Representative Edward Keating of Colorado and Senator Robert Latham Owen of Oklahoma sponsored the first child labor bill to pass Congress. It prohibited mines or factories that employed children from engaging in interstate commerce. In 1918 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional for overstepping federal regulatory authority. Congress finally outlawed child labor with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration
H.R. 8234, A Bill to prevent interstate commerce in the products of child labor (Keating-Owen Act), January 17, 1916
Lewis Hine: Exposing Child Labor
Although some states had laws against employment of juveniles, millions of American children worked in agriculture and industry in the early twentieth century. In 1904 progressive reformers founded the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), which Congress chartered in 1907. To raise awareness of the abuses of child labor, the NCLC hired sociologist Lewis Hine to photograph children working in fields, factories, mines, and city streets. His photos and reports, produced between 1908 and 1924, fueled public opinion and inspired Congress to enact national child labor legislation.
There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. . . . The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profit from their work.
Lewis Hine, “The High Cost of Child Labor,” Child Labor Bulletin, 1914
Representative Edward Keating of Colorado and Senator Robert Latham Owen of Oklahoma sponsored the first child labor bill to pass Congress. It prohibited mines or factories that employed children from engaging in interstate commerce. In 1918 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Keating-Owen Act unconstitutional for overstepping federal regulatory authority. Congress finally outlawed child labor with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration
