"Carroll D. Wright and Workers' Budgets," in Ballard C. Campbell, ed., The Challenges of Change: American Lives, 1870-1920 (Scholarly Resources, 1999).

The stranger in the stiff white collar immediately attracted notice. Visitors of any sort were rare in the South Works of the Washburn & Moen Wire Company. It was Worcester, Massachusetts' biggest industrial employer and the world's largest maker of barbed wire, telegraph wire, and innumerable other products. Five minutes before work commenced, at 6:25 A.M., upwards of a thousand men streamed through the gates which were then locked. Anyone coming even a minute late lost that day's pay. A second offense cost him his job. There were no exceptions, no excuses.Visitors had to get a pass and, even then, were not free to wander about. There was always an assistant superintendant or someone else in management serving as escort. But this visitor was by himself.

He carried a sheaf of papers and glanced about curiously before striding over to a small cluster of workers, die sinkers who made the devices through which the various sizes of wire were drawn. "Good day," he began. "I'm with the state Bureau of the Statistics of Labor. We're conducting an inquiry into the wages and expenditures of workingmen and their families here in Massachusetts. I'm hoping one of you will be willing and able to assist." "What kind of inquiry would that be, then?" one asked. "And who are you to be askin'?" another put in. "We're studying how families manage to make ends meet," the stranger said. "What you can earn, what kind of life can you provide your families, that's what we want to find out. My instructions are to go to the biggest industrial centers in the state, Lowell, Worcester, Fall River, and seek out the biggest factories and shops. Then I'm to ask the first worker I see. The idea is to get information from enough families, maybe up to a thousand, so we can know pretty well what living conditions are like."

"You still haven't said what you want to know, not so I can tell," the first worker interjected. "We want to develop a budget for each family that'll itemize every penny that comes in and every penny that goes out." "You mean you want to snoop into how much we put into the collection plate." "Or whether a man spends two cents for a beer of a Saturday after getting paid." The man from the Bureau shifted his weight a bit uncomfortably. It was not easy persuading workingmen to trust him. Why should they? The Bureau was only a few years old, and Colonel Wright had only taken over as director two years ago. "I know it might look like snooping," he began. "But my chief, Col. Carroll D. Wright, has given orders not to pry into such things." He pulled out a document with the Bureau's seal on the top. "'There is a sanctity to every household which even the state should not invade,'" he read. "The Colonel's orders are that we are not to try to learn 'how much was thrown away from bad habits, or how much was squandered in extravagance.' We are only trying to determine if the workingmen of Massachusetts get a fair return on their day's labor." "A fair return! That's a laugh. What's fair is what the foreman says is fair. 'If you don't like it,' he says to you, 'there's plenty that'll be happy to take your place.'"

"The Bureau wants to know what's really fair," the agent began again. "I'll read you more of my instructions. Our 'particular work,' as Col. Wright calls it, is to find out if the 'wage system' permits the laboring man 'with economy and prudence' to 'comfortably maintain himself and family.' That is, can he 'educate his children, and also to lay by enough for his decent support when his laboring powers have failed'? That's what the Bureau means by fair. That's what I want you to help me find out." "It sure isn't what Washburn & Moen means, I can tell you that right now," a worker murmured. "And what are you going to do once you've got all those facts. Stick them in some report that nobody will ever read," he went on in a louder voice. "Oh people will read it, you can count on that. Col. Wright will make sure. So, will one of you help?" The men exchanged glances. Should they trust the Bureau? Who was this Col. Wright? Could it really help their families if they agreed to cooperate? Could it hurt?

Enough said yes. The Bureau's agents didn't compile a thousand family budgets, but they did put together almost four hundred. Each detailed the family's size, the range in age of the children, the earnings of each working member plus all other sources of income. Each also itemized every expenditure, no matter how small. The agents did add in the nickel left in the collection plate on Sunday, the beer on Saturday, the penny candy for the kids. But they grouped them as "sundries." Only the reputable expenses of this type, the pennies for newspapers, the quarter for a union membership, or the church contribution were identified as such. The money spent on tobacco or beer was not.

Agents visited each family twice. The first time, during the day, allowed them to describe the family's housing and the condition of their neighborhood. Was there a garden? If so, were there only vegetables planted or were there flowers too? How clean were the streets? Where were the outhouses? How clean were they? The second visit, in the evening when all family members were home, allowed agents to compile the budgets. How much did each working member earn? How much did the family pay in rent? What had they spent on food? on clothes?

