Hammer v. Dagenhart

247 U.S. 251 (1918), argued 15–16 Apr. 1918, decided 3 June 1918 by vote of 5 to 4; Day for the Court, Holmes, McKenna, Brandeis, and Clarke in dissent. As the Progressive movement (see Progressivism) coalesced early in the twentieth century, Congress increasingly used the commerce power and taxing and spending power for police power purposes, enacting regulatory legislation to ameliorate social problems deemed national in character. Prominent among these problems was concern for children working outside their homes, who were dependent, often exploited, nearly always powerless to effect the conditions under which they labored. As it became increasingly apparent that state legislation could not effectively establish national regulatory standards, reformers turned to Congress, seeking federal legislation that would abolish child labor. In 1916, in what became recognized as the climax of the Progressive movement, substantial majorities in the House and the Senate enacted the Keating‐Owen Child Labor Act, which utilized the commerce power to bar goods made by children from interstate commerce.

Because the Supreme Court had repeatedly legitimated national police power enactments, notably in such seemingly decisive holdings as Champion v. Ames (1903), Hipolite Egg Company v. United States (1911), and Hoke v. United States (1913), it was widely expected that the Supreme Court would build upon this precedential foundation in its decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart. The earlier opinions seemed to establish the principle that Congress could use its power over commerce to prohibit interstate transportation as the national welfare dictated. Congress had authority, Hoke had declared, “to occupy, by legislation, the whole field of interstate commerce” (p. 320).

However, a five‐justice majority on a bitterly divided bench rejected this constitutional justification and recurred to a line of reasoning thought to have been repudiated earlier in the century. Justice William Rufus Day's opinion rested upon the distinction between manufacture and commerce enunciated in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895): the congressional “power is one to control the means by which commerce is carried on, which is directly the contrary of the assumed right to forbid commerce” (pp. 269–270). He condemned the Keating‐Owen law as having reached an area of regulation wholly within the ambit of the states and exerting power not warranted in the Constitution. While conceding that child laborers needed protection, Day charged Congress with action destructive to federalism. “[T]he far‐reaching result,” if Congress was not stopped, he assented, was that “all freedom of commerce will be at an end … and thus our system of government be practically destroyed” (p. 276). This resort to the grand peur was characteristic of the doctrines of constitutional laissez‐faire to which the majority now returned.

Writing with uncharacteristic passion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes fashioned one of the most notable dissenting opinions in the Court's history. He excoriated the majority for intruding their personal judgments “upon questions of policy and morals” (p. 280). “I should have thought,” Holmes wrote, “that if we were to introduce our own moral conceptions where, in my opinion, they do not belong, this was preeminently a case for upholding the exercise of all its powers by the United States” (p. 280). To Holmes, one analytical proposition was indisputable: the congressional prohibition applied only at the point where an offending state sought to transport its commercial products across its borders into national commerce. “Regulation means the prohibition of something” (p. 277), he argued, and he enumerated the line of constitutional development, stretching back to Veazie Bank v. Fenno (1869), in which the Court had lent sanction to national regulation of the kind embodied in the Keating‐Owen law. “The power to regulate commerce and other constitutional powers could not be cut down or qualified,” he asserted, as a consequence of their “indirect effects” (p. 278).

Holmes's revulsion at what he considered the majority's defiance of the democratic will mirrored the consternation evident throughout the country. Congress swiftly responded by enacting the second federal child labor law, using the taxing power to apply against manufacturers the same regulatory standards embodied in the Keating‐Owen law (see Taxing and Spending Clause). Even though the Court overturned this statute in *Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. (1922), the minority was vindicated two decades later, following the Constitutional Revolution in 1937, when a unanimous bench in United States v. *Darby Lumber Co. (1941) adopted and, indeed, went beyond the constitutional principles set forth in what Justice Harlan Fiske *Stone characterized as Holmes's “powerful and now classic dissent” (p. 115).

See also Labor; State Regulation of Commerce.

Bibliography

• Stephen B. Wood, Constitutional Politics in the Progressive Era (1968)

— Stephen B. Wood

• 247 U.S. 251 (1918)
• Vote: 5–4
• For the Court: Day
• Dissenting: Holmes, McKenna, Brandeis, and Clarke

In 1916 Congress passed the Keating Owen Child Labor Act, which banned the interstate shipment of products made by child labor. This federal law applied to businesses that employed children younger than 14 years of age or employed children of ages 14 through 16 for more than eight hours a day or more than six days per week.

Roland H. Dagenhart's two sons, Reuben (under 14 years old) and John (between 14 and 16 years old), worked at a cotton mill in Charlotte, North Carolina. He did not want his sons to lose their jobs because of the federal law regulating child labor. So Dagenhart brought suit to prevent the federal government from enforcing the Child Labor Act.

