Within the final couple of years, People 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 USA 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 deal with the flagrant exploitation of migrant baby farmworkers and reframed different kinds of employment nearly as good for younger individuals’s improvement. Actually, as I argue, by the mid-Fifties, organizations just like the Nationwide Baby Labor Committee, which had as soon as been wholly dedicated to sustaining strict state baby labor legal guidelines, started to argue that younger individuals wanted employment to study duty and obtain private success. By the Sixties, poverty warriors had little to say about baby labor in any respect and the Struggle on Poverty’s most outstanding packages have been ones that supplied jobs to poor youth.
My first guide 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 Struggle II, particularly the ladies who had been probably 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 spotted I had no concept what had occurred to the Youngsters’s Bureau, the federal company staffed and run by Progressive ladies who have been all for 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 serious 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 have 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 challenge.[5] By 1963, the College had already determined to show what remained right into a museum.[6] By 1969, the Youngsters’s Bureau, the historic authorities outpost for Progressive ladies specializing in baby welfare, had been cut up amongst varied companies within the federal authorities. The data of the Youngsters’s Bureau after 1950 had been despatched to the Nationwide Archives instantly from the Bureau’s file drawers with out a lot processing, nonetheless organized by the Youngsters’s Bureau’s baroque decimal level submitting scheme. Certainly, whereas trying by way of the Youngsters’s Bureau’s data on the Nationwide Archives in Faculty Park, Maryland, I got here throughout a plastic fork caught between the pages. The Youngsters’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 USA had vanished or, within the extra exact phrasing of former Youngsters’s Bureau chief, Martha Could Eliot, been “dismembered.”[8]
What, I questioned, was the price of dropping a era 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 Struggle 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 considerations about labor exploitation, insisting that employment was important to younger individuals’s maturation. Progressive ladies, who continued to advocate for strengthening baby labor legal guidelines, have been maligned as old school and overprotective. By the Sixties, a lot of these ladies had died or retired.
Regardless of this, I used to be stunned to seek out that there was not a lot secondary literature that addressed baby labor after World Struggle II. Although some students discovered incidents of kid labor after World Struggle II, particularly in industrial agriculture, only a few handled baby labor as a discrete political drawback 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, Baby Staff in Agriculture, discovered near 500,000 youngsters below fifteen years outdated working for pay on farms. These baby laborers represented 18 % 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 kids at work within the fields although many baby staff hid in the course of the documentary capturing as a result of they weren’t alleged to be working throughout college hours.[11] Whilst baby labor had not gone away, the discourse round baby labor had utterly reworked.
As I gathered sources associated to points Progressive ladies historically cared about, together with juvenile delinquency, childcare, baby labor, and welfare, I began to seek out college principals, newspaper reporters, native judges, and even some federal officers arguing that one reason for 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 Research 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 schooling, within the juvenile justice system, and in state authorities argued that baby labor legal guidelines have been standing in the best way 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 Baby 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 seek out organizations acquainted to me lacking amongst its data.
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 seemed by way of Dyckman’s papers, I discovered correspondence between Dyckman and the Juvenile Delinquency Research Fee. She had, in truth, testified earlier than the Fee in 1955 and had introduced a chart displaying that the speed of juvenile delinquency was positively correlated to the variety of youth employment permits the state had issued.[12] In the course of the listening to, juvenile court docket decide David Nimmo insisted repeatedly that she was flawed and that her personal chart confirmed the alternative of what she mentioned it did, contending that juvenile delinquency elevated when younger individuals have 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 get pleasure from listening to your program all of the extra for that purpose.”[15] She enclosed a duplicate of her earlier testimony and her chart, however she will need to have realized that this was a weak response. All through the hearings, in the meantime, college principals and different witnesses searching for to weaken baby labor restrictions argued that baby labor legal guidelines overprotected younger individuals. 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 “era of vipers.”[16] Thus, older ladies like Dyckman, who had lengthy championed the safety of kids from labor exploitation and had as soon as been extensively thought of consultants on baby welfare, have been now not even invited to take part in conversations about baby labor and juvenile delinquency.
I skilled one other shock after I ordered the microfilm data of the Nationwide Baby 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 seek out the NCLC persevering with their conventional mission, albeit with waning affect. As a substitute, I discovered one thing far more fascinating: 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 overcome baby labor. One historical past of the Nationwide Baby Labor Committee argued that though not totally gone, abusive baby labor had largely been “worn out” by 1950 and one other scholar characterised the Forties as a interval of “closing 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 drawback and targeted as an alternative on selling work alternatives for youngsters as a way of growing maturity, duty, and independence. Pursuing youth employment represented a real about-face for the nation’s preeminent anti-child labor group, nevertheless it was rhetoric I noticed in all places, particularly as older Progressive ladies died, retired, or have been pushed out of management positions. As new management took over the NCLC, its mission basically modified to selling work expertise for youth.
As soon as I noticed rhetoric within the NCLC’s papers about work providing younger individuals a path to accountable maturity, I started to see it in all places. It was a thread that, as soon as pulled, led me by way of Fifties debates about juvenile delinquency to jobs packages championed by antipoverty warriors within the Sixties. The ubiquity of this rhetoric appeared to make jobs packages the plain device for addressing younger individuals’s poverty—however in selecting that device, authorities officers essentially foreclosed different coverage choices. In the meantime, as Progressive ladies’s establishments have been demolished and older ladies baby labor reformers, like Mary Dyckman, have 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 People immediately in all probability view these as abhorrent tales about youngsters and youngsters working the nightshift in slaughterhouses or lacking college to work building, organizations just like the Youngsters’s Bureau and the Nationwide Baby Labor Committee, which had traditionally referred to as the nation to account for such abuses, are, not like baby labor itself, really gone or basically reworked.
Vanessa Could is an affiliate professor of historical past at Hunter Faculty, CUNY. She is the writer of Unprotected Labor: Family Staff, Politics, and Center-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 and is engaged on a guide on maternalists and the welfare state after World Struggle II.
[1] Steve Fraser, “Baby Labor in America Is Again—And It’s As Chilling as Ever,” Nation, July 13, 2023; Sabrina Tavernise, “A New Baby Labor Disaster in America,” March 9, 2023, in The Day by 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 Could, “‘It Will Be Our Job to Make Them Staff’: Baby Labor and Youth Employment in Postwar America,” Journal of American Historical past, 110 (Dec. 2023), 474–96.
[3] Vanessa H. Could, Unprotected Labor: Family Staff, 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, Girls’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 Could Eliot to Eleanor Roosevelt, Feb. 10, 1961, field 19, folder 267, collection V: The Youngsters’s Bureau, Papers of Martha Could Eliot, 1898–1975 (Schlesinger Library Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Mass.).
[9] U.S. Division of Labor, Labor Requirements Bureau, Baby Staff in Agriculture, leaflet no. 4 (1959).
[10] Bess Furman, “Farm Baby Labor Abuse Scored; Legislation Urged to Assist All Below 14,” New York Instances, Feb. 7, 1959, p. 22.
[11] Mary Lyons-Barnett, “Postwar Enhancements for Youngsters 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 Research 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 “era of vipers” comes from Philip Wylie, Technology of Vipers (1942). See additionally Elaine Tyler Could, Homeward Certain: American Households within the Chilly Struggle Period (1988), 74–75.
[17] Walter Trattner, Campaign for the Youngsters: A Historical past of the Nationwide Baby Labor Committee and Baby Labor Reform in America (1970), 225; John A. Filter, Baby Labor in America: The Epic Authorized Wrestle to Defend Youngsters (2018), 191.