Children

Concerns about the employment of children also increased in the pre-World War I years. True, the proportion of children who worked was always small, except on the farm, and it was probably lower in the United States than in other industrial countries. But the conditions in which children worked were sometimes unsafe and harsh by modern standards. In 1880, 1 million boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 15 were “gainfully occupied,”

When publicized, bad working conditions like these among very young slate pickers in Pennsylvania at the turn of the century won middle-class sympathy for labor’s cause.

And the number rose to a high of nearly 2 million by 1910, when one-fifth of all youngsters between 10 and 15 had jobs, and they constituted 5.2 percent of the workforce. By 1920, however, the total number of children employed was again less than 1 million.

The employment of children decreased primarily because advocates for children, including religious groups and trade unions, worked to obtain protective legislation at the state level. Massachusetts had a long history of ineffective child labor legislation, the first stringent state regulation did not appear until 1903, when Illinois passed a law limiting child labor to an eight-hour day. State laws limiting hours of work, requiring minimum wages, and setting age limits were common by 1920, but additional protection was needed in certain states, such as in the cotton belt and some industrial states in the mid-South and East. In these states, the fight against child labor was waged indirectly through increases in compulsory education ages. Federal legislation that outlawed child labor was passed in 1916, but the Supreme Court struck it down on the grounds that the federal government had no power to regulate intrastate commerce. Child labor would not be effectively controlled by the federal government until the 1930s, when the Supreme Court reversed itself.