Muckrakers

Remember...

Muckrakers were journalists and/or photographers that exposed the problems of industrialization. They DID NOT make changes but their worked showed the US Government problems that needed to be fixed.

Source: John Spargo, The Bitter Cry of Children, 1906

I could not do that work and live, but there were boys of ten and twelve years of age doing it for fifty and sixty cents a day. Some of them had never been inside of a school; few of them could read a child’s primer. True, some of them attended the night schools, but after working ten hours in the breaker the educational results from attending school were practically nil. Boys twelve years of age may be legally employed in the mines of West Virginia, by day or by night, and for as many hours as the employers care to make them toil or their bodies will stand the strain. Where the disregard of child life is such that this may be done openly and with legal sanction, it is easy to believe what miners have again and again told me—that there are hundreds of little boys of nine and ten years of age employed in the coal mines of this state.

John Spargo wrote a book called The Biter Cry of Children to bring attention to child labor.

Lewis Hines published photographs of children working in mines and factories.

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​Lewis Hines

Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, 1916
This made it illegal to sell products made by children but it was ultimately unsuccessful because it was ruled unconstitutional

This created a minimum wage & made 16 the minimum working age for non-farm work

The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

Changes?