Burying Children Alive Think of coalmines as vast experimental laboratories of human behavior testing the proposition that men, women, and children will do virtually anything — even allow themselves to be consigned to damp dangerous tunnels under the ground for all the sunlight hours in order to have real work to do as part of the community of mankind. If the American Revolution could be said (as the Declaration held) to demonstrate a self- evident truth, that all were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," the coal revolution tested the contrary proposition — just how far those rights could be taken away if exchanged for work. Work was shown by this unworldly occupation to be a value as necessary to human contentment as liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In lieu of alternatives, people would indeed bury themselves alive to get it. And coal was a continuous, highly visible object lesson about just how thoroughly the concerns of unseen outside interests could be imposed on childhood. For over a century, the best profits had come from using young children as coalminers. By 1843, when Horace Mann visited coal-dependent Prussia to gather background for his Seventh Report, boys and girls between the ages of five and eight were at work in every coalmine in America. Fifty percent of all coalminers were children. Children were employed as trappers to open and shut doors guiding air through the mine, as fillers to fill carriages as grown men knocked coal from the seams, and as hurriers to push trucks along to the workers at the foot of the shaft. In some places trucks were pulled instead of pushed, and little girls were employed as pullers because their small size was in harmony with the diminutive tunnels, and because they were more dependable than boys. An excerpt from a Pittsburgh newspaper of the day is instructive: A girdle is put round the naked waist, to which a chain from the carriage is hooked, and the girls crawl on their hands and knees, drawing the carriage after them. One quiet stream in my own family background was the McManus family from West Elizabeth, Pennsylvania, Irish immigrants in the 1840s. Census records list some of them as coal- miners. My grandmother was Moss McManus before she became Moss Zimmer. She never talked about the past or recalled a single ancestor except one, a McManus licensed as a Mississippi River pilot in a document signed by Abraham Lincoln which still floats around somewhere in the family. What of all those coalminers, Moss? No memories for your grandson? I suppose the answer is she was ashamed. Coalmining was something that ignorant, shanty-boat Irish did, not a fit occupation for lace-curtain Irish, as Moss tried so hard to be in the face of long odds. Long after the owners of mines, mills, and factories had abandoned piety except on ceremonial occasions, miners would pray for the strength to endure what had to be endured. Their children would pray with them. Here are the words of a little eight-year- old girl — exactly the age of my own granddaughter Moss as I write this — who worked as a coal miner a hundred years ago. Worked, perhaps, for the famously civilized Dwights and Peabodys of New England: I'm a trapper in the Gamer Pit. I have to trap without a light and I'm scared. I go at four and sometimes half past three in the morning and come out at five and a half past. I never go to sleep. Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark, I dare not sing then. Isn't the most incredible part of that the fact she could write so eloquently with no formal schooling at all? The year was 1867. A newspaper of that year observed: Chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet and more than half-naked — crawling upon their hands and feet and dragging their heavy loads behind them — they presented an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural. The confinement of American children to warehouse schools less than a half-century later had been pioneered by the Massachusetts experiment we associate with Horace Mann in the decade just before the Civil War. No other state followed Massachusetts' lead for a long time, but everywhere children were engaged in mining and factory work. In Massachusetts, the essential practice in confinement was underway, a prelude to universal acceptance of schooling as the natural burden of childhood. Schools were the anti-matter twins of mines and mills: the latter added children to the labor market, schools subtracted them. Both were important functions of a new, centralized command economy. By 1900, direct child labor had been rendered unnecessary by the swift onset of mechanization, except in those anomalous areas like theater, carnival, advertising, and modeling where special pleading to keep children at work would succeed during the general campaign to insulate children from common life. The End Of Competition
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