By 1913, there were "minimum-wage boards" in eight states, for at that time, instead of an economy-wide wage floor, appeals for higher wages in specific industries would prompt a review by representatives of capital and labor. "In Massachusetts and Nebraska the wage boards have not the backing of the law in enforcing their rulings," The Outlook reported in October of that year. "Instead, they are allowed to publish in the newspapers the names of delinquent employers, and the force of public opinion is relied upon to bring the employers to term."

As another contemporaneous Outlook piece stated, "The enactment of a minimum wage law, without special provision for apprentices, would result in the dismissal of employees who do not earn the minimum wage. Foreseeing this difficulty, it is the plan of the Wage Scale Board to perfect a system of apprenticeship, according to which an inexperienced worker will be employed at a wage below the minimum and advanced periodically until he or she attains the efficiency and wages of an experienced worker, i.e. the minimum wage for that particular occupation."

Some minimum-wage advocates, like academic Victor Morris, acknowledged that the minimum wage would harm the prospects of "crippled, infirm, aged and slow workers," and insisted that was a feature: "It is a highly desirable outcome that they be segregated from the regular group of employees. They are special cases and should be dealt with separately and not be included simply as a drag on the wage rate of the entire group. They constitute a group largely unable to bargain and under normal conditions without state interference are a dead weight hanging on the wage rate."

This progressive attempt at unsentimental, utilitarian management of the economy coexisted with the intellectual heirs of the aforementioned religious thinkers, with Dr. Peter Taylor Forsyth, who thought that a living wage "is an assertion of the Christian principle of the supreme worth of the soul.... A great step is taken to the measuring of a man by what he is instead of by what he has." He added that "if the worker is rewarded on principles of the soul he must put his soul into his work. If he is recognized as a moral personality, he must act as such."

Professor Clifford Thies calls it "an odd coalition of Christian Social reformers and utilitarian socialists.... There were those who viewed minimum wages as a way of providing a living wage to low-wage workers. And there were those who viewed minimum wages as part of a program of keeping the destitute, including the aged, infirm, widowed, and immigrant, segregated and offshore."

The coalition was actually bigger than that.

During his brief tenure, President Harding seemed to call for more generous wages than any viable proposal, saying that "the wage earner's lowest wages must be enough for comfort, enough to make his house a home, enough to insure that the struggle for existence shall not crowd out the things truly worth living for. There must be a provision for education; for recreation and a margin for saving. There must be such freedom of action as will insure full play to the individual's abilities."