State Will LImit Enforcement of Child Labor Laws, March 10, 1919

From the editorial page of the Brevard News, March 7, 1919; M.L. Shipman, Editor; C.B. Osborne, Managing Editor and Publisher; and Gertrude R. Zachary, City Editor. This editoral was correct. The article below summarizes what the N.C. General Assembly accomplished in 1919 and what it didn't do in enforcing laws that would limit children from working more than eight hours a day in factories.

It appears that no child labor legislation in harmony with the Federal tax amendment will be enacted by the General Assembly now in session. Therefore, the Government will have to step in and protect the children of North Carolina as it started out to do when the Keating-Owen bill was voided on a technicality by divided Supreme Court last year. The mill men of the State are probably relying upon the hope that the Tax Amendment will meet with the like fate but we would respectfully remind them that the highest tribunal in the land has never yet interfered with a revenue measure. And it will not break the record of a century now.

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From an article by W.T. Bost in the Hickory Daily Record, March 10, 1919, summarizing the actions of the 1919 General Assembly

Raleigh, March 10--$23 million of federal government money for North Carolina roads in 10 years; six months terms in every North Carolina district with every teacher’s salary abundantly raised; four big state-wide health laws governing the suppression of vice and the cure of social diseases; the abolishment of nearly 100,000 malodorous, unslightly and disease-spreading privies, the inspection of schools and increasing county health appropriations; the inauguration of a state-wide warehouse plan whereby the cotton farmer may hold his crop and negotiate money on the guarantee that its storage makes possible; revaluation of all the property and imposition of an income tax—these bills have been written into law and give a tabloid history of the 1919 general assembly.

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The general assembly did not pass the child labor law that it had indicated its purpose to do; but it is admitted that the Neal bill putting the enforcement of child labor law in the hands of the state superintendent of public instruction, the Secretary of the State Board of Health and the Commissioner of Public Welfare, isn’t vitally crippled. The manufacturers yielding to the principal of popular control did fight the enforcement of this act through the office of commissioner of labor and printing, but there is no radical difference in the power of the statute. The house did decline to adopt the federal statute as to the hours.

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