Children Freed

In London a century ago Charles Dickens got a job in a warehouse at Old Hungerford Stairs. There for twelve hours a day he tied up pot after pot of blacking, stuck labels on them, earned barely enough to eat. Years later Dickens, out of the bitterness of his own heart, wrote the horrors of child exploitation into his stories of Oliver Twist, undertaker's apprentice and thief, and of David Copperfield who toiled long'and dismally for a London wine merchant. All England was shocked and startled by Dickens' tut ionized propaganda. Resentment was quickly followed by reform. The U. S. had no great novelist to dramatize the curse of childhood.* But it did have Florence Kelley. Florence Kelley was born in Philadelphia in 1859, an Irish Quaker. Her father had been apprenticed to a jeweler, turned to law, helped nominate Lincoln at Chicago in 1860, lived to serve 29 fruitful years in the House of Representatives. Her mother was an aristocratic Bonsall. As a girl Florence was taken to Pittsburgh by her father to see a glass factory. The sight of frightened youngsters working over "the glory hole" reduced her to tears. She went to Cornell, wrote a thesis on "The Law and the Child." She worked at Chicago's Hull House, Manhattan's Henry Street Settlement, traveled abroad, became an out & out Socialist. She married a Polish count, bore him two children, took the name of Mrs. Florence Kelley after her divorce. She served four years as Illinois' first factory inspector. She helped to found the National Consumers' League, was its longtime secretary. Because her heart bled for overworked salesgirls, she started the "Shop Early For Christmas" movement in the early 1900's. She heard of a youngster who worked 17 hours a day during the Christmas rush, trotting packages between a store delivery wagon and front doors. One night the boy, too tired to go home, curled up in the back of the wagon in the stable. Someone rolled it out into the icy yard and the little worker froze to death in his sleep. Mrs. Kelley carried that story up & down the U. S. as a challenge to greedy employers, used it to launch her national drive against Child Labor. Last week Florence Kelley's grave at Brooklin, Me. was more than a year old but in Washington her cause marched on to score its biggest triumph. Cotton textile manufacturers were appearing before Industrial Recovery Administrator Johnson to get their work & wages code approved. Labor was pounding them hard for proposing to pay their employes too little ($10-$11 per week), work them too long (40 hours per week). Even the President of the U. S. last May had pointed a damning finger at them for using children in their mills. Administrator Johnson bluntly suggested that it might be a good thing specifically to outlaw child labor in the cotton code. At first the manufacturers quibbled on the ground that their minimum wage proposal would make child employment uneconomic. But that night they got together in an emergency meeting, voted to put into their code such a clause. Next day at the hearing their spokesman announced: "This brings a good deal of happiness. . . . Our industry believes that it would be helpful to the broad movement to put an express provision in the cotton textile code that the employment of minors under 16 years of age be not permitted during the emergency." The sudden end of child labor in the cotton textile industry was a smart and inexpensive concession. It deluged the employers with public approval, gave them a better leverage against Labor's extreme demands. Likewise they would be put to no great financial loss because, of the 600,000 U. S. textile workers, only about 15,000 are children, toiling mostly in the lint-laden air of Southern mills. But their child labor prohibition was packed with moral dynamite which might yet blow the anachronistic practice out of all industry. Next to cotton mills, clothing factories suck in more girls and boys than any other U. S. industry. Most of them are dark. fetid "sweatshops" where youngsters trim and stitch and sew on buttons at starvation wages. But because so much of this cheap dress & shirt work is done in tenement homes, no reliable figures are available of children employed or wages paid. In a Brooklyn factory lately investigators found 5-year-old girls making 6f an hour ($2.78 per week) threading and sponging pants. In Pennsylvania last May Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, wife of the Governor, took to the picket line as a protest against the exploitation of young girls in Northampton and Allentown shirt factories. Employers seduced 15-year-olds--or fired them. When a plant was fined for violating the State working code, the boss would take the fine out of the pay of his child laborers whose use had got him in trouble. Canning and food packing compose another industry which will have to purge itself of child labor when it brings its code to Washington for approval. Children are extensively used in the cheaper shrimp and oyster canneries along the Gulf Coast. They stand on wet, sloppy floors working at long tables until their backs are about to break. Because their product is perishable they are worked night & day at top speed. When Federal inspectors come around, the lights suddenly go out of commission.

The great bulk of child labor, however, is on farms. The 1930 census showed that of the 667,118 children under 16 gainfully employed, 469.497 were engaged in agriculture. These ranged from 6-year-old toddlers sweating in the Colorado sugar beet fields to strapping 15-year-olds strong enough to do their father's plowing.

Because State laws were weak or unenforced. Mrs. Kelley was one of the first to demand Federal legislation against child exploitation. Self-interest rather than high ideals caused organized labor to swing to her support, for every child put out of a job meant a new job for a grownup. Mrs. Kelley and the National Child Labor Committee lobbied and lobbied at Washington, finally in 1906 won a $50.000 appropriation for an investigation. It showed conditions just as bad as Mrs. Kelley expected. In 1912 the Federal Children's Bureau was created but it had no power to do anything. In 1916 the first definite child labor law was put through Congress and a great victory seemed won. But 276 days after the law went into effect the U. S. Supreme Court in a 5-10-4 decision knocked it out on the ground that Congress had exceeded its powers under the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution.

Again starting from scratch, Mrs. Kelley in 1919 helped put through legislation which imposed a penalty tax upon employers of child labor. But the Supreme Court was not to be fooled by any such oblique methods of social reform and in 1922 declared the penalty tax also unconstitutional. The Child Labor cause was at low ebb but not Mrs. Kelley's dauntless zeal. Only a Constitutional Amendment, she now realized, would do the trick and this she set out to get.

By this time Congress was growing tired of the Child Labor issue which Mrs. Kelley and her cohorts so persistently advocated in the Capitol lobbies and committee rooms. In 1924, less from conviction of right than from a desire to wash its hands of a troublesome question, it submitted child labor to the States in the form of a Constitutional Amendment. If ratified by 36 States, the Amendment would empower Congress to "limit, regulate and prohibit" the employment of persons under 18.

But the amendment was not ratified and Mrs. Kelley found herself up against the toughest fight in her whole life. Manufacturers who profited from child labor perverted the issue by telling mothers that if the amendment became law their own 17-year-old daughters would not be allowed to help them about the house. Farmers were stirred up to fight for their right to their sons' labor. Within two years, more than the necessary 13 states had voted adversely, thus blocking the chance of ratification. When Mrs. Kelley died, the Child Labor Amendment was buried with her.

But last January it rose from the tomb and under the impetus of the New Deal started a fresh march. At that time 24 States had voted "No," six "Yes" (Arizona. Arkansas, California, Colorado, Montana. Wisconsin). During the winter four more (Michigan. Ohio. Oregon and Washington ) joined the "Yes" parade. New Hampshire and North Dakota reconsidered, switched from "No" to "Yes." Last month New Jersey voted "Yes." Last week Illinois did the same. Score: 26 "No"; 14 "Yes."

Despite the amendment's spurt in the last six months it looked last week as though Mrs. Kelley's goal, once so remote and so futile, was destined to be achieved faster and better by voluntary code agreements in Washington under the pressure of an emergency than by the cumbersome constitutional method. If so. the children of the nation can thank the Depression for setting them free.

-U.S. novelists have produced only two books which made history: Uncle Tom's Cabin (slavery) and the Hungle (Chicago stockyards, pure food.)

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