564 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
As stricter and more far-reaching laws were
enacted, many judges, fearing a trend toward social-
ism and regimentation, adopted an increasingly nar-
row interpretation of state authority to regulate
business. In 1905 the U.S. Supreme Court declared
in the case of Lochner v. New Yorkthat a New York
ten-hour act for bakers deprived the bakers of the lib-
erty of working as long as they wished and thus vio-
lated the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote a famous dissenting opin-
ion in this case. If the people of New York believed
that the public health was endangered by bakers
working long hours, he reasoned, it was not the
Court’s job to overrule them.
Nevertheless, the progressives continued to bat-
tle for legislation to use state power against busi-
ness. Women played a particularly important part in
these struggles. Sparked by the National Child
Labor Committee, organized in 1904, reformers
over the next ten years obtained laws in nearly every
state banning the employment of young children
and limiting the hours of older ones. Many of these
laws were poorly enforced, yet when Congress
passed a federal child labor law in 1916, the
Supreme Court, inHammer v. Dagenhart(1918),
declared it unconstitutional.^1
By 1917 nearly all the states had placed limita-
tions on the hours of women industrial workers, and
about ten had set minimum wage standards for
women. But once again federal action that would
have extended such regulation to the entire country
did not materialize. A minimum wage law for women
in the District of Columbia was overturned by the
Court in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital(1923).
Many states also enacted laws protecting workers
against on-the-job accidents. Disasters like the 1911
fire in New York City, in which nearly 150 women
perished because the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had
no fire escapes, led to the passage of stricter municipal
building codes and factory inspection acts. By 1910
most states had modified the common-law principle
that a worker accepted the risk of accident as a condi-
tion of employment and was not entitled to compen-
sation if injured unless it could be proved that theOn March 25, 1911, as scores of young factory girls leaped to their deaths from the eighth, ninth, and tenth stories of the Triangle Shirtwaist
Factory in New York City, eighteen-year-old Victor Gatto watched in horror. Thirty-three years later he painted this rendering of his nightmare,
the bodies of the dead girls placed in order at the base of the building.
Source: Victor Joseph Gatto (1893–1965), Triangle Fire: March 25, 1911.c. 1944 (depicting 1911), oil on canvas, 19 28", Gift of Mrs. Henry L. Moses, 54.75. The Museum
of the City of New York.
(^1) A second child labor law, passed in 1919, was also thrown out by
the Court, and a child labor amendment, submitted in 1924, failed
to achieve ratification by the necessary three-quarters of the states.