Class four described how workers were recruited to factories. The government set up workhouses where people were assigned tasks so difficult, demeaning, and brutal that factory work seemed preferable by comparison. Large numbers of children from orphanages and hard-up families were brought in because they could be paid less, were less able to resist, and could be, because of their small size, be assigned jobs under or inside dangerous machinery.
American sociologist and photographer Lewis Hine made thousands of photographs documenting child labor in factories the southern United States in the early twentieth century.
The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 outlawed the most egregious of these practices but was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Hamer v Dagenhart in 1918. Successful legislation against child labor in the U.S. only became possible in the wake of FDR’s threat to increased the size of the Supreme Court.
