“Ever Since I Can Remember, I’ve Been Working”—Alfred Benoit
Alfred Benoit was one of many youths who spent their childhood laboring in the brutal, unforgiving mills of New Bedford. Born September 3, 1900, Alfred began working in 1912 as a floor sweeper but became skilled at repairing the looms that sustained the New Bedford textile industry.
We know of Alfred partly from photographs taken by social worker and labor activist Lewis Hine, who came to New Bedford to document the conditions in the mills for his work with the National Child Labor Committee. The work of Hines and other reformers like Jacob Riis helped to change harsh child labor policies, which had allowed children under sixteen years-old to work in dangerous and unhealthy conditions for more than ten hours a day. In January, 1912, Hine photographed part of the Benoit family in their rented tenement on North Front Street. He jotted this note:
Slovenly kitchen living-room of family of Alfred Beniot [sic], 191 N. Front St., a sweeper in Bennett Mill; has been there for two months. Mother works in the same mill; father is a canvasser (and shiftless). Said, “I’m de father of 11 children.” The baby in the girl’s arms is one they are keeping for another woman. The mother would not get in the photo. Alfred had bad eyes this morning (influenza apparently) and mopping them with a filthy rag. One of the little ones had the same trouble. Another had a boil on his face.
When Hine took this photograph in 1912, three of Alfred’s siblings had already died, and Hine observed the poor health of the Benoit children.
Alfred’s father, Archille, came to New Bedford from Canada around 1905. He worked as a weaver, moving between New Bedford, Fall River, and Waltham, and briefly returned to Canada, following rumors of economic opportunity. By 1912, Archille was employed as a canvasser, going door-to-door selling goods and services. Hine considered him to be lazy, but it is possible that Archille was worn down by years of hard labor.
The Benoit house at 191 North Front Street was likely a three-decker tenement. A 1911 map of New Bedford indicated that the property was owned by M. Rogers. Behind the house was the New Bedford Day Nursery, and a block away was the St. Rose School, but it is unlikely that the Benoit children were able to take advantage of these facilities.
Alfred married his wife, Nora, in 1923, and together they raised seven children. Alfred’s grandchildren remember him as “a man who truly enjoyed life.” His granddaughter Nancy, the first of the Benoit family to graduate college, recalls that Alfred “wasn’t an overachiever. He enjoyed what he had.” Alfred enjoyed lawn bowling and sometimes traveled to Canada to compete in checkers tournaments. He spent time at the Brown Jug, a neighborhood bar owned by Francis Lawler, who served a New Bedford’s mayor in the late 1950s. Alfred and Lawler became good friends.
The three-decker on North Front Street was demolished to make way for Interstate 195, but still standing is the house on Clark Street where Alfred lived with his own family and the Brown Jug, a North End institution. Alfred’s son in law, Romeo Pothier, recalls him as a man with many friends. Asked if Alfred ever spoke of his childhood, Pothier recalled, “He once told me, ‘Ever since I can remember, I’ve been working.’”
]]>Sam Patch swung his hat and leapt off the cliff, cutting through the mist towards the seething whirlpool below. A roar rose up from the massive crowd of over 8,000 people. The outcome of this feat – at High Falls in upstate New York – would send reverberations across the nation.
Sam Patch's jumping career began several decades earlier at Slater Mill in Pawtucket. From the age of seven, Patch worked in the mill, scuttling between looms, clearing bobbins of cotton, and replacing them with empty ones. Eventually, he was promoted to a coveted weaving position. He toiled for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, starting at five in the morning. In the summer the mill was hot and humid, and during lunch breaks Patch would join other boys in jumping off the mill dam or nearby bridges into the cool tidal pool at the foot of the Pawtucket Falls. Soon this leisurely activity turned into a competition, with each boy jumping from higher and higher-still factory windows.
In 1824, mill owners demanded that workers accept steep wage cuts and a shortened lunch break. Patch, along with his fellow workers, protested against these unfair practices. Continuing conflict with mill management may have been one factor that precipitated Patch's subsequent move to Paterson, New Jersey, where he found work at another mill. Upon hearing that a bridge was to be built over the Passaic Falls, Patch declared that – once built – he would jump from it. On September 30, 1827, he jumped as promised from Clinton Bridge, drawing a large, incredulous crowd. The press went wild, dubbing him the “New Jersey Jumper” and launching his career as a daredevil stuntman.
Patch's career hit a high point in October of 1829, when, as part of his east coast “Jumping Tour” he became the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls. Waving to crowds assembled on both the American and Canadian sides of the Niagara River, he kissed the American flag before hurling himself one hundred and thirty feet down into the churning river.
One month later, Patch found himself poised above High Falls in upstate New York. However, this leap went terribly wrong.
Patch's body dropped like an arrow, when suddenly his legs separated and set his body spinning. As he struck the water, a terrible thwack echoed through the air. Audience members held their breath – one minute – two minutes – three minutes – but there was no sign of the daredevil. Rumors rippled through the crowd: could he be hiding in a cave at the base of the falls, poised for a triumphant reappearance? It took four months to find his corpse, frozen in a block of ice six miles downstream.
Sam Patch lived on in the American imagination as hero to a budding proletariat culture: democratic, hard-drinking, sports-obsessed, and loving of melodrama. Amidst a rapidly changing social structure, Patch's trademark phrase – "Some things can be done as well as others” – hinted at what we now call the American dream: a belief that human ingenuity can generate endless, perhaps even extravagant, possibilities.
]]>On January 3, 1791, Ann Arnold walked into the newly founded Slater Mill and onto the pages of history as one of the first nine employees hired by the mill. She was probably about ten years old.
As the industrial revolution swept across the western world, many factories, including Slater Mill, capitalized on child labor. Pliable young children could be easily taught the skills needed to operate the mill’s spinning frames, could be paid less than adults, and were less likely to incite trouble than adult workers. Some factories hired children as young as four years old. At Slater Mill, Ann Arnold joined a workforce made up of boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve who worked six days a week – twelve hours a day in the winter, sixteen hours a day in the summer. They spent more than twice the amount of time that today’s kids spend in school working at the mill each day.
Ann Arnold and her fellow workers picked cotton clean and worked the mill’s carding and spinning machines. The roar of the Blackstone River and hum of the water-powered machinery filled the air. Fine cotton lint coated the floor, clung to the workers' clothes, and clogged their throats. If the mill supervisor thought the children were not working hard enough, the children were fined, further reducing the small paycheck that they took home each week. The children were expected to spend Sundays, their one day of rest, at a mill-sponsored Sunday school where Brown University students provided basic schooling.
For her hard work, Ann Arnold brought home a regular salary: a luxury compared to farm life. The rest of her family toiled all day on the family farm, working just as hard as Ann did in the factory, but without the assurance of a regular paycheck.
As Slater Mill expanded, more workers were needed to run the carding and spinning equipment. Mill operators adopted the “Rhode Island System” of labor where entire families were hired to work together in the factories. Nonetheless, children remained a key source of labor. In 1830, fifty-five percent of all millworkers in Rhode Island were still children.
Long after Slater Mill closed its doors in 1895, child labor continued to be a contested issue. In the early 1900s, organizations such as the Consumer's League of Rhode Island fought to limit child labor. Early legislation restricted the number of hours that children could work and set age requirements for factory work – unscrupulous mill owners seldom enforced these rules. In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act made it illegal to employ any child under the age of twelve in the United States. However, children like Ann still work in factories throughout the world today, enduring harsh conditions to support themselves and their family.
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