After the Civil War, the United States underwent an unprecedented period of industrial expansion. In the ensuing decades, ever-increasing numbers of children throughout the country worked in textile factories, coal mines, meatpacking plants and food canneries, as well as in fields picking produce, in city tenements manufacturing piece-goods and on urban streets as peddlers, newsboys and messengers. The number of 10- to 14-year-olds employed in industrial jobs increased more than threefold between 1870 and 1900, from just over 350,000 to nearly 1.1 million.
These developments spurred organized labor and Progressive reformers across the industrial North to work aggressively for the passage of child labor protections. Unions advanced economic arguments about the depressive effect of child labor on adult workers’ wage rates, while reformers trained their attention to moralistic arguments — often positioned in racist and nativist terms — about working children who were being exploited in equal turns by employers and greedy parents. The result was that through the turn of the 20th century a variety of age, hours and compulsory education laws were put in place in states from New England to the Midwest.
At the same time in the South, however, child labor came to be inexorably tied to state and regional economic development, especially in textile manufacturing, which became the largest industrial employer in the region. Business and political leaders worked to position their states as industry-friendly and regulation- and union-free in a chase for industrial investments. Economic boosters promoted the region as a pro-business alternative to states where labor and industrial legislation regulating hours, overnight work and child labor were solidly in place. In North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, these efforts focused especially on persuading textile companies based in New England to build factories there.
Alabama’s experience was notable in this respect. Alabama’s actions in the winter of 1894 came to be a regional touchstone in this race for runaway capital. Until then, the state had been an outlier among other southern states. In 1887, a state child labor law had gone into effect mandating age and hours regulations for children working in mines and manufacturing, although it was considered weak and unenforceable.
During the next legislative session in 1889, a bill was enacted that carved out exceptions for two counties where textile mills had been built, although this law remained in place elsewhere in the state. Then, to secure assurances from one of the largest New England textile companies that it would build a factory in the state, the legislature repealed the law altogether in December 1894, proving, according to the would-be investors, “that Alabama was governed in a common sense and economical way, and that we had less to fear here from hostile legislation.” By 1895 the editor of the Lynchburg News mused on “the investments of large sums of money in the far South by the greatest cotton-mill corporations of New England,” whose “object in coming South is to get away from the meddlesome and restrictive laws enacted.”