5 year old Harold Walker would pick 20 to 25 pounds of cotton a day. Oklahoma, 1916.
Drafted For Sure! No wonder people from their generation rewrote laws in their favor. They never enjoyed shit
Drafted after he spent his late teens/20s unemployed during the great depression too. Assuming he survived the Spanish flu.
If you run the numbers adjusted for inflation our economy right now is worse than the Great Depression. Look at the average wage vs cost of a median home and compared to now it was way better.
I’d still rather live with inflation, a/c, and vaccines.
And don’t forget the most important one cheap food, cus like back in the day food when bad fast and was hard to grow
Dude, actually yes. I know there’s a lot of hate around GMO foods but I love them. I don’t always want to eat 6 avocados immediately.
That's kinda a mixed bag at least in some cases. Take strawberries. Those giant standard ones are built to last and ship but don't taste nearly as good as other varieties.
Seasonal food is great and almost always tastes better when it isn't grown at scale. Then again, being able to get say, lettuce in the middle of winter is a perk. Hoping that micro-growing + hydroponic setups really take off and we get the best of both worlds.
I’m buying a hydroponic herb garden someday
That’s because it was made of food. Any food we have today that doesn’t spoil is not food.
People always reminisce about the past but they always look back with rose tainted glasses. In 1920, women couldn’t even vote.
Living the dream, aren't you?
That's not how that works.
The great depression wasn't an issue with property prices. It was an issue with employment rates, GDP growth, debt management and other key economic indicators.
Of course the average wage was better at affording a house during the great depression because so many people didn't have jobs, so anyone with property was trying to sell, but there weren't many people to buy, so prices dropped.
That sounds like you’re comparing 2 pairs of numbers and making a very general assertion from it
I was just looking at this an hour or so ago, and maybe that’s true for 1920 but not for the last 20 to 40 years.
Even over the last 60 years and adjusted for inflation: wages are up ~20%, the average price per square foot is up ~25%, the size of the house has doubled.
So it’s true average home prices themselves are much higher compared to average wage, BUT the average cost per square foot compared to the average wage is only up a bit.
Don't know where you get your "numbers" but it's obvious you have no clue how bad The Great Depression really was.
Besides, if that were truly the case, CNN would be all over it and blaming "rich" people.
The reality is that during the depression, most rich people lost everything along with everyone else. That's why there was record unemployment, whereas now there is a labor shortage.
lol….wut
Do the math it checks out.
Houses were pretty shitty back then—no AC, probably no indoor plumbing, no insulation, and tiny—they were cheap for a reason.
I mean, houses in 2500BC were wicked expensive. How much are a house worth now in goats?
We should have never left the goat standard. Economics hasn't been the same since.
Poo poo pee pee
You wouldnt' want to live in a 1916 median home. Also the average doesn't tell you anything about the wage distribution, you would need the median for that. If you think wealth distribution is bad now, you won't like pre-WW1 America.
And this right here is why its tough to go by just numbers. There are definitely struggles right now and the economy skewed against people in many ways, but if the numbers are telling you the economy is worse than the Great Depression, you gotta question the numbers.
So, the housing market was better, not the entire economy. The great depression had unemployment in the 20's and no safety nets. No welfare, no social security, or other government programs. There is literally no valid comparison to the current situation to the great depression, except that the housing market is terrible.
This is a lie
Um.. sure
No it’s not.
This is the dumbest shit I have read on the internet in a long time… and that is really saying something.
So you checked the numbers and determined I was wrong or you just don’t want to believe it?
My issue isn’t so much with your numbers, it’s with your logic. You are using a narrow set of parameters to make a broad statement that “the economy was better during the Great Depression”. A more reasonable conclusion you could have made is “housing was more affordable during the Great Depression than it is today”. This wouldn’t be surprising since 1/4 of Americans were jobless, so buying a home would have been impossible, driving down costs. A parallel argument to the statement you made would be “people during the great plague epidemics of the 1400s were healthier than people today because there was less cardiovascular disease”. Sounds idiotic, no?
This is just not even close to true.
