In 1900 one-third of the workers in our Southern mills were children. For the United States at large about twenty percent of all children between 10 to 15 years of age were employed as full-time factory workers. At the turn of the century child labor was a practice encouraged by industry, agreed to by parents, and generally ignored by government. To call attention to the evils of child labor, John Spargo, an American reformer and author, published his impassioned book entitled, The Bitter Cry of Children, in 1906.
In it he wrote:
It is a sorry but indisputable fact that where children are employed, the most unheathful work is generally given them. In the spinning and carding rooms of cotton and woollen mills, where large numbers of children are employed, clouds of lint-dust fill the lungs and menace the health. The children have often a distressing cough, caused by the irritation of the throat, and many are hoarse from the same cause. In bottle factories and other branches of glass manufacture, the atmosphere is constantly charged with microscopic particles of glass. In the wood working industries, such as the manufacture of cheap furniture and wooden boxes, and packing cases, the air is laden with fine sawdust. Children employed in soap and soap-powder factories work, many of them, in clouds of alkaline dust which inflames the eyelids and nostrils. Boys employed in filling boxes of soap-powder work all day long with handkerchiefs tied over their mouths. In the coal-mines the breaker boys breathe air that is heavy and thick with particles of coal, and their lungs become black in consequence.
