Labor, Industry, and Poverty
The Southern workforce changed drastically in the 13 brief years of Mary Phagan's life. As cotton prices rose and farming became harder work for less profit, former tenant farmers flocked to cities for factory work by the thousands. From 1900-1910, Atlanta's population had just about doubled, and the population growth only spurred on rapid industrialization further.
Factory work was long, grueling, and ill-paying. Factory workers labored for an average of 66 hours a week, and they were paid as little as 10 or 15 cents an hour in return, almost 40% less than the average factory worker in the North. Atlanta also had the second-highest cost of living among U.S. cities, meaning the low wages left working Atlantans in even worse shape than in other, comparable cities.
Low pay and high cost of living left several poor families no choice but to send children to work. Children as young as 10 could, and often did, work 10- or 11-hour shifts in factories, earning hardly any money. While the practice was unfortunately common for families who needed the money to stay afloat, sending a child to work was a begrudging choice that parents often resisted as long as they could.
Ending child labor was a cause celebre for many, including newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst. On the Saturday afternoon Mary Phagan was killed, Hearst's Atlanta Georgian ran a headline decrying child labor. Still, children across Atlanta knew they would return to the factory on Monday for another week of hard labor to help their families make ends meet.
In Parade...
Fannie Coleman, Mary's mother, explicitly linked her daughter's murder to her work. She said:
"I'm so sorry for young girls working everywhere... To think that they're open to the same things and there is nothing to protect them"
Mary's death was every working Atlantan's worst nightmare brought to life: that the child they reluctantly sent to work would be harmed or killed. That it was allegedly at the hands of her boss, who became wealthy from her toil and pain, only made matters worse. Working and poor Atlantans were already overworked, impoverished, ill, and malnourished from their conditions. Seeing a young girl, who could have been their own daughter, killed in a factory basement, stirred up fear, anger, and grief. They needed to defend their people and their former rural culture against the industrial heads taking them over at the cost of their own children.