Season's End

Last week Connecticut and Rhode Island became respectively the 16th and 17th States this year to reject the proposed Constitutional amendment empowering Congress to "limit, regulate and prohibit the labor of persons under 18 years of age." Thus, with State Legislatures rapidly adjourning their spring sessions, the 1935 season of the long-lived campaign to abolish "child labor" was practically over. Since Jan. 1 the total number of State ratifications has been in- creased from 20 to 20 to 24--still twelve short of the goal. This showing was not nearly so impressive as that of 1933 when the Blue Eagle and Industrial Democracy were young and the Legislatures of 14 States approved this proposed 22nd Amendment. Twelve States now in the affirmative column at one time or another in the past voted negatively.

President Roosevelt does his bit to persuade the States to sanction Federal control of child labor. So does his ubiquitous wife. But the real spearhead of this Administration drive is Miss Katharine Frederika Lenroot whom President Roosevelt appointed chief of the U. S. Children's Bureau last winter. After Connecticut and Rhode Island turned down her pet project last week, Chief Lenroot declared: "It is clear that the fight will have to continue another two years. But I am not at all discouraged. I am sure that in the long run the American people will not want to lose the ground gained under the NRA codes, which have largely eliminated child labor."

Retorted the Sentinels of the Republic, bitter foes of the Child Labor Amendment : "We feel that the failure of Legislatures to ratify this year, in spite of the pressure brought upon them, means that the Amendment is dead and never will be enacted."

In assuming active leadership on the child labor front, Miss Lenroot was following the traditions of the Children's Bureau and Grace Abbott, its longtime chief whom she succeeded. When Katharine Lenroot was 10, her father, Irvine L. Lenroot, took her with him to the Wisconsin Legislature for six weeks because the Lenroot home at Superior was quarantined for scarlet fever. Katharine escaped that disease, but was badly infected with the virus of public affairs. When Mr. Lenroot was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1908 (before his promotion to the Senate in 1918), his daughter deferred entering college for a year to be with him in Washington. While still a junior at the University of Wisconsin, she appeared before a Legislative Committee with a report in behalf of a minimum wage bill. Two years later she had passed a Civil Service examination and was making a survey of Milwaukee living costs for the State Industrial Commission. If she had ever entertained any notion of engaging in her Republican father's political battles with the La Follette progressives, she had dropped it when she returned to Washington in 1914 as a special agent for the Children's Bureau.

Among the nation's topflight social service experts, Miss Lenroot at 44 is prematurely grey, a good-natured spinster who speaks three languages, likes to attend international conventions, drive far in her car. A lifetime of dealing with the oppressed, disadvantaged and weak has made childless Katharine Lenroot neither cynical nor maudlin. Her friends like to say that she has achieved "a spiritual motherhood."

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