The Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1914, compiled by the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce and published by the Government Printing Office, presented a comprehensive accounting of the nation’s productive capabilities. Anything that could be quantified, inventoried, ranked, or averaged out had a place within the 720 pages of the report.
Chart Number 16: “Coal.” No. 89: “Potato Crop.” No. 37: “ForeignBorn White Paupers Enumerated in Alms-Houses.” No. 44: “Religious Organizations.” No. 54: “Marital Condition of Persons 15 Years of Age and Over.”
Chart No. 135, “Summary of Manufactures, By Specified Industry,” listed relevant facts concerning the production of Axle Grease, Buttons, Billiard Tables, Cigar Boxes, Corsets, Crucibles, Grindstones, Horseshoes, Oakum, Pavers, Peanuts, Shoddy, Whips, Windmills, and Wall Paper. Chart No. 154, “Population 10 Years of Age and Upward Engaged in Gainful Occupations,” tallied six million farm workers, two and a half million manufacturers, six hundred thousand coal miners, three hundred thousand iron and steelworkers, 105,000 bankers, 101,000 bartenders, 98,000 telephone operators, 30,000 newsboys, 25,000 ticket takers and railroad station agents, 26,000 paper hangers, 21,000 undertakers, 14,000 bootblacks, 7,000 piano tuners, 5,000 cornshellers, 1,600 lighthouse keepers.
No. 174: “Wireless Telegraph Systems.” No. 190: “Traffic on Railroads.” No. 210: “Cattle, Hogs, and Sheep.” No. 222: “Panama Canal Excavations.” No. 313: “Life Insurance By Fraternal Orders.”
An entire chapter belonged to Chart Number 352. Rather than offering a snapshot of a particular commodity, it combined dozens of categories into one agglomerated “Statistical Record of the Progress of the United States.” In 1914, the population stood at 98,646,491, of whom more than a million were immigrants who had arrived during the course of the year. The railroads carried more than a billion passengers. The mails delivered 960 million postcards. Wires transmitted ninety million telegraphs. Twenty thousand newspapers published editions. Thirty-two million cotton spindles turned. Two hundred and eighty-six metallurgical furnaces were kept in blast. The government issued forty-two thousand patents. Nineteen million pupils studied in the public schools. Three and a half trillion dollars circulated.
Taken as a whole, these numbers offered objective and undeniable proof of American achievement. Even adverse data—the 18,000 commercial failures that occurred in 1914, the 2,454 fatalities suffered “in and around” coal mines, or the eleven million working days lost to strikes—were merely the inevitable by-products of large-scale enterprise. To anyone who cared to examine them, the figures conveyed the most sensational epic of the age.
But few Americans had patience for the Statistical Abstract.
Edward Mott Woolley was typical of the rest in eschewing these “huge volumes” of data. “Ordinarily such books were of no use to me,” he wrote, “they lacked altogether the human element which made up most of my work.” A magazine writer, Woolley, along with his articles, was everywhere in 1914. He claimed to freelance simultaneously for forty different periodicals, and had ten articles published during the year in McClure’s magazine alone—a feat of popularity that none of his colleagues could approach.
Of all the magazines in the United States, McClure’s was most closely associated with the muckraking movement. It was in its pages a decade earlier that Ida Tarbell had pilloried John D. Rockefeller, and Lincoln Steffens had dramatically exposed corrupt urban politics to a scandalized middle-class readership. Like them, Woolley was a skilled reporter who tenaciously pursued his subjects. But he despised the anticapitalist principles of his peers and considered two topics off-limits: “No muckraking or sex stuff,” he’d tell any editor who pitched him a sensationalist assignment.
Woolley may not have found the Statistical Abstract compelling reading, but he enthusiastically believed in the news value of American industry. He stuffed his notebook with such story ideas as “peanuts, clothespins, buttons, cotton and tin cans.” And as dry as the material looked on paper, editors were eager to acquire it. The December 1913 McClure’s contained Woolley’s feature on peanut farming. The next month it was the grocery business. In February, “Buttons: A Romance of American Industry.” In March, “Tin Canners: The Story of the Greatest Utility Industry of the Age and the Men Who Built It.” Then, beginning in April, the magazine published a seven-part series on executives, including Samuel Insull, the Chicago electricity magnate, and D. W. Griffith, who earned at least $100,000 a year.
Lincoln Steffens.
Despite his emphasis on industry, Woolley hated to hear the phrase “business stuff” applied to his work. “What I was trying to do went wholly beyond mere business,” he wrote. It was nothing less than “the eternal and ubiquitous competition of men for existence and supremacy.” Three quarters of a million readers subscribed to McClure’s or purchased it at newsstands. In each issue they received the same edifying lessons. “There is money sticking out everywhere in this land of ours,” Woolley suggested in a story about the grocery business, “but you’ve got to reach for it quickly or somebody else nabs it.” American business—any business, no matter how lowly or obscure—offered the chance at success to any individual with the grit to seize it. “Every industry is worth studying, if only to get acquainted with the stayers who have made it,” he wrote in an article on button making. “After all, the real inside story of an industry is the story of the men, not the money.”
Frank Wiegel.
Woolley believed that his own rise from lowly reporter to magazine luminary followed the same trajectory that his subjects had taken. The cold numbers in the Statistical Abstract did not convey his story; instead he took the novels of Horatio Alger, Jr., to be his model. Conceding that such works as Strive and Succeed or Andy Grant’s Pluck featured some “crude workmanship,” Woolley nevertheless insisted that the tales contained “eternal truths” and “ranked as masterpieces.” Even more to the point, Alger’s books for boys sold a million copies each year, putting them “easily first among the best-sellers.” Every so often, small-town lads, their imaginations agitated by the paperback tales of metropolitan adventure, would run away to New York. The police were used to it. After some bitter lessons, the kids would be put on a train and sent home, chastened and disappointed.
Frank Wiegel had lived in Brooklyn long enough to have abandoned any such naïve ideas. Around eight A.M. on Saturday, January 18, he showed up to work at the Henry Bosch wallpaper company, which had a factory on Thirty-fifth Street, near the East River. At nearly two A.M. on Sunday morning, still at it, he fell asleep at his station; “in some way,” speculated the subsequent report, “he knocked against the controlling pedal, and the next thing he knew his hand was caught in the machine.” When rescuers finally disentangled him from the apparatus, the index and pinky fingers of his right hand were too badly mangled to be saved. The accident had occurred seventeen hours and fifty-five minutes into an eighteen-hour shift. Frank was fifteen years old.
