Only Fools Want to Take Negro Children Out of Cotton Fields, Says Senator Overman, June 4, 1924

Child Labor Act May Never Become a Law. . . Senator Overman Thinks 13 States Can be Found to Act Against It

Washington, June 3—Senator Overman, who spoke and voted against the child labor amendment, was ??(words obscured) today about the prospect of the Senate defeating the amendment when it is submitted to them. He said he would feel absolutely certain that as many as 13 states could be got to reject the amendment if it could be submitted directly to the people through constitutional conventions, for by that method the people would come to understand the nature of the amendment. In that way it would be the only question under discussion and the members of the convention would meet, knowing what the people wanted.

However, the amendment will not go to constitutional conventions but to the state legislatures whose members will be elected without regard to whether they are for or against the amendment, said the senator. The fact is, he continued, the amendment will not figure at all in the campaign and the proponents of it do not intend that is shall. They want the people to forget that Congress ever passed it.

But when the legislatures meet, he pointed out, the great propaganda mill that has been grinding here in Washington for the last two years, well financed by certain male and female sentimentalists on the one hand and shrewd New England cotton mill men n the other, will set to work at every capital in the union. It is not likely that these legislatures can resist what Congress has proven unable to resist, had sent a man here from North Carolina, W.H. Swift, to lobby for this amendment, and was paying him a salary nearly equal to that of a Congressman while the opponents of the measure, so far as the senator himself knew, had spent no money to prevent its passage.

Representative Weaver, who made a speech in the House supporting the child labor amendment, and who was one of the principal movers in putting the North Carolina child labor law on the statute books while he was in the legislature, says the textile men of the state fought him at every turn in that campaign. When they saw they would lose the battle they offered compromise after compromise.

But Mr. Weaver frankly admitted the amendment passed by Congress should have been changed. He said there were certain kinds of farm work where the employment of children should be prohibited, such as that in the sugar beet fields in the west where children are required to work in a stooped position calculated to injure seriously their health.

Mr. Weaver does not think that any member of Congress would ever be “fool enough” to propose taking the negro children out of the cotton fields of the south, as some opponents of the amendment have pointed out as one of its dangers. Senator Overman does not agree with Mr. Weaver. He says if the amendment is ratified by three-fourths of the states the way will be open for the wildest sort of legislation. The North Carolina child labor law will be a dead letter the moment the amendment is ratified, the senator said.

From the front page of the Concord Daily Tribune, Wednesday, June 4, 1924