The last few decades have seen a renewed interest in the history of child labor, in the United States and beyond. Oddly, that surge in scholarship has not devoted much attention to federal regulation. John Fliter’s new book addresses this gap in the literature and provides a highly valuable narrative of the long route to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Darby Lumber, the 1941 Supreme Court case that upheld the child labor sections of that historic federal action.
Fliter opens the book with an overview of the economic, legal, and social conditions that turned youthful employment into a social problem that attracted the attention of reformers. Drawing on the legal language of statutory regulation, the author is clear that he is talking about “oppressive child labor,” not all work by minors. He straightforwardly defines child labor as “the commercial employment of children seventeen and under for their labor” and acknowledges that he uses child labor “as a pejorative term” (p. 3). Indeed, throughout the book—and like most historians and other scholars—Fliter adopts the viewpoint and tone of child labor reformers, past and present. It is a work of heroes and villains, of battles won and lost, of victory eventually achieved.
After the opening chapter, the book settles into an outstanding narrative of federal lawmaking and Supreme Court adjudicating. The first serious federal effort to regulate child labor came in the form of the 1906 Beveridge Bill, named for the crusading Republican senator from Indiana, Albert Beveridge, who almost single-handedly forced the issue into congressional consideration. Here as in later chapters, Fliter does an excellent job of detailing the relationships between congressional leaders and reform groups, such as the National Child Labor Committee and the National Consumers’ League. He digs into the internal histories of those organizations, closely examining debates about policy formation and political strategy.
When Beveridge’s bill failed, federal reform waned for a spell, but during the years of World War I, a new set of congressional champions sought and eventually secured legislation that aimed to regulate child labor through the Commerce Clause and the power to tax. These bills, known popularly as the Keating-Owen Act (1916) and the Child Labor Tax Bill (1919), were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918) and Bailey v. Drexel Furniture (1922). Both cases spoke to constitutional limits on the federal police power, and Fliter provides an in-depth analysis of all sides of the ideological divide on that issue. He also outlines the role of David Clark and the Cotton Textile Association in fighting federal regulation. As in most accounts, the actual workers appear as pawns in a larger game, and it might have enriched the author’s narrative to have spent more time explaining the social and economic context from which the cases arose.
The two Supreme Court losses redirected reform efforts toward a constitutional amendment that would give Congress unequivocal power to regulate child labor, and Fliter provides the best history we have of these efforts. His story allows a close look at the way reformers understood this project, and even better, he offers a rich account of the ratification fights in key states. Particularly useful is his story of the revived attempts to ratify the Child Labor Amendment during the later years of the Great Depression.
In addition to new attempts to ratify the amendment, the Depression era story centers on the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the road to the FLSA. As might be expected, Fliter details the actions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, in securing the votes to pass historic pieces of legislation. The best part of the story here is a fine-grained account of how labor codes promulgated by the National Recovery Administration began to make a real dent in the incidence of child labor, which had actually risen because of the economic disaster besetting the country. When the Supreme Court declared sections of the NIRA unconstitutional, the game was on once again, and reformers looked for new ways to regulate child labor, now within the broader context of labor reform generally. The Constitutional Revolution of 1937 opened the door to expansive federal police powers, and congressional leaders quickly formulated new policies that eventually produced the FLSA. Such an outcome was not a foregone conclusion, however, and Fliter produces a supreme political history of these events, showing how seemingly minor events, such as Rep. Claude Pepper’s primary election win as the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Florida, changed congressional thinking on the bill.
With the FLSA signed into law, a legal challenge seemed likely, and it came in the form of US v. Darby Lumber. Describing the case as “the final victory,” Fliter concludes that it was “a bit anti-climactic but still of great consequence” (p. 213) Decided in 1941, the ruling built on the emerging constitutional shift of the previous four years to explicitly overrule Hammer and uphold congressional power to regulate the terms of labor.
The book closes with what might be described as two postscripts. The last substantive chapter briefly outlines later issues, such as access to hazardous work and the agricultural exemptions that have allowed employment of minors in farm work. A section involves controversies from the 1980s onward regarding batboys and girls, mostly in minor league baseball settings. Fliter sees child labor law as increasingly under siege by Republican politicians who have sought to weaken federal and state regulation based on the notion that young people need to acquire a strong work ethic.
The theme of social consensus breaking down pervades the actual postscript of the book, a place where Fliter writes with passion about the rise of the Tea Party movement and its concerted attempts to overturn child labor regulation. He argues that such attacks are not motivated by “genuine concern for the welfare of teenagers” (p. 234) but, rather, by the search for cheap labor in service industries. He is particularly worried about such libertarians as Jeffrey Tucker, who published an incendiary piece in 2016 with the self-explanatory title, “Let Kids Work.” Tucker’s viewpoint “reflected a person who is completely tone-deaf on the evils of child labor exploitation and the long struggle to abolish the practice” (p. 237). As with many liberals, the 2016 presidential election raised even more cause for concern that such “libertarian screeds” could not safely be contained “within a right-wing echo chamber” (p. 238). To fight against these attacks, Fliter recommends attention to the past: “A sober understanding of the history and reasons for child labor laws should inform any subsequent debate” (p. 239).
Child Labor in America is, of course, that history for the federal level. Fliter unabashedly takes sides in “the long struggle,” but he provides an in-depth look at all of the players. The book stands as an excellent analysis of the ways in which reform legislation can make it through Congress. Unsurprisingly, it demonstrates that success is a matter of both social consciousness raising and political maneuvering. And it shows that it takes a long time. For those seeking change in the present, there just might be a lesson there.
