"The Child Labor Amendment Debate of the 1920s"

The movement to regulate child labor began as a New Eng­land parlor revolt against industrialism, or at least its grimier, more noisome aspects. Gradually, well-intentioned reformers with modest goals gave way to socialists whose reconstructionist dreams included the interposition of the state between the parent and the child.

The "gaunt goblin army”[5]of teenaged workers was cashiered by a series of laws prohibiting employment and prescribing schooling. Mission, ostensibly, accomplished. But the triumph was incomplete: the Child Labor Amendment to the Constitution was rejected. Thwarted were what Columbia University President Nicholas Mur­ray Butler called "more far-reaching. .. changes in our family, social, economic, and political life than have heretofore been dreamed of by the most ardent revolutionary.[6]

Nascent American industries frequently employed families of the working class. Alexander Hamilton had remarked, in his "Report on Manufactures," that "children are rendered more useful ... by manufacturing establishments than they would otherwise be."[7]

As the mill towns grew, so did the conviction of many genteel ladies that boys and girls ought to be scholars, not mill doffers. Ella Wheeler Wilcox keened:

In this boasted land of freedom there are bonded baby slaves,
And the busy world goes by and does not heed.
 They are driven to the mill, just to glut and overfill
Bursting coffers of the mighty monarch, Greed.
When they perish we are told it is God's will,
Oh, the roaring of the mill, of the mill![8]

Contrasting views of child labor are found in the novels of Horatio Alger and the Gilded Age fictions of a passel of New England women novelists.

Alger did not neglect the vice and dirt that spattered the forlorn "Child of the Street," but his glasses were tinted roseate. Tatterde­malion boys full of pluck and guile acted out the Algerian philosophy that "in the boot-blacking business, as well as in higher avocations, the same rule prevails, that energy and industry are rewarded, and indolence suffers."[9]Labor neither ennobles nor degrades the poor boy; it is simply necessary to his advancement.

(Alger hero Ragged Dick Hunter was not immune to the depraving influences of the street. His newsboy career ended when he sold out his New York Heralds with the pitch, "Queen Victoria Assassinated!")[10]

There were no indomitable Ragged Dicks in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's influential 1871 novel, The Silent Partner. Phelps's heroine, the righteous spinster Perley Kelso, is the daughter of a Massachu­setts mill owner. Upon learning that "factory girls ate black molasses and had the cotton-cough,"[11]Perley undertakes the reformation of the Five Falls working class. Weekly teas are inaugurated, at which millhands mix with proper Boston girls; the beaux-arts are culti­vated; pacified and uplifted, the workers cheerfully accept a pay cut.

The Silent Partner is a charmingly naive piece of didacticism by a woman whom Vernon Parrington called "an Andover Brahmin, highly sensitive, whose deeply religious nature was ruffled by every vagrant wind." [12] Perley Kelso presaged a new generation of reforming women for whom the home—the working class home, at least—was no longer the inviolable castle defined by William Pitt: "The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail—the roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter—but the King of England can not enter; all his forces may not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."

After Perley meets the eight-year-old urchin Bub Mell, a billingsgate-spewing millboy and marble-sharp, she barges into Mell pere's apartment and confronts the feckless dad: "He was out so late about the streets, Mr. Mell. He uses tobacco as most children use candy. And a child of that age ought not to be in the mills, sir, he ought to be at school! .. . The stairs in this house are in shocking condition. What is—excuse me—the very peculiar odor which I notice on these premises?"[13]

Poor Mell's ruined tenement launches Perley on a life of good works. She never will marry; reform is her spouse. The Mell threshold offers as little resistance to her as a turnstile. Years later, the Woman Patriot would note of the schemes of Perley's living breathing counterparts: "It is solely the poor man's right of castle that is sacrificed."[14]

* * *

How many Ragged Dicks and Bub Mells were there? The federal census reported that in 1880, 1.18 million.children between the ages of 10 and 15 (16.8 percent of all such children) were "gainfully employed." In 1890 that number climbed to 1.75 million (18.2 percent) and in 1910,1.99 million (18.4 percent).

But these two million were hardly a gaunt goblin army: Census-takers enumerated those farm children who constituted a "material addition" to the family income. Plowboys and farmers' daughters far outnumbered young cannery and coal mine workers. Of the two million child laborers counted in the 1910 census, 72 percent were farm kids, about 85 percent of whom worked on the family acres.

Farm labor, admittedly exhausting, was at first unassailable by the Perley Kelsos. Outdoor chores were salubrious, offering "none of the hazards of mines and factories to the growing body and soul."[15]Novelist Hamlin Garland, no dreamy pastoralist, wrote: "There are certain ameliorations to child labor on a farm. Air and sunshine and food are plentiful. I never lacked for meat or clothing, and mingled with my records of toil are exquisite memories of the joy I took in following the changes in the landscape, in the notes of birds, and in the play of small animals on the sunny soil.”[16]

Moreover, farm children worked under the direction of their parents. They ate and wore the fruits of their labor, inspiring Jefferson's comment that "every family in the country is a manu­factory within itself, and is very generally able to make within itself all the stouter and middling stuffs for its own clothing and household use."[17]

So Hamilton's useful drudges in the factories, mills, and mines were the first candidates for deliverance. Next would be the tens of thousands of Ragged Dicks plying the street trades on city sidewalks. The farms were as yet off-limits—awaiting a Progressive Movement.

It all began in New England. In 1836, Massachusetts barred children under 15 from jobs in manufacturing unless they had attended school for at least three of the preceding 12 months. (The best child-labor law is compulsory schooling, went the maxim.) Six years later, the Bay State forbade children under 12 from working more than ten hours a day; by midcentury, every state in the region had similar restrictions. By century's end, 28 states had enacted child-labor laws, usually setting a minimum age (14 for factory work), prohibiting nightwork, and requiring school attendance.

In 1872, the Prohibitionists become the first party to nail a child-labor plank into their platform. (Half a century later, Child Labor Amendment foes would be arraigned as wets, reactionary kid-abusing sots.) The cause attracted dozens of Democratic and Republican paladins, though the parties did not formally endorse federal legislation until 1912, when a bidding war erupted for the votes of Progressives.

