MARKHAM, EDWIN
Industrializing America was becoming “a modern Babylon,” Edwin Markham (1852–1940) wrote in 1906, where
children were “barred from school, dragged from play and
sleep and rest, and set tramping in grim, forced march to
the mills and mines and shops” while privileged parents
“give our children books and beauty by day and fold them
into white beds at night” (Weinberg 1961, 362).
Charles Edwin Anson Markham’s own childhood began
in Oregon City in the Oregon Territory. He was the sixth
child and fifth son of Samuel Markham and Elizabeth
Winchell Markham, Campbellites who believed in the unity
of all believers yet knew only division within their marriage.
The couple divorced and his father died before Edwin was
five. In 1856, Edwin and a sister moved with their mother
to a ranch near Suisun City, northeast of Oakland, where Mrs. Markham would marry and divorce two more times.
Markham attended Vacaville College, where he graduated
with a teaching degree in 1870.
Markham became an Oakland area teacher and administrator. Markham’s poetry appeared in Commonweal,
Scribner’s, and Century magazines and on January 15,
1899, the San Francisco Examiner published his poem
“The Man with the Hoe,” based on a painting by Jean Francois Millet. Markham saw himself in the stooped image of
the hoeman, old before his time, the “emptiness of ages in
his face.” His hoeman is a “symbol of betrayed humanity.”
He bore “the burden of the world on his back” and his suffering represented “the awful degradation of man through
endless, hopeless, joyless labor.” The poem, translated
into forty languages, earned Markham $250,000. Collections of his poetry, published in 1899 and 1901, solidified
Markham’s reputation as a major poet and defender of the
working man.
Markham’s articles, first appearing in Cosmopolitan in
1906, helped build public opposition to child labor. More
than 1.7 million children under fourteen years of age worked
in 1900, nearly half of them in factories, mines, textile mills,
and tenement workshops that enveloped them in “an eternity of petty movements,“ while leaving victims “stunted,
slow and sad, their lives emptied of passion and poetry”
(Weinberg 1961, 363, 365). Markham wondered how an
“age of enlightenment” could justify “children robbed of
childhood” “crowded into caverns of our industrial abyss,”
where they were subjected to pneumonia and maiming for
a 22-cent daily wage all so that “a few more millions may
be heaped up” by those already wealthy (Markham 1961,
362, 364, 366).
Championing the Child Labor Federation and other
political action organizations, Markham and fellow muckrakers fought for state and federal intervention. By 1907,
two-thirds of all states had passed legislation banning child
labor. A federal law followed in 1916. By then, Markham
had become a revered national figure who advocated cooperative action to assure “industrial freedom” for every
man, woman and child. (The Markham Book. Entry for
October 21, 1899. Box 3455. Markham Papers. Library of
Congress.)
Further Reading
“Edwin Markham,” in Scot Peacock, ed., Contemporary Authors,
vol. 160, Detroit: Gale Research, 1998.
Edwin Markham Archives, Horrmann Library, Wagner College, Staten Island, New York. There is also a collection of
Markham’s statements on social justice in “The Markham
Book” in his papers at the Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.
Evensen, Bruce J. “The Media and Reform, 1900–1917.” In The
Age of Mass Communication, edited by Wm. David Sloan.
Northport, AL: Vision Press, 1998.
Filler, Louis. “Edwin Markham, Poetry, and What Have You.”
Antioch Review 23, 1963–1964.
——. The Unknown Edwin Markham: His Mystery and Its Signifi cance. Yellow Springs, OH: Antioch Press, 1966.
Markham, Edwin. Lincoln and Other Poems. New York: McClure,
Phillips, 1901.
——. The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899.
——. “The ‘Hoe-Man’ in the Making.” Cosmopolitan, September 1906.
——. “Spinners in the Dark.” Cosmopolitan, July 1907.
Markham, Edwin, Benjamin B. Lindsey, and George Creel. Children in Bondage. New York: Hearst’s International Library,
1914.
New York Times, March 8, 1940.
Stidger, William L. Edwin Markham. New York: Abingdon Press,
1933.
Weinberg, Arthur, and Lila Weinberg, eds. The Muckrakers,.New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1961.
Bruce J. Evensen