Lewis Hine child labor photos + Newt Gingrich = fun with viral video! This viral video has gone around the web over the last few days. Among other things, it excoriates Newt Gingrich for his comments about how schoolchildren would be a lot more useful if they just learned some hard work already. Like the really poor ones can be janitors at school!
Of interest to me, of course, is the video maker’s appropriation of Lewis Hine’s Progressive Era child labor photos to offer some perspective by incongruity. While most folks probably couldn’t place them or their time period directly, the Hine photos signal to viewers that Newt’s ideas are, shall we say, more than a little old school. Furthermore, if you’ve spent enough time with the pro-child labor rhetoric of Hine’s period (as I have), you’ll be pleased to know that Newt’s arguments are the exact same arguments folks made back then. Everything old is new(t) again.
The video’s Christmas theme brought to mind another child labor image, this one published in John Spargo’s 1906 The Bitter Cry of the Children. If you look closely at this photo of boys working the night shift at a glass factory (click on photo to make it bigger), you can see the word “xmas” written at the lower left corner of the chalkboard in front of which they are working. It makes one wonder who wrote that, or what precisely Christmas might have meant to these child workers - a blessed day off, perhaps? And while I’m not sure why there were chalkboards in the glass factory, it does eerily visualize the video’s Gingri(n)chian narrative whereby children combine school and labor and it’s all for their own good.
image credits: freeze frame from video by Adam Kontras; John Spargo, Bitter Cry of the Children, 1906.