This "crusade for the children," as its adult warriors dubbed it, bogged down in the South. Parents, many of them new in the mill towns, just in from the piedmont or the hardscrabble, "felt the children should continue to do their part to help support the family, just as they had done on the farm."[18]

Sectional enmity flared. The reformers, largely of Northeastern mint, were seen as meddling do-gooders at best, agents of New England mills at worst. David Clark, the pugnacious editor of the Southern Textile Bulletin, claimed—without adducing much evidence—that the crusade "was financed to a considerable extent by New England cotton manufacturers in order to reduce competition."[19]

(In 1900, only 10 percent of minors employed in industry were of the South; nonetheless, the region came to be associated with this social blight. The actual number of non-agricultural child laborers was higher in Pennsylvania than in every Confederate state combined.)

Even Southern proponents of child-labor laws resented outside interference. Populist South Carolina Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman, a charter member of the National Child Labor Commit­tee, railed against "Northern millionaires who have gone down there and built mills and made industrial slaves out of white children instead of the chattel black slaves of the old days."[20](Yankee activists also spoke ominously of the "race degeneracy and race suicide"[21]committed when white tykes toddled off to the mills while black kids went to school.)

Episcopal clergyman Edgar Gardner Murphy, a son of Fort Smith, Arkansas, who was trained at Columbia University and the General Theological Seminary, emerged as the movement's Southern Knight.

Murphy, though no agrarian—"the cotton mills," he wrote, "indeed our factories of every sort, are bringing their blessings to the South"[22]—lamented the ruin of derusticated families. Fathers, indispensable on the farm, were less so in the factory. The idle papa, lazing and drinking while mama and junior toiled the livelong day, became an object of obloquy. "Back of nearly every child at work," steamed Miss Jean M. Gordon, Factory Inspector of Louisiana, "is a lazy, shiftless father or an incompetent mother.”[23]

The mills tore at the family in other ways. Murphy explained: "Upon the farm the child labors, as it labors in the home, under the eye of a guardianship which is usually that of the parent, which is full of a parental solicitude. ... In the factory the child works as an industrial unit, a little member of an industrial aggregate, under an oversight which must, of necessity, be administrative rather than personal."[24]

At Murphy's prodding, in 1903 his adopted state of Alabama forbade children under 12 from working in factories—the strictest standard in the South. By decade's end, every state legislature in the South, save that of Georgia, had passed a minimum-age law. (Oglethorpe's commonwealth did punish able-bodied fathers who lived off the labor of their progeny.)

Murphy's abilities—and his Southern pedigree—won him a following in New York City. He and Felix Adler founded the National Child Labor Committee on April 15, 1904, at Carnegie Hall. The NCLC was small but puissant; its directorate read like a Who's Who of plutocrats and uplifters, virtually all resident in New York City and its overspill: John D. Rockefeller, E.H. Harriman, J.P. Morgan, Paul Warburg, Andrew Carnegie, Adolph C. Ochs, Gifford Pinchot, and a flock of "idle-rich, sentimental, good-hearted women."[25]Southern cousins included future Georgia Governor Hoke Smith and the aforementioned firebrand Tillman.

(Tillman excepted, the NCLC and kindred organizations had no luck recruiting Populists and other agrarian radicals. Paternalism ran counter to the Populist character. Says Casy, the itinerant preacher in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath: "On'y one thing in this worl' I'm sure of, an' that's I'm sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella's life. He got to do it all hisself. Help him, maybe, but not tell him what to do.")

The NCLC lobbied state legislatures to: set minimum ages of 14 in manufactures and 16 in mining; limit children to an eight-hour day; and ban work after 7 p.m. The Southern cotton mills, the Pennsylania coal mines where "breaker boys" picked slate and slag from the black chutes, coastal canneries, and urban street trades were the NCLC's prime targets.

The newsboy's life, so picturesque, came in for special condemnation. Sing Sing Warden Lewis E. Lawes testified that 69 percent of his inmates had hawked dailies.[26]Profanity, gambling, fast women, even "the dubious frankfurter"[27]conspired to corrupt the Ragged Dicks of the pavement. Messenger boys faced even greater temptations: polemicist John Spargo despaired, "Sad to relate, boys like to be employed in 'red-light' districts.[28]

Alger notwithstanding, few Ragged Dicks were orphans. NCLC operative E.C. Clopper found that over 75 percent of 400 Cincinnati newsboys were from intact families. Myron E. Adams, a New York City social worker, determined that "only a very small number" of boys in the street trades were from alms-deserving families. Josephine Goldmark reported that just one-quarter of the incarcerated ex-newsboys she studied were raised by widows. [29] The point that Clopper et al. wanted to make was that the labor of children was not necessary to the economic life of the family; dad's wages (and maybe mom's too) were sufficient. Inadvertently, they painted a picture of the newsboy as the product of a solid home.

* * *

The battle shifted to Washington after a marathon three-day speech in January 1907 by Senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN), an apostle of Teddy Roosevelt progressivism. Beveridge's address was filled with fantastic allegations, though none dared call them mendacious. Relying on the notarized depositions of socialists Scott Nearing, Florence Kelley, and John Spargo, Beveridge narrated lurid tales of thumbless boys and girls who "don't know how to play.”[30]  He concluded, "More than a million children are dying of overwork or being forever stunted and dwarfed in body, mind, and soul.”[31]

Child labor was an evil to be extirpated, in the same way that lotteries and obscene literature had been forever banished from God's republic: by federal law. (In a colloquy with Senator Tillman, Beveridge volunteered, "I have no objection to the working of children in the open air; . . . labor on a farm within their strength is a good thing."[32]But once out of the gate, the horse soon outran the senator.)

Beveridge proposed to prohibit the interstate transportation of articles produced in factories or mines that employed children under 14. His bill rent the NCLC asunder. Its New York City dominated board endorsed it, prompting Edgar Gardner Murphy, a principled states rightser, to resign. (Unwilling to let its prize Southerner slip away, the NCLC rescinded its support of federal action, at least until Reverend Murphy died in 1913, at which time the committee replunged into Washington's turbid sea.)

Once into the drink, the Beveridge bill began its long upstream swim against states rights eddies. Meanwhile, a Federal Children's Bureau was created within the Department of Commerce and Labor. This information-gathering agency, invaluable in the coming propaganda war, boasted a payroll reading like Hull House East.

The Bureau bill's supporters professed its innocuousness. We already gather data on the "diseases of hogs and cattle and sheep,"[33]    they reasoned; aren't kids at least as important?

