Whether the studio could have acted differently, given the legal frameworks and industry norms of the time, is a historical question without a fully satisfying answer. What it was choosing not to do was limited by what the law required it to do, which was very little. The Coogan Law’s protections were narrow. Child labor regulations in the entertainment industry were weak. The medical norms of the 1930s and 1940s did not treat amphetamine administration to children as the clear wrong that later decades would understand it to be.
This is the historical context. It does not, in retrospect, make what was done to Garland acceptable. It explains how it could happen and why it was not stopped.
The Later Performances and the Full Measure of the Artist
The narrative of Judy Garland’s career is sometimes told as a tragedy — the brilliant child destroyed by the system that discovered her, the adult performer who never recovered from what was done to her as a child. This narrative is not false, but it is incomplete in a way that dishonors the actual record.
Between 1950, when MGM terminated her contract, and 1969, when she died, Garland performed more than most entertainers perform in a full career. She produced work of genuine artistic significance that had nothing to do with nostalgia for The Wizard of Oz. She built a different relationship to her audience than the one the studio had built for her — one that was more direct, more personal, and more durable than anything a studio publicity department could engineer.