If you were lucky enough to have a job
This is just not true on so many levels. We might spend relatively more on hosing, but only ~1% had water and electricity in 1920 - let alone wifi. Real GDP per capita has also grown more than 10 fold over the last century.
There was a reason Roosevelt kept getting re-elected.
Cotton picking soldier Harold wasn’t writing any laws brother
He could have if he had wanted to, he became an engineer.
Correction. They rewrote laws so that their children didn’t have to suffer what they went through.
Bingo, and those are the children that changed things in their favor.
Then everyone after them suffered
You’re the thinking of the boomers, who didn’t do Jack shit expect maybe die in Vietnam
Probably too old. In 1941, he would have been 30.
I thought the same thing so I looked it up. You had to register in 1940 if you were under 36.
Average age in WW2 was 26, old but not out of the woods.
Hard luck Harold had to live through prohibition also. Probably resorted to bathtub gin!
Heard Hard luck Harold shot down 87 planes in that war. They started calling him Hard shot Harold. Poor kid.
The face of a hardened criminal.
I wonder what he thought about while picking cotton all day. Just makes me sad to imagine how hard this lil fella had it.
Have you read "A Painted House"?
I don't think so, but I will look into it.
Gives you an idea about what his life might have been like
Or The Grapes of Wrath.
Grapes of Wrath is amazing.
I forgot about that book. John Grisham is a great storyteller.
Bloody legend mate. I always wanted to be Hank when I read that. Don't know why. Maybe I'm a long lost hill person deep down!
My five year old would like it. He loves doing big people stuff. My seven year old would protest continuously
How long do you think they'd last?
He’s fine, he made his own stuffed animals.🧸
Build a Bear
Yup, He helped found the company. The first ones were a little rough, just raw cotton stuffed into sack cloth with button eyes.
That’s a Hard life little buddy.
Here’s some info on him, he ended up becoming an engineer and did serve in WWII:
https://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2016/10/13/harold-jewel-walker-geronimo-oklahoma-2/
And check out this very progressive letter he wrote:
To The Editor:
I am deeply gratified to learn that during the week of Feb 13-19, Lawton Public Schools will observe their third Black Heritage Week.
This has worked so well in our schools in the area of reducing ethnic problems that are still troubling many schools in Oklahoma. And because of the initiative shown by this observance, the Lawton Public School administration is deserving of our appreciation.
I am looking forward to an even wider observance of “heritage” weeks in our schools that will include Mexican-American students and Indians. The result of an expanded effort will in my opinion develop an excellence in our schools that can be found nowhere else in America.
Cuz picked cotton so he knew he was kinfolk. We’re in this together.
Lived to be 90, died in 2001 - bring back child labor!
Honestly wonderful to see
Ah, he was a Lawton resident. That’s a shame, guy really couldn’t catch a break.
As someone who grew up in Wichita Falls, TX this got a laugh out of me.
My only experience with either TX or OK is Basic at Sill and AIT at JBSA in San Antonio
It is a shockingly rough area of the country to live in. The heat bakes the flat, red earth and the wind never stops blowing. Like living in a convection oven praying for rain but expecting a tornado.
I live in Houston now, which is its own sort of unpleasant, but Wichita Falls will be over 100 degrees for the foreseeable future, per the current forecast, with 104 by the middle of the week (Lawton same).
I read the whole thing. Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.🙏
My grandmama picked cotton in Oklahoma, she told me the kids would do cotton because they had little fingers and could get the cotton out easier and not get as cut up, and helped build planes doing the Rosie the riveter thing in ww2. She was tough as hell. could cook country food so damn good, knew all the oils school stuff, canning, sewing, ect. and pushed mowed her yard through her 80s.
My great grandma picked cotton as a little kid too and told me the same thing. Little fingers were perfect for pickin cotton. They were built real tough back then!
My dad told me he started picking cotton when he was six which would have been in 1944. He had to pick 100 lbs per week. This was in East Texas.
In a link in another comment on this post, a descendant of the child in the photo explains that little kids went out in the fields just because that's where their parents were and they were too young to be left alone. Maybe they were learning to work, but mostly they were just being supervised.
