Phone Interview with Joe Manning

Joe Manning: Hello?

Genova Brown: Hello is this Mr. Manning?
Joe Manning: Yes it is, how are you?
Genova Brown: Im fine, this is Genova from Townsend Harris
Joe Manning: Okay, and am I correct that you live around the flushing area?
Genova Brown: Yes.
Joe Manning: Yea okay my wife was from that area. She lived in West Hempstead, out in Nassau
County. So what can I do for you?
Genova Brown: Okay, is it okay if I record you toJoe Manning: Oh certainly thats okay with me.
Genova Brown: Okay, thank you. Okay so my first question is how would you say Lewis Hine
had left a legacy today?
Joe Manning: How would he have left a legacy?
Genova Brown: Yeah.
Joe Manning: Well a number of things, obviously his child labor photos, which hes probably
best known for, certainly not only indicated you know, what our history was at that time among
people who worked in mills and factories. And you know he had 5,130 pictures that he took in
that area and probably if he hadnt done it no one would have taken the pictures and then no one
would have known what the people looked like and what the buildings looked like. A second
legacy is that he was one of the first persons, photographers, to use pictures to change public
opinion about an issue. He believed that the pictures themselves would convince people that
what they saw in the pictures was wrong and it would convince people much better than it would

be to write stuff like that down or newspaper articles. And thirdly, this is sort of similar to the
first one, is that even though his pictures were best known as child labor photos and promoted
different child labor laws, right now a hundred years or so later theyre one of the few records
that we have of what poor children looked like, what they dressed like, how they combed their
hair, types of things, the way they would look at that time. Otherwise very seldom were people
taking pictures of poor children those days. Families didnt have cameras, they wouldnt have
taken pictures of their own families and it is one of the few records we have of what children
looked like a hundred years ago.
Genova Brown: Okay, thank you. And would you say that these photos were vital to the National
Child Labor Committee?
Joe Manning: Very much so and they believed that they would be. It wasnt Mr. Hines idea, it
was the National Child Labor Committees idea they felt that they had been lobbying for child
labor laws for about two years, when they believed that photographing the child laborers would
be a better way of calling attention to it and circulating those photographs around. They knew of
Mr. Hines work and that he had taken pictures at Ellis Island of the immigrants coming in. He
was also taking some pictures of steelworkers, adult steelworkers in Pittsburg and they thought
he was the person to do it. They really felt that the pictures would be helpful and I think they did
not understand who they had hired. The talent that he had, the devotion Mr. Hine had to the
work. It was Hines way of taking the photos and the things he said in the captions and his
speaking engagements and everything else that he did that advocated for child labor laws. That
helped to change-- make it a really important issue to people and change public opinion.
Genova Brown: And is that what made his photos so unique?

Joe Manning: What made his photos unique was something that he decided to do that wasnt
something that had been done before with photographs. Prior to his pictures, you know, using his
pictures for changing public opinion, there have been some photographs, famous photographs in
the 1890s of really dangerous and dirty conditions in tenement housing in New York for
immigrants. There was a man named Jacob Riis who-- his name is spelled Riis, not Reese and
Mr. Riis took a lot of pictures of the terrible conditions in the tenements, but he often took
pictures of very dirty looking children laying on the ground, or laying on the sidewalk. The
kinds of things that didn't really make people feel, you know, very good about the children. In
some ways it tended to reinforce the sort of racist idea that immigrant child were not worthy
because they were from countries that didnt speak English, or the were dirty, or their culture
wasnt good. Mr. Hine felt that taking pictures of the children, the child laborers, that he needed
to make the children look likeable and ordinary, not dirty. He didnt want to over do the pictures.
He wanted to just show the kids as being just people. So when people who werent aware of
child labor very much and saw the pictures and were awakened to the idea that there was such a
thing going on. They didnt look at those children and say, oh look at those dirty crummy
children, nobody really cares about them. Theyd look at the children and say, well, why are
those nice looking children being subjected to this kind of work?
Genova Brown: Okay. And do you feel that Lewis Hine doesnt get as much attention or
acknowledgement as other child photographers, like Jacob Riis, and that he should?
Joe Manning: Yea, I actually think its happening. Mr. Hine between the time he died in 1940 and
up until probably the advent of the internet, Mr. Hines work was only, you know, known to a
few people. His most famous photos for a while were the pictures that he took of the building of
the empire state building. I dont know if youve seen those pictures, but he took them in 1931.