Opponents harped on the threat that the Bureau's investigators might pose to the poor man's right of castle. "The unmarried of the country who know how to raise children”[34]will be loosed upon "the class that is most helpless in their hands—those who toil for a living,"[35]warned Senator Weldon Heyburn (ID). Why, these uplifters would've "taken Abraham Lincoln from his parents' care . . . Some committee . . . would have gone down there and said, 'What, allow that child to lie down there and eat corn pone and hoecake by the hearth; he can not possibly amount to anything; we want to take him down to the headquarters, where we are drawing salaries for taking care of that kind of people.'"[36]

By a 39-34 vote, Heyburn and Senator Charles A. Culberson (TX) added a right-of-castle amendment to the bill: "No official or representative of said bureau shall, over the objection of the head of the family, enter any . . . family residence.”[37]Notice had been served; there were limits beyond which the child savers could not go. Thus amended, the Bureau bill passed, 54-20; President Taft signed it into law on April 9, 1912. Hull Houser Julia Lathrop was appointed to head the Children's Bureau, with a modest budget of $25,000 at her disposal.

Defenders of child labor in the mills and factories at first favored paternalistic arguments. Thomas Dawley, Jr., a disgruntled government inspector of Southern mills, indicted the muckrakers for "misrepresentations so gross ... as fairly to astound an unbiased mind.[38]Sent to Asheville, Dawley looked up that city's two most prominent children's crusaders: a minister and a social worker newly arrived from New York City—neither of whom had ever been inside a cotton mill. When Dawley entered, he found "bright, vivacious”[39]mill girls and "happy and contented"[40]boys, working none too hard and learning in mill-built schools. Contrasted with the "mountain homes of squalor"[41]Dawley had seen, the mills were godsends. A Tennessee innkeeper told Dawley, "Why, thar' ain't enough cotton-mills to take care o' them poor chil'ren what's in our mountains. If thar' only war ... it would be the greates' thing in the world fer 'em,"[42]

Apologists played up the advantages of living in a company town: steady wages, nearby churches and schools and libraries, public parks, indeed, civilization.[43]

The sweat and toil of children was said to be indispensable. Lewis B. Parker, a Greenville, South Carolina cotton manufacturer, explained, "All the people who are poverty stricken or who can not make a success of anything else have gravitated to the cotton mills." The pool of skilled adult labor was yet too small: "We can not possibly [move] from . . . agriculturalism to . . . industrialism without the employment of minors."[44]

Julia Magruder, replying in the North American Review to "ignorant sentimentalists"[45]who bled sugar over the two million scurvy wretched baby slaves, claimed: "The class from which the millhands in the South are drawn is the very lowest . . . (Praise be] the elevating and civilizing influence of the cotton-mills."[46]

Hadn't New England long demanded the mental and spiritual maturation of poor Southern whites? Emerson was willing to accept worse cotton if it meant better men; well, the mill towns were improving both.

Mill families themselves were downright hostile to the prohibitionists. "Some of the most devoted advocates of child labor … were the young themselves and their own parents,"[47]noted one labor historian. Southern parents, to the bitter dismay of reformers, evaded the laws by lying about the ages of their offspring.

Northerners were no less obdurate. Inconveniently for the NCLC, child laborers were neither mute nor idiot; many resented their benefactresses. Inspector Helen Todd asked 500 children in 20 Chicago factories, "If your father had a good job, and you didn't have to work, which would you rather do—go to school or work in a factory?"[48]To Miss Todd's horror, 412 chose the factory.

Looking back, many adults no doubt rue spending their nonage at hard labor. Bertha Awford Black, after a lifetime in the Amazon Mills in Thomasville, North Carolina, recalled, "We'd go out there behind the mill at the warehouse and us girls we'd build us a little playhouse until they'd whistle for us and yell, 'Time for the doffers to piece up again.' Just nothing but children. You know, that ought to have been stopped a long time before it was. We didn't get no education. We weren't old enough to go to work. That thar child labor law was wonderful when it came in_: We, everyone, should have been in school."[49]

Amen, said the NCLC. Secretary A.J. McKelway urged laws "compelling the ignorant and indifferent parent to send his children to school."[50]By 1914, only Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas lacked compulsory education laws, although the average rural school year was still 40 days less than the urban term. If the nation was not yet "a vast kindergarten,”[51]as Alonzo B, See of the A.B. See Elevator Company complained, at least yesterday's bonded baby slaves had been legislated into school.

To David Clark's question, "What are you going to do for them when you throw them out of the milk?"[52]the child savers shouted with vigor, "Educate them!" (In 1918, the NCLC joined with the National Education Association to propose the creation of a federal Department of Education.)

"To keep the child from going to work," wrote historian Walter Trattner, "they had to follow him into the school, the street, and the home."[53]Families might resist remodeling at first, but not to worry: in NCLC executive Gertrude Folks Zimand's chilling aphorism, "Laws make morals.”[54]

That faith in the state as the fount of all things good suffused Children in Bondage, a 1914 tract coauthored by poet Edwin Markham, Denver Judge Benjamin Lindsey, and George Creel, later chief propagandist for President Wilson's notorious Committee on Public Information. This remarkable best-seller contains wild assertions—"the average life of the children after they go into the mills is four years"[55]; three of five home-knitters die of tuberculosis[56]—that rival Creel's later concoctions of rampaging Huns and the villainy of Eugene V, Debs.

The book reads like a purple parody: apple-cheeked munchkins peer into "the crater of death,”[57]while "greed plays with loaded dice and the little player loses all.”[58]      But shorn of its goofy grandilo­quence, Children in Bondage offers us a frank progressive view of child, parent, and state.

The authors are particularly exercised over "homework," i.e., the embroidering, stitching, and making of artificial flowers and such by mothers and their tots in tenements. Homework was nigh-impossible to regulate; New York law, for instance, required only that a tenement be "sanitary." Once her building was licensed, mother could direct her children as she pleased.

Markham tells of a widow who applied for a homework permit in New York City. She desired to sew at home and watch over her baby while her boys attended school and sold papers at dawn and dusk. The permit was denied; the relict's home reeked of "stench and filth." So she went to work in a factory, and the boys quit school to care for the infant.

