Counting the unemployed had significant ideological implications. Carroll Wright, a disciple of Francis Walker and a leading statistician in his own right, led the effort, which found only twenty-two thousand unemployed in Massachusetts. He regarded the result as a refutation of the “croakers” who claimed three million unemployed in the United States and a quarter of a million in Massachusetts. But Wright’s figures concealed as much as they revealed. He did not count women; nor did he count children under eighteen, a substantial part of the workforce. For Wright, not everyone thrown out of
...more
