IDA. — AMERICA'S 250th BIRTHDAY SERIES-HEROES WHO CHANGED AMERICA AND WHAT THEY RISKED
The story of the Americans who ended child labor, and why the fight is not as over as most people think
Sources: Library of Congress · Smithsonian Magazine · Britannica · New England Historical Society · U.S. House of Representatives Archives · Economic Policy Institute · Fair Labor Standards Act primary document · National Child Labor Committee Archives
In 1908 a schoolteacher named Lewis Hine quit his job, picked up a camera, and set out to photograph something most Americans preferred not to see.
He traveled to textile mills in Georgia and South Carolina, coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, canneries in Maryland, tobacco fields in Virginia, and glass factories in Indiana. He photographed children as young as 3 years old doing industrial labor. He photographed a 12-year-old named Clinton Stewart in western Massachusetts, sitting on the ground next to the mowing machine that had just cut off his hand. He photographed an 8-year-old boy named Leo working in a textile factory in Tennessee. He photographed Michael McNelis, an 8-year-old newsboy in Philadelphia who had just recovered from his second bout of pneumonia.
To get these photographs, Hine lied. He posed as a fire inspector, a Bible salesman, an industrial researcher, and a postcard photographer. Factory owners did not want him inside and would have turned him away if they had known why he was there. So he went in as someone else, saw what was actually happening, and brought it out in photographs.
Over the next decade he traveled hundreds of thousands of miles. He captured more than 5,400 photographs. He was threatened. He was followed. He was escorted off properties by men who understood exactly what his camera was doing to their business model. He kept going.
His photographs did not immediately change the law. Nothing in America changes immediately. But they changed what Americans were willing to tolerate, and that change in tolerance is where every law eventually begins.
WHAT HE WAS PHOTOGRAPHING
At the start of the 20th century, approximately 2 million children worked in American mines, mills, factories, fields, and streets. The minimum age for employment in most states was 10 or 12. Many states had no minimum age at all. Children worked 12-hour days in cotton mills breathing lint-filled air. They worked in coal mines where a single mistake could bury them alive. They worked in glass factories in front of furnaces running at 3,000 degrees. They worked in canneries from before dawn until after dark during the packing season.
The industries that employed them argued that working children were learning valuable skills. That their families needed the income. That the market should decide. That government had no business telling employers who they could hire.
These are not arguments from a distant and unrecognizable past. They are the same arguments that have been made every time someone has tried to roll back child labor protections, from 1908 to 2025.
THE WOMAN WHO BUILT THE MOVEMENT
Florence Kelley was already fighting for children's rights before Hine picked up his camera.
She had translated Friedrich Engels from German into English. She had lived at Hull House, Jane Addams' legendary Chicago settlement house, organizing immigrant workers on the city's West Side. In 1893 she was appointed Illinois' first chief factory inspector and used the position to investigate and prosecute employers who violated the state's new labor laws. She was fired when the Republican governor who replaced her ally lost interest in enforcement.
In 1899 she became executive director of the National Consumers League, a position she would hold for 34 years. From that platform she did something that transformed American reform: she made consumers responsible for the conditions under which the goods they bought were produced. If you bought a shirt sewn by a 10-year-old working a 14-hour day, she argued, you were part of the system. If you refused to buy it, you were part of the solution.
She lobbied state legislatures. She trained lawyers. She organized boycotts. She recruited allies. One of the people she recruited was a young social worker named Frances Perkins, who heard Kelley speak in 1902 and never looked at labor conditions the same way again. Perkins would go on to become Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, the first woman to hold a cabinet position in American history, and the architect of the New Deal labor protections that ended child labor at the federal level.
Florence Kelley built the network that built the law. Most Americans have never heard of her.
THE SETBACKS
Nothing about this fight was straightforward. Every step forward was followed by a legal or political reversal that required starting over.
In 1916, after years of organizing and lobbying, Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act, which prohibited the interstate sale of goods produced by child labor. It was the first federal child labor law in American history. Two years later, in 1918, the Supreme Court struck it down in a 5-4 decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart. The Court ruled that Congress had overstepped its authority to regulate interstate commerce.
Congress tried again. In 1919 it passed the Child Labor Tax Law, which imposed a 10 percent tax on goods produced by child labor. In 1922 the Supreme Court struck that down too.
Congress then attempted to pass a constitutional amendment giving itself the authority to regulate child labor. In 1924 the amendment passed Congress. By 1937 only 28 of the required 36 states had ratified it. It was never added to the Constitution.
