Seeds of a New Sectionalism

In the age of industrialization and American imperialism, the child labor issue was remade into a symbol of the collapse of the prevailing racial order in the South when the region’s textile industry increasingly employed poor white children. Led by Southern Progressive reformer Edgar Gardner Murphy, reformers redefined the child labor issue as a crisis of white racial deterioration and founded the National Child Labor Committee in 1904. On the basis of saving the South’s poor white children, Northern reformers justified expanded federal authority in the market, but Southern reformers rejected this approach, calling instead for local control of the issue. A split in the movement left in its wake a growing opposition to national child labor reform in the South.