The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South (review)

Like other recent studies of whiteness in American history, Shelley Sallee's The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South offers a narrative of transformation—in this case, the story of how "crackers" became Anglo-Saxons. To illustrate this transformation, Sallee employs the lens of child welfare reform in the Progressive Era, arguing that the campaign to end child labor in the New South was successful only because reformers made the tactical choice to emphasize the racial identity of the South's youngest industrial workers. This slender volume is innovative and ambitious, and it raises a number of provocative issues. Ultimately, however, it does not quite deliver on its promise and says too little about the deep-seated problem of race in the New South.

Sallee's account traces the politics of factory life and reform in turn-of-the-century Alabama, where the mill economy was fueled by the cheap labor of poor white parents and their children. The manifest exploitation of these children, sometimes as young as ten or twelve years old, inspired the activist attention of two concerned Northern constituencies: Progressive reformers who sought to protect child welfare, and organized labor which feared competition from such low-paid workers. To make child labor reform possible, Sallee argues, Samuel Gompers and child-welfare advocates pursued their campaign in terms that resonated with a broad range of Southern interests, including the mill owners who benefited from low-paid child labor, poor white parents who depended on the wages of their children, and white Southerners, more generally, who resented any reform agenda that originated outside the region. Sallee explains that in order to pass protective legislation, reformers galvanized these interests under a banner of white supremacy, invoking racial fears and contending that the young mill workers had become the "forgotten children" of the South.¹ Reformers stipulated that black families were making social, economic and cultural gains by sending their children to school, while poor white parents sent their children instead to the mills. Middle-class reformers also laid the blame for continued racial unrest and violence at the feet of poor white people, claiming that poor whites' ignorance and fear of economic competition from blacks had led to the many acts of terror that plagued the New South. In Sallee's account, such claims were not just "vulgar opportunism"; rather, they represented a "genuine" attempt to fight the degradation of child labor.²

In service of this argument, Sallee invokes an ambitious array of historical themes, including mill life, class conflict, the emergence of new womanhood, Progressive Era politics and policies, and postbellum reconciliation. While her discussions of Progressive reform culture and the evolving persona of white Southern womanhood are interesting—and Sallee deserves great credit for recognizing the linkages between gender and racial identity, a theme most studies of whiteness overlook—they are not fully integrated into her main argument. Nor is it exactly clear when or how reformers lit upon whiteness as an ideal means for addressing the two great disparities that Sallee claims defined the New South, namely the gulf between white haves and have-nots and the tension between North and South. In a book that purports to examine racial politics, it is curious that Sallee does not also explore the divide between black and white as a defining feature of Southern society.

Indeed, Sallee's passages on the construction of whiteness are the most underdeveloped part of her work. While some prior studies of whiteness have been criticized for making too much of too little evidence,³ this is not Sallee's problem. She writes of ample instances in which child labor reformers in the New South deployed a self-serving rhetoric of white consciousness, and she even shows how Senator Albert Beveridge adopted this language in his crusade to enact a national child labor law. However, Sallee does not do as much with her evidence as she could...