Fight for the Children
How One Committee Revolutionized Child Labor Reform
National Child Labor Committee
On April 25, 1904, a mass meeting was held at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Men and women alike, spurred by the concern for children working in horrid conditions, attended this meeting to support the formation of a new organization that would awaken the nation to the problem that lied before them and ultimately end it. The resulting private non-profit organization became known as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). They wasted no time in procuring the support of prominent Americans such as politicians, philanthropists, and intellectuals.
Three years later, in 1907, the NCLC was chartered with a board of directors consisting of renowned reformers including Lillian Wald, Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, and Edward T. Devine. The committee would soon also recruit members who would be key players to child labor reform in each state and the effort to pass a uniform national law.
Some key members of the NCLC:
Alexander McKelway, Assistant Secretary General of the Southern States
Owen R. Lovejoy, Secretary General in charge of child labor reform in the Northern States , taken by Lewis Hine (1913)
Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/nclc.04812/
Over the years as the NCLC continued to boast a number of prominent members, one particular man stood out from the rest. Lewis Wickes Hine took charge as the leading figure in exposing the treacheries of child labor to the public, a crucial step to abolishing child labor in the United States.
Source: www.nationalchildlabor.org
The New York Times published an article about the formation of the National Child Labor Committee.
Source: Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives