1. Sociologists, political scientists, and historians have been particularly prominent in this development. See particularly: Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Evans, Peter B., Rueschmeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; Skocpol, Theda, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10 (1980): 155–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finegold, Kenneth and Skocpol, Theda, “State, Party, and Industry: From Business Recovery to the Wagner Act in America's New Deal,” in Bright, Charles and Harding, Susan, eds., Statemaking and Social Movements: Articles in History and Theory (Ann Arbor, 1984), 159–92Google Scholar; Krasner, Stephen D., “Approaches to the State: Altenative Conceptions and Historical Dynamics,” Comparative Politics 16, no. 2 (January 1984): 223–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Galambos, Louis, ed., The New American State: Bureaucracies and Policies Since World War II (Baltimore, 1987)Google Scholar.

2. Some recently published collections of articles pull together work in these two areas. Furner, Mary O. and Supple, Barry, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar is an excellent recent collection that explores the connection between the state and knowledge. See also the companion volume: Lacey, Michael J. and Furner, Mary O., eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar. For the historical institutional area, see Steinmo, Sven, Thelen, Kathleen, and Longstreth, Frank, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionaiism in Comparative Analysis (New York, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple, “Ideas, Institutions, and State in the United States and Britain: An Introduction,” in Fumer and Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge, 339 (quotation on 11). See also the other articles in that volume and in the companion volume: Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, eds., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States.

4. For the reference to the trilogy “institutions, interests, and ideas,” see Peter A. Hall, “The Movement from Keynesianism to Monetarism: Institutional Analysis and British Economic Policy in the 1970s,” in Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics, 90–91. In addition to that collection of articles, two other books that have been influential in developing the historical institutional model should be mentioned: Hall, Peter A., Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (Cambridge and Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Weir, Margaret, Politics and Jobs: The Boundaries of Employment Policy in the United States (Princeton, 1992)Google Scholar. See also Mucciaroni, Gary, The Political Failure of Employment Policy, 1945–1982 (Pittsburgh, 1990)Google Scholar.

5. No doubt this partially reflected an assumption that the surplus of labor that prevailed in the prewar era would continue and hence render superfluous any special statistical information related to the operation of the labor market. In 1915 and 1916, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had done some useful surveys of unemployment in selected urban areas, but by the time the results were published they were out of date. See Bureau of Labor Statistics, Unemployment in New York City, New York, Bulletin no. 172 (1915) and Unemployment in the United States, Bulletin no. 195 (1916). The BLS did begin a monthly series on employment and total payrolls in selected industries in late 1915, which was the only official attempt to measure current levels of employment and unemployment. However, the series initially covered only five industries. See Goldberg, Joseph and Moye, William T., The First Hundred Years of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Washington, D.C., 1985. Bulletin 2235), 96–98Google Scholar. For a recent, general discussion of unemployment statistics prior to 1930, see Keyssar, Alexander, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar, esp. Appendix B (342–58).

6. On the early history of the Bureau, see Mary O. Furner, “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in Furner and Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge, 241–86. In 1913, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lost its independent status and was made a component of the newly created Department of Labor, together with the Bureau of Immigration, the Bureau of Naturalization, and the Children's Bureau.

7. See, for example, Walter L. Sears, “The Distribution of Labor and the Problem of Transportation,” in Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices, Indianapolis, Sept. 24 and 25, 1914, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin, no. 192 (May 1916), 80–84. (quotations on 82).

8. Royal Meeker, “Address,” Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices, Indianapolis, Sept. 24 and 25, 1914, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin, no. 192 (May 1916), 42–47 (quotations on 47). Royal Meeker, the U.S. Commissioner of Labor Statistics from 1913 to 1921, was born in 1873 in Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate education at Princeton University and at Iowa State College and had then done graduate work at Columbia University and at Leipzig University. When appointed commissioner, he was an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University, a position he had held since 1908. He was a Democrat.

