Dangerous toys, strange bedfellows: hipster moms and conservative congressmen join forces against the regulatory state.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine

CECILIA LEIBOVITZ is the kind of person who writes sentences like: "Children are individuals, each with their own unique personality, so I just couldn't feel good about buying mass-produced toys and clothing from cookie-cutter chain stores." Leibovitz is the 36-year-old founder of Craftsbury Kids, a Vermont-based online vendor of handmade toys. She sells the type of gear that arty, upscale, NPR-listening parents can't get enough of: sock monkeys, baby onesies featuring a "hand-stamped and appliqued" crow with "crocheted flowers and recycled fabric grass," even a carved wooden "707 Air Force One plane" with "a beautiful silk screened portrait of President John F. Kennedy." So no one was more surprised than Leibovitz last winter when she found herself on the wrong side of federal law, fighting against consumer safety groups, and building alliances with Republican congressmen to defend free markets.

It all started with the panic over Chinese toys in the summer of 2007. Against a backdrop of daily scare stories about kids gnawing on knick-knacks full of lead, Mattel recalled a staggering 19 million toys. The news made headlines for weeks.

Leibovitz and her compatriots had been anticipating the backlash against industrial Chinese toys for years. When the Polly Pockets hit the fan, here was a cadre of crafty hipsters ready to fill the void, making toys, clothes, and even foodstuffs in small U.S.-based factories and home workshops. Leibovitz remembers thinking the Mattel recall would be good for business. And for a while, it was: In September 2007, when holiday sales started to ramp up, "there was just suddenly a huge demand for wooden natural toys and alternative toys that were made in the U.S.," she says. Her suppliers worked feverishly to fill orders.

But the existence of this burgeoning domestic alternative wasn't enough to placate a do-something Congress. In August 2008--more than a year after the toy scandal broke--President George W. Bush signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA), which went into effect on February 10, 2009. The law bans lead and phthalates in toys, books, clothes, and any other object intended for children under 12. To enforce these rules, the law requires every toymaker, distributor, or retailer who sells products in the U.S. to certify each of its models through third-party testing, labeling every item with an individual date and batch number.

Overnight, a bunch of cheerful believers in good government found themselves on the wrong side of a do-gooding law. Under the terms of the new rules, their lead-free, hand-crafted toys were now illegal until proven clean.

'Weird Alliance'

When the law went into effect, the U.S. "went from being a country that did not really push certification to having the strictest certification in the world," says Jason Gold of Camden Rose, a natural toymaker in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Many of the toys Gold sells are made from wood pulled out of a local forest by Amish men using horses, so that no machines are employed in the making of the products. Gold had been following the progress of the CPSIA from the beginning, trying unsuccessfully to get the word out about damage to mom-and-pop producers, until interest finally exploded in the first week of December.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The new requirements are easy for big manufacturers to meet but are impossibly onerous for small domestic toymakers. Producers have to pay up to $4,000 to have each new toy tested in the United States. Ironically, testing can be done much more cheaply in China--for just a couple hundred dollars per item. But this option is hardly appealing to a man who pays top dollar to Amish carters to make sure no dead...