Hammer v. Dagenhart

The case established the Supreme Court of the 1920s as highly conservative and a powerful opponent to those in Congress, and in state legislatures, who were trying to enact social-welfare legislature limiting the work day, insuring health and safety in the workplace, and abolishing child labor.

By the time the Supreme Court decided Hammer v. Dagenhart in 1918, many generations of U.S. children had worked long hours at difficult and dangerous jobs--on farms, in mines, in factories. At the turn of the century, one-sixth of all children between the ages of 10 and 15 years was working for money, often at jobs that paid a few cents an hour for work that lasted ten or even 12 hours a day. Children were particularly in demand as workers in the South's growing textile industry, which relied on cheap labor.

Slowly but surely, a child-labor reform movement began to gain ground. In 1907, Senator Albert Beveridge tried to get the Senate to pass anti-child labor legislation. Although he did not succeed, he did draw national attention to the issue.

Opponents of child labor faced two difficult obstacles. The first was the widespread belief that labor contracts were individual matters that ought not be interfered with by the government. For the government to say that children should not work more than 10 hours, or that children under the age of 14 should not work at all, was considered an infringement of a parent's and an employer's liberty to enter into a contract.

To complicate matters further, labor legislation was believed to be the province of state government, not federal. Since using child labor was cheaper than hiring adult workers, many people argued that their state could not afford to pass anti-child-labor legislation. Otherwise, they claimed, states that could use child labor could sell their goods more cheaply, putting those that could not at a disadvantage.