The Whiteness of Child Labor Reform in the New South

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White racial solidarity and the humanitarian movement to restrict child labor in Alabama. Focusing on Alabama's textile industry, this study looks at the complex motivations behind the "Whites-only" route taken by the Progressive reform movement in the South. In the early 1900s, northern mill owners seeking cheaper labor and fewer regulations found the South's doors wide open. Children then comprised over 22 percent of the southern textile labor force, compared to 6 percent in New England. Shelley Sallee explains how northern and southern Progressives, who formed a transregional alliance to nudge the South toward minimal child welfare standards, had to mold their strategies around the racial and societal preoccupations of a crucial ally--white middleclass southerners. Southern whites of the "better sort" often regarded white mill workers as something of a race unto themselves--degenerate and just above blacks in station. To enlist white middle-class support, says Sallee, reformers had to address concerns about social chaos fueled by northern interference, the empowerment of "white trash, " or the alliance of poor whites and blacks. The answer was to couch reform in terms of white racial uplift--and to persuade the white middle class that to demean white children through factory work was to undermine "whiteness" generally. Sallee discusses how the child-labor problem was tackled by southern middle-class whites within their own prevailing ideas about race, family, and gender. This approach discounted many of organized labor's concerns about safety, fair wages and hours, and workers' rights, Sallee says. Although it did create an entree for women to participate in the public sphere, thelingering effect of a "whites-only" strategy was to reinforce the idea of whiteness as essential to American identity and the politics of reform. This study will enrich our interpretation of reform, racism, and political compromise in the Progressive-era South.