9. Royal Meeker, “What Records Should be Kept by Public Employment Offices and How They Should be Used,” Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices, Buffalo, New York, July 20 and 21, 1916, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin, no. 220 (July 1917), 12–14.

10. “Report of the Committee on Standardization,” Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices [Milwaukee, Wis., Sept. 20 21, 1917] Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Review 5, no. 5 (November 1917), 950–64. The report repeated the problems with the statistics that had been publicized by employment experts for some time. See, for example, William M. Leiserson's comments in 1913 in his address: “Public Employment Offices in the United States,” Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices, Chicago, Dec. 19 and 20, 1913, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin, no. 192 (May 1916), 13–16.1

11. The USES had originated in 1907 in a division of the Bureau of Immigration designed to assist new immigrants find jobs away from the eastern seaboard cities. When America entered the war, the Department of Labor lobbied to expand the USES into a major agency of the domestic mobilization. The USES established cooperative relations with the twentyfour state-funded employment agencies throughout the country and, in the fall of 1917, the Secretary of Labor submitted a request to Congress for $750,000 to provide for projected expansion. Congress provided only $250,000. However, an appeal to President Wilson resulted in a grant of $825,000 from his national defense and security fund. On the prewar and wartime development of the USES, see Sautter, Udo, Three Cheers for the Unemployed: Government and Unemployment Before the New Deal (Cambridge, 1991), 52–94; 121–26Google Scholar. Sautter deals with the wartime experience of the USES very briefly and relies heavily on the printed Department of Labor sources. This slighting of the wartime experience reflects the fact that the central records of the wartime USES were destroyed in a fire in the late 1920s. As a consequence, what has been published about the wartime USES is largely gleaned from Deparment of Labor sources, which are highly partisan and fail to acknowledge the critical importance of the wartime struggle between federalists and nationalists that convulsed the organization. That wartime experience profoundly influenced the subsequent history of the USES. See William J. Breen, “Administrative Politics and Labor Policy in the First World War: The U.S. Employment Service and the Seattle Labor Market Experiment,” Business History Review 61, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 582–605; and Breen, Labor Market Politics and the Great War: The Department of Labor, the States, and the First U.S. Employment Service, 1907–1933 (forthcoming).

12. William M. Leiserson, “Organizing the Labor Market for the War and After the War” (An address delivered before the Ohio Academy of Social Sciences, Columbus, March 29, 1918), typescript (quotations on 5 and 11). Copy found in Wisconsin State Historical Society, William M. Leiserson Papers, Box 48, File “Speeches and Articles, 1918–1921.”

13. William M. Leiserson, “The Labor Shortage and the Organization of the Labor Market,” Survey 40 (20 April 1918), 68. The superintendent of employment at the American International Shipbuilding Corporation at the giant Hog Island shipyard outside Philadelphia noted that the USES office counted as men supplied all workers to whom they gave a card directing them to Hog Island. He commented that many of these men never arrived at the yard, which meant that the figures produced by the USES were obviously inflated. See Superintendent of Employment [D. R. Kennedy?], American International Shipbuilding Corporation, Hog Island, to L. C. Marshall, 23 July 1918. NA, RG 32, USSB: Construction Organization: Industrial Relations Division: General Records: Box 63, File 53732–1 (Labor—James L. Hughes—Special Representative).

14. S. Gompers, “No Scarcity of Workers” (editorial), American Federationist 24 (June 1917): 463–64. For a discussion of the response of the Selective Service System to the increasing clamor over the alleged shortage of labor, see Chambers, John Whiteclay II, To Raise an Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 7. Shortly after American entry into the war, there was a clamor from all parts of the country calling for the suspension of protective labor legislation, particularly laws regulating hours of labor for women and children. The Council of National Defense managed to deflect this hysteria. See Lombardi, John, Labor's Voice in the Cabinet: A History of the Department of Labor from Origin to 1921 (New York, 1942), 176–79Google Scholar.

