The US Children's Bureau

Florence Kelley later recalled that the idea came up over breakfast with Lillian Wald in 1903: the federal government spent money on crops and farm animals but ignored children. The National Child Labor Committee endorsed a federal children's bureau in 1905, and in January 1909 the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children, called by Theodore Roosevelt, resolved in its favour. In 1912 the Senate passed the bill by 54 votes to 20 and the House by 177 to 17, and President Taft approved it on 9 April.

The act placed the bureau in the Department of Commerce and Labor under a chief paid $5,000 a year. It was to investigate and report on the welfare of children of every class, and especially on infant mortality, the birth rate, orphanage, juvenile courts, desertion, dangerous occupations, accidents and diseases of children, and employment. Taft named Julia Lathrop, formerly of Hull House in Chicago, as chief. With a staff of 15 and a budget of $25,640, she began with infant mortality, the first subject the law named.

The first field study began in January 1913 at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, chosen partly for its good birth registration. Instead of starting from death records, women agents took every baby born in the town in 1911 and followed each through its first year, visiting 1,553 mothers; only two refused to answer. The law gave the bureau no medical officer, so the inquiry kept to family, social and industrial questions. It also left out alcoholism and venereal disease, because asking about them in the home was thought humiliating. Emma Duke's report, published in 1915, gave an infant mortality rate of 130.7 per 1,000 for babies born in wedlock. It was 255.7 where the father earned under $521 a year and 84 where he earned $1,200 or more. Later annual reports combined eight such studies covering more than 13,000 babies.

In 1921 Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act and gave the bureau its administration. The American Medical Association attacked the programme as socialized medicine, and its funding ended in 1929. Grace Abbott, Katharine Lenroot and Martha May Eliot of the bureau later wrote the child welfare sections of the Social Security Act of 1935, whose Title V funds maternal and infant care for low-income families.