Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism by Betsy Wood (review)

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism examines the ideologies and politics that shaped child labor debates from the middle of the nineteenth century until the New Deal. Navigating a well-traveled terrain, Betsy Wood manages to escape the deep ruts of previous scholarship. She crafts an innovative and persuasive narrative that traces the evolution of ideas championed by child labor reformers from their free labor roots to their faith in the modern bureaucratic state—a process bookended by mid-nineteenth-century sectionalism and a "new sectionalism" in the early twentieth century (p. 5).

The debate between free and slave labor played a central role in child labor reform ideas of the decades straddling the Civil War. Antebellum child savers viewed strategies of providing assistance to needy children engaged in street trades through the lens of slavery. Drawing from publications by the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS), Wood argues that reformers believed that free labor promised to instill the values of discipline, thrift, independence, and social mobility. The CAS championed emigration—sending children and youths to live and work with rural families in the West—and other strategies that taught free labor values rather than dispensing charity, which perpetuated dependence. Although Wood glosses over the fact that child reform institutions throughout the country stressed the importance of work and training as a means to gaining self-sufficiency, she makes clear that free labor ideas remained influential during Reconstruction. Child advocates invoked slavery to criticize the forced apprenticeship of Black children in the South and the coerced labor of Italian immigrant children in the urban North, arguing that such practices fostered dependence and subservience.

In the early twentieth century, reformers jettisoned free labor ideas, turning their attention to child labor in southern textile mills. Wood notes that deepening concerns over white degeneration—operating against the backdrop of imperialism and racial segregation—drove efforts to combat child labor because it weakened white children's bodies and starved their minds. Although originally committed to localized approaches, reformers turned toward a national strategy that culminated in the passage of significant (although short-lived) legislation, which instigated sectional opposition. Reformers, echoing previous generations of abolitionists, characterized southern child industrial labor as unfree and unrestrained capitalism as sinful.

During the 1910s, child labor reformers embraced modern secular bureaucracy, while opponents galvanized around traditional forms of morality. Child labor advocates raised the alarm over the plight of rural children engaged in farm labor, noting that it deprived children of the modern rights of childhood, such as health, education, and play. Joined by Progressive organizations, reformers sought to educate rural families on the virtues of modern childhood and pursued a constitutional amendment to regulate child labor. Opponents, including southern industrialists, traditionalist women's groups, northern working-class Catholics, and other conservatives, invoked traditional authority and the sacred value of children's labor to resist the influence of the bureaucratic state to establish morality and interfere with families. The result was a stunning defeat of the amendment's ratification and a schism between urban and rural, modern and traditional. According to Wood, this "new" sectionalism formed an "imaginary new Mason Dixon Line … within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who resisted them" (p. 147). Although the Depression saw renewed efforts to ratify the amendment, New Deal child labor legislation rendered the effort moot.

Upon the Altar of Work is a well-researched, crisply argued, and excellent addition to the scholarship on the politics of child labor reform. Wood makes no promises to include children's voices, and, with few exceptions, the book does not deliver their perspectives. This study remains tightly focused on the individuals, organizations, and...