|
Winter 2003
PDF version 
Government economic reports don’t
make good poolside reading. Their language is temperate;
their tone is noncommittal.
The unhappy experience of Henry K.
Oliver might help to explain why. Oliver was founding
director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, the world’s first labor statistics bureau,
established in 1869. He was also a social activist,
who believed in using government statistics to help
improve the lives of working-class families.
Oliver’s activism met with strong
disapproval from Massachusetts business interests, and
that led to his undoing. In 1873, the governor appointed
a new director, whose more technocratic approach helped
to quiet the bureau’s critics. The entire story
is chronicled in Their Lives & Numbers, edited
by Henry F. Bedford.
At the heart of the book are interviews
with people who worked in the mills and factories of
Massachusetts during the late 19th century. Most of
the interviews originally appeared in annual reports
issued by the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, and not only do they provide a good baseline
for measuring the improvement in our material standard
of living, but they also serve as a perfect antidote
to nostalgia. If you’ve ever fantasized about
living in the 1870s, the workers’ descriptions
of their living conditions will bring you back to reality.
Not convinced? Here’s how a
Taunton, Massachusetts factory worker described his
family’s apartment in 1873:
I have two rooms with fire,
four sleeping rooms, a pantry, and sink-room. It is
an upstairs tenement. Two families in the house. Rent
$180 per year. Sleeping rooms miserably small, about
9 feet square. One window in each sleeping room; ventilation
of these rooms is impossible without exposing the
occupant. The fire rooms are about 12 x 12. Pantry
and sink-room very small. When the tenement was engaged,
[I] was informed that the water was brought up [piped
in], but its impurities were carefully concealed from
my knowledge. I soon found that the drainage of [the
outdoor] privy affected the water badly, and that
it could not be passed through the pump without filling
the house with a disagreeable odor. . . . [We] have
no cistern and are obliged to bring all the water
for family use from the well across the street, up
a hard flight of winding stairs, except what we catch
in tubs when it storms. In winter the sink-pipes freeze,
and all the slops have to be removed in a pail. The
coal and wood must be brought from the cellar up two
flights of stairs.
An outdoor toilet! No central heat!
Bedrooms the size of a modernday office cube! A contaminated
water supply that makes your apartment smell like sewage!
It’s enough to make you wonder where the phrase
“good old days” ever came from.
|
