Children of the Coal Fields: Classroom or Breaker? Part I
It has not always been easy for children in the United States to obtain an education. The 1900 Census reported that half a million children between the ages of 10 and 14 could neither read nor write; children of the coalfields were included in those figures.
Many factors intervened to prevent children of the coalfields from attending school. Miners moved around frequently, seeking work. They were poor and needed their children's help to support the family. Ethnic and racial prejudices affected miners and educators alike. Educational facilities were scarce, and coal companies erected barriers to force children into the mines and away from school.
Historically, American workers have been mobile people, and miners seem to have been the most mobile of the lot. In 1920 the Children's Bureau reported that in one mine in western Pennsylvania, "more than one-third of the miners moved every two years." That trend was true of every coal-producing state, and it produced difficulties for education. The superintendent of schools in Fayette County, West Virginia, claimed that the constant moving was detrimental to the educational system. He said, "Owing to the ever shifting population [of miners] we are continually required to instruct those who have just come among us, and will not remain with us long enough to show the fruits of our labor."
The use of child labor in the mines, as in other industries, was a problem early in the century. Poverty was a driving force behind child labor in the coalfields. Wages were low, and miners and their families suffered from frequent periods without work. Often a miner was fortunate to get 150 days of work in a year. Thus, because the father's income was not enough, children had to leave school and go to work. John Mitchell, in 1901, described the life of a mine worker's child by saying, the child begins "a life of drudgery at a very early age--at an age in fact, when the children of the average American citizen are considered scarcely more than babies." When they should have been in school, young boys in the anthracite coalfields often started their mining careers as breaker boys. In the bituminous mines, they worked inside the mines as runners, drivers, door boys, and couplers, or (the largest percentage) with their fathers, loading coal.
State laws that regulated the age at which children might leave school and begin work varied widely, and most laws that did exist could be circumvented easily. For example, in Pennsylvania--which prohibited the employment of children under the age of 16 in the mines and of boys under 14 in the breakers--in the spring at the close of school, hoards of boys obtained fraudulent certificates attesting that they had come of age and could work in the mines.
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