James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor, Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. xxiii + 279, £17.99/$27.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-521-15505-2.

Abstract

James D. Schmidt’s Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor is an extraordinarily sophisticated, incisive, even brilliant analysis of the place of workplace violence in the development of the concept of child labour. Focusing on the southern United States, the author analyses how the courts played a critical role as young workers and their families sought justice from their employers. In addition, he explores how middle-class reformers’ ideology and language were mediated and acted upon by the courts to effect changes in work practices, and ultimately, in the very definition of childhood by working people themselves. The origins of the conflict over child labour at the turn of the twentieth century can be found in the values of agricultural life, in which childhood was not seen as a separate stage of life, but rather as a time for youngsters to participate in the producing economy, whether in the home, the yard, or the fields. When young workers and their families entered nineteenth century mills, mines, or factories, they brought these same values with them. ‘This desire to help, to do something productive, to be a grown-up, formed the core value for young Southern workers and their families’ (p. 31). Schmidt provides a richly detailed description of the range of industries that young people entered, as well as the motivations of parents and children alike in seeking and keeping a variety of work experiences. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, child-labour crusaders put forward a very different perspective on child labour. Childhood, to them, should not be defined by production, but rather by dependence, passivity, play, and inactivity. Seeing children who laboured as comparable to prisoners and slaves, reformers argued that children should be at school not at work. Initially, young workers and their families rejected attempts to outlaw child labour, but Schmidt demonstrates that it was these families’ actual experiences in dangerous industrial settings that slowly convinced them to adopt the reformers’ views. When families sent their children into workplaces they expected that employers would ensure the safety of these young workers, that they would be slowly integrated into, and educated about, the hazardous conditions that were ever present in the world of industry. Instead of being protected, parents found that their children were frequently placed in perilous situations. The machines of modern industry decimated workers’ fingers, arms, and legs causing extreme pain and disfigurement; explosions burned young victims, blinded them, and often killed them; steel fragments broke off from machinery causing fatal injuries to the torso and head. Using a wide array of court records that had not been used for this purpose before, Schmidt documents the financial and emotional distress these assaults caused, the serious and permanent disability that left many crippled, the infections that occurred after operations, and the amputations and diminished mental capacity that became an ever-present part of industrial society. Faced with the constant threat of violence on the job, and seeking both redress and justice, young people and their families turned to the courts. Schmidt’s book is one of an increasing number of studies that has shown how the courts have been used by workers to improve their health and safety on the job. This author’s special contribution is that he demonstrates how the private horrors of industrialisation became public. Thus, it was not just journalists and reformers who were describing the costs of child labour, but workers themselves testifying in courtrooms. Indeed, a major theme of the book is how the courts functioned as a forum for communities to tell what happened to their young people on the job – what Schmidt calls ‘the chilling truths of industrial life’ (p. 219). However, the courts performed another function as well, for, as judges and juries granted judgements to injured child workers against industry, they were incorporating the reformers’ ideas about the distinctive nature of childhood, and they were enunciating the view that the legislation enacted in states against child labour had been primarily intended to prevent accidents on the job. The courts, then, played a key role in winning acceptance of child labour laws, not only from the broader public, but also from workers themselves. Historians of medicine and public health, and many others, will have much to learn from this strikingly original interpretation of the origins of child labour reform.