"I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnessy, because it ain't like what I see ivry day in Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll show me th' people fightin', gettin' dhrunk, makin' love, gettin' married, owin' th' grocery man an' bein' without hard-coal, I'll believe they was a Greece or Rome, but not befure. — Finley Peter Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902) [You can download the complete text at Project Gutenberg in your choice of formats.]

In 1875 Carroll D. Wright, the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, published the first study of American working-class family budgets in the Bureau's Sixth Annual Report. The very first budget studies were Belgian and French. Wright adapted the technique as part of a campaign to get Massachusetts to adopt a minimum wage, and his Report began that conversation in the U.S., one that continues to this day. Numerous other states created Bureaus of Labor Statistics modeled on Massachusetts' and embarked upon their own budget studies. As a result, historians have a great deal of information about earnings, spending patterns, housing conditions, and a variety of other topics. The budgets do not show us "th' people fightin'," but they do allow us to infer quite a bit about how they paid (or did not) the grocery man or the coal dealer as well as about how they planned (or did not) the size of their families.

Wright was one of the pioneers in the collection and interpretation of social statistics but he had no idea about random sampling. The 1875 Report contains information on 397 Massachusetts families who were selected according to a protocol Wright devised himself. Bureau agents went to the state's largest industrial centers and then to the largest factories and mills where they approached the first person they saw. They explained that the Bureau wanted to detail their families' economic experience over the course of a full year. They wanted to know income to the penny as well as its sources. They wanted to know what the family ate, meal by meal, and how much they spent on each item in their diet. They wanted to know how much they spent on rent, on heat, on kerosene for lamps, on clothing. They wanted, in short, to know what happened to every penny the family earned. To gather all of this information, they wanted to visit the family in its home at least twice. The first time, during the day, would allow the agents to assess the "surroundings," i.e., the neighborhood, along with the quality of the housing and the condition of outhouses. They would also note the presence or absence of gardens and whether the family grew vegetables, flowers, or some combination. The second visit was primarily to collect the financial data. But it would also enable agents to assess furnishings, clothing, and note whether the family possessed carpets, asewing machine, books, a piano, and other objects. (Pp. 201-202, 219)

Wright made this claim for his study's findings:

Under such general instructions, with no purpose in view but the procurement of facts, with no theory to maintain or demolish, our agents prosecuted their investigations. The size of families; whether father alone worked, or was assisted by wife or children; nationality; whether saving money or in debt; manner of living as regarded food or dwelling, and such kindred points, were entirely unknown until the agent took down the facts. And the particulars obtained being complete, and of the same nature for each family, no throwing out of incomplete returns has been necessary. (P.202)

Bureau agents initially approached about 1,000 workers. Presumably many refused to devote the time and effort. Some no doubt distrusted the Bureau's motives. Some lacked sufficient proficiency in English. These factors introduced biases into the Bureau's sample that Wright did not recognize. Families in the industrial villages along the Blackstone, for example, were largely but not completely omitted because most of the towns were too small. Native-born working families were over-represented as were families headed by skilled workers.

Undated photograph of boys working in a New England textile mill

What was Wright up to? Why did he want to know all of this? Like many of the public figures of the day, he was a Civil War veteran. He was Col. Wright. And, like many, the war was the defining moment of his life. The country, he came to believe, was only as strong as its ordinary citizens. Massachusetts was, therefore, only as strong as the working families upon whom its prosperity depended. He further believed that the state had an obligation to protect those families. Clearly many were suffering. But conventional wisdom held that the poor had themselves to blame. Fathers drank or gambled. Families failed to save during good times. They did not spend their earnings wisely. Wright did not doubt that this was true in individual cases. But was it true in all cases? Were wages adequate? He defined what he meant in the 1875 Report:

. . . no one should receive such small compensation for his toil, that even when expended with economy and prudence, it fails to pay for his necessary cost of living; rendering him an involuntary debtor, subjecting him continually to the demands of creditors who wish pay for the necessities of life he has consumed; obliging him to overwork his wife with home and outside duties; forcing him to deprive his children of education, that he may supply by their labor their cries for bread; finally, bringing him to the poor-house, to the state of a continual recipient of charity, or entailing him as a morally not-to-be-got-rid-of burden upon his children, relations or friends.

The broad and pertinent inquiry is, Does the wage system, as now existing in the world, do what it is acknowledged is "natural and just" and right? and if not, in what way can its workings be improved so that it will do what no one can deny it ought to do? (P. 194)

This definition explains key facts about the families Wright decided to sample. All had a working father. All kept careful records of earnings and expenditures. Wright wanted these families precisely because, if they fell short of his standard, the conventional wisdom would not apply. These were not the drunkards, the wastrels, the gamblers. They were hard-working families. If they could not succeed, even with the constant practice of "economy and prudence," then the state had a responsibility to step up and guarantee a living wage.

Wright was a pioneer, indeed the most important single pioneer, in what would become the standard operating procedures of the modern regulatory state: experts carefully collecting and tabulating data and measuring the results against a generally accepted minimum standard. Defining the minimum standard would prove a political process. Collecting the data was not, at least in theory. In theory, facts were simply facts that the Bureau collected and then tabulated according to standard statistical practices. In practice, as we have already seen, Wright's choice of which facts to collect came out of his reform agenda. He wanted to test conventional wisdom, in the hope of disproving it.

This need not mean, however, that the data his agents collected are only valid for the 397 families interviewed. We can use them to build a descriptive model of working-class living standards. The plural is crucial. We are not trying to define the "average" family. We are trying to describe a range of working class living standards. We cannot state what percentage of all working families attained any given standard. But we can say what facts about them largely determined the lives they could afford to lead. We can, that is, calculate the odds on a given family's chances of having enough hard coal or enough milk for the children. And that is, as Mr. Dooley would say, "thrue histhry."

A note on the accuracy of the data: Some families were omitted from the survey because they were unable to supply the kind of detailed information the Bureau wanted. But this was probably less of a problem than it would be today. In the late nineteenth century working families did owe the grocery man. They bought on credit, recorded their purchases in a notebook (as did the grocer), and settled up on payday. So we can trust the very precise amounts in the Report. These families did know exactly what they spent on milk, say. So too with meat, rent, coal, and a variety of other expenditures. And they knew to the penny the amounts in the weekly pay envelopes. More precisely, the mother knew since in the large majority of working-class families she handled all of the finances. The father and the children turned their pay over to her, envelopes unopened. She meted out spending money out of which the father might buy a beer after work or the daughter a new hat.

Our task: Working in groups of three, examine the family budgets from the Sixth Annual Report you have been given. Compile a list of the sorts of information they contain and of the sorts of questions about "histhry" they might help us answer. Briefly report back to the class as a whole.