The Labor of Older Americans: Retirement of Men On and Off the Job, 1870–1937

The Journal of Economic History

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 1986, Pages 1-30

  Ransom, Roger L ^a   Sutch, Richard ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84971995968     PISSN: 00220507     EISSN: 14716372     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700045472     Document Type: Article

References (89)

1. We are referring largely to the discussion of this topic by social historians. A sampling can be found in: W. Andrew Achenbaum, “The Obsolescence of Old Age in America, 1865–1914,” Journal of Social History, 8 (Fall 1974), pp. 48–62
2. Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience Since 1790 (Baltimore, 1978)
3. David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America: The Bland-Lee Lectures Delivered at Clark University (expanded ed., New York, 1978; original ed., 1977)
4. Carole Haber, “Mandatory Retirement in Nineteenth Century America: The Conceptual Basis of a New Work Cycle,” Journal of Social History, 12 (Fall 1978), pp. 77–97
5. Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America's Past (New York, 1983)
6. William Graebner, A History of Retirement: The Meaning and Function of an American Institution: 1885–1978 (New Haven, 1980).
7. Economic historians have done comparatively little work on the history of retirement in the United States, but those who have looked at this topic seem to accept the conventional wisdom on the issue. For example, see Carolyn L. Weaver, “On the Lack of a Political Market for Compulsory Old-Age Insurance Prior to the Great Depression,” Explorations in Economic History, 20 (July 1983), pp. 294–328.
8. Graebner, History of Retirement, pp. 215–17.
9. Fischer, Growing Old in America, pp. 135–53.
10. The life-cycle hypothesis is associated with Franco Modigliani's research on saving. Modigliani's extensive collection of articles spanning the past four decades has been reprinted in Andrew Abel, ed., The Collected Papers of Franco Modigliani, vol. 2, “The Life Cycle Hypothesis of Saving” (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
11. For a discussion of the aggregate rate of saving in the nineteenth century see Lance E. Davis and Robert E. Gallman, “The Share of Savings and Investment in Gross National Product During the 19th Century in the U.S.A.,” Fourth International Conference of Economic History, Bloomington, 1968 (Paris, 1973).
12. S. J. Mushkin and Alan Berman, “Factors Influencing Trends in Employment of the Aged,” Social Security Bulletin, 10 (Aug. 1947), table 1, p. 19.
13. Mushkin and Berman's figure for 1910 is an interpolated estimate taken from Alba M. Edwards, Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States, 1870 to 1940, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 1940, “Special Report” (Washington, D.C., 1943), p. 93.
14. The Mushkin and Berman numbers have been relied upon by many observers. David Hackett Fischer cites them to support his argument that a downward trend in labor force participation began at least as early as 1870, Growing Old in America, p. 142.
15. Fischer's source for these numbers is a textbook by Domenico Gagliardo, American Social Insurance (revised ed., New York, 1955), p. 32.
16. Gagliardo's source was the article by Mushkin and Berman. Andrew Achenbaum, “Obsolescence of Old Age,” has also cited the version presented in Gagliardo.
17. Separate tabulations were reported for men and women. Our focus here is only on the labor force participation of men; a complete examination of household labor supply would, of course, require an examination of the labor force participation of women as well. The nineteenth-century history of women's labor force participation over the life cycle is an important subject in its own right which has recently received a good deal of attention. The interested reader should consult Valerie Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States (Berkeley, 1970)
18. Martha Norby Fraundorf, “The Labor Force Participation of Tum-of-the-Century Married Women,” this Journal, 39 (June 1979), pp. 401–17
19. Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America: 1776 to the Present (New York, 1980)
20. Elyce Rotella, From Home to Office: U.S. Women at Work, 1870–1930 (Ann Arbor, 1981)
21. Winifred Wandersee, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981)
22. Penelope Ciancanelli, “Women's Transition to Wage Labor: A Critique of Labor Force Statistics and Reestimates of the Labor Force Participation of American Women” (Ph.d. diss., New School for Social Research, 1983)
23. Claudia Goldin, “The Changing Economic Role of Women: A Quantitative Approach,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (Spring 1983), pp. 707–34
24. Mary Cookingham, “Working After Childbearing in Modern America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 14 (Spring 1984), pp. 773–920.
25. Instructions to enumerators have been reprinted in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twenty Censuses: Population and Housing Questions, 1790–1980 (Washington, D.C., 1979). The quotations are taken from pp. 19–20.
26. U.S. Census Office, Ninth Census, 1870, The Statistics of Wealth and Industry of the United States III (Washington, D.C., 1872), p. 805.
