Colonial and early national In an overwhelmingly rural society, farmers discovered that children as young as six or seven could usefully handle chores assigned along gender lines. In the cities, at a time when schools were uncommon outside New England, girls had household and child care chores while boys at about age 12 were apprenticed to craftsmen. Colonial America had a surplus of good farmland and a shortage of workers, so criminals in England kidnapped London youth to spirit them away for resale in Virginia. Parliament made it a priority to catch and prosecute offenders. In many rural towns until the 1830 or so, the apprenticeship system gave way to factory employment for poor children, and school attendance for the middle classes. At the age of 13, orphan children were sent into a trade or domestic work due to laws that sought to prevent idle children from becoming a burden to society. In the apprenticeship system, children whose parents died or are unable to support them were routinely placed outside of their homes under indenture contracts with a master who provided substance in exchange for the child’s labor. Many states during this period followed Pennsylvania's lead in enacting laws that prohibited matching children with masters who were of a different faith from the apprentice because of an expectation that masters should improve not only apprentices’ trade skills, but also their moral and religious upbringing. In the 1840s, labor started to shift away from families, to hiring older individuals, especially new immigrants from Ireland and Canada.
19th century As the North industrialized in the first half of the 19th century, factories and mines hired young workers for a variety of tasks. According to the
1900 census, of the children ages ten to fifteen, 18 percent were employed: 1,264,000 boys and 486,000 girls. Most worked on family farms. Every decade following 1870, the number of children in the workforce increased, with the percentage not dropping until the 1920s. Especially in
textile mills, children were often hired together with both parents and could be hired for only $2 a week. Their parents could both work in the mill and watch their children at the same time. Children had an advantage as their small statures were useful for fixing machinery and squeezing into small spaces. Many families in mill towns depended on the children's labor to make enough money for necessities. In mining towns, many parents often helped their children thwart child laws that did exist since miners were paid per carload of coal and any additional help to move the coal meant an increase in pay.
Farming Advocates for reform began crusading against factories, which they considered debilitating to growing children and threatened to damage them permanently. They saw farm labor as an entirely different matter—indeed, an American ideal. According to activist
Alexander McKelway in 1905, open-air farm work was "beneficial in developing a strong physical constitution." Harvest season did not interfere with the scheduled school year, he added, and being under the beneficial and watchful eye of parents strengthened the family. Using census data processed by Lee Craig, Robert Whaples concludes for the Midwest in the mid-19th century: From 1910 to 1920, more than 60 percent of child workers in the United States were employed in
agriculture. A son born into a farm family was worth real cash in terms of productivity and needing to hire less outside labor, as well as an heir to the family property.
Early 20th century In the early 20th century, opponents of child labor cooperated with other
Progressive Era reformers and
American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions to organize at the state level. In 1904, a major national organization emerged, the
National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). In state after state, reformers launched crusades to pass laws restricting child labor, with the ultimate goals of rescuing young bodies and increasing school attendance. The frustrations included the Supreme Court striking down two national laws as unconstitutional, and the weak enforcement of state laws that impacted local businesses. An effective tool was publicity, especially photographs in
muckraking magazines that showed bad working conditions. The most successful of their crusaders was photographer
Lewis Hine. In 1908, he became the photographer for the NCLC, which had good contact with the muckraking press. Over the next decade, Hine focused on the negative side of child labor. In the North, reformers were often successful in getting legislation on the books, but were disappointed when enforcement was handled by patronage appointees who proved reluctant to challenge the business community. Meanwhile, in the South legislation was opposed by rapidly growing textile mills that undercut Northern competitors with cheap wages. Starting in 1898,
Montgomery, Alabama, minister
Edgar Gardner Murphy crusaded to end child labor across the South but had little success. In Congress, a leading proponent was Senator
Albert J. Beveridge Republican of Indiana. He tried—and failed—to get the first national bill passed. Unlike the Republican leadership, the Democratic leadership was not beholden to employers, and thus was more supportive of controls on child labor and other laws promoted by labor unions.
Alexander McKelway (1866–1918), a staunch supporter of
Woodrow Wilson, campaigned for such laws as the 1916
Keating–Owen Act. The Keating–Owen Act prohibited shipment in interstate commerce of goods manufactured or processed by child labor. However, in 1918 the law was deemed unconstitutional by the
United States Supreme Court in a five-to-four decision in
Hammer v. Dagenhart. The court, although acknowledging child labor as a social evil, felt that the Keating-Owen Act overstepped
Congress' power to regulate trade. The bill was immediately revised and again deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. A similar 1919 law was also overturned. In the 1920s, an effort to pass a constitutional amendment failed because of opposition from the South and from Catholics. The South finally passed compulsory school laws and by the late 1920s, children under 15 were rarely hired by mills or factories. Finally, in the
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the New Deal successfully ended most child labor outside agriculture.
Newsboys sold the latest edition of daily newspapers on the street. They worked as contractors without benefits. Age was a disadvantage as younger boys collected more tips. The newspaper publishers needed their work and editors shielded them from child labor laws while romanticizing their entrepreneurial enterprise and downplaying their squalid life under dangerous conditions. ==After 1933: Laws to reduce child labor==