The garment trade the census would not print

1899 — 1909

Counted, but folded away: The Thirteenth Census measured South Bend's manufactures three times — 1899, 1904, and 1909 — and in its comparative table for the city (Vol. IX, Table I) it printed the leading industries by name: carriages and wagons, foundry products, printing, tobacco, and the rest. Clothing is not among them in any of the three years. The detail table for 1909 (Table III) does the same: South Bend's industries are named down to patent medicines and confectionery, and then a single line — "All other industries," 84 establishments with 7,323 wage earners and $16,886,599 in products — swallows everything else. The garment trade is inside that line, and the census puts it there in a footnote, which enumerates the folded industries by count of establishments. For South Bend the footnote reads, in its clothing lines: clothing, men's, including shirts, 4 establishments; hosiery and knit goods, 1; woolen, worsted, and felt goods, and wool hats, 1; fur goods, 1 — with awnings, tents, and sails (1) and rag carpets (2) at the cloth trade's edge. No establishment of women's-clothing manufacture, and none of millinery manufacture, appears in the city's enumeration at all.

The census's own text explains the mechanism without naming this case: industries were carried under "all other," the Indiana chapter's companion discussion states, "in some cases because the operations of individual establishments would be disclosed if they were shown separately." South Bend's shirt trade was in substance one great house — Wilson Brothers — with a second maker beside it, and a printed line would have been a printed account of a single firm. The contrast stands in the same table, a column away: Terre Haute, with a third of South Bend's manufactures, received a printed clothing row — 3 establishments, 418 wage earners on average, of whom 362 were women — because its trade was spread across houses no one of which the figures would expose. And the census's narrative for Indiana makes the fold stranger, not simpler: explaining South Bend's 83.5 per cent growth in products across 1904–1909, it names "men's shirts" among the industries over a million dollars that drove it, and says of another of the city's trades that the manufacture of sewing-machine cases was "practically confined to this city." The shirt millions are in the story; they are only missing from the table. What the tables do give plainly is the workforce the sewing rooms drew on: of the city's 11,789 average wage earners in 1909, 2,510 were women sixteen and over, with several hundred children under sixteen beside them — the hands the shirt, underwear, and knit shops are documented, in the firm records, to have employed.

Sources:

1. Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910), Vol. IX, Manufactures 1909, Indiana chapter — Table I, p. 326 (South Bend's selected industries, 1899/1904/1909; no clothing line in any year; "All other industries," 84 establishments and $16,886 thousand in products for 1909), read from the printed page.
2. Same volume — Table III, pp. 334–335 (the South Bend block and its footnote enumerating the folded industries: men's clothing including shirts, 4; hosiery and knit goods, 1; woolen, worsted, and felt goods and wool hats, 1; fur goods, 1; and the Terre Haute clothing row, 3 establishments and 418 wage earners, 362 of them women), read from the printed pages.
3. Same volume — the Indiana narrative, p. 311 (the 83.5 per cent increase "due principally to" carriages and wagons, agricultural implements, sewing-machine cases, and men's shirts, each over $1,000,000), and the chapter's statement of why industries were folded into "all other."