Within the final couple of years, Individuals have rediscovered baby labor. The Nation reported that “Child Labor is Back—And It’s as Chilling as Ever” and the New York Instances declared a “New Child Labor Crisis in America.”[1] However, as I argue in my latest JAH article, the US by no means utterly abolished baby labor.[2] After the passage of federal limitations on baby labor in the course of the New Deal, policymakers failed to handle the flagrant exploitation of migrant baby farmworkers and reframed different kinds of employment nearly as good for younger folks’s growth. In actual fact, as I argue, by the mid-Fifties, organizations just like the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee, which had as soon as been wholly dedicated to sustaining strict state baby labor legal guidelines, started to argue that younger folks wanted employment to be taught accountability and obtain private achievement. By the Sixties, poverty warriors had little to say about baby labor in any respect and the Battle on Poverty’s most outstanding applications had been ones that supplied jobs to poor youth.
My first e-book examined labor reformers’ attitudes towards home staff within the Progressive Period.[3] My analysis on baby labor thus started with a easy curiosity in what occurred to these Progressive reformers after World Battle II, particularly the ladies who had been essentially the most dedicated advocates of kid labor prohibitions. I had learn the work of students like Linda Gordon and Landon R. Y. Storrs and so I understood that Progressive ladies skilled marginalization by the late Forties, however I noticed I had no thought what had occurred to the Kids’s Bureau, the federal company staffed and run by Progressive ladies who had been excited about points associated to ladies and youngsters within the early twentieth century.[4] I knew Hull Home, America’s most well-known settlement home, was now not a significant establishment in Chicago however what precisely occurred to it?
What I found was not only a fading away of establishments that had outlived their historic moments—within the area of ten years, over the course of the Sixties, Progressive ladies’s establishments had been destroyed one after the other. In 1961, Chicago’s Hull Home shut its doorways and was partially bulldozed to make room for a College of Illinois constructing undertaking.[5] By 1963, the College had already determined to show what remained right into a museum.[6] By 1969, the Kids’s Bureau, the historic authorities outpost for Progressive ladies specializing in baby welfare, had been cut up amongst numerous businesses within the federal authorities. The information of the Kids’s Bureau after 1950 had been despatched to the Nationwide Archives immediately from the Bureau’s file drawers with out a lot processing, nonetheless organized by the Kids’s Bureau’s baroque decimal level submitting scheme. Certainly, whereas wanting by the Kids’s Bureau’s information on the Nationwide Archives in School Park, Maryland, I got here throughout a plastic fork caught between the pages. The Kids’s Bureau had been a cornerstone of what Robyn Muncy as soon as referred to as the early twentieth-century “feminine dominion in American reform.”[7] By the Sixties, it appeared, establishments dedicated to the safety of girls and youngsters in the US had vanished or, within the extra exact phrasing of former Kids’s Bureau chief, Martha Might Eliot, been “dismembered.”[8]
What, I puzzled, was the price of dropping a technology of Progressive reformers and their establishments? As I argue within the JAH, the disappearance of girls’s Progressive establishments was linked to a widescale rejection of insurance policies designed to guard ladies and youngsters from labor exploitation after World Battle II. Protecting labor coverage had been a central ethos of Progressive ladies’s establishments. In distinction, as liberals entered authorities within the Fifties and Sixties, they expressed few issues about labor exploitation, insisting that employment was important to younger folks’s maturation. Progressive ladies, who continued to advocate for strengthening baby labor legal guidelines, had been maligned as old style and overprotective. By the Sixties, lots of these ladies had died or retired.
Regardless of this, I used to be stunned to search out that there was not a lot secondary literature that addressed baby labor after World Battle II. Although some students discovered incidents of kid labor after World Battle II, particularly in industrial agriculture, only a few handled baby labor as a discrete political downside of the period.
However I had an inkling that this was not the one story. Agricultural labor notoriously exploited youngsters effectively after the passage of the 1938 Truthful Labor Requirements Act. A 1959 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, Little one Employees in Agriculture, discovered near 500,000 youngsters below fifteen years outdated working for pay on farms. These baby laborers represented 18 p.c of the industrial agricultural workforce.[9] Of the estimated 227,000 baby agricultural staff between 10 and 13 years outdated, a few third labored thirty-five or extra hours every week.[10] As one historian has famous, cautious viewers of Edward R. Murrow’s documentary, Harvest of Disgrace, might need caught glimpses of youngsters at work within the fields although many baby staff hid in the course of the documentary taking pictures as a result of they weren’t purported to be working throughout faculty hours.[11] Whilst baby labor had not gone away, the discourse round baby labor had utterly remodeled.
