"Now They Want to Take Our Children": The Conservative Politics of the Early Twentieth-Century Movement against Child Labor Regulation

This paper examines how anti-government sentiment gained the moral upper-hand in national debates over child labor in the 1920s. During this decade, a Child Labor Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became the focal point of the movement to abolish child labor. Progressive-minded reformers argued that America's children could not be free unless they were given federal protection from the market. But an organized and powerful opposition to the Amendment argued that federal legislation of child labor violated sacred values such as patriarchal authority over the family, rural virtue, and the prerogative of churches to establish morality. Through this impassioned debate, two distinct visions of freedom in relation to the market crystallized. One necessitated federal intervention in the market while the other insisted upon its exclusion. In the 1920s, the latter vision of freedom, which imbued laissez-faire capitalism with sacred meaning and mobilized populist fears of federal power, won out. The Child Labor Amendment was never ratified. Textile and manufacturing interests had organized and funded the amendment's defeat by feeding fears of government takeover of the home, usurpation of parental authority, and destruction of the sacred Constitution. They thus achieved much more than just defeating the amendment. They mobilized millions of Americans against federal regulation of child labor by linking parental authority over children with free market ideology and anti-government sentiment, thereby creating enduring divisions in American politics.