No presidential candidate of a major party has ever died or withdrawn before a presidential election and no President-elect has ever died or withdrawn after winning the general election, but before taking office.

However, one vice-presidential candidate died after he was nominated, but before the general election, and another dropped off his party's ticket.

The procedures for finding replacements for candidate vacancies are guided by federal and state laws and party regulations. They are not exactly a patchwork, but they have evolved in response to practical problems that have arisen during the presidential elections, and in response to the growth of political parties as integral players in the election process.

In this respect, the procedures for filling vacancies in the parties' nominated tickets are like those that have evolved for the succession of the presidency when the person holding that office vacates it for one reason or another: When William Henry Harrison contracted pneumonia after giving a three-hour-long speech in the snow at his 1841 inauguration and died barely a month later, he was succeeded in office by John Tyler. It was not until confronting the issues raised in the transition of power from Harrison to Tyler that Congress thought through the rules for the succession of the President when the office is vacated during mid-term.

The popular vote in the general election actually elects the states' electors who form the Electoral College, which, in turn, elects the president and vice-president of the United States. These electors, chosen nowadays by state party organizations, meet in each state in the middle of December to cast their votes. No Constitutional provision or federal law requires electors to vote in accordance with the popular vote in their states, but the electors are made eligible to vote by being on the slate provided by the party that won the state's popular vote.

They are generally committed to cast their votes for the winner of that popular vote although some states do not require them by law to do so. These votes are sent to Congress. The Congress meets in joint session in the House of Representatives to tally electoral votes on a date close to inauguration day. The President of the Senate certifies the outcome, and when that is done, the President and Vice-President can be sworn in soon thereafter.

The procedures for conducting the Electoral College voting were changed substantially by the 12th Amendment, adopted in 1804, so that each elector would vote twice—once for President and once for Vice-President. Before that, the Vice-President was whoever received the next highest number of electoral votes after the person who won the presidency. The earlier arrangement had created unnecessary confusion and political intrigue in the preceding elections. The new arrangement did not meet every difficulty: When no candidate receives a majority of the electoral votes, Congress has to decide the winner.

Since the time of Andrew Jackson's run for the presidency in 1828, individual political parties have had the job of filling any vacancy on their national ticket, either that of their presidential or vice-presidential candidate. If one of their candidates vacates the ticket after they are nominated, either because of death or withdrawal, the party selects a replacement.

Both the Republican and the Democratic parties have rules in their bylaws governing how to fill the vacancy. The Party Chair calls a meeting of the National Committee, and the Committee members at the meeting vote to fill the vacancy on the ticket. A candidate must receive a majority of the votes to win the party's nod.

The same process would happen if the vacancy were to occur after the general election but before the Electoral College voting. If a vacancy should occur on the winning ticket, it would then be the party's responsibility to fill it and provide a candidate for whom their electors could vote.

A vacancy could occur at the top of a winning ticket during the period after the electoral votes had been cast but before the President-elect had been sworn in. Perhaps the closest the country has come to confronting this was during the widespread anxiety as the 1861 inauguration of Abraham Lincoln approached, that he would be assassinated before he could take office, or that the counting of the electoral votes (at that time occurring on the morning of the inauguration, which, in those days, occurred on March 5) would be disrupted by Southern pro-slavery sympathizers, neither of which happened.

No President-elect has in fact failed to be sworn in. Nevertheless, the rules for what would happen if a President-elect were to be unavailable to be sworn in actually became a part of our law with the adoption of the 20th Amendment in 1933. This amendment was passed primarily to shorten the length of time between the general election and the beginning of the new administration (inauguration day was moved from March to January). But it also specified that if, at the time of the inauguration, the President-elect has died, then the Vice-President-elect becomes President, and if a President has not yet been qualified by that time, then the Vice-President-elect acts as President until a President has been so qualified. The concern was that, since inauguration day was moved earlier, provision had to be made to cover cases in which the Electoral College vote did not prove decisive and the winner had to be chosen through a possibly lengthy series of votes in Congress.

In the election of 1872, Horace Greeley was the Democratic nominee for President, but the Democrats lost the general election to the Republican ticket, headed by Ulysses Grant. After the popular vote, but before the Electoral College vote, Greeley died. Because the Democrats had no chance of winning the election, given the outcome of the popular vote and the number of electoral votes already secured by Grant, the party did not bother to stipulate to their electors who an official replacement candidate would be, and most of the Democratic electors in the states that the Democrats had won cast their votes for people other than whom their party had nominated.

In 1912, James Sherman, the Republican candidate for Vice-President (and the incumbent Vice-President under William Howard Taft) died on October 30 of kidney disease, a few days before the general election on November 5. The Republican National Committee scheduled a meeting to be held after the general election, on November 12, to select a successor, and Sherman's name remained on the ticket for the general election. The Republicans lost, however (the Democratic ticket of Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall won), and decided on November 8 not to meet as they had planned because voters only chose eight Republican electors, in Vermont and Utah. These electors did meet later, however, and, acting without instructions from the RNC, voted to replace Sherman's name on the ticket with that of Columbia University President Nicholas Butler of New York. This was a purely formal act with no practical consequences for the election.

