Within the final couple of years, Individuals have rediscovered little one labor. The Nation reported that “Child Labor is Back—And It’s as Chilling as Ever” and the New York Occasions declared a “New Child Labor Crisis in America.”[1] However, as I argue in my latest JAH article, the USA by no means fully abolished little one labor.[2] After the passage of federal limitations on little one labor through the New Deal, policymakers failed to deal with the flagrant exploitation of migrant little one farmworkers and reframed different kinds of employment nearly as good for younger folks’s improvement. In truth, as I argue, by the mid-Fifties, organizations just like the Nationwide Youngster Labor Committee, which had as soon as been wholly dedicated to sustaining strict state little one labor legal guidelines, started to argue that younger folks wanted employment to be taught accountability and obtain private success. By the Sixties, poverty warriors had little to say about little one labor in any respect and the Conflict 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 little one labor thus started with a easy curiosity in what occurred to these Progressive reformers after World Conflict 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 girls skilled marginalization by the late Nineteen Forties, however I noticed I had no concept what had occurred to the Youngsters’s Bureau, the federal company staffed and run by Progressive girls who had been inquisitive about points associated to girls and kids 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 girls’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 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 girls specializing in little one welfare, had been cut up amongst numerous businesses within the federal authorities. The data of the Youngsters’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 Youngsters’s Bureau’s baroque decimal level submitting scheme. Certainly, whereas trying by the Youngsters’s Bureau’s data on the Nationwide Archives in School 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 known as the early twentieth-century “feminine dominion in American reform.”[7] By the Sixties, it appeared, establishments dedicated to the safety of girls and kids 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 puzzled, was the price of shedding a era of Progressive reformers and their establishments? As I argue within the JAH, the disappearance of girls’s Progressive establishments was related to a widescale rejection of insurance policies designed to guard girls and kids from labor exploitation after World Conflict II. Protecting labor coverage had been a central ethos of Progressive girls’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 girls, who continued to advocate for strengthening little one labor legal guidelines, had been maligned as old style and overprotective. By the Sixties, a lot of these girls had died or retired.
Regardless of this, I used to be shocked to search out that there was not a lot secondary literature that addressed little one labor after World Conflict II. Although some students discovered incidents of kid labor after World Conflict II, particularly in business agriculture, only a few handled little one 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, Youngster Staff in Agriculture, discovered near 500,000 youngsters underneath fifteen years outdated working for pay on farms. These little one laborers represented 18 % of the business agricultural workforce.[9] Of the estimated 227,000 little one 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, may need caught glimpses of youngsters at work within the fields despite the fact that many little one staff hid through the documentary capturing as a result of they weren’t imagined to be working throughout faculty hours.[11] Whilst little one labor had not gone away, the discourse round little one labor had fully remodeled.
As I gathered sources associated to points Progressive girls historically cared about, together with juvenile delinquency, childcare, little one labor, and welfare, I began to search out faculty principals, newspaper reporters, native judges, and even some federal officers arguing that one explanation for juvenile delinquency was too-strict little one labor legal guidelines. At Rutgers College Libraries, the common stacks held a number of cabinets filled 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 little one labor legal guidelines had been standing in the way in which of sending idle youngsters out to work. Curiously, few of the older girls in little one welfare circles or in girls’s voluntary organizations, just like the Nationwide Customers’ League or the Nationwide Youngster 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, shocked to search 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 Customers’ League of New Jersey and outspoken on the state’s labor points, significantly little one labor. As I seemed by Dyckman’s papers, I discovered correspondence between Dyckman and the Juvenile Delinquency Research Fee. She had, actually, testified earlier than the Fee in 1955 and had offered a chart exhibiting 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 courtroom choose David Nimmo insisted many times that she was improper and that her personal chart confirmed the other of what she stated 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 aren’t invited to talk—solely hear!”[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 cause.”[15] She enclosed a replica 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, faculty principals and different witnesses looking for to weaken little one labor restrictions argued that little one 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 “era of vipers.”[16] Thus, older girls like Dyckman, who had lengthy championed the safety of youngsters from labor exploitation and had as soon as been extensively thought-about specialists on little one welfare, had been now not even invited to take part in conversations about little one labor and juvenile delinquency.
I skilled one other shock once I ordered the microfilm data of the Nationwide Youngster Labor Committee (NCLC). The NCLC had been stalwart opponents of kid labor, dedicated to investigating circumstances for little one staff throughout the nation and lobbying state governments to take care of or strengthen their little one labor legal guidelines. I anticipated to search out the NCLC persevering with their conventional mission, albeit with waning affect. As an alternative, I discovered one thing far 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 little one labor. One historical past of the Nationwide Youngster Labor Committee argued that though not totally gone, abusive little one labor had largely been “worn out” by 1950 and one other scholar characterised the Nineteen Forties as a interval of “ultimate victory” over little one labor.[17] However I knew little one labor nonetheless existed within the Fifties. On nearer inspection, the NCLC’s correspondence minimized little one labor as a social drawback and targeted as a substitute on selling work alternatives for youngsters 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 in every single place, particularly as older Progressive girls died, retired, or had 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 folks a path to accountable maturity, I started to see it in every single 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 software for addressing younger folks’s poverty—however in selecting that software, authorities officers essentially foreclosed different coverage choices. In the meantime, as Progressive girls’s establishments had been demolished and older girls little one labor reformers, like Mary Dyckman, had been shut out of kid welfare conversations, there was nobody left to counter this dedication to employment as one of the best coverage answer for poor youth. Thus, whereas many Individuals right now most likely view these as abhorrent tales about youngsters and kids working the nightshift in slaughterhouses or lacking faculty to work development, organizations just like the Youngsters’s Bureau and the Nationwide Youngster Labor Committee, which had traditionally known as the nation to account for such abuses, are, not like little one labor itself, really gone or basically remodeled.
Vanessa Could is an affiliate professor of historical past at Hunter School, CUNY. She is the creator of Unprotected Labor: Family Staff, 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 Conflict II.
[1] Steve Fraser, “Youngster Labor in America Is Again—And It’s As Chilling as Ever,” Nation, July 13, 2023; Sabrina Tavernise, “A New Youngster Labor Disaster in America,” March 9, 2023, in The Day by day, produced by Nina Feldman and Will Reid for the New York Occasions, 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’: Youngster 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 Customers’ League, Ladies’s Activism, and Labor Requirements within the New Deal Period (2003).
[5] “Hull Home Faces Battle for Its Life,” New York Occasions, 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, Youngster Staff in Agriculture, leaflet no. 4 (1959).
[10] Bess Furman, “Farm Youngster Labor Abuse Scored; Legislation Urged to Assist All Below 14,” New York Occasions, 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 Conflict Period (1988), 74–75.
[17] Walter Trattner, Campaign for the Youngsters: A Historical past of the Nationwide Youngster Labor Committee and Youngster Labor Reform in America (1970), 225; John A. Filter, Youngster Labor in America: The Epic Authorized Battle to Shield Youngsters (2018), 191.