A bureaucratic injustice? No, says Markham. "In denying to mothers the right to work at home for their helpless young, and in denying to little children the right to work for needy mothers, it may seem that the law sets a cruel foot upon the neck of the broken poor. But for the larger good of humanity these denials must be: the public and the child must be protected, and the safeguard against inhumanity lies in the statute's recognition of motherhood as a service."[59]

Until the home came within the state's purview, the triune authors advised, "work on all marketed goods had to be brought into the shop and placed under factory laws.”[60]

Mill apologists and hidebound states rights Democrats were no match for the Children's Crusaders, whose progress was braked, for a time, only by the men in the White House. Disre­garding the 1912 Republican platform, President Taft opposed federal child-labor legislation as unconstitutional. His successor, Woodrow Wilson, agreed. (The Virginian in Wilson surfaced at the oddest times.)[61]

Hopeful that the President had shed his strict constructionist skin—the awesome responsi­bilities of office are a molting force—a delegation of social workers came a-calling, soliciting support for Congressman A. Mitchell Palmer's NCLC-drafted child-labor bill. Palmer, a Pennsyl­vania Democrat and future Attorney General—from which position he orchestrated the Red Scare—sought to ban the interstate transport of articles produced by (1) children under 14 who worked in factories or under 16 who toiled in mines; (2) children under 16 who worked more than eight hours a day; or (3) children under 16 who worked between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. Only about 150,000 of the land's two million young workers would be affected; the army of newsboys and farmkids and bowling-pin setters was beyond the edifying reach of Mr. Palmer's bill. (By 1912, 31 and 22 states already met the mine and factory standards, respectively; 31 states had adopted the eight-hour day, and 28 had banned nightwork for minors.)

The measure was flatly unconstitutional, Wilson lectured his supplicants, but he pledged neu­trality.[62]The Palmer Bill passed the lame-duck House in February 1915, 233^13, over the protests of South Atlantic legislators, who prevented a companion Senate bill from coining to the floor.

The measure sailed through the next Congress, passing the House 337-46 and the Senate 52-12. The debate was brief and insipid; Congressman George F. O'Shaunessy (RI) confidently asserted that "this bill is in line with the enlightened progress of the age; in line with advanced thought."[63]His colleague C.F. Reavis (NE) added, "Down deep in the subconscious of the childhood of America lies embryonic greatness."[64](If nothing else, the Congressional Record of the era confirms the brilliancy of Sinclair Lewis's ear. No doubt about it: these men knew Coolidge.)

Out of the feeble murmuring opposition one voice carried. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, the NCLC pioneer, staked his position: "The United States had assumed the right to enter the homes of the people and tell them how they must rear their children, and how, when, and where they must work them . . . The Prussianizing of our free Republic will have begun. Little by little the Central Government would finally assume all the powers of Government, the States would sink to the level of mere counties, and Washington's control over the remainder of the country would be not less complete than Berlin's over all of Germany."[65]

President Wilson, locked in a tight race with progressive Republican Charles E. Hughes, reversed field. He signed the bill, with the rather unseemly boast, "I congratulate the country and felicitate myself."[66]Southern textile operative David Clark hunted up a North Carolina mill-worker, Roland Dagenhart, whose 13-year-old son John would be fired and whose 15-year-old son Reuben would see his daily hours cut from eleven to eight. Federal Judge James E. Boyd of the western district of North Carolina pronounced the law unconstitutional; so, too, on June 3, 1918, did the Supreme Court.[67]

The Court's 5—4 decision was written by Justice William Rufus "Good" Day, a Ravenna, Ohio, attorney whose "faith in the small town as a symbol of the American brand of democracy"[68]yielded his distrust of all centralized power, political and economic. Under such a broad reading of the interstate commerce clause, Day wrote, "freedom of commerce will be at an end, and the power of the States over local matters may be eliminated, and thus our system of government be practically destroyed."[69]

Progressives were aghast. In The New Republic, Edwin S. Corwin fumed, "At a moment when the government is directing the mines, the factories, and the farms of the nation, is saying what price producers shall receive for their products, is conscripting the manhood of the country for the national armies, it is informed that it cannot regulate commerce with the end in view of conserving the health of those of whom its future armies must be composed."[70]

A new tack was chosen. Our future soldiers would be protected by Senator Atlee Pomerene (D-OH), who proposed to levy a 10 percent tax on the net profits of those industries whose practices violated the standards of the Palmer Bill. The Senate approved Pomerene's amendment by 50-12 on December 18,1918; friendly organs christened it "the children's Christmas present." The House voted 312-11 for Pomerene's tax, and President Wilson signed it into law on February 24, 1919.

Again, Southern textile manufacturers found an aggrieved family to challenge the law; again, Judge Boyd voided the law in western North Carolina; again, the Supreme Court heard the case; again, the high court struck down the law, this time by a vote of 8—1. This time, most liberals concurred with the Court; Felix Frankfurter called Pomerene's levy "a dishonest use of the taxing power." He advised his nationalizing friends at The New Republic, "We must pay a price for Federalism."[71]

***

Discouraged reformers turned to their last resort: a constitutional amendment.

The Great War had swelled the national government to an aggressive plumpness much admired by Progressives. Washington had conscripted youth, set prices, and jailed dissenters. The 18th amendment had banned the sale of spirits; the 19th amendment had forced refractory states to grant women the vote; a 20th amendment giving Congress the power to regulate child labor seemed a small step indeed. The Bourbons were weary; as one dejected state legislator whined, "They have taken our women away from us by constitutional amendment; they have taken our liquor away from us; and now they want to take our children.”[72]

The centralizing trend seemed inexorable. Localism's disrepute was such that Children's Bureau chief Grace Abbott could say, "The issue of states' rights has never been raised in behalf of a good cause."[73]

The push for an amendment began as the child-labor force was shrinking apace. State laws had been toughened: all but two states now banned children under 14 from the factories, and 30 states had adopted the eight-hour day.

The number of working minors had fallen from 1.99 million (18.4 percent of all children) in 1910 to 1.06 million (8.5 percent) in 1920. Far and away the majority of this million (647,000) labored on farms—90 percent of them on their parents' land. The percentage of children aged 10-15 who worked at non-agricultural jobs had slipped from 7.1 in 1900 to 5.2 in 1910 and 3.3 in 1920.

