Writing for JOTWELL's Legal History Section,
Reuel Schiller (UC Hastings) has posted an admiring
review of an article by
Susan J. Pearson (Northwestern University): "
'Age Ought to be a Fact': The Campaign Against Child Labor and the Rise of the Birth Certificate,'"
Journal of American History 101 (2015). Here's a taste of Schiller's review:
[A]s Susan J. Pearson’s
richly detailed article demonstrates, before the political impulse to
protect children from the dangers of industrial labor could succeed, the
administrative state had to assert its power in another way. The most
fundamental obstacle to abolishing child labor was not political
resistance from business interests or immigrant families in need of
income. Nor was it hostile courts with their concerns about federalism
and freedom of contract. The most intransigent barrier to abolishing
child labor was the fact that well into the twentieth century, the state
had no way of knowing how old somebody was. In a world without
state-issued birth certificates, enforcing age-based prohibitions on
work was impossible.
This, then, is the story that Pearson tells: how the states and the
federal government created the bureaucratic infrastructure to ensure
that every child born in the United States had a government-issued birth
certificate to verify their age. . . .
Read on
here.