These second visits also provided an opportunity to describe how well the apartment or house was furnished and how well the family dressed. If there was a piano or a sewing machine or rugs on the floor, agents wrote that down. If the children were neatly dressed and clean scrubbed, they noted that as well. Lastly, and by no means least, agents put together detailed information about the family's diet. How often did they eat vegetables? What about meat? And fish? Did they have pie with breakfast? That was the working family's big meal of the day. "You should breakfast like a king, dine like a prince, and sup like a peasant" ran an old saying. There was usually six hours of hard work between breakfast and dinner. Then there was another five or five and one half before supper. A man needed his biggest meal in the morning. And he needed a substantial lunch. The rest of the family subordinated their needs to his. Families ate pork chops and steak for breakfast, not to mention pie or cake. They had meat again, if they could afford it, at the noon meal along with potatoes, and perhaps more pie. How little did they eat for supper, agents asked. Some families had just beans and bread or potatoes left over from lunch. If a family was really scrimping on food, agents learned, they might have only bread and tea. The worst-off families had two meals a day like this, always lunch and supper.

[Insert Family Budget Example One here]

Col. Wright, Carroll D. Wright, the architect of this investigation, was born in Dunbarton, New Hampshire in 1840. He enlisted in the Civil War and rose through the ranks. After Appomatox, he studied law, passed the bar examination, and settled in Reading, Massachusetts. His new neighbors soon elected him to two terms in the state senate. This was not unusual. Civil War veterans dominated politics for two generations. Wright left the legislature to take over the fledgling Bureau of the Statistics of Labor in 1873. It was the first agency of its kind, and the thirty-three year old Wright was determined to demonstrate that the collection of reliable information was the crucial prerequisite to wise legislation. "All true and lasting progress," he maintained, "is founded upon knowledge." The budget study was his first major project. It proved, he confidently explained, that "the condition of the wage laborers of the Commonwealth" required "amelioration." Massachusetts needed a minimum wage which all employers must pay, one high enough to allow the hardworking and temperate laborer to support himself and his family at a decent standard.

Such a law was only fair, Wright argued. If an employer overextended himself and could not meet his obligations, he could seek refuge in the bankruptcy courts. A minimum wage would give the worker and his family a similar sort of protection. And Massachusetts' blue-collar families needed it. Most could not save money for hard times, no matter how careful they were. Too many found themselves in debt even as they literally tightened their belts by cutting meat consumption down to one meal a day or by denying their children the milk they needed to grow properly. Few could do more than dream of owning their own home. As for being able to retire, virtually all working men worked for as long as they were physically able. Only a widower whose grown children were willing and able to take him in might retire. Otherwise a man worked until he dropped.

More than fairness was involved. For Wright, as for many of his generation who served in the Civil War, the state was only as strong as its citizens. Massachusetts' industrial prosperity rested upon its workers, he insisted, just as the survival of the Union had rested upon its soldiers. How long would prosperity last if the workers and their families did not share in it?

Wright's 1875 Report really began the discussion in the United States of the whole notion of what came to be called a "living wage." It is a discussion still going on, and his definition of "fair and just" has proven as influential as his pioneering use of statistics:

. . . No one should receive such small compensation for his toil, that even when expended with economy and prudence, it fails to pay for his necessary cost of living; rendering him an involuntary debtor, subjecting him continually to the demands of creditors who wish pay for the necessities of life he has consumed; obliging him to overwork his wife with home and outside duties; forcing him to deprive his children of education, that he may supply by their labor their cries for bread; finally, bringing him to the poor-house, to the state of a continual recipient of charity, or entailing him as a morally not-to-be-got-rid-of burden upon his children, relations or friends.

This definition of a "fair day's pay" advanced a view of the government's responsibilities to its citizens which would in the twentieth century become normative, namely, that the state has an obligation to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Protection might take the form of laws requiring school attendance, limiting the hours children could work, establishing a minimum age before they could work at all, stipulating fire prevention and other safety measures, guaranteeing minimum wages, or providing worker's compensation in case of injury. Despite a hostile Supreme Court, which throughout the last third of the nineteenth century often ruled state laws regulating these matters unconstitutional infringements upon the rights of corporations to "due process," this was an era of legislative activism. Massachusetts, thanks in part to Wright's efforts, frequently took the lead.

His Report did not gather dust. Instead state after state across the North and West set up their own bureaus of labor statistics, undertook studies of living and working conditions modelled upon his, and used the results very much in the way he envisioned, as "proof" that their state needed to act to protect workers and their families. By 1883 there were enough state bureaus for Wright to organize a convention of their chiefs.

Wright himself went on to become the first United States Commissioner of Labor in 1885. In 1893 he was named Director of the Census to speed up the processing of the Census of 1890. In both positions he designed and supervised even more ambitious studies and, in the process, helped found the science of statistics. He also chaired the federal commission which investigated the great Pullman strike of 1894 and served on the commission of inquiry into the antracite coal strike of 1902. Anthracite was then the main home heating fuel, and the strike had threatened to leave millions of Americans with cold houses.

