How Old Are You?

ED: So far today, we’ve looked at how a couple of manufactured objects– muskets and porcelain– changed the course of American life. Now let’s reverse the process. Let’s see how another object– actually just a slip of paper– actually changed American manufacturing, by changing who could work.

BRIAN: By the late 19th century, manufacturing in the United States was exploding. Machines were stitching together shirts, cutting leather, rolling cigars, and forging steel. To keep up with all that production, factories needed workers– and lots of them. Company managers met that demand with children. Many even preferred children. Kids were docile, less likely to strike, and best of all, cheap.

SUSAN PEARSON: About 20% of children in 1900 are working outside the home for wages.

BRIAN: This is historian Susan Pearson.

SUSAN PEARSON: One thing that industrialization does is it deskills labor. And the great advantage of unskilled labor for employers is that they can pay children so much less than they have to pay an adult male to perform the equivalent task.

BRIAN: It was one thing for kids to help out on the family farm, but industrial jobs were something else altogether. Working in factories and mines was dangerous and hard, with the workday often stretching beyond 12 hours. You know those photos you’ve seen of forlorn-looking children standing next to machines three times their size? Those pictures were part of reformers’ efforts to outlaw child labor in factories. But progress was slow, in part because the government couldn’t prove how old anybody was.

SUSAN PEARSON: Even in states that are able to pass laws that regulate children’s labor– so, say New York State passes a law in the 1880s that says you’ve got to be 14 years old to work in a factory. OK, well, how do you prove that? How do you know what children are 14 and which are 13, and which are 12?

PETER: The answer? The birth certificate. Today every American citizen has one. But in the 19th century, parents recorded the birth of their children in the family Bible, if at all. Pearson says in the 19th century, age was a fuzzy concept.

SUSAN PEARSON: A lot of people didn’t keep careful track of when their children were born or when they themselves were born. If you think about it, in the 19th century, there weren’t a lot of reasons you needed to know your exact birthdate. So when census takers would come around and ask people how old they were, they would give very round numbers. They would say, I’m about 25, or I’m close to 30.

BRIAN: So if so many children were working, why were some other people so concerned about those children working, especially in factories?

SUSAN PEARSON: They would have told you that child labor is wrong because it stunts the physical and mental growth of children who work in industrial settings. However, historians have different explanations for why child labor becomes a problem, and that really has to do with changing ideas about childhood itself and what it is that childhood is for, right? That children should be kept away from the adult world, in their own kinds of activities that are developmentally appropriate. So they should be in school, not working. They should be playing, not working. They should be shielded from premature contact with adult activities, like going into saloons or coming in contact with vice, or any of the kinds of mixing that children and adults routinely used to do.

BRIAN: Once the states actually started requiring registration of births and then requiring birth certificates in order to work, how did the families react?

SUSAN PEARSON: A lot of families were not happy. Clearly the child labor reformers, they are at war with working-class conceptions of childhood, of the fuzziness of chronological age, and of working-class household economy. And those parents, we might look at them and think they were greedy or selfish, or didn’t understand what children really need. Chances are they were operating from a world view in which all family members contribute to the financial well-being of the household. As soon as they’re big enough to work, everybody’s put to work. That’s how it had always been. What changed was that the kind of work children could do became industrial.

PETER: We haven’t talked about how the kids felt about this. Did they like working?

SUSAN PEARSON: Most of them did. There’s a lot of testimony, even among the reformers, who think that they’re protecting these children– they find all the time when they go into factories that the children want to be there, and they are even proud of the work that they do and the money that they bring into their families. A National Child Labor Committee employee, a guy named Owen Lovejoy, went and visited kids in the coal mines in Pennsylvania, and he wrote, the typical breaker boy– who’s a boy who works in the coal mine– is proud of his breaker and boasts of its daily output. And he goes on to say they’re proud about how fast they can work, how accurately they can work, but also, and I quote, “They’re proud of the independence which personal economic value gives him in the home.”

BRIAN: Hm. So what impact does this have when it’s fully in place– let’s say by 1940? How does this change manufacturing?