Bub Mell had entered public school. Barely 20,000 youngsters were employed as cotton mill operatives in 1920; fewer than 6,000 worked in the coal mines.

The South—the godforsaken South, as it was known in Northeastern salons—was still considered the Evilest Place. Alabama and South Carolina led the country in child workers (24 percent), but the vast majority of these were farm kids. Discounting agricultural labor, the South had proportionately fewer young toilers than the Middle Atlantic, the East North Central, or even the New England states.[74]

More than a score of amendment resolutions were introduced; the principal sponsors were Congressman Israel Foster (OH) and Senators Medill McCormick (IL) and Samuel Shortlidge (CA). As reported onto the House and Senate floors, the amendment read:

Section 1. The Congress shall have the power to limit, regulate, and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age.

Section 2. The power of the several states is unimpaired by this article except that the operation of State laws shall be suspended to the extent necessary to give effect to legislation enacted by the Congress.

Two features gave lukewarm supporters pause.[75]First, the use of 18 years instead of 16. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, among others, counseled the tenderer age, but, he later recalled, "the lunatic fringe was demanding two years more than was attainable."[76]

Second, the use of the term "labor" rather than "employment" was a tactical—and revealing— blunder. Only now, after 20 years of agitation by the NCLC and the Hull Housers, did ordinary Americans catch a hint that the child-labor movement had grander aims than simply taking Amanda out of the mill.

Grace Abbott was responsible for the substitution: she explained, "Children often work with their parents, and are not on the payroll."[77]Mary Kilbreth of the Woman Patriot immediately grasped the import of the word "labor": "A girl making the bed or washing the dishes, That is labor. Or a boy helping his father milk the cows."[78]Surely these homely chores were not to be brought within Washington's bailiwick—or were they?

Congressional hearings gave the barest foretaste of the coming fight. Virtually every civic organi­zation in the land lined up behind the Child Labor Amendment: the National Education Association, the American Legion, the Camp Fire Girls, the League of Women Voters, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, the PTA, the YWCA. .. even Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

The two best-known witnesses against the amendment, Southern Textile Bulletin editor David Clark and James A. Emery of the National Association of Manufacturers, were dismissed as mouthpieces of the child-exploiters. Also testifying were a stream of obscure self-styled "constitutionalists," most of them from Sopping Wet Maryland. They were paid little heed, but they adumbrated two of the most devastating anti-amendment themes.[79]

First—and no one disputed this—is that the Child Labor Amendment was cousin-german to Prohibition. Drunkard fathers necessitated the 18th amendment; indolent dads would force the 20th upon us.[80]American men were dissolute bums whose failings cried out for Washington's remedies.

The second discordant note was introduced by Willis R. Jones, representing the Women's Constitutional League of Maryland: "The fathers and the mothers are better prepared to pass judgement upon the needs and the welfare of their children than this Congress is, or than the Children's Bureau. I know not who the Children's Bureau is composed of: I have heard intimations that there are not many mothers connected with [it].”[81]

The charge that pro-amendment women were hypocrite humanitarians who bled for the abstraction "Child" but blanched at real, live, fleshy bloody tykes was rude . .. and clever . .. and partly true. When American Bar Association President Clarence E. Martin referred to "the maiden ladies resident in Hull House, Chicago, ... a hotbed of radicalism,”[82]the implication was clear: the child savers were officious spinsters, lesbians, and Reds.

Grace Abbott, Lillian Wald, Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Katharine Lumpkin, Florence Kelley: Messrs. Martin and Jones, however tactless, had a point. National Consumers League chief Kelley, the amendment's lobbyist-dynamo, had been a fervid Socialist Laborite until she was expelled by the party on the (possibly trumped-up) charge of misusing funds.

Marcet Haldeman-Julius, Jane Addams's niece, told of visiting her "Aunt Jenny" at Hull House and finding her distant, impersonal, cold.

"She isn't a very auntly person," I (aged six) complained to my mother on one of our visits.

"That," I was informed in a tone of rebuke, "is because she is aunt to so many. She hasn't much time for each of you.”[83]

The childlessness of the child savers became a favorite refrain. Pennsylvanian Edward J. Maginnis wrote in a widely circulated open letter: "One class of citizens composed principally of cultured men and women of small or no families at all, living in comfort, albeit with good intentions, are attempting to force legislation on the industrial class, composed mostly of humble, stalwart men and women of large families."[84]

The Woman Patriot, an anti-suffrage organ refitted for the broader "defense of the family against the state," entered the fray with articles alternately cogent and screed-like. Miss Mary C. Kilbreth, its president, picked up the ball carried years ago by Senator Weldon Heyburn. "As women," she testified, "we are particularly concerned [about] the right of castle aspect of this amendment.[85]

This phrase, worn threadbare over the next year, drove reformers up the wall. "The home is the castle!" jeered two socialist researchers. "Have they seen the 'castles' out of which child workers come?" Shiftless or absent fathers; overworked skeletal mothers; poor little Bub Mell in his fetid cell, his mill town hell, a slangy kid headed for the pen . . .[86]

Labor for teenagers did find its defenders. "Give the children a chance to work," pleaded the principal of a girls' trade school. "Give at least as much attention to fostering work habits in all as we give to restrictive legislation which affects relatively few."[87]

Miss Kilbreth of the Woman Patriot declared, "We are oppressed with white collarism. It is absurd that we Americans, who are supposed to be a democracy, have a contempt for manual work . .. We have been a resourceful, self-reliant, energetic people, and I contend that this amendment would result in the practical-minded children becoming idlers and loafers, and by the implied stigma on work in this amendment there would be more overcerebralized young intellectuals, from whom the radicals are recruited and who are the curse of society."[88]

Miss Kilbreth and others unbeholden to industrial interests saw child labor as good and proper to a Jeffersonian America. Elders taught skills to youngsters that would enable them to live, in adulthood, as independent freeholders, sturdy hard-working unbought and unbossed citizens of the republic. The Hamiltonian uses of children—as cogs in a mighty industrial empire—went undefended in the 1920s. David Clark and the National Association of Manufacturers played states rights tunes instead.

Kilbrethians saluted the salutary effects of wholesome work. Senator Bayard reminded scripture-spouting legislators that "as a boy of 12 Jesus worked in a carpenter's shop ... He received no detriment from doing so, and He grew up to be the most wonderful man in the world."[89]No one dared gainsay Bayard.

