Child Labor. Child labor, long a feature of American rural life, grew enormously and changed character with the
industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On farms and in coal mines, on city streets and in tenements, in mills and canneries, almost two million children, some as young as five and six years old, worked long hours for a pittance, often under harsh conditions.
In response, some people began to fight the evil of child labor. In 1901, Edgar Gardner Murphy, a clergyman, organized the Alabama Child Labor Committee, the first organization of its kind in the United States. A year later, Florence
Kelley, Lillian Wald, and Robert Hunter created the New York Child Labor Committee. In the early twentieth century, twenty‐eight states restricted child labor by law, but most of the laws were vaguely worded, full of exemptions, and laxly enforced. To achieve better enforcement of these laws on a national basis, reformers in 1904 created the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC, under the leadership of such reformers as Felix Adler, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Alexander McKelway, and Owen R. Lovejoy, led the fight against child labor.
By 1909, despite further success in securing state regulation of child labor, the NCLC sought federal legislation. Despite vigorous opposition from various groups, Congress in 1916 passed, and President Woodrow
Wilson signed into law, the Keating‐Owen Child Labor Act, the first federal law addressing the issue. Two years later, however, in
Hammer v.
Dagenhart, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled the measure unconstitutional as an unwarranted exercise of the power to regulate interstate commerce granted to the federal government in the
Constitution. When Congress quickly passed a second federal child‐labor statute, using its taxing power, the Supreme Court again invalidated that measure as well.
For the reformers, the only remaining course appeared to be a constitutional amendment. Winning broad public support, the proposed amendment sailed through both houses of Congress in 1924 by large majorities. Opponents, however, organized an aggressive counterattack, led by big business (especially the
National Association of Manufacturers) in alliance with conservative organizations and publications. Some Catholic church leaders, moreover, opposed the amendment as a threat to parental rights and parochial education. Falling eight states short of ratification, the proposed amendment died.
In June 1938, however, Congress passed, and President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt signed into law, the Fair Labor Standards Act, which effectively prohibited child labor. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the act in February 1941. Even before the 1938 law, however, the use of machines on farms and in factories had diminished the need for unskilled manual labor. As a result, by the 1950s child labor had been largely eliminated in America.
At the end of the twentieth century, however, the practice reappeared. An influx of immigrants from Asia and Latin America, including illegal aliens, gave new life to tenement sweatshops; the fast‐food industry employed masses of young workers. Simultaneously, a rise in both school‐dropout rates and
juvenile delinquency prompted many people to promote paid employment for youngsters as a positive good. Thus, despite legislative and judicial victories, the issue of child labor remained troubling and unresolved.
See also
Immigration;
New Deal Era, The;
Progressive Era.
Bibliography
Walter I. Trattner , Crusade for the Children: The National Child Labor Committee and Child Labor Reform in America, 1970.
Walter I. Trattner
