Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Spring/Section24/Hubert Harrison Johnson

Biography

       Hubert Harrison Johnson was born on August 28th, 1905 in Hickory, NC to a horse-trading father, Miles Britton Johnson, and his invalid mother who passed when he was seven years old. Following her death, Johnson lived with his grandmother and uncle, Samuel Johnson, on a farm in Hickory, where he developed an interest in working. He soon moved to Gastonia with his father and attended elementary school up to the 6th grade. During his last two years of school Johnson worked a paper route, before leaving school and working full time at Nolan’s Newsstand for another two years. Johnson took jobs at a grocery store and a tent show for about a year before returning to work at the newsstand. He was fired from the stand after visiting Hickory for two weeks with the keys to the stand in his back pocket.

In the 1920 Census, Johnson was listed as a spinner in a local cotton mill. He was 14 years old at the time. In 1922, while driving some laborers home from work, Johnson’s truck was hit by a train and he was hospitalized for nine months. The railroad company was at fault and awarded Johnson several thousand dollars as well as a court appointed guardian. While recovering, Johnson was unable to do more physically demanding work and worked instead as a salesman of various cleaning supplies until that shop was closed. In 1926, Johnson and some friends drove south to Miami, stopping only to telegram his guardian for fifty dollars. The telegraph company could not verify that Johnson was the money’s proper recipient without a personal voucher from someone known to them, but they accepted the initials sewn into Johnson’s suit pocket as proof enough. Miami was so immensely crowded and expensive that it was financially impractical to take up work there. Johnson telegrammed his guardian for twenty-five dollars and hitchhiked back to Gastonia where he recuperated and found work operating a printing press at a print shop. He eventually left and got work as a book salesman. On a weekend trip to Charlotte, NC, Johnson and two friends crashed their car while speeding down an unfinished, unlit strip of roadway. Johnson was taken to a Charlotte hospital for several weeks and recovered, while one friend and passenger, John Davis, died. Johnson sued both the contractor of the road, and his insurance company, the latter of which reached a settlement. Johnson returned to work at the print shop, making recreational trips to Baltimore and Washington DC, where he worked for several months in a stationery store, before returning to Gastonia and his job at the print shop. The manager of the shop, Arthur Spencer, closed it up and bought enough photography equipment to start a studio. Johnson was interested enough in the photography to buy 50% ownership in 1931, and the entire operation outright in 1936. At the end of his interview, Johnson reflected on photography, “The camera is a most interesting instrument. It cannot lie; it must film what it sees, no more, no less.” He died on October 9th, 1956.

Child Labor in the Early 20th Century American South

As the southern United States industrialized in the later 1800s, factories, mills, printers and other manufacturers became reliant on the use of child labor as the skills needed for factory jobs were more dependent on nimble fingers than technical knowledge. (Korstad) Many young boys in North Carolina worked “street trades” like shoeshine barkers, drugstore deliveries, messengers, newspaper salesmen, and more, rather than attending school. (Reimer) For some, inside and outside the factory work, jobs were a source of pride and fun as joining family and friends from the well-knit communities of the mill villages (communities with housing owned by the mill) at work could be a social, active, and productive time in an otherwise slow-moving environment. (Korstad) Many cases of child labor were documented in the early 1900s by photographer Lewis Hine for the National Child Labor Committee, frequently in disguise as not to provoke illegally practicing manufacturers. (petapixel) In the 1880s and 90s, groups like the Knights of Labor and National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) argued for child labor reform as the low cost of child labor reduced wages and opportunities for adults. (Korstad) They were followed in the 20th Century by activists motivated by social reform and frequently tied to women’s and unions’ rights movements (see Gastonia Strike). These groups led to the formation of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) in 1904 which sought to end child labor and require free education for all children. The NCLC was opposed by southern manufactures who lobbied heavily against reform and were arguably effective until the 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act at the federal level. (Reimer) The Fair Labor Standards act “established legal standards for wages, hours of employment, and occupations for working-age children” outside of agricultural work. (Reimer)

Photography in the Early 20th Century and Great Depression

Following a history of early portraiture in cities and along major roads, the development of lower maintenance film and developing processes enabled photographers to explore more mobile and documentary/photojournalism-based work. (NCpedia) By the turn of the 20th Century, the popularization of the Kodak camera had allowed photography to reach households and casual enthusiasts across the nation. (Kodak) This causal accessibility led to a divide between more serious photographers (represented by Alfred Steiglitz’s Photo-Secession movement) looking to hold photography in the esteem of fine art, and casual photographers, primarily filling up family photo albums. (Kodak) However, notable photojournalism work influenced by both fields of thought continued to permeate the culture of American photography, occasionally prompted by the political interests of committees and administrations. In 1908 the National Child Labor Committee hired Lewis Hine to document child labor across the country which was then spread to build public support for the reformation of current child labor practices. (EDP) During the 1930s, to show the American public the need for government funding of New Deal programs, the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration hired a horde of photographers to document the struggle of the average American during the Great Depression and illustrate how government aid was helping ease that struggle. (history.com) (Evans) The resulting collections of photography created a national visual representation of the Great Depression and offered a new understanding of documentary photography by RA/FSA hired photographers like Walker Evans. (Kodak) They viewed documentary and the photography of the everyday, as a medium of American folk art, deserving of artistic acclaim and focus. (Kodak) Female North Carolina artist, Bayard Wootten, made Depression-era documentary work comparable to Evan’s and represents the foundational role of women as active members of the early American photography movement. (NCpedia)