Yet for all of Wright's credentials as a pioneer, some of the families who cooperated with his 1875 budget study had already had experience with systematic inquiries into their standard of living. At least this was true of French-Canadian immigrants living in Worcester whose pastor, Rev. Jean Baptiste Primeau, no sooner arrived in 1869 to found the first French-Canadian parish in the city than he undertook his own study of family living standards.

Like Wright, he wanted to know how the families under his care were making ends meet. He too visited them in their homes and he asked just as many questions. Who worked in the family? What did they earn? Did they take a newspaper? Who in the family could read? English or only French? Was the father planning on taking out citizenship papers? Was the family saving up to purchase a home? He asked about what they ate, but -- unlike the Bureau's agents -- he also swapped recipes for soup and stew. Most importantly, he talked with the families about a shared dream, a church of their own, perhaps someday soon with a school where children could learn French and Canadian history, where they would be exposed to the "right" sort of moral influence. Primeau did not discuss what each family might contribute. That would come later, he explained at the first meeting of the prospective congregation. His first duty was to be a shepherd, he told them. A shepherd must know his flock.

Primeau was scarcely the only pastor to undertake such a survey of the families in his parish. What is unusual is that the results of his visits were published so we know specifically what he asked and how he interpreted the answers he received. As a result, we can compare his study and Wright's, a revealing exercise in several ways. First, although Wright and Primeau agreed upon most facts with respect to wages, costs of various necessities, and related matters, they disagreed over what those facts meant. These conflicting views, one from inside the working world and one from outside, also can tell us a good deal about the perspectives of early investigators like Wright and of immigrant community leaders like Primeau. Finally, their disagreements and agreements illumine the processes whereby immigrants found their way into the larger American society and native-born Yankees slowly learned to live with these newcomers.

In 1869-70 there were 1743 "souls" in Primeau's flock, about 350 families. Most were headed by manual laborers. Shoeworkers were the largest group, followed by day laborers, and then by skilled artisans -- blacksmiths, carpenters, and machinists. Only a handful had white-collar positions. There was a doctor, a lawyer, a few grocers, and a handful of clerks. There was one journalist, Ferdinand Gagnon, who was about to launch the most influential French-language newspaper in New England, Le Travailleur (The Worker). About one adult in six was an American citizen; about one in ten owned property, most often in Quebec. A majority could read neither French nor English. The families were almost all young; the average age of the fathers was thirty-eight according to the 1880 census and would have been even younger in 1869-70 when the curé made his initial visits. Almost all had children living at home, and, although the great majority of these children were still very young, many were already working fulltime. Most families could not manage on the father's wages. The two or three dollars earned by ten and twelve-year-olds, supplemented occasionally by income from boarders and by what the mother could earn from taking in laundry or sewing, were needed to keep the wolf from the door. These were, in short, the same families Wright's survey showed to be living on the edge of subsistence. They ate meat or fish once a day; they frequently made do with a supper of bread and potatoes left over from lunch. Small wonder Primeau's recipes were for soup and stew.

Here is how Wright's agents described some of these families. #223 was headed by a laborer in a mill. Two sons, 12 and 10, also worked.

"Family numbers 7, parents and 5 children from one to twelve years of age; one child goes to school. . . . Occupy a tenement of 4 rooms in a good locality, with neat surroundings. The house is moderately well furnished, but no carpets. Family dresses poorly, and looks pale and unhealthy, but neat. Tries to keep out of debt, but the father has to work all the time, as well as the children. Lost six days through sickness last year, and had to go without necessary clothing."

Another family, #224, also had a father who was a laborer in a mill. It too had two working sons, aged 14 and 12, but its overall condition seemed better to the agent.

"Family numbers 6, parents and 4 children from three to fourteen years of age; one goes to school. Occupy a tenement of 5 rooms, in a good locality. House is moderately well furnished. Family dresses well and attends church."

If some families were holding their own and some teetering on the brink, others were collapsing. Of one, headed by a day laborer with one working child, an agent wrote:

"Family numbers 6, parents and 4 children from one to twelve years of age; one goes to school. Have a tenement of 3 rooms, in a poor locality. Sanitary arrangements are disgraceful; sink water running in the yard; privies over-running with filth. The house is poorly furnished and dirty; in fact, it is impossible to keep it clean. Family dresses moderately well."

