Exploited Resource.

When the United States was nation of farms, shops, and small mills, the use of children to supplement a family's income was so common that it attracted little notice and even less concern. The nation's rapid and dramatic transformation into an industrialized society, however, changed the environment in which children labored and the conditions to which they were exposed. At the same time, changes were taking place in the way the childhood years were perceived. More and more Americans began to regard children as a national resource that deserved society's protection and guidance. Reformers such as Jacob Riis, author of The Children of the Tenements (1903), and George Creel, who with the assistance of Denver's juvenile court judge, Ben Lindsey, wrote Children In Bondage (1913), helped broaden awareness of the conditions under which many of the nation's poor children were reared. Exhibitions of photographs...