“Child saving” united Progressivism's otherwise vaguely connected reform agenda. Innovations from city manager government to the secret ballot supposedly made America better for the young. Not surprisingly, then, advocates of genuinely child-specific issues often cooperated, and crowd-pleasing speakers – Homer Folks, Julian Mack, and most of all, Ben Lindsey – constituted an informal child-savers' Chautauqua. From one stage they promoted the ideals of the juvenile court. Standing on another they solicited contributions for an anticruelty philanthropy. At a different meeting, they denounced child labor. Sometimes one stem-winding appeal mentioned all three.

Ben Lindsey's expansive personality magnified two central traits of early-twentieth-century reform: its buoyant embrace of many causes and its apocalyptic sense of crisis. Without the juvenile court, he declaimed, “struggling humanity” would be crushed. Similarly, Denver's juvenile court judge warned that unless the state intervened, the “cancer” of child labor would “destroy the American democratic experiment.”

A generation of attentive Progressives accepted Lindsey's challenge, and by 1930, every state in the union regulated the paid work of children. Most extended their lists of prohibited occupations, imposed greater restrictions on night work, and demanded that youngsters complete the fifth grade before working during school hours. In 1938, the United States Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), for the next sixty years the benchmark for state and federal regulation of child labor.