Lewis Hine socialist working for the National Child Labor Committee, made the photograph in December 1908. That year Hine’s acquaintance and friend, the tireless socialist writer John Spargo, wrote that “the liberation of the soul” is the highest aim of socialism. “To free the wage-worker from economic exploitation is indeed the primary object, the immediate aim, of socialism,” Spargo said, “but it is not the sole object. It is not the end, but the means to an end that is higher, the liberation of the soul.” This was The Spiritual Significance of Modern Socialism, the title of Spargo’s book. Hine probably heard Spargo’s lectures on the topic in the winter of 1907.
When a bobbin was full, a doffer boy would take it, load it into a cart with other full bobbins, and replace the full one with an empty bobbin. He would take his loaded cart of full bobbins to the loom room. Being a spinner, like the little girl, or a doffer, as many young boys were, was not complicated work. There was a reason why children got these jobs someone needed to supervise the spinning bobbins, and someone needed to “doff” them to the next stage of the process. Children were the definition of cheap labor, and their employment could readily be cast as a form of social uplift.
Around Whitnel, North Carolina, where Hine’s spinner girl stands, previous generations lived and worked on mountain farms, struggling in dire poverty and squalor: “At the mills, children over 12 years old, after they learn their job, can make more than men can make on farms,” ran a testimonial distributed around the western North Carolina town of Clyde in 1907. Even the sallow appearances of the spinners and doffers, mill apologists claimed, owed more to their lives before the mill than in it, where medical care, daily bread, and a living wage were newly the norm for these poor folk. But the job was hard, requiring long hours of repetitive action and the pure boredom of standing around day after day.
Hugo Münsterberg, a Harvard psychologist of those years, noted that some workers enjoyed repetitious tasks while others loathed them, depending on temperament. A person comforted by routine, for example, “will experience the repetition itself with true satisfaction.” But Hine’s girl does not seem to be one of these people. Hine makes the infinity of her labor 4 stretch to the vanishing point.
The uniformity of the perspective is her unchanging mental world. Chained to the traces like Buck, the dog hero of Jack London’s novel The Call of the Wild (1903), she sleds in a mill of fluff, a heroine who would be at home in a naturalist novel, mired in the long avenues marked No Way Out. Her blur is the lost focus of boredom and weariness, a panorama in which every scene is the same, forever. All the moments drown into one another, an empty sea of time. “Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand years or a minute,” London wrote in his short story of child labor, “The Apostate,” published in 1908. “Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark the march of time. Time did not march. It stood always still. It was only the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere in spite of the fact that they moved faster.”
Likewise, in his account of his visit to the United States, The Future in America (1906), London’s fellow socialist H. G. Wells quotes Spargo’s Bitter Cry of the Children: “for ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the coal as it moves past them.”
An illustration shows the chute-children bent like penitents at a confession. Instead of being pelted with stones, their punishment the true measure of horror is to look at rocks. The coal coming down the chutes is like the river Wells describes gathering to fall at Niagara “a limitless ocean pouring down a sloping world,” a sign of America both majestic and terrifying, “so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry.”
The Niagara of endless work the horizontal fall of the bobbin row the cascade of labor, pitching forth and over in a strict level, ruled and regulated in a mind-numbing noise, a crescendo that makes the cotton thread like the plucked strings of a grotesque elongated harp this is the stripped mental world where the punishment seems to be that the child will see and hear, even asleep, the sounding picture of what America is. Says one of Anderson’s mill girls, her eyes closed at night, “I got thread in my brain.” But this naturalist detailing is only a baseline in Hine’s photograph.
It is not the kind of time he most wants to show. Factory time is the machinery that gets the photograph into operation the power of thrumming naturalist storytelling but all of this is only a grease works allowing a more important time to emerge as a puff of inexplicable steam.