The 1929 summit — and the silences of the thirties

Census years 1929, 1935, 1937 and 1939

1929 is the summit of the old series. The Census of Manufactures of 1929 — taken on the eve of the crash, its Indiana volume printing the city's 1930 population as 28,630 — counted 30 establishments in Mishawaka, 5,595 wage earners, and 16,820 primary horsepower, the last horsepower figure the city tables ever print. Wages were $7,477,658; materials, supplies, containers, fuel and purchased electric energy cost $10,523,453; the value of products was $27,640,080; and value added by manufacture was $17,116,627 — the highest value added of the pre-war series, on products that had barely moved in nominal dollars from 1919's $27,765,000. A decade that the city's memory files under boom shows in the federal count as a plateau in the value shipped and a thirty per cent rise in the value added at home: the works were keeping more of each dollar inside the city even before the collapse.

Then the record goes quiet — by rule. The biennial censuses of manufactures counted the city in 1935 and again in 1937, and the published volume of the 1937 census refuses to say what it found. Its index of cities of 25,000 inhabitants or more carries Mishawaka's name with an asterisk and no page, under the volume's own rule, printed at the head of the index: detailed statistics are withheld for cities preceded by an asterisk, to avoid disclosing approximations of data for individual establishments. The Indiana pages of its city table were read whole: Anderson, East Chicago, Elkhart, Evansville, Hammond, Indianapolis, Lafayette, Michigan City, Muncie, Richmond, South Bend and Terre Haute stand there, and Mishawaka does not. No 1935 row and no 1937 row exists in print. The silence is itself a measurement: by the middle Depression the city's manufacturing had become so concentrated that the federal government could not publish its totals without publishing, in effect, one company's.

1939 prints the headcount and withholds the money. The Sixteenth Census counted manufactures for 1939 and gave Mishawaka a row — footnoted, as before, that its figures were withheld to avoid disclosing exact or approximate data for individual establishments. What the row prints: population (1940) 28,298; 29 establishments; wage earners averaging 3,854. Wages, materials, products and value added stand as dashes. The Depression's depth in this city is therefore in the record only as a headcount: the wage force of 1939 stood thirty-one per cent below 1929's, and the money columns that would price the collapse do not exist in print. One divergence stands whole: when the 1947 census volume reached back and printed 1939 comparative columns for this city, it gave the establishments as 28, not 29 — the wage earners, 3,854, agree in both. The two volumes differ by one establishment, and the record reached does not say why; both readings stand here, each with its carrier.

Sources:

1. Fifteenth Census of the United States, Census of Manufactures: 1929, Vol. III (Statistics by States), Indiana, Table 2 — statistics for cities of 10,000 inhabitants or more: Mishawaka, p. 163, read from the page image.
2. Biennial Census of Manufactures, 1937 (Bureau of the Census, 1939), Part II, Table 1 — cities of 25,000 inhabitants or more, 1937 and 1935: Indiana, pp. 31–34, read whole from the page images; the cities index and its withholding rule, p. 8 (Mishawaka asterisked, no page given).
3. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Manufactures 1939, Vol. III (Statistics for States and Cities), Indiana, Table 2 — statistics for places of 10,000 inhabitants or more: Mishawaka, p. 279, read from the page image (footnote 11: figures withheld).
4. Census of Manufactures: 1947, Vol. III, Table 2, Indiana: Mishawaka's 1939 comparative columns, p. 201, read from the page image (establishments 28; production workers 3,854; value added withheld).