Roy G. Fitzgerald - Congressional Service

Congressional Service

Fitzgerald was elected as a Republican from Ohio’s Third District to the Sixty-seventh Congress and to the four succeeding Congresses. He was chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Commerce in the Sixty-eighth Congress. He served on the Committee on Revision of the Laws in the Seventieth and Seventy-first Congresses, during which time he authored a cumulative codification system for statutory law of the United States and the District of Columbia. He was defeated for reelection in 1930 to the Seventy-second Congress.

During his decade in Congress, Fitzgerald fought for a number of causes that dismayed his more conservative colleagues, including child labor laws, reorganization of the U. S. Army Air Corps as an independent body and Federal care of the needy aged. The latter anticipated Social Security.

In 1922, Fitzgerald introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to control the labor and working hours of children under 18 which was passed by Congress in 1924. By 1938, only 28 states had ratified it when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8), incorporating many of the child labor provisions of the amendment.