Rose Berdych has the distinction of apparently being the only child laborer that Lewis Hine photographed, and then photographed again on a return visit. In my research so far, I have found (not surprisingly) only one case where a child laborer remembered being photographed by Hine; but one would think that Rose might have remembered Hine and his camera the second time he took her picture, only three years after their first encounter. But she never mentioned it to the descendants I interviewed.

The contrast between the two photos is striking. In the second photo, Rose is neat and clean, and nicely dressed for school. Hine says: "She has given up shucking, because her mother is afraid of the law, and is attending school regularly as long as they are in the south." Could that mean that if and when the family returns to Baltimore, her mother will take Rose out of school again? On his two visits, Hine took a total of eight pictures of Rose.

The following is excerpted from the Sixth Annual Conference of the National Child Labor Committee, in January of 1910:

Dr. McKelway: Mr. Chairman, I paid a visit to Pass Christian, Miss., last spring. I had investigated the oyster canning industry in the Gulf States to some extent before. I was amazed at the number of small children who were employed in the oyster shucking factories. There are a good many along the Gulf coast, and some on the South Carolina coast. I found that the workers were Bohemian and Polish children from Baltimore. Our chief adversary in the fight for a better child labor law in Florida was the owner of an oyster cannery in Apalachicola. I visited his factory and saw acres of oyster shells there fifteen feet deep, and a great proportion of those oysters had been taken out of the shells by little children. We would not make any exemption in the Florida law, although we had to accept the twelve-year-age limit, and last year the proposal was made again that we could have the fourteen-year-age limit if we would exempt this oyster canning industry, which we declined to do.

Now here was a very interesting situation, that these people were brought from Baltimore and other parts of Maryland and Delaware in the winter season to shuck the oysters along the Gulf coast. Mr. Hine went to Maryland and made some investigations there, and he made a very interesting study of the situation and took a large number of photographs. The children in this oyster canning industry and fruit and vegetable canning industries are smaller than any children I ever saw in industrial work, smaller even than in the southern cotton mills. Miss Goldmark has spoken of the prejudice against these children and the difficulty of taking them into the schools. I found the same prejudice to exist in Florida, and the difficulty there is that they have had no compulsory school law, so the children have absolutely no schooling. The schools are not open in Maryland in the canning season, and then in the winter months the workers go to the Gulf coast.

Miss Anna Herkner: It is perfectly possible for a child to be born in Baltimore and grow up to the age of fourteen and never attend school. That is what is going on all the time. I want to make just a slight correction to something Dr. McKelway said. It is mostly Poles and not Bohemians who go south. Bohemians have done that in times past, but the public schools have had an Americanizing influence, so they have now reached the stage where they understand American institutions better. The first children - the first generation of those born here, who do not come under the influence of the public school, make the troublesome element in our community. The Poles in Baltimore are now at the stage where the Bohemians were twenty years ago. They work in canneries and on farms under such conditions as have been described. The child labor law in Maryland permits them to work in the cannery both in the country and in the city until the middle of October. It is usually November before they all get back, and about the end of November they begin going south. There are any number of families who do that, who have done that for years, and we have now children, many cases I know, who have never been to school.

The possibility of regulating the migration of people from one state to another was discussed, and Dr. McKelway suggested a license tax upon agents who go into a state to get laborers for other states. North Carolina and Tennessee have laws of this kind. He said, "If Maryland would pass a similar law, it would at least discourage this wholesale migration to the southern states." The fact was brought out that many of the children work in Maryland canneries until the middle of October. Before the truant officer reaches them to compel attendance, they have gone south to work.