How Old Are You?

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 2: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, each week along with my colleagues Ed Ayers, Joanne Freeman, and Nathan Connolly, we explore a topic of American history that’s been in the news.

Brian Balogh: This week to help you prepare for the Labor Day holiday, we’re giving you the chance to hear some of BackStory’s best segments on the world of work and the rights of workers. First, an insight into the fact that workers aren’t always as old as you would expect.

Brian Balogh: By the late 19th century, manufacturing in the United States was exploding. Machines were stitching together shirts, cutting leather, rolling cigars, and forging steel. To keep up with all that production, factories needed workers and lots of them. Company managers met that demand with children. Many even preferred children. Kids were docile, less likely to strike, and best of all cheap.

Susan Pearson: About 20% of children in 1900 are working outside the home for wages.

Brian Balogh: This is historian Susan Pearson. I spoke to her about child labor in the United States.

Susan Pearson: One thing that industrialization does is it de- skills labor, and the great advantage of unskilled labor for employers is that they can pay children so much less than they have to pay an adult male to perform the equivalent task.

Brian Balogh: It was one thing for kids to help out on the family farm, but industrial jobs were something else all together. Working in factories and mines was dangerous and hard, with the workday often stretching beyond 12 hours. You know those photos you’ve seen of forlorn looking children standing next to machines three times their size? Those pictures were part of reformers’ efforts to outlaw child labor in factories. But progress was slow, in part because the government couldn’t prove how old anybody was.

Susan Pearson: Even in states that are able to pass laws that regulate children’s labor. So say New York state passes a law in the 1880s that says you’ve got to be 14 years old to work in a factory. Okay. Well, how do you prove that? How do you know what children are 14, and which are 13, and which are 12?

Brian Balogh: The answer? The birth certificate. Today, every American citizen has one, but in the 19th century, parents recorded the birth of their children in the family Bible, if at all. Pearson says in the 19th century, age was a fuzzy concept.

Susan Pearson: A lot of people didn’t keep careful track of when their children were born or when they themselves were born. If you think about it, in the 19th century there weren’t a lot of reasons you needed to know your exact birth date. So when census takers would come around and ask people how old they were, they would give very round numbers. They would say, I’m about 25 or I’m close to 30.

Brian Balogh: So if so many children were working, why were some other people so concerned about those children working, especially in factories?

Susan Pearson: They would have told you that child labor is wrong because it stunts the physical and mental growth of children who work in industrial settings. However, historians have different explanations for why child labor becomes a problem, and that really has to do with changing ideas about childhood itself and what it is that childhood is for. Right? That children should be kept away from the adult world in their own kinds of activities that are developmentally appropriate. So they should be in school, not working. They should be playing, not working. They should be shielded from premature contact with adult activities like going into saloons, or coming in contact with vice, or any of the kinds of mixing that children and adults routinely used to do.

Brian Balogh: Once the states actually started requiring a registration of births and then requiring birth certificates in order to work, how did the families react?

Susan Pearson: A lot of families were not happy. Clearly the child labor reformers, they are at war with working class conceptions of childhood, of the fuzziness of chronological age, and of working class household economy. And those parents, we might look at them and think they were greedy, or selfish, or didn’t understand what children really need. Chances are they were operating from a worldview in which all family members contribute to the financial wellbeing of the household. As soon as they’re big enough to work, everybody’s put to work. That’s how it had always been. What changed was that the kind of work children could do became industrial.

Brian Balogh: But we haven’t talked about how the kids felt about this. Did they like working?

Susan Pearson: Most of them did. There’s a lot of testimony even among the reformers who think that they’re protecting these children, they find all the time when they go into factories that the children want to be there, and they are even proud of the work that they do, and the money that they bring into their families. The National Child Labor Committee employee, a guy named Owen Lovejoy, went and visited kids in the coal mines in Pennsylvania, and he wrote the typical breaker boy who’s a boy who works in the coal mine, is proud of his breaker and both of its daily output. And he goes on to say they’re proud about how fast they can work, how accurately they can work, but also, and I quote, “They’re proud of the independence, which personal economic value gives him in the home.”

Brian Balogh: Hmm. So what impact does this have when it’s fully in place? Let’s say by 1940, how does this change manufacturing?

Susan Pearson: It makes it much harder to work before the age of 16, which is the standard that the Fair Labor Standards Act creates. It also works in conjunction with compulsory schooling laws to change the nature of the workforce as a whole. So in 1900, only 10% of youth aged 14 to 17 are attending high school. By 1940 when the fair labor standards act is in place, that has jumped to 73%. So that’s a seven fold increase in the number of young people that are staying in the workforce past the age of 14.

Brian Balogh: When you started doing your research, did you expect a piece of paper to have such a dramatic impact on the labor force, the workforce in manufacturing?

Susan Pearson: I did not. I didn’t know how central it was to child labor reform. I thought that it would be on the periphery, one of many things at the birth certificate did. But the more I did the research, the more I discovered that it was really this campaign against child labor that was the first time that birth certificates were used as identification documents in this way.

Brian Balogh: Is the birth certificate just a symbol of government’s increased role in kind of mediating between workers and employers?

Susan Pearson: In some sense, yeah, it is. It’s certainly not the only example from this period, from the late 19th and early 20th century where you see everything from the Pure Food and Drug Act, which was passed in 1906, to efforts in the states to regulate the number of hours per day and per week that employees can work, to regulating the kinds of work that women can do. There’s a large national movement to try to control the terms of industrial production in the United States.

Brian Balogh: Right, and you can add workers compensation and worker safety laws to that.

Susan Pearson: Absolutely.

Brian Balogh: Susan Pearson is a historian at Northwestern University and the author of The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Children and Animals in the Gilded Age. She’s currently working on a book about the history of, you guessed it, that birth certificate.