27. The 1870 census took no explicit notice of unemployment. In 1880 an attempt was made to enumerate the months of unemployment, but results of this inquiry were neither published nor tabulated. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, D.C., 1904), p. ccxxv. It is probable that the unemployed who were seeking employment for the first time in 1870 and in 1880 were not counted as productively occupied. This is a difference from the modern treatment which would influence the comparability of the figures for teenagers (and perhaps adult women), but it had negligible impact on the statistics for adult males.
28. U.S. Census Office, 1870, Statistics of Wealth and Industry, p. 832
29. U.S. Gensus Office, Tenth Census, 1880, Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Washington, D.C., 1882), p. 714.
30. The census study was undertaken in the 1940s by John D. Durand and Edwin Goldfield, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 1940, Population: Estimates of the Labor Force, Employment, and Unemployment in the United States, 1940 and 1930 (Washington, D.C., 1944)
31. and the results were reported in greater detail in John D. Durand, The Labor Force in the United States, 1890–1960 (New York, 1948), tables A-2 and A-6, pp. 199 and 208.
32. We have used the labor force figures reported by Durand and the age tabulations of the population reported in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 1930, Population V, “General Report on Occupations” (Washington, D.C., 1933), table 2, p. 115. We have distributed those reported with “age unknown” to specific age categories in proportion to those with reported ages.
33. Andrew Achenbaum apparently feels that this problem was severe since he has rejected the 1870 and 1880 tabulated results as “so flawed” as to be “useless,” Old Age in the New Land, p. 179. Unfortunately, Achenbaum provides no details of how he reached this conclusion.
34. U.S. Census Office, 1870, Statistics of Wealth and Industry, p. 832
35. U.S. Census Office, 1880, Population, p. 704
36. U.S. Census Office, Eleventh Census, 1890, Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part 2 (Washington, D.C., 1897), p. 115
37. John Durand, Labor Force in the United States, p. 199
38. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1930, Population V, p. 115.
39. We have also conducted a review of the scholarly work by Alba Edwards, Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States
40. John Durand, Labor Force in the United States
41. Clarence Long, The Labor Force Under Changing Income and Employment (Princeton, 1958)
42. Ann Rattner Miller and Carol Brainerd, “Labor Force Estimates,” in Simon Kuznets and Dorothy Swain Thomas, eds., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870–1950 I, “Methodological Considerations and Reference Tables” (Philadelphia, 1957)
43. Stanley Lebergott, Manpower and Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800 (New York, 1964). We found no comments to suggest that these authors suspect that an undercount of adult men had occurred. This statement, however, would not be true for the case of women and children. There is evidence that female occupations were systematically underenumerated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
44. U.S. Census Office, 1870, Statistics of Wealth and Industry, p. 798.
45. U.S. Census Office, 1880, Population, p. 704.
46. U.S. Census Office, 1890, Population, 2, p. cxxii. As far as we are aware, little attention has been focused upon the 1870 and 1880 tabulations after the changes in definitions were introduced in 1890. Alba Edwards made an extensive retrospective analysis of the occupation statistics for the Census Bureau in his Comparative Occupation Statistics for the United States. Edwards had no complaints about the reliability of the occupational coverage for older men in 1870 and 1880, but when he came to make his own retabulation of the occupation-by-age figures Edwards began with 1890 because of the lack of comparability of the age classifications used at the two earlier censuses with those that followed (pp. 92–93). Most subsequent research has followed Edwards's lead and begun detailed analysis with the returns from 1890.
47. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twenty Censuses, p. 29.
48. Enumerators in 1910, 1920, and 1930 were warned not to return occupations for the permanently retired, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twenty Censuses, p. 44. However, this apparently did not prevent significant numbers of those who would be considered retired by today's standard from reporting a source of income which the census at the time interpreted as a gainful pursuit. In addition to the categories listed above, it is likely that some retired individuals were listed as “boarding house keepers” even though they merely rented out a room in their house to supplement their retirement income. In what follows we have, however, made no correction for this potential overcount.
49. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900, Occupations, pp. ccxxv, ccxxxiii. See also our discussion of the census of 1900 below. The census bureau study undertaken by Durand and Goldfield demonstrated that the 1930 labor force was less than the number enumerated as gainful workers by the census of 1930.
50. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1940, Estimates of the Labor Force. A portion of the difference was explained by “recently retired or disabled persons who were reported as having gainful occupations although they were no longer working or seeking work,”
51. Durand, The Labor Force in the United States, pp. 197–198. Although this group had a small impact on the overall statistics, it had a considerable impact on the figures for older men.
