Numbers, Needs, and Progressive Era Reform

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President Theodore Roosevelt

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Americans of the Progressive Era, which loosely spanned the period from 1889 to 1920, asked themselves this question again and again as they sought to understand and evaluate the social and economic changes unfolding around them. A proper answer, reformers like Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt believed, would enable them to focus on the positive developments in the economy while working to correct the problems. The reformers went about trying to understand the economic problems they saw using a favored tool of the times: the scientific method. In particular, they held that through numbers and the study of statistics they could determine precisely how much money families needed live decently. One could, they believed, arrive at a precise numerical "living wage" by which a family could survive. Having arrived at such a number, one could then measure how many families fell short of that standard and consider the kinds of reforms -- minimum wage laws, stronger unions, profit-sharing companies -- necessary to achieve a living wage for all families.

"Numbers," as one nineteenth-century educator summarized the feeling of many Progressives, "are the only perfect instruments we can handle and the only means of ascertaining the true effect of any given cause." The reformer's faith in statistics reflected this idea of the number as the perfect instrument for pinpointing true effects.

Factory workers, for their part, looked at numbers slightly differently, but with just as much faith in their ability to convey truths. Late nineteenth century industrialization pushed wages, prices, and the cost of living to the forefront of the factory worker's thinking. Many had once been farmers, and were accustomed to making their own clothing, to growing and eating their own food. Now they found themselves paying for necessities out of the cash wages they earned through hourly labor. They would join together in unions and bargain with employees for higher pay. They would beseech the government to take an active role in keeping wages high and prices low.

They, like the Progressive reformers, grappled with the same questions:

What is a fair wage?

What is a just price?

Only statistics, data, numbers, could provide answers to such questions, they too believed, and only a government bureau could be trusted to collect that information impartially. Beginning in the eastern part of the country where industrialization emerged first, and spreading to the mid and far west, labor unions began to agitate for state bureaus of labor statistics. Workers in Massachusetts were the first to press for a labor bureau. In 1865 unions there had pushed the state to create a commission to study wage rates, but the commission complained that it lacked the proper statistics to determine what workers were being paid. The unions then pressured the state legislature to create a state Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 1883, there were twelve such bureaus in states across the country, and by 1884 a United States Bureau of Labor Statistics was formed. As the Commissioner of this new national Bureau, Carroll Wright, claimed in 1904: "the spirit of the age undertakes to ascertain what social classes owe to each other and statistical science helps the world to answer."

Both workers in labor unions and reformers, then, were interested in answering the question "how much is enough live?" For specific ways of pinning down answers they consulted with a new breed of intellectuals, dubbed "social scientists," who were working on specific ways of understanding the wage issue. Systematic graduate training, modeled on European, particularly German, universities, emerged for the first time after the Civil War and helped establish the prominence of the professionally-trained scholar over the amateur dabbler in a wide range of disciplines. Several schools still prominent today, among them Clark University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Chicago, were founded as graduate schools for just this purpose in the late nineteenth century. Members of the newly emerging professional disciplines of sociology and economics, reflecting the dramatic changes in higher education, were especially interested in the power of numbers to explain facets of social and economic phenomena. Economists, sociologists and others in social-science fields founded their own professional organizations during this period. The American Economic Association, for example, was founded in 1885, the American Anthropological Association in 1902, and the American Sociological Association was established in 1905. These associations sought to set standards of education and training that would set them apart as uniquely qualified professionals and experts in these disciplines. For the new sociologists and economists, the ability to manipulate statistics was critically important to their claims of special expertise, for it suggested that their professions were both scientific and objective, and that their people had unique skills.

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Andrew Carnegie

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Many of these social scientists found themselves in the Progressive movement. By the turn of the century the social science disciplines enjoyed broad and deep public confidence. As the historian Steven Diner has noted, there was widespread belief at this time that natural and social sciences could generate both understandings of and solutions to social problems. The new emphasis on solving problems and the field of social science came together in the minds of public commentators, politicians, writers, and union organizers to generate a preoccupation with living wage issues. The wealth of the new industrialists was scrutinized and attacked as excessive and self-indulgent. Critics lampooned the practices of the very rich, who built "summer cottages" modeled on European palaces in Newport, Rhode Island, as well as mansions on Park avenue in New York, and State Street in Chicago that were even more opulent.

Men like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt imported whole rooms from medieval castles for their mansions, bought up loads of antique furniture once owned by seventeenth century French kings, acquired expensive art from the Dutch and Italian masters, and porcelains from the ancient emperors and empresses of China. The social philosopher Thorstein Veblen called this amassing of wealth "conspicuous consumption," a term that came to describe the extravagant and misguided consumerism of the upper classes.

Men like Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and Cornelius Vanderbilt imported whole rooms from medieval castles for their mansions, bought up loads of antique furniture once owned by seventeenth century French kings, acquired expensive art from the Dutch and Italian masters, and porcelains from the ancient emperors and empresses of China. The social philosopher Thorstein Veblen called this amassing of wealth "conspicuous consumption," a term that came to describe the extravagant and misguided consumerism of the upper classes.

Veblen and others argued that business entrepreneurs were predators that hurt rather than helped the industrial system. They warped industrial and social progress, according to Veblen, by restricting output to keep prices artificially high, thinking only of their own profits and hampering the supply of goods and services to the general public, who deserved a share of the wealth as much as the rich.

Other social scientists focused on the people at the other end of the social and economic spectrum, the very poor. How much, they asked, did the poor need to live? Robert Hunter, in his 1904 study Poverty, cited Jacob Riis when he noted that 10 percent of the people who died in New York City between 1885 and 1890 had been given a pauper's burial. He claimed that 20% of the population of Boston lived in constant economic distress and estimated that 10 million people in the nation as a whole, or about 12% of the population, were poor at the turn of the century. This estimate is now seen as too low. Recent analysis puts the number of impoverished Americans at closer to 40% of the national population in 1900.

Few were more sensitive to the shifting definition of a living wage than Father John A. Ryan (1865-1945), a priest and social reformer who taught at Catholic University's School of Sacred Theology from 1915 until 1940. Ryan, the eldest of eleven children born to Irish immigrants who had fled the potato famine in the 1850s, grew up in modest circumstances in rural Minnesota. Ryan's sense of life's necessities were conditioned by his upbringing in an Irish-American culture, which emphasized that the needs of the community mattered as much as the needs of the family and the individual.

In many ways, Father Ryan thought like the wage earners he would come to guide and defend in his writings. For example, he did not expect workers to accept the impoverished conditions to which many employers relegated them by paying them abysmal wages. As the documents on this website show, Father Ryan believed that workers should possess goods that they think are necessary according to community standards, such as respectable clothing, in addition to those goods that are "objectively necessary," such as the food and clothing essential to mere survival. At the same time, he thought that "the indefinite pursuit of material satisfaction" made people unhealthy and turned them away from spiritual matters crucial to one's development as a Christian, and as a member of a broader community.

Thorny questions of individual, family, and community needs and standards of living were made more difficult by the difficulties in estimating the number of poor living in the United States at the turn of the century. In their attempts to arrive at an answer to the question of "how much is enough," workers, politicians, social reformers, social scientists, and labor union leaders focused their attention on the means by which one acquired what was necessary to live, one's wages.