But carpenters and mill-hands were small in number; the vast majority of "child workers" were farm boys and girls. Grace Abbott assured solons that banning field work was the furthest thing from her mind, but the amendment mustn't exempt agriculture because, well, who knew what conditions would obtain in rural America in 50 years? (That rural America would very nearly cease to exist occurred to no one.)

Miss Abbott may have been an honest sort—although immediately after the amendment's death she announced her support for federal regulation of family farm labor. Her comrades, though, were either disingenuous or liars. NCLC secretary Lovejoy, for instance, claimed that "the farm child is frequently getting too much work, too little schooling, and too little developmental care . . . He is too often a mere drudge who will grow up an ignorant, inefficient worker."[90]Yet Lovejoy hastened to add: "There is no thought on the part of advocates of this amendment to have the Federal Government interfere with the conditions of children on farms.[91]

The NCLC disgorged study after study confirming the dreariness of the georgic world and the imbecility of its inmates. E.G. Lindeman found that "farm life in general does not produce a degree of mental alertness and neuromuscular co-ordination essential to an enthusiastic and optimistic outlook on life."[92]

The romantic vision of an American Arcadia was a joke; its cultured defenders were "type­writer agrarians," scoffed H.L. Mencken. Twenty years earlier Populist Tom Watson had com­plained, "It takes these city fellows to draw ideal pictures of farm life—pictures which are no more true to real life than a Fashion Plate is to an actual man or woman."[93]Progress kicked small farmers into towns that more often resembled Winesburg than Friendship Village. However unwittingly—Edgar Lee Masters, after all, was a Jeffersonian, and Mencken an anarchist—the debunkers of rural virtue blazed a path for the Remolders.

With deliberate speed, the Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation rolled into opposition. Amendment foes had found their hook: defense of the 40-acre family. Congressman Fritz G. Lanham (TX) brought down the House with his mock psalm:

Consider the Federal agent in the field; he toils not, nor does he spin; and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his populous household was not arrayed with powers like one of these.

Children, obey your agents from Washington, for this is right.

Honor thy father and thy mother, for the Government has created them but a little lower than the Federal agent. Love, honor, and disobey them.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, tell it to thy father and mother and let them do it.

Six days shaft thou do all thy rest, and on the seventh day thy parents shall rest with thee.

Go to the bureau officer, thou sluggard; consider his -ways and be idle.

Toil thou farmer's wife; thou shalt have no servant in thy house, nor let thy children help thee.

And all thy children shall be taught of the Federal agent, and great shall be the peace of thy

children. Thy children shall rise up and call the Federal agent blessed.[94]

How odd, how unsettling for us, in this age of the DEA and the IRS, to read of the deep-seated antipathy that conservatives of the 1920s had for Federal officers. Some warned of "house-to-house and farm-to-farm searches for youthful workers.[95]      The Woman Patriot prevised "vicious espionage and invasion of the homes of the people in violation of Article IV of the Bill of Rights by swarms of bureaucrats from Washington with inquisitorial powers. It is absurd to pretend that these salaried professional humanitarians would have the interest of the youth of distant States as much at heart as the mothers who bore them or the communities in which they live."[96]

(The cost of administering these laws, through a host of bureaus and agents, never became an issue. When nagged for a dollar estimate, Grace Abbott sighed, "I would hate to have any cost value put on what we were doing for the child."[97])

Burlesques and dire prophecies were—yet— no match for the child savers. The House approved the Child Labor Amendment on April 26, 1924, by a vote of 297-69.[98]

The outstanding Senate foe of the amendment was James Wadsworth (R-NY), issue of the Genesee Valley's hoariest aristocrats. Although detested by many of their neighbors as fox-hunting twits who abused the hired help in phony accents, the Wadsworths, like many old families, had an admirable sense of civic-mindedness, an almost proprietary feeling toward the republic.

The old America was slipping away from Wadsworth; his revered Constitution had become the instrument of wrenching social change. "We are whittling away at the structure established by the fathers," the Senator lamented. "If we whittle long enough, we will destroy it.”[99]

Wadsworth had especial loathing for uplifters and their constitutional amendments. He was New York's most vocal Wet; he and his wife, the daughter of John Hay, were the country's leading anti-women's suffrage couple. Now came yet another amendment striking at local rule—which in the Genesee Valley meant Wadsworth Rule.[100]

Although his motley Senate coalition was defeated on June 2, 1924, by 61—23, James Wadsworth introduced an issue that would, in six months time, scuttle the Child Labor Amend­ment. Congress, he predicted, would someday legislate "that no person of 17 years of age . .. shall be permitted to do a certain kind of work unless that person had a certain kind of education; not only a certain amount of schooling but the kind of schooling."[101]

American Catholicism waked. The Church was besieged on several fronts. Prohibition was widely regarded as a swipe against "rum and romanism." The Klan was enjoying a brief resur­gence. New York Governor Al Smith had been denied the 1924 Democratic nomination for president partly on the papist question.

Even more alarming, Oregon had effectively outlawed private schools in a 1922 initiative. (The Oregon law, which required children between the ages of eight and sixteen to attend public schools, was struck down in 1925 by a unanimous Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters.) A similar initiative was on the Michigan ballot in November 1924; anti-Catholics and Progressives had declared war on the parochial school.[102]

By the time the Child Labor Amendment was sent to the 48 states, a massive shift in popular sentiment was underway. The opposition had once consisted of mill-owners and Southern politi­cians whose valentines to the Anti-Saloon League made their orotund invocations of states rights seem like so much fustian. Now, as the amendment came before state legislatures, a fresh coalition assembled: the Catholic Church, farmers, anti-feminists, Northern Mugwumps (Senator Wadsworth, Nicholas Murray Butler, Elihu Root), and ordinary families afeard of the encroach­ment of the state and childless do-gooders. Bub Mell's dad was fighting back.

