Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Articles
For help at various stages of the project he thanks Brian Balogh, Dan Coenen, Charles McCurdy, Dan Ernst, Paul Heald, Nancy Leong, Stephanie Hunter McMahon, Tim Meyer, Willow Meyer, Cynthia Nicoletti, Laura Phillips Sawyer, Robin West, G. Edward White, David Tanenhaus and the anonymous Law and History Review reviewers. Nicholas Rolader provided able research assistance.
Following the 1906 midterm elections, Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge was excited to return to Washington to introduce a bill that would prohibit child labor in the nation's factories, mines, and mills. He hoped the bill would curtail the unpopular practice and help rebrand his Republican Party as the nation's progressive party. The Party's old guard, however, proved uncooperative. Recognizing the unpopularity of child labor, they fought the bill on constitutional grounds and challenged Beveridge with a parade of horribles. If Congress could constitutionally regulate child labor, they asked, could it not also regulate the hours or wages of adults? Could it not prevent a man from joining a labor union? Or require it? One would have expected Beveridge--who opposed such regulations--to blunt that criticism with some legal distinction. Instead, he embraced it. Would Beveridge go so far as to claim that Congress could prohibit the interstate shipment of cotton picked by children, asked one Senator. "Yes," Beveridge retorted, "or [by] a redheaded girl." 1
Historians have noted this episode, but hurried past it, seeing little more than a bill that lacked popular support.2Beveridge's insistence on the constitutionality of his bill, however, is more than that. It is a case study of constitutional politics in the early twentieth century. The role of constitutional argument in Congress is denigrated by broader studies of Progressive Era legislative and party politics as well as narrower histories of child labor regulation. They generally ignore it or portray it as camouflage for "real" political motivations. 3That framework, however, cannot explain why Beveridge respected the integrity of his constitutional argument when doing so undermined his political goals. His behavior is better understood as a striking example of the independent effect of constitutionalism on Progressive Era legislative and party politics.
Beveridge was no prisoner of Supreme Court doctrine. He knew passing federal child labor legislation would require...