15. J. W. Sullivan to H. Hoover, “Memorandum as to the Supply of Labor,” 15 August 1917. [7]. NA, RG 174, Department of Labor Records: W. B. Wilson Papers, Box 208, File 20/31 “Scarcity of Labor, 1917.” Copy also found in: Louis McHenry Howe Papers, Box 7, File “Labor and Personnel: Procurement, July-Sept., 1917,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. Until the middle of 1918, organized labor refused to concede that a labor shortage existed. At the annual convention of the AFL in November 1917, a special committee was established to inquire into the labor market. The committee surveyed twenty-eight international unions “with a paid-up membership of 922, 400” and the central labor unions in sixty-six cities, and corresponded with state labor bureaus and public employment agencies. The committee's report reinforced Sullivan's conclusions. See “Alleged 'Shortage of Labor: Report of Special Committee to Buffalo Convention,” American Federationist 25 (January 1918): 41–49. The report was subsequently published by the AFL as a separate twelve-page pamphlet titled The Alleged ‘Shortage of Labor’: Report of Committee Appointed by the American Federation of Labor to Investigate this Question—Report Indorsed by the Buffalo Convention of the A.F. of L. (Washington, D.C., n.d.). Copy found attached to W. J. Spillman to Assistant Secretary Ousley, memorandum, 16 March 1918. NA, RG 16, Department of Agriculture: Office of the Secretary, Incoming Correspondence, “1918: Labor (March),” Acc. 234, Dr. 154. Sullivan, who had been largely responsible for assembling the evidence for the committee, circulated the final report to senior government officials in early January 1918. See J. W. Sullivan to D. F. Houston, Seer, of Agriculture, 4 January 1918. NA, RG 16, Department of Agriculture Records: Office of the Secretary, Incoming Correspondence, “1918: Irrigation-Labor (Jan.),” Acc. 234, Dr. 152. Sullivan enclosed a copy of the report that had been printed in the January 1918, issue of the American Federationist.

16. Sullivan, “Memorandum as to the Labor Supply,” 5.

17. Charles B. Barnes, “Some Problems in Organizing a State Sytem of Employment Offices,” Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the American Association of Public Employment Offices, Detroit, July 1 and 2, 1915, Bureau of Labor Statistics, no. 192 (May 1916).

18. Slichter, Sumner Huber, The Turnover of Factory Labor (New York, 1919)Google Scholar, chap. 2. See also Nelson, Daniel, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1975), 84–86Google Scholar.

19. C. W. Doten, Industrial Service Department, Division of Construction, USSB-EFC, “Memorandum for the Division of Construction (Attention of Admiral Bowles),” 3 December 1917, [2]. NA, RG 32, U.S. Shipping Board, Subject Classified General Files, 19171920, Box 93, File 4439, Pt. 2. C. W. Doten was a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, in 1917, was the acting head of the Labor Supply Section, Industrial Service Department, of the Emergency Fleet Corporation.

20. I. W. Litchfield, USES, to L. A. Korper, 20 May 1918, Hartford, Connecticut State Archives, RG 20, Department of Labor: U.S. Employment Service, Correspondence 1918–19, Box 14, Correspondence with Director General, Jan.-Sept. 1918, “File May 15–31.”

21. J. C. Jones to C. M. Schwab, 24 October 1918 [3pp.; copy], NA, RG 32, U.S. Shipping Board, Construction Organization, Industrial Relations Division, General Records, Box 71, File 53814–2, Pt. 3 (Labor-Available Supply).