Arkansas was the first state to ratify the amendment, in late June, after which, the deluge. State after state, including progressive bastions, rejected the measure. In Georgia, where the repudiation was unanimous, State Representative McCorsey declared: "I don't want any more monkeying with the buzz-saw by that bunch in Washington. We don't mix nohow. We weren't born under the same regime and don't drink out of the same bottle."[103](The suspicion that Massachusetts manufacturers were pulling the strings remained strong in the Confederacy. South Carolina's Senator Dial excoriated "the mill people of New England, who are jealous of the prosperity and progress the South has made."[104]Well, maybe. A tyro Ohio state legislator named Robert Taft, for instance, supported the amendment "on the practical grounds that it would help Cincinnati industries meet unfair competition from other states."[105])

Backers were taken aback. They had predicted swift ratification; Survey had foreseen only "the familiar bogeys ... of states' rights, the prohibition analogy, the grasping bureaucrats of Washington, [and] the sacred right of the 17-year-old farmer-boy to pick blueberries on the hill."[106]

How reasonable were the fears of amendment foes? How justified were their alarms?

Certainly the farmers had cause to worry.

Children helping their parents in the fields and barns must be rescued and spirited into schools, reformers insisted, and if the local economy depended on their labor at harvest time, then perhaps the local economy ought to be modernized. A New Jersey cranberry bog owner's protests fell on deaf ears: "If man-made laws about when children must attend school are in conflict with God-made laws about when the crops shall ripen, then the laws of God must be obeyed."[107]

The other, more speculative backroads fear, as expressed by the editors of Power Farming, was that the amendment would grant Congress "the power to forbid any farm boy from milking a cow or even driving in a cow from the pasture until he is eighteen years old ... It might and probably would be made illegal for sister Susie to wash a dish or sew on a button until after her eighteenth birthday."[108]

This was an exaggeration; even Edwin Markham saw nothing wrong with washing the dishes. (Hoeing was another matter.) But Power Farming was right: the amendment did grant that power—to a Congress that had so recently torn boys from their homes and communities and sent them across a vast ocean to die, or to return to a country in which bottles of beer were contraband. As New York attorney Austen F. Fox dryly commented, "Granting power is not the best way to prevent its exercise."[109]

And what of the claims made by the Woman Patriot that governmental authority would supersede parental authority? That, as Senator Reed (MO) feared, Congress would "trample upon the institution of the home; and establish an offensive and tyrannical socialism on the soil that was redeemed to freedom and that had been consecrated to individual liberty?"[110]

Even moderate Raymond G. Fuller, NCLC research director, admitted, "If it is unsafe to leave children to the mercies of business for profit, so it is to leave their protection even to so great and beneficent a force in the life of mankind as parental love . . . We must limit parental freedom as well as employers' freedom, but the main thing is to aid and strengthen the home—for the children's sake. The virtue of laws ... is to make legal prohibitions and compulsions less and less necessary, through having promoted the intelligence of the makers of homes."[111](Or "laws make morals," in Ms. Zimand's pungent adage.)

Amendment advocates were determined to nurture some embryonic greatness, and if a few doors had to be kicked in, well, that's advanced thinking for you. A popular theory (they didn't have "paradigms" then) was Government as Overparent, Denver Judge Ben Lindsey, coauthor of Children in Bondage, believed that "an economic earthquake has shaken the 'old home'to pieces. The foundations are crumbled, the walls are spread, the winds of the world blow through . . . The Nation, the State, the municipality, these have stepped in, assumed practical control of the family in its most intimate relations, and are overparents."[112]

Just how far this overparenting might go was unclear. Florence Kelley, Leninist bete-noire to the Woman Patriot, envisioned virtually no limits on the powers of the central authority. Suffra­gette Alice Paul, a marginal figure in this debate, insisted that "the State assume entire respon­sibility for the maintenance and education of children."[113]

Charlotte Perkins Gilman had depicted the family of the future in The Home: Its Work and Influence. Decrying "the archaic cult of home-worship,"[114]Gilman urged housewives to turn over their two most time-consuming domestic duties (child rearing and cooking) to trained experts, versed in the advanced scientific thought of the age. Dinner would he eaten in large communal eateries; infants would be cared for by professionals in nurseries. For too long American women had given us dyspepsia and spoiled brats; indeed, "that the care and education of children have developed at all is due to the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, [and] teachers."[115]

Home, in Gilman's view, stifled "social consciousness." We become excessively attached to other members of the family, and disregard the outer world. "Christ rose above all family ties,"[116]she pointed out; oughtn't we be Christ-like?

Once freed from the confinement of home, from the tedium of cooking and mothering, American women would take their rightful place in industrial society. Children, no longer dependent upon ignorant mamas lacking college degrees, would emerge "from the very lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad level of common citizenship. That which no million separate families could give their millions of separate children, the state can give."[117]

In Gilman's view—largely shared by the Hull Housers who ran the Children's Bureau—the federal government had not only the right but the obligation to intervene in family relations. And yes, if science determined that sewing buttons was bad for Susie, then Susie's mom must be prevented from passing on seamstress work to the poor girl.

In the aftermath of war, in the midst of Prohibition, on the cusp of a movement (which soon fizzled) to enact national laws regulating marriage and divorce, Middle Americans were right to suspect the Child Labor Amendment as a potentially monstrous measure. (I don't want to exaggerate the tyrannical cast of the movement, but the Torquemada and Goebbels of the late teens were A. Mitchell Palmer and George Creel, leading child savers of the early teens. The cause did not attract men and women in whose hearts burned love of liberty.)

The Child Labor Amendment met its Waterloo in Massachusetts, once thought to be its stronghold.

An advisory referendum was scheduled for November 4, 1924. The tea leaves betokened success: Massachusetts had been the first state to pass a strict child-labor law; Bay State mill owners were at a competitive disadvantage with Southern employers; Senators Walsh and Lodge—in fact, every candidate for a major office—endorsed it.

