Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: June 2, 1924. A constitutional amendment to ban child labor passed the Senate and was sent out to the states for ratification. And yet it never happened. Let's talk about why and what we can do about that.

The fight against child labor had been a major part of both the struggle of organized labor and of middle-class reformers for decades. For unionists, they not only saw child labor as degrading to children, but also as undermining the wages of working class.

Get rid of the children, they argued, and you eliminate a major source of competition driving wages down. The wages would rise and children could go to school instead of working.

For Progressives like Florence Kelley and Lewis Hine, child labor was a horror of American society, contributing to long-term poverty and social unrest that hurt the entire nation.

Kelley’s Consumers’ League, as well as the National Child Labor Committee, lobbied Americans, especially middle-class women, to fight against the scourge of child labor through the early twentieth century, first focusing on the state level and then moving into national politics.

n the other hand, many working families, especially in the South, relied on child labor. But they had little political power.

The real opposition came from corporations, especially the textile industry, which relied heavily on children in their mills and which had moved from the northeast to the South during these years in order to take advantage of states that had not passed child labor laws.

In the 1890s, a Massachusetts textile firm moved to Alabama on the condition that the state repeal its child labor law. Of course it did so and the company moved. That was the power dynamic. And yes, that sounds similar to today.

It was in southern mills where Hine took many of his most powerful images of child labor. This was the southern working class that capitalists wanted to keep just where it was.

The need for a constitutional amendment became apparent when the conservative Supreme Court overturned federal legislation regulating child labor in 1918 and again in 1922. Again, the similarities of the present to a century ago should alarm you greatly.

In 1916, the Keating-Owen Act, which the National Child Labor Committee had lobbied for, passed Congress and was signed by Wilson. In 1918, the Supreme Court overturned it in Hammer v. Dagenhart, deciding that Congress had no authority to regulate products made by children.

For anti-child labor activists, the only remaining strategy was a constitutional amendment. On April 26, 1924, the child labor amendment passed the House of Representatives and on June 2, the Senate.

The text was simple:

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.

That's it.

Given the relatively easy passage of the amendment through Congress, the failure of it to gain traction at the state level was striking. Between 1924 and 1932, a resounding 6 states ratified it and 32 state legislatures had voted it down. It was seen as a dead letter.

This is why conservatives talk about how they want state-level regulation. States are much easier to buy off than national legislatures and more easily controlled than municipalities.

Comparing child laborers to Civil War soldiers, Manufactures Record noted that 850,000 soldiers under the age of 18 had fought in the war and opined, “If they were old enough to fight for their country, they ought to be old enough to regulate the matter of their own employment.”

The same editorial read that passing the amendment "would mean the destruction of manhood and womanhood through the destruction of boys and girls in this country....

....The proposed amendment is fathered by Socialists, Communists and Bolshevists…aimed to nationalize the children of the land and bring about in this country the exact conditions that prevail in Russia....

...If adopted, the amendment would be the greatest thing ever done in America in behalf of the activities of hell. It will make millions of young people under eighteen years of age idlers in brain and body, and thus make them the devil’s best workshop."

This sort of pressure, coordinated by the National Association of Manufacturers, is why so few states ratified. But it received a jolt of life, thanks to the Great Depression and the overwhelming victories of the Roosevelt administration and reformers at the state level in 1932.

Child labor was still a major problem. In 1933, 12 more states passed it, 10 which had previously rejected it. In 1934, the Roosevelt administration decided to get behind it to build on the National Recovery Administration’s goals to reduce competition and stabilize the economy.

But momentum was fleeting. 4 more states ratified in 1935 and another 4 in 1937. Kansas was the 28th and last on February 25, 1937. Overcoming intransigent or indifferent state legislatures was just too much, as it often is with constitutional amendments.

The child labor amendment would fail, but eliminating child labor was still a leading goal of the Roosevelt administration. It was incorporated into the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which covered most industries, but not agriculture, where child labor remains an issue today.

Interestingly, Congress did not set a time frame on the amendment. Thus, it theoretically still could be ratified today. Ten more states would need to ratify it. We could still ban child labor in the Constitution today! And we should!

Perhaps even more interestingly, this issue led to its own Supreme Court decision, with the Court ruling in Coleman v. Miller in 1939 that if Congress doesn’t set an end date for an amendment sent to the states, there is no end date.

This actually led to the ratification of the 27th Amendment, which 7 states ratified between 1789 and 1792, Ohio ratified in 1873, and no other states ratified until 1978. The other day, Illinois ratified the Equal Rights Amendment!

Now, you might say that we face so many problems today that ratifying the Child Labor Amendment isn't that important. But kids are getting poisoned in American tobacco fields today! They need protection!

hrw.org/news/2014/05/1…

I would like to see any Democrat who wants the nomination in 2020 come out in support of ratifying both the Equal Rights Amendment and the Child Labor Amendment. These things should have happened decades ago. Let's have that fight.

If you want an overview of child labor in American history, check out Chaim Rosenberg's book.

amazon.com/dp/0786473495/…

Back on Monday to talk about Massachusetts' 1912 effort to pass a minimum wage for women and children.