Document A: Lewis Hine Source: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee Report, 1911. The boys working in the breaker are bent double, with little chance to relax; the air at times is dense with coal-dust, which penetrates so far into the passages of the lungs that for long periods after the boy leaves the breaker, he continues to cough up the black coal dust. Fingers are calloused and cut by the coal and slate, the noise and monotony are deadening.... While I was in the region, two breaker boys of 15 years ... fell or were carried by the coal down into the car below. One was badly burned and the other smothered to death. This was the Lee Breaker at Chauncy, Pennsylvania, January 6th, 1911. The boy who was killed was Dennis McKee. Note: Breaker boys were often located just outside the mine next to a machine (called a breaker) where they sorted and separated the coal from slate rock. View of Ewen Breaker, Pennsylvania Coal Company Photograph Questions: 1. What was a breaker boy? 2. How old were the two boys who were injured and killed at the Lee Breaker? 3. What is the main idea of the Lewis Hine report? 4. How does the photograph help support the report's descriptions? Document B: Upton Sinclair Source: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, Viking Press, 1905. Note: The Jungle was a novel that described the conditions in the Chicago meat-packing industry. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage.... There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit.... There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread and meat would go into the hoppers together. This was no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even if he saw one.... Questions: 1. What does Upton Sinclair claim about the meat-packing industry? 2. If you were alive in 1906, and had just read this book, what might you decide to do to change the situation? Document C: Jacob Riis "How the Other Half Lives" This image shows an Italian immigrant and her baby sitting in their windowless one- room tenement. The room contains all their possessions, including a rolled-up mattress and a pallet (to her right) that likely served as their bed. Title: Italian Mother and Her Baby in Jersey Street Location: New York City Date: 1888-1889 This passage is from Riis's influential book, How the Other Half Lives. The section is excerpted from a chapter that discusses Italian immigrants and their living conditions. The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who "makes less trouble" than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German, that is to say: is content to live in a pig-sty and submits to robbery at the hands of the rent-collector without murmur. . . . Ordinarily he is easily enough governed by authority-always excepting Sunday, when he settles down to a game of cards and lets loose all his bad passions. Like the Chinese, the Italian is a born gambler. His soul is in the game from the moment the cards are on the table, and very frequently his knife is in it too before the game is ended. Source: How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis, 1890. Questions: 1. What does the photograph suggest about what life was like in New York in the late 19th century? 2. What were the conditions like in New York city tenements according to these documents? Document D: Lincoln Steffens "The Shame of Cities" New advances in printing technology during the 1890s made magazines and other publications inexpensive to print. Magazines became available to a broader middle-class audience. Lincoln Steffens was well known for writing magazine articles about child labor, prisons, religion and political machines The typical American citizen is a business man. The spirit of business is profit, not patriotism; individual gain, not national prosperity. "My business is sacred," says the business man in his heart. "Whatever helps my business, is good; it must be. Whatever hurts it, is wrong; it must be. A bribe is bad, that is, it is a bad thing to take; but it is not so bad to give one, not if it is necessary to my business." And it's all a moral weakness. Oh, we are good-on Sunday, and we are "fearfully patriotic" on the Fourth of July. But the bribe we pay to the janitor is the little brother of the bribe passed to the councilman to sell a city street, and the father of the deal made by the president of the railroad, who agrees to use air-brakes only if he is given stock in the air-brake company. We are responsible, not our leaders, since we follow them. We let them divert our loyalty from the United States to some "party"; we let them boss the party and turn our democracies into autocracies. We cheat our government and we let our leaders loot it, and we let them bribe our sovereignty from us. We are content to let them pass bad laws, giving away public property in exchange for money. Vocabulary Divert- redirect, change Autocracy-rule by one person Sovereignty-independence Source: Excerpt from a book by muckraker Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of Cities, published in 1904. Questions: 1. What is Lincoln Steffens trying to convince the reader of? 2. What is his main argument about political machines? Document E: W.E.B. DuBois The most influential critique of Booker T. Washington's ideas came in 1903 when W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. The following is an excerpt from the book. Mr. Washington asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things— First, political power; Second, insistence on civil rights; Third, higher education of Negro youth and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. . . What has been the return? ... 1 2 3 4 5 1. The disfranchisement of the Negro. 6 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. These movements are not . . . direct results of Mr. Washington's teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment. Is it possible... that [African Americans] can make economic progress if they are deprived of political rights and allowed only the most meager chance for developing their exceptional men? . . . [The] answer. . . is an emphatic No. . . . So far as Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, . . . does not value the privilege and duty of voting, ... and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds, we must firmly oppose them. . . . We must strive for the rights . . . which the sons of the Fathers would fain forget: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Source: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903). Vocabulary conciliation: appeasement, an act to keep peace disfranchisement: being kept from the right to vote fain: gladly Questions: 1. (Close reading) Read lines 1-9. Based on this passage, what is Du Bois's main critique of Washington's approach to civil rights and education?