A Paddy-Brahmin united front arrayed against the amendment. The Citizens' Committee to Protect Our Homes and Children, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell at the helm, warned of Congress interfering "in the discipline of every household. [It will] .. . take from parents the right and duty to educate and guide their children."[118]

Cardinal William O'Connell and the Archdiocese of Boston mounted a vigorous (and, outside Massachusetts, widely denounced) campaign against the amendment. On three successive Sun­days, priests inveighed against the amendment from the pulpit. It would unleash "swarms of paid Governmental workers through the country," one padre contended, "seeing that parents are complying with the bureau's ideas of bringing up their children, supervising their education . . . and interfering in the sacred rights of parents.”[119]

The Lutherans, if less powerful, were equally comminatory. The Lutheran Pastors of Boston declared, "We hold that the child belongs to the parents, not to the State. Any infringement of the fundamental rights of parents would be not only un-American, but also anti-Christian . . . Bureaucrats . . . may abuse the power thus given them to destroy the Family and the Church."[120]

(Lutherans were decisive in defeating the measure in Nebraska and Missouri. While Oregon was trying to shut down Catholic schools, Nebraska was prohibiting the teaching of any foreign language—read: German—to elementary students and the teaching in any foreign language to students of all ages. The Nebraska law was struck down by the Supreme Court in Meyer v. State of Nebraska, 1923,)

The Child Labor Amendment died in Massachusetts, 697,563-241,461. It was done in by Catholics and Mugwumps and farmers. That canniest of pols, Mayor James Curley, apostasized and presided over the amendment's last hurrah. The rebuke—the jaw-dropping magnitude of the defeat—staggered observers. (See the 1975 New York referendum on a state Equal Rights Amendment for an uncanny parallel.)[121]

The Massachusetts shot was heard 'round the country. Governor Al Smith, whilom champion of the amendment, backpedaled. When he proposed an advisory referendum for New York, Florence Kelley threw a termagant fit. Convinced that working-class Catholics and the mossback cretinage of Upstate would sink the measure, Miss Kelley set out to collect the signatures of 100,000 "leading citizens"—beginning with Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.[122]Her tony petition drive fizzled; no referendum was held; New York never ratified. (Indeed, when the amendment recru­desced in the mid-30s, Al Smith was among its fieriest foes.)

Miss Kelley's undemocratic folly was no aberration. Frustrated by the amendment's failure to excite enthusiasm outside of Hull House, reformers itched for an iron heel. Fumed Henry F. Pringle: "The fact of the matter is that I haven't much faith in the States. I don't think they are entitled to their 'rights' when they fail to exercise them."[123]Or as Raymond G. Fuller put it, "there is no democracy in permitting backward localities to use up childhood."[124]

By Christmas 1925, just four states—Arkansas, Arizona, California, and Wisconsin—had ratified the would-be 20th amendment. Montana and Colorado later made it a sextet, but 20 years of prologue had led to . . . rout.[125]

The amendment was killed, establishment historiography has it, by "reactionary religious elements and the rural and business interests.”[126]

* # *

The amendment jerked back to life in 1933. Swayed by the labor-union argument that children were stealing scarce jobs from adults, 14 states ratified the amendment in the New Deal's first year. (By 1933, every state had enacted a compulsory school attendance law covering youths up to the age of 14, so legislation was less necessary than ever before.)

On a parallel track, the rule of ukase was picking up steam. Under the National Recovery Act, the Roosevelt Administration imposed a nationwide "code of competition" that forbade children under 16 from working in any mining or manufacturing industry, and limited those between the ages of 14 and 16 to three hour workdays between the morning and vespertinal seven o'clocks. More than 150,000 youngsters were thrown out of work, prompting NCLC general secretary Courtenay Dinwiddie to rhapsodize, "We have done more to eliminate child labor in the last three or four months than we were able to do in the preceding ten years."[127]Ah, the joys of executive fiat!

Although President Roosevelt announced, "Child labor is abolished,"[128]in his 1934 State of the Union address, the amendment trudged on. Four more states ratified over the next two years.

Anti-amendment forces regrouped, led by an eminence grise quartet: Harvard President Lowell, Columbia University President Butler, ABA President Martin, and statesman Elihu Root, whose place in the Senate James Wadsworth had taken.[129]

Martin, in a nationwide radio address, argued that under the amendment, "the children of the nation can be Russianized . . . Military training can be made compulsory . . . Congress shall acquire over children the primary power parents now have."[130](As the teens had given way to the '20s and '30s, "Russianized" had replaced "Prussianized" as the totalitarian verb of choice.)

Amusingly, the newspapers, after 10 years of flacking for the amendment, did a collective flip-flop. An NRA newspaper code had been adopted in February 1934: to combat the scourge of juvenile delinquency, paper boys in cities of 50,000 had to be at least fourteen; in smaller burgs, these Ragged Dick Hunters had to be twelve. Newsgirls were subjected to even stricter standards.

Upon the promulgation of the NRA newsboy code, 60 papers that had championed the amendment as late as 1933 now gravely editorialized against it as subversive of all that is good and American. (The most shameless volte-face was done by the Chicago Tribune, whose co-owner Medill McCormick had sponsored the amendment in the Senate.)[131]

The NRA was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935, spurring four more states to ratify, upping the total to 28. And there the drive stalled.

Restrictions similar to those in the old Palmer Bill were incorporated into the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. "When the FSLA was upheld by a chastened Court, Hammer v. Dagenhart was laid to rest at last.

The FSLA did exempt children employed by their parents: the NCLC criticized this "loophole”[132]and Grace Abbott, erstwhile professor of the sanctity of the family farm, fretted that "agricultural work is not adequately controlled."[133]But the original goals of the child savers had been achieved. The amendment—eight states shy of enshrinement in the Constitution—was interred. "Finally," announced NCLC chairman Homer Folks, "in 1938, the long battle was won.”[134]

* * *

Historian Richard B. Sherman has noted, "The fight for the amendment scattered rather than consolidated . . . the old progressive coalition."[135]Nationalizes and centralizers split with antimonopolists such as Senator Borah, who called the amendment "the most pronounced invasion of local self-government that has ever been proposed."[136]The rift presaged the breakup of the progressive coalition in the late 1930s over the New Deal and U.S. involvement in the Second World War. With the Child Labor Amendment, the battle between partisans of the old republic and The New Republic was joined.

Industrial child labor was ended, but the sacred right of the 17-year-old boy to pick blueberries, at least on his own farm, remained intact. Those who would overrun the poor man's castle would acquire many new weapons, but a Child Labor Amendment battering ram was not among them.

Opposition to the amendment had united, in common—and successful—cause, an extraordi­nary coalition: rural Southern Protestants, Northern working-class Catholics, anti-feminists, localist Progressives, domestic manufacturers, farmers, and Mugwump wisemen. Together, they defeated a measure that had virtually the entire political establishment behind it.

A pity that the coalition has never re-formed.

Bill Kauffman is the author of the novel Every Man a King. He lives in Genesee County, New York. This paper was prepared for the Liberty Fund conference, "Liberty, Family, and Home Production," which was organized by the Rockford Institute in June 1991.