One thing I often wonder is if the US could have pulled off WW2 without these kids having this experience. They would have been at their prime at the time and would have had the grit and know how to get stuff done that maybe the following or previous generations wouldn’t have. I’m not condoning it in any way, just something I ponder.
One could equally wonder whether the US would have been even more effective during and after WWII if it hadn't squandered the formative years of many of its children on nonsense like shucking oysters when they could have been learning.
From my understanding Japan didn’t have much child labor, and while I think they had less natural resources, their war production was dwarfed by the US war production. The US pivoted so fast I think at one point in a single month they built more aircraft or boats than the entire war for Japan.
Are you trying to attribute that difference to child labor? Because uhhh… that’s a huge, huge stretch.
Japan’s poor production numbers were not due to lack of successful “pivot” of their workforce, nor of idle hands, nor of lack of skill. Everything was on all cylinders for the war effort.
It was a tiny, resource-poor country of craftsmen and corrupt sycophants fighting an industrial war of attrition, already many years deep in their own theater by the time the US entered. They were doomed even before Pearl Harbor and doubly so afterwards for dozens of reasons aside from their use of child labor prior to the war.
They were towing (handmade, not assembly line) Mitsubishi Zeros out of the jungle by oxen.
I think this is an impossible question to answer, but proposing it implicitly condones child labor as a component of the "return to greatness" that so many on the right desire.
I do think that the time period and what the kids were doing were an important part of it. Being at the late stage of the industrial age and early stage of the machine age made them familiar with exactly what the US would need and used to the sacrifices and hard work it would require. I don’t think you could in good faith compare it to modern day meat packing or farm labor though I agree many would like to make them the same.
How did my grandfather bringing in the harvest, bailing hay, maintaining the farm machines translate into skills of storming the beaches in the Pacific, calling in the flamethrower to burn soldiers out, and finally MP work making sure US Marines used the correct sex workers in occupied Japan?
Ocean experience = 0
Having to initiate burning other humans alive experience = 0
Finally, keeping occupier Marines inline and only going to the 'approved' comfort houses (this really made my devout Catholic grandfather who enlisted to 'fight the good fight' sick to see which is ironically why he got stuck in the position) and arresting them when they didn't experience = 0
Maybe world travel, visits to the ocean, mandatory brothel visits, and boating would have helped him do better. Maybe we should send all children on foreign exchange years to seaside towns with brothels, and create mandatory local youth yacht clubs on the off chance they need to be shipped out interact with foreigners versus make them work in factories. About as strong as argument as kids working enabled victory.
This argument would have pissed my grandfather off to no end. Don't justify child labor in their name or off the back of their deeds.
Is there really much of a difference once you set aside specific political complaints?
Right: "We used to be great, but now we suck. We should become great again" (though if you ask one, they could prob name things that are better now than they used to be)
Left: "We used to be great in some ways (e.g. income inequality), but now we suck at those. We used to suck in other ways (racism) but now we suck less at those. We should be great at everything instead."
Darn kids these days just don't know how to get anything done! /s
This thought has a bunch of baked in assumptions that come from your own biases - we certainly have not stood still as a country since 1945. And I don't think shucking oysters or planting crops at age ten would help anyone be a better programmer or physicist or really anything other than manual labor.
Well in my opinion the kids who were working in factories were working on the latest tech. It most definitely sucked and was horrible but the experiences would have prepared them for what the US needed.
I think the equivalent today would be forcing kids to do tech work, as we are out of the industrial age and into the Information Age. But tech work isn’t dirty and going to kill you so there is less incentive to force it on marginalized groups.
That’s why I think it was maybe just a perfect storm of circumstances.
Probably not, or it would have been more difficult or taken longer. That generation is exemplified in Tom Brokaw's truly excellent book The Greatest Generation. He covers the lives of people of that generation and shows how they took life as it came and when adversity struck they managed the best they could and did so without complaint.
I have an interest in the historical aspects of old photographs, those taken in the 19th Century and early 20th, Civil War photos etc. and there's an excellent collection on the Library of Congress web site and among them is a large collection of Lewis Hine's National Child Labor Committee Collection, and I found them very informative—one can learn things from these photos that never make it into the history books. One thing immediately obvious to me was the vast majority of the kids were happy and enjoying themselves. In the photos one sees kids poking fun at other at other ones, a kid in a row behind making fun of one in front of him without his knowledge and so on. They were acting naturally doing what kids do.
The photos depict the harsh life these kids led and their work conditions are clearly unacceptable by today's standards but I'd suggest that for most of human history a kid's life wasn't a bed of roses—a century earlier it'd likely have been worse. One thing is clear from the photos is that these kids had developed an adaption and resilience to life's knocks at a very early age and because they were all in the same boat together they accepted their lives as the norm.
I've mentioned on HN previously that today's kids are much more mollycoddled and protected than even I was as a kid, I was allowed to do things that kids today would never be allowed to do today and my parents weren't harsh, it was just how things were for all kids back then. That freedom meant we experienced more of life's knocks at an early age than today's kids and I reckon it put us in good stead. I worry about today's society where trivial matters are often blown up to seem as if they are life-threatening events.
Incidentally, when browsing through Hine's photographs one thing was very noticeable, many of those kids were dressed in little more than rags but most wore excellent shoes and boots (that is if they wore them, many didn't). I couldn't help thinking I'd like a few pairs of them myself. I've never gotten to the bottom of this, why was the quality of the footwear seemingly so much better a century ago than it is today?