As I gathered sources associated to points Progressive ladies historically cared about, together with juvenile delinquency, childcare, baby labor, and welfare, I began to search out faculty principals, newspaper reporters, native judges, and even some federal officers arguing that one reason behind juvenile delinquency was too-strict baby labor legal guidelines. At Rutgers College Libraries, the common stacks held a number of cabinets stuffed with transcripts of the New Jersey Juvenile Delinquency Examine Fee hearings. These monumental tomes of type-written transcripts had been certain and despatched to Rutgers as an official New Jersey State Depository. In testimony after testimony, witnesses in training, within the juvenile justice system, and in state authorities argued that baby labor legal guidelines had been standing in the way in which of sending idle youngsters out to work. Curiously, few of the older ladies in baby welfare circles or in ladies’s voluntary organizations, just like the Nationwide Shoppers’ League or the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee, testified in these hearings. As a historian who had lengthy labored on the Progressive Period, I felt like a time traveler analyzing the Fifties paperwork, stunned to search out organizations acquainted to me lacking amongst its information.
Since I used to be already there, I headed to the basement of the Rutgers Library to Particular Collections to place in a name slip for Mary Dyckman’s papers. Dyckman was the president of the Shoppers’ League of New Jersey and outspoken on the state’s labor points, notably baby labor. As I appeared by Dyckman’s papers, I discovered correspondence between Dyckman and the Juvenile Delinquency Examine Fee. She had, in reality, testified earlier than the Fee in 1955 and had introduced a chart exhibiting that the speed of juvenile delinquency was positively correlated to the variety of youth employment permits the state had issued.[12] Throughout the listening to, juvenile courtroom choose David Nimmo insisted repeatedly that she was mistaken and that her personal chart confirmed the alternative of what she mentioned it did, contending that juvenile delinquency elevated when younger folks had been unemployed.[13]
Two years later, when the Fee held one other (their 16th!) listening to on juvenile delinquency, Dyckman was invited to the listening to, however to not testify. Throughout the highest of the listening to invitation, Dyckman had scrawled, “as you see we’re not invited to talk—solely pay attention!”[14] Her response to the Fee’s invitation positively dripped with sarcasm. She wrote that it was “fairly clear that this isn’t a listening to the place I’m invited to talk and I’m positive that I shall take pleasure in listening to your program all of the extra for that motive.”[15] She enclosed a duplicate of her earlier testimony and her chart, however she should have realized that this was a weak response. All through the hearings, in the meantime, faculty principals and different witnesses in search of to weaken baby labor restrictions argued that baby labor legal guidelines overprotected younger folks. This gendered rhetoric echoed widespread Fifties cultural criticism of moms, epitomized by Phillip Wylie, who accused overprotective moms of manufacturing effeminate males and juvenile delinquents, birthing a veritable “technology of vipers.”[16] Thus, older ladies like Dyckman, who had lengthy championed the safety of youngsters from labor exploitation and had as soon as been broadly thought-about specialists on baby welfare, had been now not even invited to take part in conversations about baby labor and juvenile delinquency.
I skilled one other shock once I ordered the microfilm information of the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC had been stalwart opponents of kid labor, dedicated to investigating circumstances for baby staff throughout the nation and lobbying state governments to keep up or strengthen their baby labor legal guidelines. I anticipated to search out the NCLC persevering with their conventional mission, albeit with waning affect. As a substitute, I discovered one thing rather more attention-grabbing: in 1955, as I famous in my JAH article, the NCLC modified its identify to the Nationwide Committee for the Employment of Youth.
The scholarship that talked about this identify change tended to jot down it off as proof of the American conquer baby labor. One historical past of the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee argued that though not solely gone, abusive baby labor had largely been “worn out” by 1950 and one other scholar characterised the Forties as a interval of “ultimate victory” over baby labor.[17] However I knew baby labor nonetheless existed within the Fifties. On nearer inspection, the NCLC’s correspondence minimized baby labor as a social downside and targeted as an alternative on selling work alternatives for kids as a method of creating maturity, accountability, and independence. Pursuing youth employment represented a real about-face for the nation’s preeminent anti-child labor group, however it was rhetoric I noticed all over the place, particularly as older Progressive ladies died, retired, or had been pushed out of management positions. As new management took over the NCLC, its mission essentially modified to selling work expertise for youth.
