DAILY MAIL - GRIM PHOTOS - CHILD LABOR - by Chris Dyer
Child labor was a reality for many an immigrant family. It was work or starve. Even children worked up to ten hours a day on farms and in mines and factories. And so America was not just built on adult labor but robbed children of what we call childhood now. How fortunate those children whose parents could support them so that they could go to school!
EXCERPTS: Children at work in a Florida warehouse while smoking cigars. Many children smoked as they rolled cigars in factories across America. In 1910 children under the age of 15 made up 18.4 percent of the nation's workforce....
Vance, who is 15 years old, was forced to sit in the darkness for ten hours a day for just 75 cents in a West Virginia coal mine. Many children were forced to work in these squalid conditions and it was not until 1938 that laws against child labor were passed by Congress.
