See Dick Sew: A Newt Gingrich Primer on Child Labor

by Jim Washburn

If Horatio Alger was alive today, do you think he’d be changing the arc of his stories to suit the times, with his plucky young characters of today persevering their way from rags to ditches?

No. Horatio Alger was an asshole. He’d still be writing the same Ragged-Dick-pulls-himself-up-by-his-own-jockstrap stories he did in the Reconstruction Era, because they were just as cruelly untrue then. Maybe Alger was a nice guy to have for a neighbor or husband, I don’t know, but between the covers of his books he was telling the vilest of lies to children.

In one after another of his stories, he writes of poor little urchins who raised themselves up from poverty to riches; and all they had to do was rely on “honesty, thrift, self-reliance, industry, a cheerful whistle and an open manly face,” Alger told kids.

He was right in the sense that following such a path certainly increases one’s chances of rising to the top, much more so than sitting in a drunken heap on a cat-pee sofa bemoaning your fate does.

But only a very small percentage of hard-working folks could realize that dream: You’re not on top unless you’re on top of a bunch of schmoes who aren’t on top. At best, for a brief short time in the middle of the past century, a lifetime of good, hard, honest work was a pretty good guarantee that your family would be better off than your father’s.

But for most of our history, good, hard, honest work only guaranteed that someone else would be rising to the top. That’s how it worked during the days of slavery and feudalism, and that’s pretty much how it continued on through the glory days of free enterprise. The guy at the top would get rich because the people doing the work for him weren’t. It was only when workers organized and were able to pose a threat to owners—occasionally returning bloodshed with bloodshed—that they were able to share in some small part in the success of an enterprise.

And consider that back when Alger was writing, there were no child labor laws. An Alger-inspired kid would go to work in a coal mine or scampering under the looms in a textile mill, whistling a cheerful tune and dreaming of the riches that work would bring him, only to be tossed back on the street a few years later, his limbs mangled or with ruined lungs. And by the Alger formula, it was his fault. He wasn’t bushy-tailed or industrious enough to get out of the render’s way.

As it had in banning slavery, Great Britain preceded the United States in protecting children, and you only have to look at the child labor law they passed in the 1830s to realize how desperately they needed protecting: Under the law, employers could no long require child laborers, aged 11 to 18, to work more than 12 hours a day; those aged 9 to 11 could work no more than eight hours a day; and if you were younger than nine, you actually got to have a bit of a childhood, since bosses were now prevented from hiring you. This law applied only to the textile industry—often a fatal job—leaving bosses in other walks free for several years to still force kids to work whatever hours they demanded.

Kids could crawl into the difficult, cramped places in mines or machinery that adults couldn’t. They could perform the repetitive, body breaking tasks that older adults were too ruined to handle. Sometimes, they were hired simply to replace adults, since children were generally paid only one-fifth of an adult wage.

 In the United States, the notion of child labor laws were an anathema to the grand engine of free enterprise, which is still being touted as society’s grand equalizer and the fount of all things good and true. It wasn’t until 1916—more than 80 years after England began to limit child labor—when the United States followed suit with the Keating-Owen Act, which prohibited interstate commerce in products made by children 14 and younger.

Up until then, the US workforce had over two million kids in it. Many of them worked more than 70 hours a week, day and night, often in life-threatening jobs, with no obligation on the employer to care for them if they were hurt or disabled.

And those kids kept on working, because the 1916 law was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1918, on the grounds that it violated a state’s right to determine its own labor laws. Few states were brave enough to enact their own child labor laws, because then their businesses would face unfair competition from states that didn’t prevent their children from being exploited. Manufacturers also made the self-serving argument that the laws would interfere with a child’s “right” to contract out his own labor.

So US kids kept on working under onerous conditions right up until 1938, when that communist Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Fair Labor Standards Act took away their right to be worked to a nub.

I’ve known a few real–life Horatio Algers, my favorite being John Crean. He grew up dirt-poor in Compton during the Depression, and from about age five was always creating ways to make a buck. He founded Fleetwood Enterprises, starting in a Compton garage and growing it into the world’s largest recreational vehicle and manufactured homes manufacturer.

He thought child labor was fine, that even if you’re being exploited, you’re still being of use to others and are learning something. But, as a business owner, he was scrupulous about not exploiting others. He kept his profit margins low and prided himself on providing value to his customers. He paid his employees better than the prevailing wages, and then added profit sharing on top of that. Everyone had a chance for advancement, because he only wanted managers who had worked every station in a factory, so they’d know what the employees had to deal with. Crean once told me that the only reason he took his company nationwide was because he had so many capable employees, he wanted them all to have a chance to advance in the company.

I mention Crean as an example that capitalism can work just fine. If everyone were like him, we wouldn’t need laws.

But a great many ambitious people aren’t, which is why we still have miners being sent into unsafe mines, and oil spills that threaten whole seas, and rich folks exerting every bit of influence they have to roll back the advances workers have made in the past century.

Two things set me thinking about Horatio Alger’s works this week, the first being Freddie Mac housing expert Newt Gingrich opining that we need to roll back our child labor laws, which he said are “truly stupid.” He’d like for poor kids as young as nine to replace their school janitors, so they can learn the work ethic, as opposed to well-off kids, who are evidently born with a work ethic.

Newt’s the great thinker of the Republican party, the one who cogitates grand iconoclastic, innovative ideas, such as going back to shit that wasn’t working a century ago.

The other thing was a piece I read in the LA Times about a study conducted by Wells Fargo Securities, not exactly a bastion of liberalism, which drove another nail in the coffin of the Alger myth. It found that the percentage of poor Americans who were able to improve their lots—never a big number to begin with—dropped sharply in the years from 1980 to 2009, compared with years previous to then.

As summarized by Times writer Walter Hamilton, “The drop in economic mobility, combined with recently declining government aid to the poor, has left many Americans with no way to dig themselves out of poverty.”

Lest we’ve all forgotten, the article also notes that over roughly the same period of Reagan-ushered years—from 1979 to 2007—the wealth of America’s richest 1% has bloated by 275%. My God, they must be doing all the work that poor ghetto children won’t!

So sure, tout your Horatio Alger tales as part of our labor history, but include some other stories to tell the other side of it. How about some John Lennon?

There’s room at the top they are telling you still,
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill,
If you want to be like the folk on the hill …
A working class hero is something to be,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

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