Hammer v. Dagenhart
Encyclopedia
Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251
Case citation
Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...

 (1918), was a United States Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

 decision involving the power of Congress
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

 to enact child labor
Child labor
Child labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This practice is considered exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in many countries...

 laws. The Court held regulation of child labor in purely internal (to a single state) manufacturing, the products of which may never enter interstate commerce, to be beyond the power of Congress, distinguishing the Lottery
Champion v. Ames
Champion v. Ames, 188 U.S. 321 , was a decision by the United States Supreme Court which held that trafficking lottery tickets constituted interstate commerce that could be regulated by the U.S. Congress under the Commerce Clause....

line of cases, which concerned Congressional regulation of harms (e.g. interstate sale of lottery tickets) that required the use of interstate commerce.

Background

During the Progressive Era
Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social activism and political reform that flourished from the 1890s to the 1920s. One main goal of the Progressive movement was purification of government, as Progressives tried to eliminate corruption by exposing and undercutting political...

, public sentiment in America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 turned against what was perceived as increasingly intolerable child labor conditions. Activities of such groups as the National Child Labor Committee
National Child Labor Committee
The National Child Labor Committee, or NCLC, is a private, non-profit organization in the United States that serves as a leading proponent for the national child labor reform movement...

, muckraking journalists, and labor groups called attention to unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Historical material presented by the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...

 provides a sense of the motivation behind these concerns in an electronic exhibit on the work of the photographer Lewis Hine
Lewis Hine
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform. His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States.-Early life:...

:

Over and over, Hine saw children working sixty and seventy-hour weeks, by day and by night, often under hazardous conditions. He saw children caught in a cycle of poverty, often so ill-paid that they could not support a family on their earnings alone, and had to rely on their children's earnings as a supplement for the family's survival. He saw children growing up stunted mentally (illiterate or barely able to read because their jobs kept them out of school) and physically (from lack of fresh air, exercise, and time to relax and play). He saw countless children who had been injured and permanently disabled on the job; he knew that, in the cotton mills for example, children had accident rates three times those of adults.


Responding to the growing public concern, many states sought to impose local restrictions on child labor. In many states, however, the attempt to regulate was ineffective. In addition, manufacturers argued that where restrictions were imposed only in selected states, it placed them at a competitive disadvantage with competitors from states which still placed no restrictions.

Unable to regulate hours and working conditions for child labor within individual states, Congress sought to regulate child labor by banning the product of that labor from interstate commerce. The Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate commerce of any merchandise that had been made by children under the age of fourteen, or merchandise that had been made in factories where children between the ages of 14 and 16 worked for more than eight hours a day, worked overnight, or worked more than six days a week.

Roland Dagenhart, who worked in a cotton mill in Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina
Charlotte is the largest city in the U.S. state of North Carolina and the seat of Mecklenburg County. In 2010, Charlotte's population according to the US Census Bureau was 731,424, making it the 17th largest city in the United States based on population. The Charlotte metropolitan area had a 2009...

, North Carolina with his two sons, sued, arguing that this law was unconstitutional. A district court ruled the statute unconstitutional, which caused United States Attorney W.C. Hammer to appeal to the Supreme Court. At issue was the question: Does Congress have the authority to regulate commerce of goods that are manufactured by children under the age 14, as specified in the Keating-Owen Act of 1916
Keating-Owen Act
The Keating-Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 also known as Wick's Bill, was a statute enacted by the U.S. Congress which sought to address the perceived evils of child labor by prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce of goods manufactured by children in the United States, thus giving an expanded...

, and is it within the authority of Congress in regulating commerce among the states to prohibit the transportation in interstate commerce of manufactured goods by the child labor description above?

The Supreme Court's decision

Justice Day, for the majority, said that Congress does not have the power to regulate commerce of goods that are manufactured by children, and that the Keating-Owen Act of 1916 was therefore unconstitutional. Drawing a distinction between the manufacture of goods and the regulation of certain goods themselves "inherently evil", the Court maintained that the issue did not concern the power to keep certain immoral products out of the stream of interstate commerce, distinguishing previous cases upholding Congress's power to control lottery schemes, prostitution, and liquor. The Court reasoned that, in those cases, the goods themselves were inherently immoral and thus open to congressional scrutiny. In this case, however, the issue at hand was the manufacture of cotton, a good whose use is not immoral. The Court further held that the manufacture of cotton did not in itself constitute interstate commerce. The Court recognized that disparate labor regulations placed the various states on unequal ground in terms of economic competitiveness, but it specifically stated that Congress could not address such inequality, for it was within the right of states to enact differing laws within the scope of their police powers:


It is further contended that the authority of Congress may be exerted to control interstate commerce in the shipment of childmade goods because of the effect of the circulation of such goods in other states where the evil of this class of labor has been recognized by local legislation, and the right to thus employ child labor has been more rigorously restrained than in the state of production. In other words, that the unfair competition, thus engendered, may be controlled by closing the channels of interstate commerce to manufacturers in those states where the local laws do not meet what Congress deems to be the more just standard of other states. The grant of power of Congress over the subject of interstate commerce was to enable it to regulate such commerce, and not to give it authority to control the states in their exercise of the police power over local trade and manufacture.


"The commerce clause was not intended to give to Congress a general authority to equalize such conditions," the court reasoned. The Court added that the federal government was "one of enumerated powers" and could not go beyond the boundary drawn by the 10th Amendment:


In our view the necessary effect of this act is, by means of a prohibition against the movement in interstate commerce of ordinary commercial commodities, to regulate the hours of labor of children in factories and mines within the states, a purely state
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 authority. Thus the act in a two-fold sense is repugnant to the Constitution. It not only transcends the authority delegated to Congress over commerce but also exerts a power as to a purely local matter to which the federal authority does not extend.

Dissent

Justice Holmes dissented strongly from the logic and ruling of the majority. He maintained that Congress was completely within its right to regulate interstate commerce, and that goods manufactured in one state and sold in other states were by definition interstate commerce. This places the entire manufacturing process under the purview of Congress, and this constitutional power "could not be cut down or qualified by the fact that it might interfere with the carrying out of the domestic policy of any State." Holmes also took issue with the majority's logic in allowing Congress to regulate goods themselves regarded as immoral, while at the same time disallowing regulation of goods whose use may be considered just as immoral in a more indirect sense: "The notion that prohibition is any less prohibition when applied to things now thought evil I do not understand...to say that it is permissible as against strong drink but not as against the product of ruined lives."

Subsequent developments

The ruling of the Court was later overturned and repudiated in a series of decisions handed down in the late 1930s. Specifically, Hammer v. Dagenhart was overruled in 1941 in the case of United States v. Darby Lumber Co.
United States v. Darby Lumber Co.
United States v. Darby Lumber Co., 312 U.S. 100 , was a case in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, holding that the U.S. Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate employment conditions. The unanimous decision of the Court in this...

, . The Court in the Darby case sided strongly with Holmes' dissent, which they named "classic". They also recast the reading of the 10th Amendment, regarding it as a "truism" that merely restates what the Constitution had already provided for, rather than offering a substantive protection to the States, as the Hammer ruling had contended.

External links

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