As soon as I noticed rhetoric within the NCLC’s papers about work providing younger folks a path to accountable maturity, I started to see it all over the place. It was a thread that, as soon as pulled, led me by Fifties debates about juvenile delinquency to jobs applications championed by antipoverty warriors within the Sixties. The ubiquity of this rhetoric appeared to make jobs applications the apparent instrument for addressing younger folks’s poverty—however in selecting that instrument, authorities officers essentially foreclosed different coverage choices. In the meantime, as Progressive ladies’s establishments had been demolished and older ladies baby labor reformers, like Mary Dyckman, had been shut out of kid welfare conversations, there was nobody left to counter this dedication to employment as the perfect coverage answer for poor youth. Thus, whereas many Individuals at this time in all probability view these as abhorrent tales about youngsters and youngsters working the nightshift in slaughterhouses or lacking faculty to work building, organizations just like the Kids’s Bureau and the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee, which had traditionally referred to as the nation to account for such abuses, are, in contrast to baby labor itself, actually gone or essentially remodeled.
Vanessa Might is an affiliate professor of historical past at Hunter School, CUNY. She is the writer of Unprotected Labor: Family Employees, Politics, and Center-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 and is engaged on a e-book on maternalists and the welfare state after World Battle II.
[1] Steve Fraser, “Little one Labor in America Is Again—And It’s As Chilling as Ever,” Nation, July 13, 2023; Sabrina Tavernise, “A New Little one Labor Disaster in America,” March 9, 2023, in The Every day, produced by Nina Feldman and Will Reid for the New York Instances, podcast, MP3 audio, 33:50, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/09/podcasts/the-daily/migrant-child-labor-america.html.
[2] Vanessa Might, “‘It Will Be Our Job to Make Them Employees’: Little one Labor and Youth Employment in Postwar America,” Journal of American Historical past, 110 (Dec. 2023), 474–96.
[3] Vanessa H. Might, Unprotected Labor: Family Employees, Politics, and Center-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (2011).
[4] Linda Gordon, Pitied however Not Entitled: Single Moms and the Historical past of Welfare, 1890–1935 (1998); Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The Nationwide Shoppers’ League, Ladies’s Activism, and Labor Requirements within the New Deal Period (2003).
[5] “Hull Home Faces Battle for Its Life,” New York Instances, Feb. 19, 1961, p. 79.
[6] Eleanor Web page, “Museum Projected: Search $350,000 for Hull Home,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 31, 1963, p. C1.
[7] Robyn Muncy, Making a Feminine Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (1994).
[8] Martha Might Eliot to Eleanor Roosevelt, Feb. 10, 1961, field 19, folder 267, sequence V: The Kids’s Bureau, Papers of Martha Might Eliot, 1898–1975 (Schlesinger Library Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mass.).
[9] U.S. Division of Labor, Labor Requirements Bureau, Little one Employees in Agriculture, leaflet no. 4 (1959).
[10] Bess Furman, “Farm Little one Labor Abuse Scored; Regulation Urged to Assist All Below 14,” New York Instances, Feb. 7, 1959, p. 22.
[11] Mary Lyons-Barnett, “Postwar Enhancements for Kids Working in Commercialized Agriculture,” Journal of Latino-Latin American Research, 1 (Jan. 2004), 21.
[12] Mary Dyckman to Mr. Krantz, March 26, 1957, folder 8, field 3, Mary L. Dyckman Papers (Particular Collections and College Archives, Rutgers College Libraries, New Brunswick, N.J.).
[13] State Juvenile Examine Fee, “Seventh Public Listening to, Jersey Metropolis Medical Middle, Jersey Metropolis, N.J.,” Nov. 30, 1955, unpublished transcript, p. 54–56, Authorities Paperwork Assortment (Rutgers College Libraries).
[14] Alan S. Meyer to Mary Dyckman, April 1, 1957, folder 4, field 3, Mary L. Dyckman Papers.
[15] Dyckman to Dr. Albert E. Jochen, April 4, 1957, ibid.
[16] The time period “technology of vipers” comes from Philip Wylie, Era of Vipers (1942). See additionally Elaine Tyler Might, Homeward Certain: American Households within the Chilly Battle Period (1988), 74–75.
[17] Walter Trattner, Campaign for the Kids: A Historical past of the Nationwide Little one Labor Committee and Little one Labor Reform in America (1970), 225; John A. Filter, Little one Labor in America: The Epic Authorized Battle to Defend Kids (2018), 191.
