WHEN MEN'S WORK AND CHILD'S WORK WERE THE SAME

Author: By Liz Rosenberg

Date: SUNDAY, September 28, 1997

Page: F2

Section: Books

``Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade against Child Labor'' chronicles an era in the early 1900s when American children commonly worked 12 hours or more a day, six days a week. They labored in mines and glass-making factories, sweatshops, mills, and canneries. Along came photographer Lewis Hine, who brought these brutal and often-illegal working conditions to the public eye. He recorded what he saw, in pictures and words, as with this young paper-flower maker: ``Angela is three years old. . . . She pulls apart the petals, inserts the center, and glues it to the stem, making 540 flowers a day for five cents.''

The story of child labor is so grim that it is a relief to read about Hine, the schoolteacher turned crusader whose heroism and stubbornness are well-chronicled in ``Kids at Work.'' He began with a $10 box camera, a rickety tripod, and the blinding illumination of magnesium flash powder. In 1908 he left teaching and began as an investigative reporter for the National Child Labor Committee, where he worked for a decade, recording -- and making -- labor history, here and abroad.

Hine is described by Russell Freedman as a ``slender, birdlike man. . . . usually retiring and shy.'' But he could be tough and inventive. He learned innumerable tricks to get to his young subjects, posing as ``a fire inspector, or an insurance salesman, or an industrial photographer,'' braving threats, waiting outside factory gates all day to photograph the young workers coming and going.

Hine was a master photographer and a man with a mission. The first is clear from his photographs. His passion is well depicted by Freedman, who knows when to tell us about Hine and when to let the artist speak for himself: About leaving his teaching job Hine said, ``I felt that I was merely changing my educational efforts from the classroom to the world.''

``In 1931 it stopped raining in the Panhandle,'' writes Jerry Stanley in his moving book, ``Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp.'' In 1936, after five years of drought, relentless winds began blowing through Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and northern Texas. The Dust Bowl blew from 1936 to 1940, devastating the already-tenuous existence of the Okie dry farmers.

The Okies (which in this book is a name meaning ``pride, courage, and a determination to accept hardship without showing weakness'') began to make the long trek toward ``food, work, sunshine -- and clear skies. California.'' That story is recorded, of course, in John Steinbeck's great novel ``The Grapes of Wrath.'' This is a parallel story: the creation of Weedpatch School, next door to the federal labor camp known as Weedpatch Camp.

Leo Hart, like Lewis Hine, is an unlikely American hero. Yet he was proof of what one person can accomplish, given enough vision, determination, and courage. In a few of the many photographs that grace this book, he appears, a thin, dignified, bespectacled man -- the face of a New England banker -- always wearing his hat except when he has put it on the head of a little girl reluctant to go to school without it. Superintendent of schools in Kern County, near Bakersfield, Calif., in 1940, he faced opposition to educating the Okie children, who were commonly regarded as ``retarded,'' taunted with epithets like ``maggots'' and ``scum.'' So Hart built the Weedpatch School from scratch, with ``no grass, no sidewalks, no playground equipment, no toilets, no water, no books, no teachers. It started, Leo remembered, with two condemned buildings that had been in the field for years and with `fifty poorly clad, undernourished, and skeptical youngsters.' ''

Hart imported the finest teachers he could find, many of whom worked for little or no pay, teaching everything from English to plumbing to aircraft mechanics. One man ``taught the Okie children history, geography, math, science -- and shoe cobbling, so they could repair their parents' shoes.''

Along the way, Hart made secret friends as well as enemies. He received 26 new typewriters from an anonymous donor and a used hot-water heater, as well as threats and slashed tires. When someone set fire to the two condemned buildings, the children put out the flames. They, along with Hart and the teachers, also built their own school, ``brick by brick, board by board.'' They dug trenches, remodeled an old railroad car, planted and harvested crops, dug the first public swimming pool in Kern County.

``Children of the Dust Bowl,'' with its fine prose and beautiful photographs, is evidence of the triumph of spirit in the face of adversity, and a reminder that we can overcome even disaster and despair. As Hart said, ``There were no quantum leaps. . . . there were only little victories.''

Tolstoy claimed that all happy families are alike. In ``The American Family Farm,'' we see similarities and differences. The Adamses are a black Georgia family working with a cooperative of 10 farmers, all ``descended from Africans brought as slaves to this country over one hundred years ago to till the white man's land.'' The MacMillans are Massachusetts dairy farmers, and the extended family runs the farm exclusively, while the Rosmanns of Iowa helped to found an organization called the Practical Farmers of Iowa, ``which advocates farming without using artificial fertilizers and pesticides.''

All the families work long and hard. All three farms survived a countrywide drought while this book was being written. And though there is plenty of labor done by all family members -- including the youngest -- there is time for play as well: using a red wagon to collect ``whatever is growing out there''; riding a toy tractor; playing with baby animals. `` `I love what I do,' '' says Rob MacMillan, a young dairy farmer. `` `When I was a kid in school, I never could understand why I had to be inside when I could be out on the tractor or working in the barn.' ''

For most children, though, these books may be enough to convince them that homework isn't really hard labor, that the ride on the bus is a cakewalk compared to the ride down a mineshaft.