HOPE FOR CHILD WORKERS?
Hope For Child Workers? Senate Committee Holds Child Labor a Blow at Preparedness WILL the Child Labor bill be permitted to die a alow death la the United States Senate? This humane measure has...
...The passage of the bill would be assured if every citizen who believes that child welfare should be placed above mill owners' profits, were to write at once to his Senators...
...Readers of La Follette's Magazine will remember that this bill (known as the Owen-Keating bill) makes it unlawful for a producer or a dealer to ship in interstate commerce goods which are produced wholly or in part in mine or quarry by children under sixteen years of age...
...When we are dealing with such a subject as the protection of children from the known consequences of child labor, we are dealing with a helpless class of our population, whose neglect defeats the very success of democracy itself...
...They have hopes of succeeding...
...you put them between walls, To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages, To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights...
...Listen to this from its report: "The evidence is overwhelming that unregulated child labor does not promote a healthy citizenship, that it tends to the deterioration of the race physically...
...Is that to be the end of it...
...If manufactured goods they are debarred from commerce between the states if made in whole or in part by children under fourteen, or by children under sixteen employed more than eight hours a day, or by children under sixteen employed at night...
...The Senate committee, after full consideration, urges its passage on the ground of the vital need of strong healthful citizens in any program of preparedness...
...The Senate committee might well have prefaced its report with this virile little poem from Carl Sandburg's Chicago Poems: THEY WILL SAY Of my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky, And the reckless rain...
...This humane measure has passed the House of Representatives by an overwhelming majority—with forty-five of the forty-six votes cast against it coming from the South...
...Now it has been given the approval of the Committee on Interstate Commerce of the United States Senate...
...The southern mill owners and their northern allies are making a last-ditch effort to prevent the passage of this bill in the Senate...
Vol. 8 • May 1916 • No. 5