Children like him would come of age during the Dust Bowl, from which Oklahoma would never fully recover. Children like him would move out west and be hated by everyone, from Mexican farmworkers to California landowners, envious that their desperation to find work made them better workers; scared that their grit and determination would eventually help them climb up the social ladder. When I see this photo, I see the illustration of every story of average folk throughout history--trying to scrape a living and help their loved ones since childhood, against all adversity.
And climb he did!
https://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2016/10/13/harold-jewel-walker-geronimo-oklahoma-2/
God Bless America!🇺🇸
This is wonderful! Great find. This letter of Harold's put a smile on my face:
"I am deeply gratified to learn that during the week of Feb 13-19, Lawton Public Schools will observe their third Black Heritage Week.
This has worked so well in our schools in the area of reducing ethnic problems that are still troubling many schools in Oklahoma. And because of the initiative shown by this observance, the Lawton Public School administration is deserving of our appreciation.
I am looking forward to an even wider observance of “heritage” weeks in our schools that will include Mexican-American students and Indians. The result of an expanded effort will in my opinion develop an excellence in our schools that can be found nowhere else in America."
Harold was a head of his time.
There’s some shining examples of people like him throughout history.
They just get lost in the politics of grievance and partisanship and the current trend to elevate right wing dictators and autocrats over traditional American values across the political spectrum.
Civil Rights for All = American Freedom.
People have died for our freedom. Soldiers, labor leaders, Civil Rights leaders, patriots, founding fathers, presidents, religious leaders.
Love it or leave it.
Agreed. I would love to see his idea of expanding heritage celebrations in public schools become a reality. Right now we have, I think, only Black and Hispanic/Latino heritage months. But there have since been more immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, in addition to of course various European groups. And there still isn't anything for indigenous Americans in my school district, which is pretty surprising when you think about it...
Maybe instead of giving minorities months of recognition as a token, we should address the underlying issues that have been impacting their communities for decades, if not centuries.
We can do both, improve core education (reading, math, science, etc.) and include in our social studies celebration of our diversity :)
A beautiful article and story, thanks for sharing this. Teared up once or twice reading it and looking at the pictures.
It’s pretty awesome. Great values, real freedom, service. It’s absent from much of politics today.
a lot of ‘okies’ where i grew up in california! actually picked up the accent in the farming town i was raised in
envious that their desperation to find work made them better workers; scared that their grit and determination would eventually help them climb up the social ladder
nice way of saying fuck your standard of living, corpos should be allowed to bring in immigrants to keep your salary low while increasing their profits and there's nothing wrong with having an underclass as long as 1% of them make it in to the upper strata
US citizens from Oklahoma are immigrants?
displaced labor is immigration. the us is a collection of states not a whole country, it's a stupid system where you pass a line and suddenly you have different laws and taxes but you pretend you're in the same country
Immigration: the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country
“Okies” never left their country. And the US Constitution forbids discrimination by states against Americans based on their state origin.
You have an extremely odd view of America if you think California, for example, is a foreign country.
So did my mom. They were poor and living in Alabama.
Basically everyone who was poor in my parents generation picked tobacco
It’s always sad to see these kids working. The ones that are the worst is the kids that had to go down chimneys.
Chimneys aren't the worst, heating oil tanks and boilers those are worse.
Coal mining is up there too.
Didn’t even know about those.
His real name was Mart Payne.
Geez the first thing that popped into my head is how some ‘influencer’ on LinkedIn will use this to promote hard work and sacrifice or some other bs, when it’s really a crying shame.
Modern cotton picker machines pick hundreds of pounds an hour. No child labor needed, more cotton for society, more profit for farmers. Technology can be liberating.
Can you imagine living in Oklahoma then?? JFC
Can you imagine living there now?
Worked there….yes…woof
It had only been a state for 8 years, no AC, tractors are a rarity
No shoes.
Think about it.
Good on you, Harold!
My mom and her family all picked cotton in Oklahoma. Three of my uncles went off to WW2, all survived, none came back to the cotton patch. Mom left the farm in the 1950s, the cotton went bust a decade later.
