is fair to say that in the context of America, it is because of Hine that the child welfare movement got laws on the book to regulate child labor.