SUSAN PEARSON: It makes it much harder to work before the age of 16, which is the standard that the Fair Labor Standards Act creates. It also works in conjunction with compulsory schooling laws to change the nature of the workforce as a whole. So in 1900, only 10% of youth age 14 to 17 are attending high school. By 1940, when the Fair Labor Standards Act is in place, that has jumped to 73%. So that’s a seven-fold increase in the number of young people that are staying in the workforce past the age of 14.

BRIAN: When you started doing your research, did you expect a piece of paper to have such a dramatic impact on the labor force, the workforce, in manufacturing?

SUSAN PEARSON: I did not. I didn’t know how central it was to child labor reform. I thought that it would be on the periphery, one of many things that the birth certificate did. But the more I did the research, the more I discovered that it was really this campaign against child labor that was the first time that birth certificates were used as identification documents in this way.

BRIAN: Is the birth certificate just a symbol of government’s increased role in kind of mediating between workers and employers?

SUSAN PEARSON: In some sense, yeah, it is. It’s certainly not the only example from this period, from the late 19th and early 20th century, where you see everything from the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed in 1906, to efforts in the states to regulate the number of hours per day and per week that employees can work, to regulating the kinds of work that women can do. There’s a large national movement to try to control the terms of industrial production in the United States.

BRIAN: Right, and you can add workers’ compensation and worker safety laws to that.

SUSAN PEARSON: Absolutely

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BRIAN: Susan Pearson is a historian at Northwestern University and the author of The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Children and Animals in the Gilded Age. She’s currently working on a book about the history of– you guessed it– the birth certificate.

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BRIAN: BackStory listeners, listen up. This is a listener challenge, and it’s a challenge for our upcoming show on the history of horror. And to help us challenge you, we have our producer, Nina Earnest.

NINA EARNEST: Hi.

PETER: Hey, Nina.

ED: Hi, Nina.

NINA EARNEST: Hey, guys. So before I tell you the challenge, I’m going to tell you a story. So I am from rural Iowa, small town, and there’s a local legend we have about a girl named Lucinda.

The story goes that Lucinda, in the late 19th century, was supposed to get married. She was supposed to run off with a man. But when she went to go meet him, he didn’t show up. And he either didn’t show up because he abandoned her, or because his wagon wheel got stuck– the details are a little murky.

ED: Oh, not that!

PETER: Oh, stick in the mud!

NINA EARNEST: I know.

[LAUGHTER]

Either way, she threw herself off the bluffs down on Stony Hollow Road. So the local myth is that if you go to Stony Hollow Road and you call her name three times, she will appear. And if she appears and drops a rose, then you will die the next day.

ED: Oh my goodness.

NINA EARNEST: So a lot of people in my high school– this was a big thing, that people would go check it out. I just called a friend and she said that she was going to do it, but she chickened out.

ED: So are other big blank places in your high school annual where people died from hitting on the wrong side of this story?

NINA EARNEST: Well, maybe there were just no roses dropped. They saw her, but there were no roses.

ED: My goodness.

PETER: Ow!

BRIAN: It’s pretty intense.

ED: Well, Nina– Nina, I– I’m mesmerized, but where do our listeners come in?

NINA EARNEST: OK–

PETER: Yeah, what’s the challenge?

NINA EARNEST: So this is a phenomenon that folklorists and anthropologists are now calling “legend tripping.” And the idea is that it’s oral storytelling and local mythology that sets up these repeatable experiences that are seen as a rite of passage for young people, which is why it was all these people at my high school who were like, we’re gonna go see Lucinda tonight.

We want to know your local legend tripping stories. We want to know what those things are that were your rites of passage, that you said, well, we’re going to go call this person’s name three times, and whatever supernatural experience was supposed to happen to you. We want to hear them. We want to know your name, we want to know where the legend is, and what the legend says. So you should leave a comment on our website, backstoryradio.org, or record a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to us at backstory@virginia.edu.

ED: Or just call Lucinda and she’ll deliver the message. [LAUGHS]

PETER: Yeah. But make it quick. We only got a minute for you.

NINA EARNEST: That’s right, Peter. We want these to be a minute or less.

BRIAN: Thanks a lot, Nina.

ED: I’ll look forward to these scary stories.