Many of my relatives not only picked cotton here, they also traveled to other parts of the state and Texas to pick.
We have it easy.
Republican wet dream
https://morningsonmaplestreet.com/2016/10/13/harold-jewel-walker-geronimo-oklahoma-2/
Not until they find out about his letter (bottom of url)
Redditors when challenged to not bring politics into every thread(it's impossible):
It's true though. Republicans are repealing laws to protect children from living the way these kids did. This is what they want.
They found 10 year olds working at a couple fast food franchises. TEN YEAR OLDS. This change in labor laws is to cover the ass of people who are already doing it.
This is utter hyperbole... sorry. You may have a point that republicans and corporations are trying to make it possible to exploit teenage labor. But sorry this is the wet dream of slave owners do with that what you will.
But the laws on teenage labor are merely the first step. It's not like once laws on teen labor are repealed, the people who repealed them will say "well, that's enough, we're not going to keep going any further." Once teen labor laws are gone, child labor laws are next. The way conservatives get their way is by constantly pushing the goalposts and exploiting compromise. They get what they want by halves, not by repealing everything at once, but by chipping away at it, all the while insisting that it's not a big deal since they're only making one minor change at a time. That's how we lost the fight for legal abortion, and a good argument as to why we should never compromise with the evil of conservatism.
Good god you read like you are up on a ledge somewhere.
Conservatism is about keeping existing laws and current norms in place. So I am not even sure how I would classify this, croney capitalism?
Well I guess the only sane course of action is to about the fetusi so they can't be exploited by GOP. Maybe we could get the republicans on board to exploit the Palestinian children, that would be a win / win no?
Republicans already support harming Palestinian children, they're the most ardent supporters of Israel. Also, not sure how you don't get this, but crony capitalists are conservative. The only existing laws conservatives want to keep in place are ones that enforce preexisting discrimination and injustice.
Republicans already support harming Palestinian children, they're the most ardent supporters of Israel.
On this we agree.
I just figure if the republicans want 5 year olds working in the fields working in Mc Donald's, like you said, it might just be a win-win to not kill the children and instead have them work in Mc Donald's.
Liberal --> Change
Conservative --> Status Quo.
Not too hard of a concept.
How about neither? How about we don't exploit children in the slightest? Conservatives are not always in favor of the status quo at all. They often try to change things, and never for the better.
The kid is a few shades too light for that
TIL - All you have to do is project something on a group of people you hate and it doesn't make it racist
My bad didn’t realize Republican was a race
You are the subject, project is the verb, republicans are the direct object, black people are the indirect object.
You can talk about all the nasty things your grandpa thinks about various forms of people, but maybe at some point it is just what you think.
Nah, Republicans want to hurt all children, not just black children.
As a parent this is my wet dream. It’s like reverse day care
He just the perfect height for it…
Try picking potatoes. Or rutabagas. Or strawberries. My dad and his dad before him grew up in the fields earning their daily meals from an appallingly early age.
Yup, cottons light.
Try tobacco.
Sugar cane.
Coca, poppies, the cannabis fields.
Anything beats being a medieval gong farmer. They literally shoveled human shit all day. But they had the highest survival rates during the Black Death, so there is that …
AND in 2024, Waffle House is paying $3/hr.
Yep. There were probably hundreds of thousands of poor white sharecroppers from our country’s founding until now who didn’t have any other options.
So true
Yes, we can all agree that this is heart wrenching and be glad that many countries now have the wealth to allow children not to work, but many children up until very recently were expected to work in some capacity or other, whether for an external entity or to provide for the family within the home/on the property. It's pretty startling to think about how much our perception of a "good" childhood has changed in just the past 70 years!
Great point.
Still have children doing this in Africa, 100 years later. The world moves forward at different paces.
Hard Life Harry
He looks pissed
The origin story of Frank Grimes.
Shit I can barely get my kid to pick up their cotton clothes off the floor.
Um.
Slacker! According to my parents they had a 40lb sack, were barefoot and fought bears along the way!
