Owen R. Lovejoy

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Owen R. Lovejoy


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OWEN R. LOVEJOY
SOCIAL WELFARE LECTURES

CHILD LABOR

1.
Your Neighbors' Boy
2.
Where American Children Work (illustrated with stereopticon)
3.
Child Labor and Poverty, the Vicious Circle
4.
Safeguarding Childhood in Peace or War

He is most emphatically the man to be heard on the question of Child Labor on every Chautauqua, Lyceum Bureau and Lecture course throughout our land.  I believe he is as truly called to explain this enterprise as is Dr. Gunsaulus to preach the Gospel and our President to guide the nation.  Few stories are more entrancing or better told than the story of Mr. Lovejoy's work for the children.—REV. S. PARKES CADMAN, D.D., Central Congregational Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.



SPECIAL SUBJECTS
Woman's Place in a Democracy
He is magnetic and masterly in his addresses.  He is extremely broad-minded and well informed and is quietly eloquent and appealing.—MRS. CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT, President, National American Woman Suffrage Association, Washington.



Education for Efficiency
His visit has done much for the building up of the practical reform spirit among our students.—PROF. ULYSSES G. WEATHERLY, Indiana University, Bloomington, Ind.



Making the Public School Public
His splendid personality, his intimate and embracing knowledge of his subject and his superb gifts as a speaker make him an exceptional lecturer.  He combines in an eminent degree the humane with the scientific.—DEAN FREDERIC SIEDENBURG, S. J. School of Sociology, Loyola University, Chicago, Ill.

I know of no one better adapted to college audiences.—PROF. C. C. NORTH, Ohio State University, Columbus, O.



Building a Kingdom
Dr. FELIX ADLER, Founder of The Society for Ethical Culture of New York, and Chairman, National Child Labor Committee, says:—

Owen R. Lovejoy well deserves the title of Children's Statesman. Thirteen years ago when Edgar Gardner Murphy of Alabama came to New York and with Florence Kelley, Jane Addams, myself, and a few others organized a Committee to protect the child from exploitation in industry certain general facts about child labor were well known, but there had been few detailed studies of special phases of child employment.  So when we found that in Mt. Vernon, N. Y., there was a young clergyman who knew a good deal about child labor in the Pennsylvania coal mines because he had been investigating conditions there during the strike of 1902, we were glad to send him back to Pennsylvania in the summer of 1904 as our first special investigator of child labor in coal mines and breakers.  he had besides his knowledge of industrial conditions a sympathy for all people, rich and poor, that could not be gainsaid, and that had earned him the title of radical.  So it is not surprising that the result of this young man's summer job in Pennsylvania was that he discovered his life's job and became one of the permanent staff of the National Child Labor Committee.

As he himself puts the case, After I had seen those little boys day after day carrying their lunch-pails to the breakers every morning like grown men, bending all day over dusty coal chutes, sometimes suffering accidents in the chutes, and finally dragging themselves home at night in the dark, I couldn't think of anything else.  Sights like that cling to you.  I dreamed about those boys.

So he continued his work for the children.  He investigated glass factories, fish canneries, cotton mills, and other places of employment until he knew at first hand the conditions under which children worked.  He became Assistant Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee and in 1907 General Secretary, but he still kept in touch with the actual working places of the children by sending his special agents there to report conditions as they found them.  The literature of the Committee telling of these investigations by special agents and outlining its work has increased from a few leaflets published the first year to an annual output of over 5,000,000 pages at the present time.

But in 1913 Mr. Lovejoy felt that the progress of the fight against child labor was too slow, although every state in the union had passed or improved child labor or compulsory education laws in the nine years of the Committee's activity, the Federal Children's Bureau had been established largely through the efforts of the Committee, and everywhere more and more people were enlisting in the fight for the protection of American childhood.  Mr. Lovejoy believed, however, that the national government should take a definite stand against child labor and that the principle of child protection should be written clearly on our national statute books.  So he renewed the fight for a federal child labor law which had been begun in 1906 by Senator Beveridge with the backing of the National Child Labor Committee.  It took three years to persuade Congress to pass this law, but it was passed in August, 1916, and signed by the President, September 1.  Commenting on its passage Congressman Keating of Colorado who pushed the bill through the House said, Owen Lovejoy and Dr. McKelway, devoted the best years of their lives to the task of creating a public sentiment which would compel Congress to deal with the problem in aneffective way.