22. See report of informal meeting of Director W. S. Gifford and W. B. Hale, of the CND, R. Meeker, C. T. Clayton, and L. Post, of the Department of Labor, and Sir Stephenson Kent, Captain Asquith, Professor Garrard, and Mr. Baillie of the visiting deputation from the British Ministry of Munitions, in L. Post to Secretary W. B. Wilson, memorandum, 29 September 1917. NA, RG 174, Department of Labor Records: Chief Clerk's File, Box 132, File 129/14. At the meeting, Walter Gifford, director of the Council of National Defense, had opposed any move for a full-scale labor census, which would be a very complex under-taking, “until necessity for it arises.” Hale was particularly concerned that Dr. Leonard Ayres, who was with the War Industries Board, was contemplating a labor survey as an adjunct to an industrial survey he had undertaken. Hale felt that such a survey should be conducted by the Department of Labor as part of its employment service activities “since a labor exchange system is concerned with obtaining information as to the demand for labor as well as with the supply of labor.” See Hale to Post, 5 October 1917. NA, RG 174, Department of Labor Records: Chief Clerk's File, Box 132, File 129/14.

23. Louis F. Post and William Browne Hale, “Report to Interdepartmental Advisory Committee Pursuant to Resolution adopted by the Committee October 5, 1917 on the subject “The Needs of the Army for Men in Special Corps, The System of Exemptions from the Draft, and the Relation of the General Registration to These Subjects (October 19, 1917),” [95 pp: 1–42 text; 43–95 appendixes], 18–21, Appendixes E and F (quotations from 20). Copy found in: NA, RG 62, Council of National Defense Records: State Councils Section, 14-D3, Report to Interdepartmental Committee, Box 784.

24. Ibid., 22, Appendix E.

25. This survey was made in the week of 10–17 October 1917. On the history of the Public Service Reserve, see Breen, William J., “The Mobilization of Skilled Labor in World War I: ‘Voluntarism, the U.S. Public Service Reserve, and the Department of Labor, 1917–1918,” Labor History 32, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 253–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. W. E. Hall, “Report of U.S. Public Service Reserve on labor demand as obtained in Washington and on labor supply from trade union sources (October 17, 1917),” in Post and Hale, “Report to Interdepartmental Advisory Committee Pursuant to Resolution adopted … October 5, 1917 (October 19, 1917),” 88–95 (Appendix G). Quotations on 88, 91–92, 94- See also section 6, “Is There a Shortage of Labor?” 17–23. In late 1917, the method of supplying labor to the war industries consisted of a haphazard mixture of activities: employers hired at the factory gate; some employer associations maintained employment offices; private fee-charging employment agents actively touted for business; the business agents of labor unions organized work for their members; free employment offices, funded by various states, tried to direct workers to jobs; and the fledgling USES, in tandem with the free state employment offices, was promoting itself as an appropriate vehicle for centralizing the entire process. Hiring at the gate and the work of the private employment agents were, by far, the most significant of these labor-market activities. Indiscriminate use of misleading newspaper advertisements for jobs on the part of employers, private employment agents, and by the USES itself contributed to the further disorganization of the labor market. On newspaper advertising, see William M. Leiserson, “Organizing the Labor Market for the War and After the War” (an address delivered before the Ohio Academy of Social Sciences, Columbus, 29 March 1918), 4–5, 9–10; Leiserson, William M., “The Shortage of Labor and the Waste of Labor,” Survey 39 (30 March 1918), 701–3Google Scholar, esp. 703.

27. On the bureaucratic ambitions of senior officials in the Department of Labor, particularly the Assistant Secretary of Labor, Louis F. Post, see Cuff, Robert D., “The Politics of Labor Administration During World War I,” Labor History 21, no. 4 (Fall 1980): 546–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also William J. Breen, Labor Market Politics and the Great War, chaps. 1, 3, 4. For the way in which the Public Service Reserve was used by Post to promote the Department of Labor, see Breen, “The Mobilization of Skilled Labor in World War I,” esp, 261–62, 269–72. See also Breen, “Administrative Politics and Labor Policy in the First World War,” esp. 603.

28. USES Bulletin 1, no. 2 (4 February 1918), 1–2.

29. Ibid., 1, no. 5 (25 February 1918), 1.

30. Quoted in: “United States Employment Service Organized by the Department of Labor,” BLS, Monthly Review 6 (March 1918), 78 [568–70].

31. USES Bulletin 1, no. 6 (4 March 1918), 4; 1, no. 10 (2 April 1918), 12. The Bulletin carried weekly summaries of these reports beginning with the 16 April issue, which covered the week ending 6 April. See the complete set of detailed USES weekly reports on labor conditions in the United States, 16 March-10 August 1918, contained in: Woodrow Wilson Papers, Series 4, Case Files, No. 19, Department of Labor, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division (Reel 171).

32. USES Bulletin, 1, no. 10 (2 April 1918), 2.

33. Summaries of the weekly labor survey were printed in the USES Bulletin. See esp. USES Bulletin, 1, no. 15 (7 May 1918), 7.

34. See esp.: USES Bulletin, 1, no. 20 (11 June 1918), 6.

35. Ibid., 1, no. 24 (9 July 1918), 3.

36. Ibid., 1, no. 28 (6 August 1918), 9.

37. Ibid., 1, no. 26 (23 July 1918), 3.

38. L. C. Marshall to F. Frankfurter, memo headed “Report of the committee to consider whether an industrial survey is advisable and if so, the methods of conducting such a survey, Messrs. Marshall, Roosevelt and Hopkins constituting the committee,” 10 June 1918. NA, RG 1, War Labor Policies Board Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 32, File “Emergency Fleet Corporation: May to October: C11-f.” The War Labor Policies Board had been created on 10 June 1918 in order to coordinate government labor policies among the various agencies of the wartime government. The board was composed of representatives from the major departments and agencies involved in war production.

39. Frankfurter to Lamson, 24 August 1918. NA, RG 1, War Labor Policies Board Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 23, File “Lamson, F. L.”

40. See Densmore to L. Korper, 28 June 1918. (Copy). Hartford, Connecticut State Archives, RG 20, Department of Labor: U.S. Employment Service, Correspondence 1918–19, Box 14, Correspondence with Director General, Jan.-Sept., 1918, File “June 16-June 30.” A copy of the form is attached to the letter. See also USES Bulletin, 1, no. 23 (2 July 1918), 1, 3. The ten occupational groupings were: Military Service; Agriculture, Forestry and Animal Husbandry; Extraction of Minerals; Transportation; Manufacturing and Mechanical Industries; Trade; Public Service; Professional Service; Domestic and Personal Service; Clerical Occupations.

41. At its meeting on 7 June 1918, the War Labor Policies Board voted to accept the recommendations of its Central Recruiting Committee, which had been established at the first meeting of the Board on 29 May. The committee recommended that the USES should be the funnel between the supply and demand for common labor. Some exceptions to the complete application of this policy were allowed. For example, the new policy did not apply to firms employing fewer than one hundred workers, nor did it apply to railroad labor. However, it was regarded as a first step toward complete government control of the labor market and it was expected that skilled labor would be treated similarly in die near future.

42. This was done by administrative decree: Congress was not consulted. In fact, the decree relied upon employer cooperation. On 17 June 1918, acting on the advice of the War Labor Policies Board, President Wilson issued a proclamation solemnly urging employers engaged in war work to recruit all common labor through the USES. This was to take effect on 1 August. Only common labor was affected, although it was anticipated that skilled labor would be included subsequently. See Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed, 125.

43. John B. Densmore, “All War Labor Recruiting and Distributing Soon to be Taken over by Service,” USES Bulletin1, 1, no. 19 (4 June 1918), 1.

44. How Ohio Mobilised Her Resources for the War: A History of the Activities of the Ohio Branch, Council of National Defense, 1917–1919 (Columbus, 1919), 82–84Google Scholar.

45. Smyth, N. A., “The New Labor Recruiting Program,”Report of Proceedings of the National War Labor Conference, Washington, June 13–15, 1918(Washington, D.C.,1918), 23Google Scholar.