52. The Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology of the University of Washington has drawn from the manuscript schedules of population in 1900 a 1-in-760 sample of the national population which is available for public use. We have obtained this sample of 99,034 individuals from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. The original sample was collected by Samuel Preston under the auspices of a grant from the National Science Foundation. For a detailed description of the 1900 sample see Stephen N. Graham, “The 1900 Public Use Sample Users’ Handbook Prepared at the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, University of Washington,” Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research 7825 (draft version, 1981). We are grateful for access to this data, and note that the Center for Studies in Demography, the National Science Foundation, and the Inter-university Consortium bear no responsibility for the analysis or interpretations presented here.
53. The census of 1900 did not report the gainfully occupied rate for men 60 and over. The figure in the text may be compared to 80.4 percent reported in 1890, U.S. Census Office, 1890, Population. p. cxii. The 1900 census did publish a tabulation for the group of men 65 and over. Their gainfully occupied rate was reported as 68.4 percent
54. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900, Occupations, p. cxviii. Our census sample inplies a gainful occupation rate of 75.2 percent for men 65 and over. This suggests either that the sample over estimates the number of older employed men or that the census officials edited some occupations from the tabulations in a way not discernable to those who collected the sample.
55. The census of 1900 recorded the number of months of unemployment experienced during the preceding 12 months. According to the instructions issued to the enumerators, the census law “does not contemplate that this question shall apply solely to the principal occupation in which the person may have been engaged during the year, but it is the intent to find out the number of months (or parts of months) during which a person ordinarily engaged in gainful labor was not employed at all,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1900, Occupations, p. ccxxvii. Nevertheless, individuals appeared in the manuscripts reporting a gainful occupation but with 12 months of reported unemployment. For the purposes of Table 1, we counted as “permanently unemployed” anyone reporting six months or more of unemployment during the preceding year. We note that census officials expressed confidence in the reliability of the 1900 unemployment statistics and that the period from June 1899 to May 1900 was considered prosperous
56. The data used to plot Figure 2 are based on reported age and are presented in Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “Retirement and Changes in Occupation with Advancing Age: American Men in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Working Papers on the History of Saving, 4 (University of California, Berkeley, Sept. 1985), table B, p. 51.
57. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census, 1940, Population IV, “Characteristics by Age: Marital Status, Relationship, Education, and Citizenship,” Part I (Washington, D.C., 1943), table 24, p. 90.
58. For a discussion of the 1937 census see Durand, Labor Force in the United States, pp. 96–99.
59. The original census returns are reported in U.S. Office of the Administrator of the Census of Partial Employment, Unemployment, and Occupations, Census of Partial Employment, Unemployment, and Occupations, 1937 IV, “The Enumerative Check Census” (Washington, D.C., 1938). A description of the methods we have used to estimate labor force participation from the check census results is available from the authors upon request.
60. Durand's 1890 estimate of labor force participation may be contrasted to the gainful employment rate of 73.8 percent reported by the census that year.
61. U.S. Census Office, 1890, Population, pp. cxxi–cxxii.
62. Durand himself warned readers that these estimates “would be much less reliable than those for 1930,” Labor Force in the United States, pp. 197–198.
63. Durand's methods were criticized at the time by Clarence D. Long although Long's own estimates were only slightly different, “The Labor Force in Wartime America,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Occasional Papers, 14 (Mar. 1944), table 1, p. 9.
64. Gertrude Bancroft, The American Labor Force: Its Growth and Changing Composition (New York, 1958), pp. 38–39.
65. See, for example, Mushkin and Berman, “Trends in Employment of the Aged”
66. Robert Dorfman, “The Labor Force Status of Persons Aged Sixty-Five and Over,” American Economic Review, 44 (May 1954), pp. 634–44.
67. The figures in Table 4 are based on the published census returns and the 1900 census sample. We have employed the definitions of the agricultural sector suggested by Ann Miller and Carol Brainerd, “Labor Force Estimates,” p. 382.
68. Our estimates of the percentage of the labor force engaged in agriculture differ somewhat from the estimates made by Miller and Brainerd (p. 609)
69. and the alternative estimates calculated by Stanley Lebergott, “Labor Force and Employment, 1800–1960,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800: Studies in Income and Wealth, 30 (Princeton, 1966), table 2, p. 119. We prefer to employ the census estimates in this context to preserve comparability with the results presented in Table 2. Use of either alternative, however, would not materially affect the results.
70. Wolfgang Kleber has suggested this mechanism played an important role in the case of Germany. In that country many middle-aged workers shifted out of industrial jobs into the service sector. Kleber concluded that over the entire period from 1882 to 1978 “the increase in the working male population in the service sector occurred not so much through the recruitment of younger occupied persons as much as through mobility during occupational life,” “Labor Force Change in Germany Since 1882: A Life-Cycle Perspective,” Explorations in Economic History, 22 (Jan. 1985), pp. 109–10.
