Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (review)

African American girl with illustrated book from album (disbound): Types of American Negroes, compiled and prepared by W.E.B. Du Bois between 1899 and 1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-124804.

James Schmidt's Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor is an innovative analysis of working-class children in the Appalachian South between 1880 and 1920 that should change the way we think about the history of child labor and indeed modern childhood itself. Where other historians have noted that working-class Americans were slow to accept a middle-class understanding of childhood centered on education and play, Schmidt explains how and why they eventually did so. Working-class youth and their families envisioned an industrial childhood in which young people would enter factories and mines to learn how to become adults. The catch was that working people also wanted their children to be safe, and that was what they could not achieve. With grim regularity, machines maimed and killed young workers. Schmidt's main argument is that in litigating these industrial accidents, working people came to speak the language of child labor. Plaintiffs won substantial damages, but at the cost of adopting the view that anyone under a certain age belonged in school rather than at work. Schmidt thus explains that the force of child labor laws lay not in their weak regulatory apparatus, but in the new culture of work that arose as working-class families demanded justice and employers sought to avoid liability by demanding proof of age.

The strength of this book is its use of appellate course cases to vividly reconstruct how working youth and their families understood child development. Schmidt located full transcripts for one hundred litigations involving the injury or death of young workers in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia. Most of these cases involved white, native-born teenage boys. In a major contribution to our understanding of southern masculinity, Schmidt shows how male teenagers who sought work as young men found that they could recover damages in court by becoming children. Litigation thus helped redefine the "in-between nature of teenaged boys" by emphasizing "their childish dependence more than their manly independence" (p. 238).

Schmidt uses court transcripts, some of which also involved younger children, girls, immigrants, and African Americans, to reconstruct the various paths through which children and teens entered factories, workshops, and mines; what opportunities they sought and what realities they found; how they understood their jobs; and, finally, how they came to be hurt. Because young people themselves testified in injury cases, and young coworkers often took the stand when a friend had died, these transcripts offer a rare glimpse into how working-class youth understood their own lives.

Schmidt begins with a particularly strong chapter where he explains that working families envisioned industrial childhood as a stage of life characterized by the gradual mastery of productive skills on the job. Working families and their employers determined when children were ready to work by quite literally "sizing them up," that is, determining if they were tall, heavy, and strong enough for the job. Schmidt explores the varying degrees of autonomy that children enjoyed but concludes that overall "young people in a world of production wanted to work, both for economic rewards and as part of growing up" (p. 17).

This working-class view of industrial childhood was diametrically opposed to the middle-class understanding of childhood as a stage of life set apart from productive work. As Schmidt shows in chapter two, child labor reformers in the 1880s began to argue that industrial work necessarily destroyed all that should characterize a happy childhood, deforming small bodies, stunting young minds, and corrupting childish innocence. The "little sufferers" in these reform tracks bore scant resemblance to the plucky teens in southern factories. Most working families never read...