46. USES Bulletin, 1, no. 10 (2 April 1918), 1–2. Two weeks earlier, the Bulletin reported that more than five hundred plants were sending labor-status reports to the Reserve and it was expected that this number would rise to two thousand within two months. The reports covered the “extent to which each manufacturer of war materials is doing war work, his present and anticipated labor needs, expected releases of labor, and housing conditions.” See USES Bulletin, 1, no. 8 (18 March 1918), 6.

47. H. W. Tyler, “Memorandum for the Chairman, Committee on Centralization of Industrial Statistics [WLPB], June 10, 1918.” [2] NA.RG1, War Labor Policies Board Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 13, File “Standardization Committee.”

48. “Minutes of the Meeting of the Committee on Statistics [WLPB] held at Room 709 Labor Department Building, June 10th, [1918], at 11.30 A.M.” [5]. NA, RG 1, War Labor Policies Board Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 13, File “Standardization Committee.”

49. Ibid., 26, 31. A copy of the questionnaire (Emp. 15: Employers Order for Unskilled Male Laborers) is attached to: L. C. Marshall to All Firms Engaged in Work for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, 10 July 1918, NA, RG 32, USSB: Construction Organization: General Records: Records of Charles M. Schwab, April–December 1918, File 35 (Industrial Service Department: Publications). The form only covered unskilled labor; it was anticipated that reports on skilled labor would be incorporated into the form later. The Armistice was signed before this happened.

50. For biographical information on Lamson, see Henry T. Noyes to Edwin Gay, 3 July 1918. Box 4, Edwin F. Gay Papers, Stanford University, Palo Alto. Lamson had initially been recruited by Edwin F. Gay, dean of Harvard University's School of Business Administration, who had moved to Washington during the war in order to bring order to the government statistics. Gay was the chair of the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, which had been created in mid-June 1918. On Gay, see Cuff, Robert D., “Creating Control Systems: Edwin F. Gay and the Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics, 1917–1919,” Business History Review 63 (Autumn 1989): 588–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Lamson to Frankfurter, memo, “Plan for making use of the Community Labor Board of the U.S. Employment Service as instruments for the securing of labor data requireed by the Department of Labor and the War Industries Board,” 18 September 1918. NA, RG 1, WLPB Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 14, File “Community Boards.” A number of conferences to work out the organizational details of the proposal were held in late September. See Z. L. Potter, “Report of Statistical Clearing House, Week ending September 28, 1918.” Attached to: Edwin F. Gay, memo headed “Suggestions for Improving Weekly Reports,” 24 October 1918. (2pp. and attachments). Stanford University, Edwin F. Gay Papers, Box 3. The switch from USES officers to community labor boards probably reflected the widespread belief among Washington administrators that many USES field officers were incompetent.

52. USES Bulletin, 1, no. 24 (9 July 1918), 1–2. See also J. B. Densmore, “Instructions Concerning State Advisory Boards, Community Labor Boards, and Organization Committees (July 17,1918),” (USES Special Order Bl), reproduced in USES Bulletin, 1, no. 26 (23 July 1918), 23. The War Labor Policies Board had included the creation of such community labor boards in its resolution of 7 June 1918, centralizing labor recruiting in the USES.

53. J. B. Densmore to F. Frankfurter, memorandum, 9 September 1918. NA, RG 1, WLPB Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 17, file “Employment Service: August-Sept.-October.” USES Bulletin, 1, no. 37 (15 October 1918), 3.

54. Lamson to Frankfurter, memorandum, “Plan for making use of the Community Labor Boards of the U.S. Employment Service as instruments for the securing of labor data required by the Department of Labor and the War Industries Board,” 18 September 1918. [2]. NA, RG 1, WLPB Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 14, File “Community Boards.”

