In an article published on January 10, 1936, the Gastonia (NC) Daily Gazette reported that Elliott W. Springs, president of the Lancaster Mills and similar mills in South Carolina, had sent a special Christmas card to his friends and associates, and to a number of his wholesale customers. The card portrayed a 12-year-old barefoot girl and an 11-year-old boy, both working at the Lancaster mill. They were actually family members posing as child laborers. The reporter explained, "It was his way of satirizing the bosh about child labor in Southern Cotton Mills." Mr. Springs received a strong rebuke from a clothing company executive decrying the "terrible lot of these downtrodden children." Springs replied in part:

"In 1908, a photographer from the North came to the Lancaster Cotton Mills during the lunch hour when the mill was empty. He found a 12-year-old girl who had brought her father's lunch to the mill and persuaded her to stand by a spinning frame while he took her picture. This picture has been used ever since as evidence of child labor in the South. One of my first actions after I became president (of the mills) was to issue orders that no children should be employed in these mills."

The photographer, of course, was Lewis Hine. He took 24 pictures at Lancaster Mills on Monday, November 30; and Tuesday, December 1, 1908, twelve of which clearly show young boys and girls working in the mill, a practice widely known and documented in textile mills at the time, both in the South and in the North. Most of the pictures also show the mill far from empty, although several were taken outside at lunch time, as Hine himself described. When Hine's alleged "phony" child labor photo was taken, Elliott Springs was 12 years old and would have been in school, so it's doubtful that he witnessed the alleged incident.

He took over the company in 1931, and by that time, child labor in the vast majority of mills had declined substantially, for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, according to South Carolina and the New Deal, by J.I. Hayes (2001), the code authority, essentially the textile manufacturers' trade association, received a complaint in 1933 against Elliott Springs regarding alleged child labor in his mills. Springs replied that since most workers lacked birth certificates, he had no way of determining their ages. He was quoted as saying sarcastically, "The code authority...won't let me look at their teeth."