The Research and Publications of the Russell Sage Foundation: One of Mrs. Sage’s intentions was that the Foundation educate by publishing the work of its researchers. In 1907, the Russell Sage Foundation sponsored the famous Pittsburgh Survey, published in six volumes between 1909 and 1914, a study exposing how industrial work affected steel workers and their communities. A survey of New York Times articles from the first half of this century includes Russell Sage Foundation research interests and reports on tuberculosis and child labor (1907); overworking women at a munitions factory (1917); and child marriages (1925).

Social Photography: Documenting the Working Poor

Jacob Riis (1849-1914)

Riis was a Danish American photojournalist who, as a writer for the New York Tribune assigned to the lower East Side of New York City, exposed the slum’s conditions, He is famous for his influential 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, which documented tenement society through drawing and photography. Some of these photographs were actually taken by amateur photographers Richard Hoe Lawrence and Dr. Henry G. Piffard.

Lewis Wickes Hine (1874-1940)

Hine was a photographer whose work focused on immigrants and the working class. His photography of child laborers and Ellis Island were funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. He was also hired to photograph for the Pittsburgh Survey editor, Paul Kellog. This important survey, sponsored and published by the Russell Sage Foundation, was a strong contrast to contemporary artwork that promoted Pittsburgh’s fame as a city of iron and steel industry. Except for the Pittsburgh Survey photograph, the Hine photographs featured on this panel were produced during his time with the National Child Labor Committee, created in 1904 to fight against labor practices that permitted underage children to work in hazardous conditions and prevented them from receiving an education.