My Ex-wife was from Oklahoma, they breed some tough cookies there, my ex was no joke.
Tough as nails, hard ass worker, she was a hand full.
I will never complain about my janitor job again. Compared to this poor kid. I got it pretty damn good.
cotton-pickin' ninny-muggins
The American the GOP wants to take us back to.
Hard-ass Harold was his nickname.
I wonder where he is now
Amateur
Another great poster for child labor.
He looks like he could kick all our asses and will
Well. Jump down turn around pick a bale of Cotton.
How much time did Harold spend complaining, wallowing in self pity, and getting on his favorite apps to complain about how bad he had it ?
Yes but divide and conquer
China, republicans, Russia, federal reserve argument, houthis
My grandparents picked cotton. They couldn't afford gloves, and when picking it, their hands would get cut up to hell and back. If any drops of blood got onto the cotton, they had to sell it at about 1/10th of the value. After several years of picking cotton, they finally were able to afford some thick gloves.
Those are rookie numbers, Harold. You gotta pump those numbers up if you want to reach the big leagues.
But you don't hear him bitching do you ?!
Those are rookie numbers, Harold
Dude was barely older than a toddler. Worked his ass off like a baller. Lived like a pauper.
And this is what the "conservatives" want to bring back.....
Arkansas poster child…2024
“Looks like we’re all dead meat!”
Poor little fella
Rethuglican dream…
Whatever happened to him?
Rookie numbers, gotta pump those numbers up!
My inlaws picked cotton in Arkansas as kids and lived on a dirt floor shack. This is the white history that isn't taught in schools.
Only that?
What gop wants to bring back good old days
Red states are rewriting child labor laws to allow under 16's to work overnight in slaughterhouses, etc. Ask Gov. Huckabee, who said it will encourage kids to work and contribute.
And my kids think they have it rough.
Slacker.
Was this when America was great?
And that was when times was good.
Most of us view this photo in horror, while some are working hard to return us to this.
Damn they whites enslaved their own young too 😮💨 shheeeesh
My entire family grew and harvested their own cotton for 5 generations. We still do. Only rich white folks had plantations. Not All white people. A lot like now, there was the 1% and the rest of us. Come tf on.
Better than being stuck to a screen 24/7
So white people can ask for reparation payment for the slavery endured? Who's that guy who pointed that we all are/were slaves apart from the past and current elite? Unity brothers, don't let them divide you while they steal our futures.
Republicans: “Ah, the Good Old Days!”
Well, to be fair. Leader of the party never worked an honest day in his life and dodged the draft.
Harold here worked his whole life, bettered himself, served in WWII, raised a family, became an engineer and wrote progressive letters to the editor encouraging more material on African Americans, Mexican Americans and American Indians.
This is what a real American looks like, not the scammers and grievance mongers who run the GOP today.
Democrats: "May we live to see the birthrate fall into the single digits"
Women giving birth to 10+ kids is pretty unsustainable, I agree. Awful for the mother and the environment. Single digits is far better.
He said birth rate, not the number of children each woman has.
Birth Rate out of a 1000....
We're already at 11 in 1000. Congratulations we did it!!!
Well I guess the democratic caricature was correct then. /s
This was the average person for all of history until like 200 years ago. You worked in a field until you died of old age. And you worked every day that could be farmed. Now people bitch about 40 hours
This poor kid miserable face expression says it all...
What poor and struggling life he probably went through before dying.
He turned out fine, lived to be 90, became an engineer, married and had several kids.
He live until 90 but from those 9 decades how much he actually live to please himself and not others? He was already serving others by 5 years old.
You say he became engineer, married and have several kids (where is his own living?)
Coming back soon, thanks to Republican politicians!
Where’s his reparations?
And mine has a tantrum because it’s the wrong toy 🙄
The fact that children live in better conditions now is something to be proud of, not bitter.
Easy for him as he didn't have to bend down to pick it.
Kids today just don’t have that same work ethic.
Are they hiring?
Got to bump up those numbers! Those are rookie numbers. 😃
And by 1941 he was old enough to serve in WW2. Hard luck Harold.