Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite: Why the 21st Century Now Looks Like the 19th

Former president of Chicago Theological Seminary (1998-2008), Thistlethwaite is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The 21st century is becoming a mirror of the 19th. The 19th century, due to rapidly expanding industrialization, saw an appalling rise in poverty, and the exploitation of poor children, some as young four years old, who were often forced to work in the rapidly expanding factories.

In 1843, Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol , his indictment of 19th century industrial capitalism and the horrors it visited upon the poor and working classes, especially children. Dickens himself had fallen into poverty as a child when his father was arrested, and at the age of 12 he had to go to work in a factory. His own experience of child labor and his first-hand witness of the terrible injustices suffered by the working poor framed this complex story. A Christmas Carol tells the story of a greedy businessman, Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by the shade of his dead business partner, and then three ghosts who force him to face all the harm he has done through his exploitation of the poor, and his desire only for riches.

A Christmas Carol is about the child poverty caused by 19th century economics, and its threat to children. Over the tale hangs the fate of Tiny Tim, the youngest child of Scrooge’s employee, a child who lacks health care and proper food, and thus may die.

At the end of this, the first decade of the 21st century, nearly 1 in four children in the United States lives at or below the poverty level. Yet, Newt Gingrich, a Republican candidate for president, recently called child labor laws “stupid” and recommended that school janitors be fired so that poor children could be taught to work, that is, to do work such as cleaning the bathrooms of their schools. Firing working parents with good jobs in order to employ poor children in potentially hazardous occupations is worthy of the unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge....