In 1916, Congress for the first time attempted to regulate child labor with the Keating-Owen Act. Sponsored by Representative Edward Keating (D-Colo.) and Senator Robert Owen (D-Okla.) and supported by President Wilson, this measure barred goods produced by the labor of youths under 14 from being sold in interstate commerce. The use of child labor had been growing overtime, and by 1900 1 in 6 children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed (Encyclopedia.com). After the upholding of the Mann Act against “white slavery” (the interstate travel of prostitutes) by the Supreme Court, advocates of child labor regulation thought they stood a good chance of enacting a federal law. However, legal scholars differed as to whether the Constitution permitted such a measure.

Edward Keating, House sponsor of the Keating-Owen Act.

Some legislator views on the matter:

William Stiles Bennet (R-N.Y.) stated that “Most of us from New York City are going to vote for this child-labor bill because we think it is right. We have a similar law, somewhat more drastic, on the statute books of New York, and we are for this…” (Congressional Record, 2015). This highlighted the fact that many states already had child labor laws on their books, and thus the impact of this law would not be felt on New York. Indeed, it would not actually be felt on all but four states, as they had comparable or stricter laws on child labor.

James F. Byrnes (D-S.C.), who would later become a key supporter of FDR’s New Deal, stated on the matter, “…I am opposed to this bill, but in the only speech I ever made on the subject in my own State I advocated the enactment by the Legislature of South Carolina of a law prohibiting absolutely the employment of children under the age of 14 years. According to the majority report there are but four States in the Union in which this standard provision does not prevail, so that it is boiled down to a question here whether the Congress will force those four States now to progress gradually toward the adoption of that 14-year age limit” (Congressional Record, 2014).  

Mahlon Garland (R-Penn.) acknowledged that opinions on the measure’s constitutionality were divided, and to this he said, “…if we are going to err, for God’s sake, let us err on the side of humanity. Let us pass this bill. And if some court declares it unconstitutional, let it do so, but let us not stand here in an attitude of fear as to what the court will do and refuse to do the thing that ought to be done” (Congressional Record, 2032).

Fred Blackmon (D-Ala.) explained his opposition in a traditional Jeffersonian sense, “While I have always been a staunch advocate of proper legislation to safeguard the interests of children who of necessity are compelled to labor in manufacturing plants, yet as a Democrat I am a firm believer in the broad principle of our Government that the States are amply capable of taking care of their own affairs, without the interference of the Federal Government” (Congressional Record, 2034).

Some interesting details in this vote:

A number of representatives who had futures as New Deal opponents were voting in favor, including:

Isaac Bacharach (R-N.J.), Fred Britten (R-Ill.), Simeon Fess (R-Ohio), John Cooper (R-Ohio), Porter Dale (R-Vt.), Carter Glass (D-Va.), Frederick Lehlbach (R-N.J.), James Parker (R-N.Y.), Louis McFadden (R-Penn.), Carl Mapes (R-Mich.), George Tinkham (R-Mass.), Allen Treadway (R-Mass.), and Bert Snell (R-N.Y.). Although George Huddleston (D-Ala.), one of the votes for, was considered a progressive in this time, he would oppose much of the New Deal. Also a “yea” vote was former Speaker of the House Joe Cannon (R-Ill.), who I have yet to find a credible historian call a liberal or progressive. Indeed, his conservatism was even voiced in this debate,

“There is much talk about social justice. Great heavens, I sometimes wonder what it means! I have sent for the dictionary and I have tried to find out what social justice is. Can any man define it? Is it to make all men equal? Is it to make all men and women equal? Is it to make all boys of equal capacity? Well, so far as I know, as a rule the man and the woman who talk most about social justice are the man and the woman who have never earned a dollar but are living on the production that they inherited. They talk about social justice. Then there is another class that talks about it. They are good people, and I am not abusing any of them, but if you will go to work and investigate you will find that two thirds of them never earned a dollar in their lives and that the other third are being subsisted by their contributions” (Congressional Record, 2023).

The most glaring detail of the House vote? With only one exception, all the nays came from the South. The exception was R. Wayne Parker (R-N.J.), a staunch reactionary who based on his record seems to have been an absolutist for states’ rights and was so by opposing Prohibition, women’s suffrage, and anti-lynching legislation. All Florida as well as North and South Carolinian representatives who voted were against.

In the Senate, although few of its members in this time would carry on to the New Deal era, James W. Wadsworth Jr. (R-N.Y.) paired for this bill. Wadsworth was an anti-New Deal absolutist, as he would vote against Social Security and the minimum wage, yet he supported this measure. So did future President Warren G. Harding (R-Ohio) and future conservative Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland (R-Utah).

Perhaps, you say, but wait? Doesn’t this vote prove that the right back then had its heartland in the South? Well, no. If we examine another vote in that session of Congress that is often also seen as a triumph for progressivism in the Adamson Act, which limited the hours of railroad workers, its House vote of passage was the nearly as commanding 239-56, except the situation with the opposition was the inverse…of the House opponents only two were from the South: Sam Sells (R-Tenn.) and Eugene Black (D-Tex.). Indeed, the only two representatives on record who voted against both the Keating-Owen Act and the Adamson Act were Parker and Black. This and the fact that child labor was far more prevalent in the South in addition to the status quo only changing in four Southern states makes it abundantly clear to me that the Keating-Owen Act is a regional rather than a left-right vote. But, does this make the Adamson Act a regional vote too? No, as the prevalence of railroads and their workers was all around the country, and Southerners generally were interested in curbing what they saw as excesses of Yankee capitalism. Furthermore, crossover support for the Adamson Act in the North was far more considerable than the Keating-Owen Act in the South. Additionally, the DW-Nominate scale on this vote clearly points to the most conservative legislators of American politics at the time voting for Keating-Owen while it simultaneously points to them voting against the Adamson Act. Other votes that put the South on the bad side of conservatism in the Wilson era included support for the excess profits tax, support for an anti-trust investigation into companies involved in food production (although there was some dissent among Southerners), opposition to increasing the size of the navy, opposing limiting the time for government control of the railroads in wartime, opposition to using a stopwatch for measuring efficiency in government workers, and opposition to the Esch-Cummins Act returning railroads to private ownership in peacetime under conditions that were on net favorable to them.

The Keating-Owen Act was challenged in the Supreme Court and overturned in 1918 in Hammer v. Dagenhart. Another effort to enact such a law also was struck down by the Supreme Court. Although the proposed Child Labor Amendment was never ratified, it was not considered needed after the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and its upholding in the Supreme Court. But what people don’t know (indeed I didn’t know this until I looked into it) that this law only changed the status quo on child labor in only four states! Indeed, such a rule could serve to help the other states against the four states in competition, thus there was every reason for support outside of the South to be so strong.

References

Calendar Wednesday – Child-Labor Bill. (1916, February 2). Congressional Record, 2007-2035.

Retrieved from

Click to access GPO-CRECB-1916-pt2-v53-18-2.pdf

Keating-Owen Act. Encyclopedia.com.

Retrieved from

https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/keating-owen-act

To Pass H.R. 17700 (39 Stat. 721, Sept. 3, 1916). A Bill to Establish an 8 Hour Day for Employees of Carriers Engaged in Interstate and Foreign Commerce. (P. 13608-1). Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH0640095

To Pass H.R. 8234 (39 Stat. 675, 9-1-16), a Bill to Prevent Interstate Commerce in the Products of Child Labor (NP. 12312-2). Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RS0640214

To Pass H.R. 8234 (39 Stat. 675, Sept. 1, 1916), a Bill to Prevent Interstate Commerce in the Products of Child Labor and for Other Purposes (P. 2035-1). Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/rollcall/RH0640010

In the period before World War II, the Midwest was the heartland of non-interventionism and Chicago was regarded as the capital. One of the more notable and controversial figures from the state in this period was Stephen Albion Day (1882-1950).

Day was on track to have a career in politics from the time of his birth. His father was William Rufus Day, who would become prominent as acting Secretary of State and then briefly holding the role under President William McKinley. His most prominent position was as a Supreme Court justice, having been nominated by President Theodore Roosevelt. Through his father, he was able to get a position assisting Chief Justice Melville Fuller. From 1908 until his death, Day would practice law, and he considered himself a student of the Constitution. He was also a staunch foe of the Treaty of Versailles.

In the 1920s, Day sought a political career, but what held him back was that he was a foe of Prohibition, and had been a foe as early as 1922 when he organized the Anti-Prohibition League (The Belleville News-Democrat).  He stated, “I was never for the eighteenth amendment. I felt that a mandate on private morality had no place in the constitution. It broke down respect for the basic law of the land” (The Dispatch). Thus, his repeated efforts to get elected to Congress as a Republican flopped.

In 1933, Day wired his congratulations to Adolf Hitler after his election as chancellor, a questionable move at best even in that time. It is possible that he did so out of his opposition to Germany’s treatment under the Treaty of Versailles and saw Hitler as a figure who rebelled against the nation’s harshly imposed reparations. Something else to bear in mind is that Mein Kampf was available in the United States at the time but only in a censored format that excised explicitly anti-Semitic and militaristic passages, as I covered in my 2022 article, “Who Censored Mein Kampf in America?”.  

In 1936, Day ran for the Republican nomination for president, although he knew he had no chance of clinching it, stating afterwards that “it was a gesture to emphasize the necessity of upholding the constitution and preserving the integrity of the Supreme Court of the United States” (The Newark Advocate). He saw that the court was potentially under threat by the Roosevelt Administration, as it had struck down numerous New Deal laws, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act and the National Industrial Recovery Act. Day’s concerns were correctly placed, as Roosevelt attempted to get “court-packing legislation” enacted, but even the strongly Democratic Senate would not accede to it in the end.

On September 7^th at the Lena, Illinois festival Day predicted that if elected for a third term, FDR would get the US into war in Europe two weeks after the election and accused him of being “greedy for power” for running for a third term, and that his request for $5 billion for national defense purposes was an effort to divert attention from domestic issues (Freeport Journal-Standard). Although Roosevelt won reelection as well as Illinois, a figure who won even bigger was Republican Dwight Green, who won the gubernatorial race in a landslide and he had coattails, from which Day among others benefited. He and fellow non-interventionist Republican William G. Stratton were elected at-Large.  

At the start of his time in Congress, Day pledged to support adequate defense of the United States and to oppose involvement in World War II (The Dispatch). Whether he was supportive of “adequate defense” is questionable given what his record would be, but to be sure, he was an unfailing opponent of the latter until Pearl Harbor. Day was also a foe of the New Deal, and it was hard to find a stronger opponent of FDR’s foreign policy. However, he also voted against the Vinson Anti-Strike Bill in 1941. Day was also a strong supporter of the Dies Committee out of his staunch anti-communism. The Daily Worker, the Communist Party’s newspaper, accused him of making a “Nazi speech” with anti-Semitic remarks to an audience of 2,000 on September 4, 1941 (Lapin). A non-communist source, Detroit Evening Times, had a different description of this speech. Rather than a “Nazi speech” with anti-Semitic remarks, they characterized it as an attack on Soviet Russia, President Roosevelt, and Lend-Lease Aid to the Soviets, with Day declaring, “Internationalism has become bonder and bolder. Like a serpent it has crawled into our midst. By the recent actions of our President we have been brought face to face with the most dangerous attack that has ever been made upon the welfare of the American people and their continued right to live under the blessings of our American Constitution. This serpent of international socialism is known as communism. It is the established political and economic philosophy of the Soviet Union – that same Soviet Union which has recently formed an active alliance with Britain. We shall be asked to extend that alliance to include the United States of America, at least to the extent of providing billions of dollars of the money of American taxpayers to make gifts to this same Soviet Union” (Detroit Evening Times). He and others in Congress were trying to push an amendment to eliminate aid to the USSR from Lend-Lease, but the effort overwhelmingly failed. In his pursuit of the non-interventionist cause, he got into some trouble due to his carelessness in his associations.

