With current Republican Presidential candidates calling for the elimination of all regulations on industry, including laws against child labor, we look at a couple cartoons created to shine light on the evils which the Republican Party wants to return us to.

The title of Daughters of the Revolution, above, originally published in Life magazine, carries double meaning — a parody on the conservative “Daughters of the American Revolution”, and a warning, that the conditions these young workers are in, might someday turn them towards actual revolution. By artist Ellison Hoover, the above was scanned from Cartoons from Life, a 1925 reprint collection of Ellison Hoover’s cartoons.

Click on the above & below pictures, to view them in greater detail.

Below, a re-presentation of No; Got All the Help I Need — demonstrating how industrialists used child labor to keep wages down, and adults (who expected better wages) out of work. The Republican Party and a conservative-controlled Supreme Court, fought for the continuance of child labor, for decades, blocking laws restricting it until 1938, claiming that regulations on child labor were an unconstituional restriction on the rights of children to work! The below cartoon, by Hal Coffman, saw print first in the newspaper, New York American, and was soon after reprinted in the October 1912 issue of Cartoons Magazine.

To find prior episodes of this series,click on Wall Street Frauds Make Wonderful Cartoons. And, to find earlier posts concerning financial reforms in general, click here.

Doug Wheeler

financial reform NYLife CartoonsMag191210