The Issue

The Child Labor Act was based on Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution, which gives Congress power to “regulate commerce among the several states.” Dagenhart claimed that the Child Labor Act was not a constitutional regulation of commerce. Rather, it regulated conditions of production at the workplace, a power reserved to the states under the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. Dagenhart also argued that the federal law violated the due process clause of the 5th Amendment by taking away his sons' liberty to work. Did Congress, in passing the Child Labor Act, exceed its power to regulate interstate commerce? Did the Child Labor Act violate the 5th Amendment rights of children desiring employment?

Opinion of the Court

Justice William Day agreed with the federal government that child laborers need protection but said the state governments, not the federal government, were the proper source of legal regulation. In his opinion, Justice Day wrote that powers “not expressly delegated to the national government are reserved to the people and the states.” This is an incorrect statement of the 10th Amendment, which does not include the word expressly but says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Inclusion of expressly in a restatement of the 10th Amendment implies a narrow interpretation of Congress's commerce power and a broad view of powers reserved to the states, which is the position of the Supreme Court in this case. Day concluded that it was North Carolina's right to decide the appropriate age of child laborers or their conditions of work. Congress has no power under the Constitution to force child labor laws on the states. To permit it to do so, wrote Justice Day, would be to destroy the system of federalism established by the Constitution.

Dissent

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued for a broad interpretation of the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce, which, he said, is “given… in unqualified terms, [and] the power to regulate [includes] the power to prohibit.” Holmes also argued that the Constitution was designed to be adapted to “the felt necessities” and problems of different eras. The Court should interpret the Constitution, said Holmes, to respond to changing times unless the Constitution specifically prevents it from doing so. Holmes concluded: “The public policy of the United States is shaped with a view to the benefit of the nation as a whole. … The national welfare understood by Congress may require a different attitude within its sphere from that of some self-seeking state.”

Significance

The dissent of Justice Holmes eventually prevailed. In United States v. Darby Lumber Company (1941), the Court overturned the decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart. Justice Holmes's dissent in this case became the basis for the Court's decision in the Darby case.

See also Commerce power; Federalism; United States v. Darby Lumber Co.

Hammer v. Dagenhart
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 15–16, 1918 Decided June 3, 1918
Full case name	Hammer, United States Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina v. Dagenhart, et al.
Citations	247 U.S. 251 (more) 38 S. Ct. 529; 62 L. Ed. 1101; 1918 U.S. LEXIS 1907; 3 A.L.R. 649
Prior history	Appeal from the District of the United States for the Western District of North Carolina
Holding
Congress has no power under the Commerce Clause to regulate labor conditions.
Court membership
Chief Justice Edward D. White Associate Justices Joseph McKenna · Oliver W. Holmes, Jr. William R. Day · Willis Van Devanter Mahlon Pitney · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · John H. Clarke
Case opinions
Majority	Day, joined by White, Pitney, Van Devanter, McReynolds
Dissent	Holmes, joined by McKenna, Brandeis, Clarke
Laws applied
Keating-Owen Act of 1916; Commerce Clause of the U.S. Const.
Overruled by
United States v. Darby Lumber Company, 312 U.S. 100 (1941)

Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918), was a United States Supreme Court decision involving the power of Congress to enact child labor laws.

Contents 1 Background 2 Supreme Court decision 3 Dissenting opinion 4 Later developments 5 External links 6 See also

Background

Public sentiment turned against what was perceived as increasingly intolerable child labor conditions. Activities of such groups as the National Child Labor Committee, muckraking journalists, and labor groups called attention to unhealthy and unsafe working conditions. Historical material presented by the Smithsonian Institution provides a sense of the motivation behind these concerns in an electronic exhibit on the work of the photographer Hine:

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, North Carolina with his two sons, sued, arguing that this law was unconstitutional.

At issue: 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, 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?

Supreme Court decision

Justice Day, with the Majority Opinion, said that Congress does not have the right to regulate commerce of goods that are manufactured by children, therefore voiding the Keating-Owen Act of 1916. Drawing a distinction between the manufacture of goods and potential "inherent evil" of goods themselves introduced into interstate commerce, the Court maintained that the issue was not a moral one, removing it from precedents set in previous cases where the Congress had sought to control lottery schemes, prostitution, and liquor. The Court reasoned that such instances were inherently 'evil' and thus open to Congressional scrutiny. In this case, however, the issue at hand was the manufacture of cotton, which does not entail a moral evil. The Court further argued 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:

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. FindLaw 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 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.

Dissenting opinion

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." (Ibid) Holmes also took issue with the majority's logic in allowing Congress to regulate activities regarded as immoral, while at the same time disallowing the same in other cases: "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." (Ibid)

Later 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., 312 U.S. 100 (1941). 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

• Full text of the decision courtesy of FindLaw

• Full text of decision at Wikisource

See also

• Child labor laws in the United States
• Commerce Clause
• Lochner era

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