For 20 years the reform movement fought the same battle, lost it in court, regrouped, tried again, and lost again. Florence Kelley died in 1932 without seeing the federal law she had spent her life building. Lewis Hine died in 1940, broke, in Dobbs Ferry, New York, two years after the law finally passed. When his son tried to donate his photographs to the Museum of Modern Art after his death, MOMA turned them down.
They did not live to see their work fully recognized. They did the work anyway.
GRACE ABBOTT AND THE CHILDREN'S BUREAU
While Kelley was organizing from outside the government, Grace Abbott was fighting from inside it.
Abbott took over as head of the U.S. Children's Bureau in 1921. The Children's Bureau had been established in 1912, partly because of Lewis Hine's photographs and Florence Kelley's lobbying, as the first federal agency devoted entirely to the welfare of children. Abbott used it with the ferocity of someone who understood that bureaucratic power, applied with enough determination, could do what legislation alone could not.
She investigated. She documented. She published reports that gave reformers specific, confirmed data on child labor conditions in every state. She advocated for the constitutional amendment. She testified before Congress. She trained a generation of social workers and policy advocates who carried the movement forward after her.
She was not a household name. She did not seek to be one. She understood that institutions outlast individuals and that building a durable institution was worth more than personal recognition. The Children's Bureau she ran is still operating today, still publishing research on children's welfare, still the institutional memory of a century of American child protection law.
HOW THE LAW FINALLY PASSED
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 did not pass because the reform movement finally won an argument. It passed because the Great Depression had changed the political context in a way that made the argument irrelevant.
With millions of adults unemployed, the business case for employing children collapsed. Child labor was no longer keeping families alive, it was taking jobs from adults who needed them to survive. Labor unions that had once been indifferent to child labor restrictions became strong advocates. The political coalition that had blocked the law for 40 years fell apart.
New Jersey Congresswoman Mary Norton introduced the bill. Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor who had been recruited by Florence Kelley 36 years earlier, drove it through the Roosevelt administration. President Roosevelt signed it on June 25, 1938.
The Fair Labor Standards Act set the minimum age for employment at 14 for most jobs outside school hours. It set 16 as the minimum age for work during school hours in interstate commerce. It set 18 as the minimum age for hazardous occupations. These are still the federal minimums today.
The law that passed in 1938 was the direct result of the photographs Lewis Hine took going undercover into factories he was not supposed to enter, the organizing Florence Kelley did for 40 years from an office most people had never heard of, and the institutional work Grace Abbott built inside a government that had to be pushed, pulled, and shamed into acting.
None of them lived to see their full vindication. All three changed the country.
WHY THIS STORY IS NOT OVER
Since 2021, 28 states have introduced or passed laws to weaken child labor protections, according to the Economic Policy Institute. States including Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa, and West Virginia have passed laws loosening child labor standards. Indiana eliminated requirements for businesses to document employment of minors. In 2024 Florida considered a bill that would have allowed 16 and 17-year-olds to work on dangerous commercial construction sites, including roofing, one of the most hazardous occupations in the country.
In 2025 and 2026 the trend continues. The same arguments are being made that were made in 1908. That young workers are learning valuable skills. That families need the income. That the market should decide.
The people who made those arguments in 1908 were powerful, they were well-funded, and they controlled state legislatures and the Supreme Court. It took 30 years and the collapse of the economy that employed those children, to defeat them.
The children in Lewis Hine's photographs were real. The 8-year-old Leo in the Tennessee textile mill. The 12-year-old Clinton Stewart sitting next to the machine that took his hand. The 8-year-old Michael McNelis selling papers in the Philadelphia rain, two bouts of pneumonia behind him.
They did not get to choose the conditions they were born into. They did not get to choose whether they worked. What changed was not their circumstances. What changed was that three Americans with cameras, courtrooms, and filing cabinets decided that what was happening to those children was not acceptable, and refused to stop saying so until the country agreed.
That is how America changes. That is how it has always changed. Not by waiting for the powerful to become generous, but by people who saw something wrong and refused to look away.
Sources: Library of Congress National Child Labor Committee confirmed via Library of Congress research guide · Smithsonian Magazine confirmed Lewis Hine biography and photograph collection history · New England Historical Society confirmed Lewis Hine biography, faked identities, death details · Britannica confirmed Fair Labor Standards Act 1938 standards, Florence Kelley biography, Grace Abbott biography · U.S. House of Representatives Archives confirmed Congresswoman Mary Norton introduction of FLSA and history · Spartacus Educational confirmed Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Frances Perkins connections · Economic Policy Institute June 2025 confirmed 28 states weakened child labor protections since 2021 · EPI 2026 confirmed Indiana Senate bill eliminating documentation requirements · Fair Labor Standards Act June 25, 1938 primary document confirmed via DOL
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