He actually went up to the top floors when they were building the building to take pictures of the
workers building the empire state building. Once his pictures were turned over to the Library of
Congress they were still available, but only if somebody went into the library to look at them. In
the early 1990s when the internet came in, the Library of Congress digitized all the photos and
made them available on their website. I think thats the most significant thing thats happened to
Mr. Hines popularity, that his pictures would become available and free to people and theres no
restriction to how you can use the photos because the copyrights on the photos have expired. So
anybody can use the photos, print them. do whatever they want with them. I think Mr. Hine now
is quite famous again, simply because people can see his pictures,
Genova Brown: Okay, and why were Lewis Hines photos such a staple part in the reformation
of child labor laws?
Joe Manning: Can you repeat the question please?
Genova Brown: Why were Lewis Hines photos such a staple part in the reformation of child
labor laws?
Joe Manning: Well they were a part, they werent the only part. The most important thing the
pictures did was to raise the issue of it. You know before that time, unless people lived in a mill
town, factory town or near a coal mine, they wouldnt have even been aware that there was such
a thing as child labor because they werent near companies that hired them. People might have
lived in different kinds of housing and places where people were middle class or rich and
wouldnt necessarily have been aware of all this. So he publicized the issues, he made people
look at it and say, Gee, I didnt know this was going on. At that time the only people who
could vote in the United States were mostly white men, middle class white men. African
Americans couldnt vote, they actually legally could vote, but no one would register them to vote

or allow them to vote. Poor people very seldom voted because many of them couldnt read and
therefore they couldnt pass the literacy tests in order to get a voting registration. You had to
publicize this issue among the people who would be voting, so Hine was trying to appeal to the
middle class and upper class men. They wouldnt have been aware of child labor without these
pictures, but other things changed it to. One of things was unions, unions started to become very
effective back in the 1920s. Another reason would've been the great change in the way people
looked at children, particularly child welfare workers, social workers, the Child Welfare League,
and other organizations that felt children need to go to school and be taken care of better. They
exerted a lot of pressure, but the main reason really was that the factories-- the places that
manufactured things, where they worked in, by the 1920s had lots of modernization of their
equipment. That equipment ran more automated than it did before and it wasnt a very suitable
machine to be operated by a child. In the old days the children could stand next to a loom, or
something like that and do very simple work they could sparingly go in a week. But children
really werent useful in the modernization of the plants and so the companies stopped hiring
children because they knew they wouldn't be able to a good job.
Genova Brown: Okay, can his legacy be seen in the Keating-Owen Act and the Fair Labor Act?
Joe Manning: Yes, infact, the Keating-Owen Act, I think you understand was overturned by the
constitutional decision of the Supreme Court in 1918. Did you know that?
Genova Brown: No I didnt know that.
Joe Manning: Okay it was passed in 1916, but in 1918 the Supreme Court-- there was a lawsuit
against it-- against the constitutionality of the law. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law
was unconstitutional because, in a simple way, it said that the federal government didnt have
enough power over the state laws to change the law. And so that act was actually ended in 1918.

However, because it was a law in 1916, it was a law for two years and it was enforced for two
years. That certainly stopped a lot of child labor, that was primarily contributed to Lewis Hines
work. The Fair Labor Standards Act wasn't passed until 1938, in that period of time, Hines work
probably had very little effect on that. At that particular point, child labor had diminished
considerably. At that time the democratic party and Roosevelt believed that there should be a lot
of things in the Fair Labor Standards Act, including minimum wage and forty hours a week.
Pretty much as an afterthought they threw in the child labor law again because they thought it
would pass, and it did.
Genova Brown: And the last question is: How does Lewis Hine show leadership in his approach
to child labor reform?
Joe Manning: Well I think the kind of work he did made him naturally a leader. He was actually a
very shy, quiet person who didnt really like to be much in public. He was uncomfortable
speaking before large crowds, he was very studious, he stayed at home, when he wasnt working,
as much as he could because he was away a lot of the time taking pictures. By using his example,
the kind of work he was doing, in being very very persistent about changing child labor laws and
caring very much about it, he was a leader in the sense of people wanting to copy what he was
doing and admiring his work. He didnt go out in the streets and, you know, march in the street
yelling about child labor, he just worked quietly to expose it and he was a true leader for that
reason.
Genova Brown: Okay, thank you very much.
Joe Manning: Well good luck.
Genova Brown: Thank you, goodbye.
Joe Manning: Goodbye.