The haunting photographs of early 20th century American child workers that helped change labour laws

[HiPointDem]

23. I've been reading about Lowell, Massachusetts recently. It was built as a planned manufacturing

city in the early days of US industrialization and became the textile manufacturing center of the US for quite a long time. Most of its workforce was female and some of it was children. The usual working day was 12 to 14 hours, 6 days a week.

In the 1830s & 40s there was a lot of labor agitation in Lowell -- the "Lowell Mill Girls" story is fairly well known. But what bothers me about such histories is that they're usually told sort of triumphantly -- yes, it was grim, but then came the Lowell Mill Girls, and things got better, and ain't America grand!

The Mill Girls were agitating for a 10-hour day. They never got it, and the mill owners continued getting rich.

Ancestors of two recent presidential candidates owned mills in Lowell during its heyday. This is one of the reasons they were in a position to be recent Presidential candidates -- because their ancestors sweated labor.

Descendants of the Lowell Mill Girls, on the other hand, are unlikely to be presidential candidates. They are likely to be workers in somewhat better conditions, that's all.

Ancestors of those same two presidential candidates: 1) stole land from the indians and killed indians; 2) were military contractors; 3) owned and traded in slaves; 4) brokered slave-grown cotton in the international market; 5) sold opium; 6) traded with so-called 'enemies' during wartime in multiple wars; 7) dodged taxes in multiple instances...

And put the money they made doing all these things into industrialization and railroad development, where they sweated labor -- including child labor.

It's not that maybe 1 or 2 ancestors did these things; there's a steady path of ancestors doing such things, as well as ubiquitous financial chicanery, into the present day. This is how the ruling class got to be the ruling class and continued being the ruling class.

It really is true that behind every fortune there's a crime. But these connections are disappeared in popular history.

Which means people don't understand how their history relates to their present situation, and the present situation of the world.