There is no Federal Sunday Law, although the distillation of spirituous liquors on the first day of the week is prohibited. California only prohibits labor by any employee on more than six days out of every seven, but not specifying any compulsory day of rest. In Colorado only trafficking in liquors and barbering are prohibited on Sunday and in Montana there is a law against barbering only.
In most of the other States, as well as in the Territories and in the District of Columbia (which is also counted as a Territory), there are more or less stringent laws, most of them forbidding not only manual labor but also the carrying on of trade or business. There are eleven States――Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia――where servile or manual labor is permitted on Sunday to those who observe Saturday as their day of rest. In thirteen more――Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wisconsin――the exceptions in favor of Seventh-Day Sabbatarians affect both manual labor and trade or business. But the statute is not always a criterion of the observance or enforcement of Sunday laws in a certain locality. Some of the laws, like that of New York, decree that “it is a sufficient defense to a prosecution for work on the first day of the week, that the defendant uniformly keeps another day of the week as holy time, and does not labor on that day, and that the labor complained of was done in such manner as not to interrupt or disturb other persons in observing the first day of the week as holy time.” In many localities, especially in large cities, the Sunday laws are simply obsolete, and are usually revived in the name of Reform after the success of a Reform Party at the polls, only to become obsolete again when that party is voted out of office at the succeeding election. The defeat usually comes for no other reason than the dissatisfaction of a large number of citizens with the strict enforcement of the Sunday laws. Jews are by no means the only element of the population which resents stringency in these matters. It may be said that the coupling together of strict enforcement of the Sunday laws with the good government movements in the large cities has been a greater drawback to municipal reform in the United States than any other single cause.