William Pinckney Hamrick was general superintendent of the Pacific Mills in Columbia, S.C., from 1917 until 1941.

Asbury Francis Lever (1875-1940) was a Democratic congressman from South Carolina (1901-19). Hamrick wrote Lever on Apr. 19, 1917, urging the suspension of the federal child labor law during the war (Files of the Office of the President, General Correspondence, reel 83, frame 321, AFL Records).

Federal child labor legislation (the Keating-Owen Act) was signed into law on Sept. 1, 1916, and went into effect on Sept. 1, 1917 (U.S. Statutes at Large, 39:675-76). It barred from interstate and foreign commerce the products of mines or quarries that employed children under sixteen, and articles produced in factories, mills, or other manufacturing establishments that employed children under fourteen or that allowed children between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to work more than eight hours a day or more than six days a week. The Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1918.