The Flanders Hall Connection

On August 4, 1941, reporters Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported in their column The Washington Merry-Go-Round that Day had published a non-interventionist book titled “We Must Save Our Republic”. The problem? It was published through the small publisher Flanders Hall of Scotch Plains, New Jersey, an entity run by Sigfrid Hauck and financed by George Sylvester Viereck, a registered agent who received $1000 a month from Nazi Germany (Pearson and Allen). Unless Day had somehow forgotten what he was told in Pearson and Allen’s interview with him about the Nazi connections of the firm he had had about a month prior to the book’s publishing, he had done so with his eyes open (Pearson and Allen, September 1941).

They also reported that a speech that Day delivered on June 15^th inspired the book, in which he called on Britain to repay its war debts. Interestingly, this speech was mimeographed and sent to newspapers from Columbia Press Service, which publicized for Viereck (Pearson and Allen). It is impossible to the escape the conclusion that Day at minimum exercised terrible judgment on this matter. The publishing rights to the book were, according to Sigfrid Hauck, sold to another firm three weeks after its publication and Flanders Hall shuttered in November 1941 (The Courier-News). Despite this unsavory connection, Day was reelected to his at-Large House seat in 1942.

During the 78^th Congress, he supported banning the poll tax and although he introduced such a measure in 1943, he hadn’t done what was needed to get it considered as the Marcantonio bill was what proponents rallied behind (St. Paul Recorder). Day voted for the Marcantonio bill. He also warned against internationalism and most notably was one of 29 representatives to vote against the Fulbright Resolution in 1943, which expressed the House’s support for establishing an international peacekeeping body after the war, which would become the United Nations. On September 7^th, Day condemned the push towards internationalism, stating, “internationalists are trying to edge us up to a commitment from which we cannot recede” (Freeport Journal-Standard, 1943). He supported overriding President Roosevelt’s vetoes of anti-subsidy legislation and tax relief and relentlessly opposed price controls, but also voted to sustain his veto of the Smith-Connally Act which provided a mechanism for stopping wartime strikes. Day’s overall record was in many ways staunchly to the right and extremely nationalist but was friendly to organized labor and he supported more benefits for workers in domestic war industries. His DW-Nominate score was a 0.443. 1944 was a good year for President Roosevelt in many ways; in addition to his reelection victory several outspoken foes lost reelection, and Day was one of them, losing to Democrat Emily Taft Douglas, wife of future Senator Paul Howard Douglas. Day continued his legal career, and died on January 5, 1950, after a two-month illness.

References

2,000 Hear Day Attack Russia and President. (1941, September 5). Detroit Evening Times, p. 3.

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/874698961/

Anti-Poll Tax Bill Is Introduced in Congress By New York Member. (1943, March 12). St. Paul Recorder, p. 1.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/884209638/

Day Says America Must Preserve Its Independent Destiny. (1943, September 7). Freeport Journal-Standard, p. 1.

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/3119931/

Day, Stephen Albion. Voteview.

Retrieved from

https://voteview.com/person/2435/stephen-albion-day

Ex-Congressman Ohio Native, Dies. (1950, January 6). The Newark Advocate, p. 8.

Retrieved from

https://www.newspapers.com/image/288101424/

Gabbett, H.E. (1942, February 19). Viereck Used 5 in Congress, Juror Told. Times Herald, p. 1.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/1037992308/

Hauck Publishing Firm Folds Up in Scotch Plains. (1941, November 17). The Courier-News, p. 1

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/219742340/

Introducing – Stephen A. Day, William G. Stratton, Congressmen. (1941, January 8). The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois).

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/341694933/

Lapin, A. (1942, May 20). Rep. Day: Writer of Fascist Book, Darling of 5^th Column. The Daily Worker, p. 4.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/1144048037/

Pearson, D. & Allen, R.S. (1941, August 4). Petoskey News-Review, p. 1.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/554637816/

Pearson, D. & Allen, R.S. (1941, September 1). Spokane Chronicle, p. 1.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/562792632/

Predicts F.D.R. Will Involve U.S. In European War. Freeport Journal-Standard, p. 12.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/38721303/

Stephen Day Dies; Former Congressman. (1950, January 6). The Belleville News-Democrat, p. 9.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/769529256/

Stephen A. Day, Ex-Member of Congress, Dies. (1950, January 6). Chicago Tribune, p. 16.

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https://www.newspapers.com/image/349271215/