The Fantasy
Child MythSubversive Fantasy
Commodities Sexualized Children
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Reform Law
Before it passed the National Recovery Act (NRA) in 1933, The Fair Labor Standards Board set up code hearings to receive testimony and other documentation about child labor. One letter sent to the code hearings by Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing Prison read that over 69 percent of the current men in prison, over 2300 of them, had been newboys.
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H.W. Stodghill
Louisville Courier Journal
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"...the work of the newspaper
boy is play and the newsboys earn money in the bargain..." (Trattner, 194)
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He further protested the practice of using children who were exposed to the "temptations and bad associations" of life on the street (Amidon, 9). Newsboys (pictured on left), peddlers, and bootblacks, also referred to as little merchants, were boys and girls whose parents and family needed their income. With no familial objections and determined newpaper publishers and other business owners who did not want to forfeit this cheap labor, passing legislation against the practice was difficult. The immigrant culture expected children to contribute financially and "studies of immigrant families demonstrated that that the child was an unquestioned member of the family economic unit" (Zelizer, 68). The NRA did include a section of statutes regulated the field of child labor,
but these regulations were not welcomed by big business or the courts. On January 6, 1936, the United States Supreme Court declared the Recovery Act
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Woman Patriot
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"...the surest means of safeguarding our institutions from the assaults of communism" is to defeat federal child labor legislation...(Trattner, 167)
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unconstitutional. After the Sumpreme Court's decision, thousands of children rejoined the work force. One fifteen year old child named Helen, interviewed in Survey Graphic in 1936, explained her work history. In 1932, she held a fifty-hour week factory job and attempted to do school work at night. After the NRA codes went into effect, she started attending school. When the Supreme Court declared the codes unconstitutional, she returned to the factory and a fifty-two-hour week, at 8 cents an hour. Her younger siblings also had jobs while her father remained unemployed. Helen felt that she didn't "expect [to] ever get back to school" (Amidon, 1). Children were again employed widely. Roosevelt had jumped the gun and overstated the codes ccomplishments when in his annual message to Congress in January of 1934, he stated that "child labor is abolished" (Trattner, 196).
Historically, states resisted most vehemently against child labor laws. In 1924, Congress introduced a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the federal government to regulate child labor. States vociferously campaigned against ratification. By 1925, only four states had ratified and the matter was dropped until 1933, when the Great Depression increased demands for cheap child labor. States still wouldn't hear of granting the federal government that absolute power. The constitutional amendent was never passed. The National Industrial Recovery Act tried to enact some important reform efforts in 1933, but were thwarted by the courts.
The 1940 census showed a decline in child labor from the 1930's but WWII would open up acute labor shortages and even some schools encouraged children to be patriotic and work part time. The efforts to reduce child labor in the 1940's continued and the National Child Labor Committee fought continuing battles until 1957 when it was renamed the National Committee on Employment of Youth and began focusing on the nation's itinerant children.
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