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On the Custom of Child Sacrifice in America
School shootings seem like a 21st century phenomenon, but they are a continuation of the American custom of child sacrifice.
If we Americans think of child sacrifice as the fiery and bloody practice of other, more primitive civilizations, that must be because we don’t know our own history. America has been in the business of sacrificing children’s lives on the altar of capitalism for hundreds of years, blood and fire included. And like people in those more “primitive” cultures, we rationalize those deaths.
Let’s start with poor white children. In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 146 people, most of them teenage girls, died on March 25, 1911. That factory was known to also illegally employ children under 14, and although several young children were among the counted dead, speculation continues that other children perished in that fire, too.
In the textile mills of the late 19th and twentieth centuries, death and dismemberment were commonplace. And yet, some rationalized that life in the mills was an improvement for poor white children. One would-be reformer commented that “that to most of these unfortunate people, factory life is a distinct improvement over the log cabin, salt pork, and peach brandy, white-trash and Georgia-cracker type of life from which many of them were sifted out when the mills came.”