71. In principle, we would prefer data which follow the career paths of a sample of individuals as they age, but such information, if available, has eluded our search. Nevertheless, the cross-sectional patterns are striking and provide strong quantitative support of the view that downward occupational movement was quite common the late nineteenth century. There is also evidence of a non-quantitative nature to bolster our interpretation. Tamara Hareven has reported nineteenth-century career patterns which support our intepretation of the cross-section data, “The Last Stage: Historical Adulthood and Old Age,” in Erik Erikson, ed., Adulthood (New York, 1976), p. 208.
72. The phenomenon of downward mobility has also been mentioned by Theodore Hershberg, et al., “Occupation and Ethnicity in Five Nineteenth-Century Cities: A Collaborative Inquiry,” Historical Methods Newsletter, 7 (June 1974), pp. 204–11
73. Carole Haber, “Mandatory Retirement,” p. 78
74. Michel Dahlin, “From Poorhouse to Pension: The Changing View of Old Age in America, 1890–1929” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1982)
75. N. Sue Weiler, “The Aged, the Family, and the Problems of a Maturing Industrial Society: New York, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Chicago, 1983), pp. 107–14.
76. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics of Labor, February, 1878, Public Document 31, Part VI (Boston, 1878), pp. 155–262.
77. The original source presents a very detailed age and occupational breakdown. When the complete distributions are compared, the age distribution for industrial workers can be considered to have been drawn from a different population than the distributions for unskilled workers, artisans, and workers in the building trades. In each case the differences are significant at the 99.9 percent confidence level when tested with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov procedure. The unskilled and artisan distributions cannot be distinguished by this test even when set at the 90 percent confidence level. For more detail see Ransom and Sutch, “Retirement and Changes in Occupation,” appendix D, p. 54.
78. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. Annual Report, 1878, Part III. pp. 40–49.
79. Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics (Lansing, 1890).
80. For a detailed description of the data set on Michigan furniture workers see Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, “Labor Supply, Income, and Saving over the Life Cycle: A Survey of Male Workers from the Furniture Industry in Michigan, 1890,” History of Saving Project Research Memorandum, 3 (University of California, Berkeley, Nov. 1985).
81. selding reported these findings as a rejection of the claims made by muckrakers that industrial jobs were unsafe and unhealthy, “In Dispraise of the Muckrakers: United States Occupational Mortality, 1890–1910,” Research in Economic History, 1 (1976), pp. 348–49.
82. The procedure for calculating the age-corrected death rates is described by Uselding, “Occupational Mortality,” pp. 342–44.
83. The data on 1890 occupational mortality is from U.S. Census Office, Eleventh Census, 1890, Report on Vital and Social Statistics at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, D.C., 1896), Part I, table 15, pp. 972–73.
84. This finding is corroborated by the shape of the age-income profiles reported by other researchers for late nineteenth-century American workers in a variety of different occupations. See, for example, Joan Underhill Hannon, “The Immigrant Worker in the Promised Land: Human Capital and Ethnic Discrimination in the Michigan Labor Market, 1889–1890” (Ph.D diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1978)
85. “Ethnic Discrimination in a 19th-Century Mining District: Michigan Copper Mines, 1888,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (Jan. 1982), pp. 28–50
86. Michael R. Haines, “Industrial Work and the Family Life Cycle, 1889–1890,” Research in Economic History, 4 (1979)
87. “The Life Cycle, Savings, and Demographic Adaptation: Some Historical Evidence for the United States and Europe” in Alice S. Rossi, ed., Gender and the Life Course (Hawthorne, N Y., 1985).
88. We have attempted to investigate one possible explanation of the trend. It is possible that the health of older men was improving during this period even though life expectancy at age 60 was not (see Table 3). If so, then labor force participation rates of older men may actually have risen, industry by industry, as fewer workers would have been forced by illness or infirmity to retire. Such a rise would be obscured in the aggregate statistics because of the shift away from agriculture. We were unable to find support for this conjecture, however, and the low rates of dependency among older men reported by Daniel Scott Smith for 1900 argue against this interpretation. Smith's pioneering study concluded that “the family in the direct sense of household co-residence of adult generations was the welfare institution for old people in 1900.” Yet only one-sixth of married people 55 and over in his study lived with their married children.
89. Smith, “Life Course, Norms, and the Family System of Older Americans in 1900,” Journal of Family History, 4 (Fall 1979), p. 296.