55. See “Memorandum regarding conference on Industrial Survey held in Dean Gay's office, Room 123, New Interior Bldg., October 5, 1918.” [1]. NA, RG 1, WLPB Records, Series 2, Correspondence, Box 21, File “Industrial Survey.”

56. USES General Order B-9 (27 September 1918). From Director General, USES, to Federal Directors, re “Industrial Survey.” NA, RG 61, War Industries Board Records: Technical or Commodity File: 21A-A4: Construction Projects, Labor, Box 771, File “Labor-General.” A copy of the questionnaire, headed ‘Monthly Report Sheet,” is attached to the General Order. Another copy of the questionnaire, together with a complete list of the eightyeight manufacturing and mining industries included in the first survey, is printed in: USES Bulletin, 1, no. 36 (1 October 1918), 1–2. At the end of October the USES instituted yet another monthly report, this time to be done by the federal director of employment in each state, designed to provide an overview of the activities in each state and particularly the activities of the community labor boards. These monthly reports were to indicate “the activities of the community labor boards covering such fields as a the recruiting of skilled and unskilled labor, methods used in advertising, the utilization of the Public Service Reserve to supplement the work of the boards, a résumé of the farm labor situation, and what means have been adopted for using and recuiting women in industry.” See USES Bulletin, 1, no. 39 (29 October 1918), 1–2.

57. See reports in weekly issues of USES Bulletin, December 1918-February 1919.

58. USES Bulletin, 1, no. 43 (10 December 1918), 10.

59. Second Annual Report of the Director General, U.S. Employment Service, August 15, 1919, U.S. Congress, H.Docs., 66th Cong., 2d sess., vol. 63, no. 7734, 915–16. See also USES Bulletin, 1, no. 44 (17 December 1918), 7.

60. Second Annual Report of the Director General, U.S. Employment Service, August 15, 1919, U.S. Congress, H.Docs., 66th Cong., 2d sess., vol. 63, No 7734, 916.

61. Ralph G. Hurlin, “The Employment Statistics of the United States Employment Service,” Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association, December, 1922, 490–91 [66–67]. See also Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor, June 30, 1921 (Washington, D.C., 1921), 16–17Google Scholar. The survey covered more than 1.5 million workers or about 17 percent of total wage earners in manufacturing industries: by contrast, the 1,500 firms only represented about 0.5 percent of the total number of manufacturing establishments.

62. See Professor F. S. Deibler, Department of Economics, Northwestern University, “The Measurement of Unemployment: The Need for Additional Statistics,” Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the International Association of Public Employment Services, Buffalo, New York, September 7–9, 1921, BLS Bulletin, no. 311 (Washington, D.C., 1922), 60–70. In 1922, Illinois and Massachusetts arranged the same sort of cooperation with the Bureau of Labor Statistics as New York and Wisconsin. See Business Cycles and Unemployment: Report and Recommendations of a Committee of the President's Conference on Unemployment (New York, 1923), xxi–xxiiGoogle Scholar. The USES reports were grouped according to the following fourteen basic industries: food and kindred products; textiles and their products; iron and steel and their finished products; lumber and its manufacture; leather and its finished products; paper and printing; liquors and beverages; chemicals and allied products; stone, clay, and glass products; metals and metal products other than iron and steel; tobacco manufactures; vehicles for land transportation; railroad repair shops; miscellaneous industries. See Eleventh Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1923 (Washington, D.C., 1923), 38Google Scholar.

63. William S. Berridge, “What the Present Statistics of Employment Show,” Business Cycles and Unemployment, 54. However, although there was evidence of some carelessness and inaccurate returns, one commentator believed that “this by no means characterizes the figures as a whole, and they furnish strong internal evidence of essential reliability.” He believed these USES statistics, with some relatively minor modifications, could constitute “a thoroughly reliable index of employment fluctuation for the country as a whole, and also reliable indexes both for particular industries and for individual cities.” Hurlin, “The Employment Statistics of the United States Employment Service,” 491, 497 [67, 73].