The federal law is the greatest single accomplishment in the history of the National Child Labor Committee, says Mr. Lovejoy himself, refusing to take any personal credit for its enactment, but giving it all to his co-workers and the members of the Committee, but it is only the beginning of the end.  The federal law will protect about 150,000 children employed in factories and mines whose products are shipped in interstate commerce.  But there are 1,850,000 children employed in local industries, such as newspaper selling, messenger work, stores, offices, laundries, bakeries, and innumerable other occupations which can not be reached by the federal law.  The federal law points the way.  The states must do for these other children what the federal government has done for the children in factories and mines.  And it is the business of the National Child Labor Committee to persuade them to do it.

It is in behalf of these other children, outside the scope of the federal law, then, that Mr. Lovejoy is working this year.  The average American child leaves school at the sixth grade, he says, and until our children are kept in school longer this nation can not escape the weakness of sixth grade education.  The child on the farm, the child in the street, and the child in the store all need education just as much as the child in the factory.  All our children must be kept in school as well as out of harmful industries if we are to do our duty to the future citizens of the nation.

Besides leading the child labor campaign, Mr. Lovejoy, independently of his connection with the National Child Labor Committee, has been active in the cause of woman suffrage, using his vacations in 1915 and 1916 to travel through New York and Iowa campaigning for suffrage.  Recently he has been interested in the antimilitarist movement and appeared in Washington to protest against the universal military service bills.  In this anti-militarist stand Mr. Lovejoy is careful to emphasize however, that it is against unnecessary military training that he protests and not against adequate defence of the country in time of war.  I believe that every citizen should be ready to sacrifice his property and his life in his country's service, said Mr. Lovejoy recently at a hearing before Mayor Mitchel in New York City.

But it is in child labor that he is chiefly interested.  He is a platform speaker of exceptional distinction and power.  He possesses qualifications not often united in a single personality; a very exact knowledge of his subject; a large outlook; humane feeling; a sense of humor that gives a welcome relief to his treatment of even the most somber subjects.  In a word Mr. Lovejoy on the platform possesses both strength and charm.  He speaks to an audience of school children one day, of laboring men the next, club women the next, and business men the next, and to all he carries his message with conviction, for he knows that child labor is not merely a cause, but that it is a fact to thousands of American children—a fact that will follow them all their lives.




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A remarkably fine speaker.  He not only possesses a vast fund of information concerning Child Labor in this country and elsewhere, but he also makes a very powerful moral appeal.—JANE ADDAMS, Hull House, Chicago, Ill.

He is a practical public speaker of exceptional gifts.  In addition to being a master of his subject he has a way of expressing himself that is full of delightful surprises at every turn and which challenges your interested attention every minute.—GEORGE W. COLEMAN, Director, Ford Hall Meetings, Boston, Mass.

Mr. Lovejoy is to be credited with pioneer championship and work for the child labor bill.  A native of Michigan, and educated at Albion college, which has since made him an LL.D., he first tried to do his chief work in the ministry.  In 1904 he became assistant secretary and in 1907 secretary of the National Child Labor Committee and he still holds that position.  He has steadily gone ahead, organized public opinion, kept out of any partisan, factional or sectional phases of the problem, and now sees the rewards of his labor.  Mr. Lovejoy is a member of most of the leading societies of the country that have been established to advance civic reform and industrial betterment.  He has written voluminously for the press.—Seattle (Wash.) Post-Intelligencer.


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His pleasing presence, his simple eloquence and his tremendous earnestness, together with his magnificent ability to make figures, statistics and facts almost as interesting as the most thrilling chapter of a book, should commend him to woman's clubs, mothers' congresses, schools, legislative committees and reform organizations of every kind, whether they be directly or indirectly interested in the subject of child labor; for, after all, it is a subject which concerns the home, the school, the church, the business man and the citizen.—JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY, Denver, Colo.

He has a rich fund of knowledge and understanding, regarding the whole field of social problems which gives him a steady sense of proportion in presenting his own subject.

He is always interesting, has a quick wit and a reassuring union of sympathy and common sense.

His unaffected and charming manner, and his directness, without frills or peculiarity, make him one of the most agreeable speakers to whom I have ever listened.—JULIA C. LATHROP, Chief, Children's Bureau, Department of Labor, Washington, D. C.

With Mutual Chautauquas 1917