Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Lewis Wickes Hine
Progressive Era photographer of child labor and Empire State steelworkers; born and raised in Oshkosh; Oshkosh Normal School 1899
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Lewis Wickes Hine was the Progressive Era photographer whose pictures of working children helped build the public case for the Children’s Bureau and, later, the Fair Labor Standards Act. For the National Child Labor Committee he posed as a fire inspector, Bible salesman, or postcard vendor—whatever got him past the mill gate—and made images the country could not look away from. He also swung out over Fifth Avenue in a basket to photograph Empire State Building steelworkers. He was born in Oshkosh on September 26, 1874, and grew up above Hines’ Coffeehouse and Restaurant, the Main Street rooms his parents opened after moving from Ohio in 1871. He drew, read poetry, and watched the lumber town work. When his father died of an apparently accidental gunshot at an ironworks, the teenager left school and spent years as factory hand, woodcutter, salesman, janitor, and bank clerk. The 1898 Oshkosh woodworkers’ strike taught him what a mill did to a body. Frank Manny at Oshkosh Normal School pulled him toward teaching; after Hine finished there in 1899, Manny hired him at New York’s Ethical Culture School, put a camera in his hands, and sent the class to Ellis Island. He married Sara Rich, an 1897 Oshkosh Normal graduate, back home in August 1904. He died broke in Dobbs Ferry, New York, on November 3, 1940, after an operation; he had applied for welfare in the 1930s and lost his house. The Museum of Modern Art declined his archive; the George Eastman collection took it. Oshkosh was the birthplace, the coffeehouse childhood, and the Normal School that steered him toward the camera.