64. Mary Van Kleeck, “Charting the Course of Employment,” in Business Cycles and Unemployment, 356.

65. Ibid., 346. This report included statistics gathered by various states, including New York and Wisconsin, acting in cooperation with the BLS. By 1926, the report covered “over 10,000 establishments in 54 industries with a total of about 3 million wage earners reported.” See Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed, 151. Sautter comments that a handful of states also collected employment information on selected industries, but the methods of collection were not uniform. In addition, large sections of the workforce, notably agricultural and domestic workers, were not covered. By the time the statistics were published, they were out of date. Moreover, “Nobody really knew the number of employable persons, and hence all calculations lacked a secure premise.” See Sautter, 150–51.

66. Van Kleeck, “Charting the Course of Employment,” 357–60. See also “Report of the Committee on the Measurement of Employment,” Quarterly Publication of the American Statistical Association (March 1923); Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed, 151–53.

67. E. D. Cahn, “Some Uses of Employment Statistics,” Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the International Association of Public Employment Services, Chicago, Illinois, May 19–23, 1924, BLS Bulletin, no. 400 (Washington, D.C., 1925), 17. Udo Sautter makes some general comments on the efforts to improve the collection of employment statistics throughout the 1920s and concludes that although, at a data-collection level, there was not much change, the discussion of the problem did become much more sophisticated and the federal government came to recognize the difficulties involved in collecting reliable data. However, such recognition “did not yet imply an immediate willingness to take adequate measures to overcome the obstacles.” See Sautter, Three Cheers for the Unemployed, 151–54 (quote on 154).

68. Alpine, John R., “United States Employment Service,” in Nineteenth Annual Report of the Secretary of Labor for the Fiscal Year ended June 30, 1931 (Washington, D.C., 1931), 39Google Scholar.

69. Barney Cohen, “The Collection, Tabulation, and Distribution of Employment Information,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the International Association of Employment Services, Cleveland, Ohio, September 18–21, 1928, BLS Bulletin, no. 501 (Washington, D.C., 1929), 126–28. (Cohen was the state director of the USES for Illinois and the district superintendent for Ilinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.)

70. James A. Hamilton, “New York State Survey of Unemployment: Its Purpose, Findings, and Conclusions,” Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the International Association of Public Employment Services, Cleveland, Ohio, September 18–21, 1928, BLS Bulletin, no. 501 (Washington, D.C., 1929), 3–6. The discussion following this paper revealed the difficulties of collecting accurate unemployment statistics. Most of the representatives did not think any trustworthy figures on unemployment existed.

71. Both the bureau and the USES were part of the Department of Labor. Recent literature analyzing the post-World War II role of that Department in labor-market organization also points to a similar problem of administrative ineptitude. Gary Mucciaroni, for example, in The Political Failure of Employment Policy, 1945–1982, 264–66, argues that, in the post-World War II era, the Department of Labor failed “to develop the neutral competence of other federal agencies.” This was partly because Congress wanted to retain control over employment programs and related patronage and partly “because there [were] few political rewards for building such a capacity” (265). In the World War I era, Congress, suspicious of the bureaucratic aspirations of the Department of Labor, had also been very parsimonious in funding it. Inadequate funding, however, can only be a partial explanation for the passivity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the USES in the World War I era.

72. This seems a particularly good example of the way in which this type of professional, or disciplinary, knowledge “has entered political debate and policy making.” See Furner and Supple, “Ideas, Institutions, and State in the United States and Britain,” in Furner and Supple, eds., The State and Economic Knowledge, 12.

73. The experience of the Department of Labor in the postwar period parallels that of the War Department with regard to statistics. See Breen, William J., “Foundations, Statistics, and State-Building: Leonard Ayres, the Russell Sage Foundation, and U.S. Government Statistics in the First World War,” Business History Review 68 (Winter 1994), 451–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.