Children in the United States participated in the workforce from the earliest days of English settlement. Introduction to the working world could start for children as young as five years old, either joining their families in farm work or home industries. While less common than in England, trade apprenticeships began as young as age 13 for boys, and girls were often put to work as domestics. The fear that children might become “idle,” or become a burden on society dated back to the Puritans, and work was compelled both by social codes and, sometimes, by law.
When the Industrial Revolution began around 1820, children were seen as a natural reservoir of potential workers. Most were already accustomed to hard work, and their small size and agility made them a good fit for factory work. As a bonus to employers, they could be paid lower wages and were generally easier to control than adult workers. In the very early stages of industrialization, some felt that women and children being put to work in the factories might support the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer, as the men could stay home and work the fields while the rest of the family brought home the wages.
GROWTH OF CHILDREN IN THE WORKFORCE
In England, which embarked on industrialization in the 1760, the child labor reform movement began by 1800 and achieved significant reforms by 1833. By comparison, the there was no significant reform movement in the United States until the around 1900, Some New England states passed laws in the 1840s that limited the ages at which children could work, or limited the hours they could work, but all the various laws were so filled with loopholes that they no effect on the burgeoning child labor population. Consequently, the number of working children grew virtually untrammeled for more than fifty years.
By 1870, children made up 12.5% of the US workforce. By 1890, that number grew to 18%. Among African-American children, employment rates reached 65% for black males and 43% for girls by 1880. Children of all races dominated the workforce in glass factories, textile mills, and coal mines; in more urban areas, they found work as newsboys, messengers, shoeshine boys, domestics, and a host of other vital services. Most worked long days in dangerous conditions for low pay, and accidents and fatalities were common.
REFORM
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
— Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn, 1914
Child labor reform didn’t become part of the national conversation until around 1902, when itcaught the attention on the wider progressive reform movement of the era. In 1904, a Southern clergyman named Edgar Gardner Murphy proposed the formation of the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). He became interested in reform after seeing the conditions within the textile mills of his native Alabama, where 25% of the workforce was made up of children under 16, most of them working grueling 12 hour shifts. By drawing together several small anti-child-labor groups into one national organization, NCLC hoped to pool resources and push for action.
In 1908, the group hired a sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine to chronicle the lives of young workers. Over the next decade, Hine photographed and talked to hundreds of child laborers, often capturing the trauma inflicted on their bodies and the often desperate conditions in which they lived and worked. The images, along with a number of heartbreaking exposés, spurred public outrages. This did not, however, spur legislative action.
LEGISLATION
The first major attempt to deal with child labor on a nationwide level was a bill introduced to Congress in 1915 that would have essentially abolished the practice in mills and mines across teh country. President Woodrow Wilson refused to back the measure, and it died in the Senate.
Although he believed it was probably unconstitutional, Wilson did back the Keating-Owens Child Labor Act of 1916. Keating-Owens took the novel tack of using the Commerce Clause, which gave the Federal government the power to regulate interstate commerce. The bill prohibited the interstate sale of any items made by factories using children under 14, mines using children under 16, or any business that forced children to work long hours or overnight shifts. After intense debate, the bill passed and was signed into law. However, just a year after it went into effect, the Supreme Court struck it down in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), after a cotton mill operator brought a suit against the government.
The failure of Keating-Owens led Congress to introduce a Constitutional amendment which would give them the power to regulate child labor. In full, the amendment read:
Section 1. The Congress shall have power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.
Section 2. The power of the several States is unimpaired by this article except that the operation of State laws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by the Congress
The amendment passed out of Congress by healthy margins in both the House and the Senate on April 26, 1924. It was ratified by 28 states by 1937 and rejected by 15. The amendment is still on the books, and would take another 10 states to ratify to meet the threshold.
The breakthrough came with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The NCLC drafted language to protect child workers that became part of the final bill. Very few children of the 1 million children estimated to be in the workforce in 1938 were actually covered by the act, but it did provide some protections, and it contributed to the growing consensus that children should not be involved in labor.
As in the United Kingdom, the reduction of child labor had as as much to do with the growing middle class’s shifting perceptions of children from “little adults” to a special class that needed time for both education and exploration. The lower demand for unskilled labor after the 1930s also made education much more important. By 1930, only 2.5% of children aged 10-14 were involved in the workforce.
SEE ALSO:
Fliter, John A.. Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children. United States, University Press of Kansas, 2018.
Freedman, Russell. Kids at Work: Lewis Hine and the Crusade Against Child Labor. United Kingdom, Clarion Books, 1994.
Howard, Natasha M., and Rivera, Ian C.. Child Labor in America. United States, Nova Science Publishers, 2010.
Rosenberg, Chaim M.. Child Labor in America: A History. United States, McFarland, Incorporated, Publishers, 2013.