During the 1972 presidential campaign, Democrat Thomas Eagleton was Senator George McGovern's vice-presidential running mate for only 18 days. Eagleton dropped out of the race acknowledging that he had been hospitalized three times in the 1960s for depression and stress, and that he had undergone electric shock therapy. McGovern selected the Peace Corps Director, Sargent Shriver, to replace Eagleton, but to actually place Shriver on the ticket, the Democratic National Committee met and chose him in the first week of August. The Democrats lost the general election in November to the Republican candidates, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.

The "Join, or Die" snake, a cartoon image printed in numerous newspapers as the conflict between England and France over the Ohio Valley was expanding into war—"the first global war fought on every continent," as Thomas Bender recently has written—first appeared in the May 9, 1754 edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The image displayed a snake cut up into eight pieces. The snake’s detached head was labeled "N.E." for “New England,” while the trailing seven sections were tagged with letters representing the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The exhortation "JOIN, or DIE" appeared underneath the image.

Lester C. Olson points out that Franklin might have seen images of snakes divided into two segments that had been published in Paris in 1685, 1696, and 1724 with the similar caption "Se rejoinder ou mourir." The image in the Pennsylvania Gazette followed an article reporting the recent surrender of a British frontier fort to the French army and purported plans of the French, with their Indian allies, to establish a massive frontier presence with which to terrify British settlers and traders. The article ended with the surmise that the French were confident they would be able to "take an easy Possession of such Parts of the British Territory as they find most convenient for them" due to the "present disunited State of the British Colonies" and warned that the French success "must end in the Destruction of the British interest; Trade and Plantations in America."

A longtime advocate of intercolonial union in dealings with Indians, Franklin helped make such a union an important agenda item for the Albany Congress, convened shortly after the snake image was published, on earlier orders from the Board of Trade, the British advisory council on colonial policy, with the goal of establishing one treaty between all the colonies and the Six Nations of Iroquois. As a commissioner to the congress appointed by the governor of Pennsylvania, Franklin was opposed in his efforts to unify the colonies by representatives of some of the colonial assemblies intent on maintaining control over their own affairs.

Robert C. Newbold has speculated that Georgia was probably excluded from the snake image, "because, as a defenseless frontier area, it could contribute nothing to common security." Only three laws had been passed in Georgia since its founding as a colony in 1732, prompting a historian of the colony and state to conclude, "The hope that Georgia might become a self-reliant province of soldier-farmers had not succeeded, and even the early debtor-haven dream had not come to pass." Delaware, Newbold added, "shared the same governor, albeit a different legislature, as Pennsylvania; hence the Gazette probably considered it as included with Pennsylvania."

As with the snake image, the Albany Plan, drafted during the congress, did not include Georgia and Delaware in its proposed colonial union for mutual defense and security, specifying only Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The segmented snake image was revived in a number of newspapers during the 1765 Stamp Act conflict, again without reference to Georgia and Delaware. In 1774, when the segmented snake image, along with the "Join or Die" slogan, was employed as a masthead for newspapers in York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, a pointed tail labeled "G" for Georgia had been added.

The short answer is this: If you mean full-time work (with certain exceptions) ―none were employed, at least legally.

This was the result of the signing into law in 1938 (two years before) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Wake Forest University Economics Professor Robert Whaples puts it succinctly: "the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 prohibited the full-time employment of those 16 and under (with a few exemptions) and enacted a national minimum wage which made employing most children uneconomical." Whaples describes the various reasons, apart from the enactment of federal, state, and local laws, why the numbers of children working in industry and on the farm had already declined dramatically over the first few decades of the 20th century before the passage of the Act.

The provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) that dealt with child labor stated: "No employer shall employ any oppressive child labor in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce or in any enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce."

The FLSA, as further defined by statute, prohibited children under 16 from any kind of employment in certain hazardous kinds of work. The Secretary of Labor has periodically revised such categories of hazardous work. For agricultural work, for example, those under 16 should not be employed in operating a tractor of over 20 horsepower, or a hay baler, a forklift, a power post-hold digger, or a chain saw. Nor should they work in a yard or stall in which there is a bull, boar, or stud horse, a sow with suckling pigs, or a cow with newborn calf.

The FLSA also prohibits those under 18 from certain kinds of occupations altogether. These include occupations that require working with explosives or radioactive materials, operating most power-driven woodworking, baking, or meat processing machines, as well as most jobs in mining, meatpacking, logging, and brick-making.

The FLSA exempts certain kinds of work, including employment of children by their parents, and church work. Boys and girls also worked (as they do today) at jobs not covered by FLSA regulations, such as office or clerical work, retail sales positions, food preparation, caring for younger children, and so on.

Given these exemptions, what was the actual number working in 1940?

Gertrude Folks Zimand, General Secretary of the National Child Labor Committee, in "The Changing Picture of Child Labor," published in 1944 in the Journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (pages 83-91), reported that the 1940 census showed, among 14- to 15-year-olds, a total of 4,347,665 attending school, and a total of 209,347 gainfully employed (no number was reported for children ages 7-14 who were not in school but were gainfully employed, but the number of these children attending school was 15,034,695; the numbers for 16- to 17-year-olds were 3,361,206 in school and 662,967 gainfully employed). The term "Gainfully employed" included full- and part-time work, either in industry or agriculture. There was some overlap in these numbers because some children were in school but were also working, at least part-time. But according to Zimand, 64 percent of the 14- to 15-year-olds and 83 percent of the 16- to 17-year-olds who were working were out of school and were therefore presumably working full time.