Primeau saw all of this, but he did not see it in the same light. His point of reference was village life in Quebec, not middle-class Massachusetts. As he told a visiting priest from Montreal, "the people of Notre Dame are neither rich nor poor. They enjoy a happy ease. There has so far [through 1872] been no lack of work in Worcester, and the price of labor is regular and high enough." Day laborers earned between $1 and $1.50 a day. Skilled shoeworkers received between $2 and $2.50 a day; and the highly skilled, such as carpenters, could get up to $3. Servant girls made $3 to $4 a week in addition to their board. The cost of living, the curé continued, was moderate. Rents averaged $12 a month. Heat cost another $4 to $5. "So in general, here in Worcester . . . people can under ordinary circumstances put more or less aside each month." On the whole, "we can say that materially speaking everyone lives well at Notre Dame, that a good majority can save up, that in fact a strong minority does save, and that very few accumulate wealth." Such was "the happy lot of the parishioners of Notre Dame."

"Living well" meant quite different things for Wright and for Primeau. For Wright it meant that the father earned enough to support his family himself so that his children could go to school, his wife could stay at home and not have to take in boarders or laundry, and the family could set aside a little out of every pay envelope for the proverbial rainy day. A decent standard of living would allow the family to accumulate some of the nicer things in life such as a piano or a sewing machine. It could afford to carpet the parlor.

Primeau also emphasized saving but otherwise his view of the good life had little in common with Wright's. In March of 1872 he offered up in his parishioners' name "this prayer of Solomon: 'Lord, give me neither poverty nor riches; give me what is necessary for life; for fear that if I have more, I might be tempted to renounce you. . . or that, if I am constrained by poverty, I might steal and might through perjury violate the name of my God.'" Riches, the priest continued, were especially dangerous in the United States. "Here, more than elsewhere, wealth . . . carries people closer to the Protestant or infidel class, which is dominant; it tends to make people enemies of their own faith; it pushes them toward contempt for their brothers." What was best, what the people of Notre Dame enjoyed, was a "happy mediocrity." Mediocrity, Primeau concluded, "accomplishes prodigies, . . . builds churches, and . . . maintains the sacred fire of the sanctuary." Primeau rejected, in short, precisely what Wright was calling for, an American standard of living. And he rejected it precisely because it was American, that is, Protestant. "We must," he urged his flock in 1872, "remain Canadian above all."

Wright and Primeau would meet in 1881. The occasion was a hearing, called by Wright but organized by Primeau's parishioner Ferdinand Gagnon, into the living standards of the French-Canadian immigrants in Massachusetts. It was not a friendly encounter. In his Twelfth Annual Report (Boston, 1881) on "Uniform Hours of Labor" Wright had sought to make a case for a ten-hour day for factory workers. One argument commonly put forward by opponents, especially employers, was that some workers, more often than not immigrants, and frequently enough French Canadians, would put their additional free time to mischievious uses. The employers were correct, Wright conceded, but conditions should be "shaped for the better portion of the people" and not for the worst. "It is not too much to say," he continued, "that the sober, the industrious, and frugal operatives, and all who seek better things for them," including himself, "have to carry the loafers, the tipplers, and the saloonkeepers on their back . . . ." It was wrong, Wright maintained, to judge a law by how some might abuse it. ". . . the well-behaved ought not to be punished by having conditions put upon them which hurt their welfare" in order to control the "ill-behaved."

Had this been all he said, the debate over the ten-hour law would have remained within the usual bounds; but Wright directly took up the question of the French Canadians. They were, he wrote, "with some exceptions, the Chinese of the Eastern States." It was a hateful comment, one that reflected the racism of the day. Congress was about to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act. In California and other western states new laws prohibited Chinese from owning property, from attending the same schools as whites, and from holding a variety of jobs which required state licenses. And, although Wright attempted to disclaim any racist intent by arguing in his next Report that the "words 'Chinese of the East' are simply an expression used by economists to-day everywhere to denote the kind of labor that is migratory," the French Canadians of Massachusetts knew an ethnic slur when they heard one. Worcester's Charles Lalime claimed that the expression "hurt me somewhat" and led to his taking the lead in organizing a protest against the report. "We must meet Mr. Wright, and show him we are a white people," he proclaimed.

Lalime's comment is revealing. Being "white" was not simply a matter of skin color in late nineteenth-century America. Many immigrants, no matter how fairskinned, were viewed as non-white. The University of Wisconsin sociologist E.A. Ross observed in 1912, for example, that doctors had concluded that "Slavs can stand dirt that would kill a white man." Further, everyone, including the most recent of immigrants, understood that the United States was "a white man's country." Lowell's J.H. Guillet echoed Lalime. ". . . our French operative in the mills . . . have been opposed by the other help and abused on account of this name. For two or three weeks they were on fire for the people calling them 'Chinese' all the time. Some had to lose their places and go off; they could not stand it."

What had Wright meant by the term? The Canadian French "are a horde of industrial invaders," he wrote, who endeavored to crowd their children "into the mills at the earliest possible age" and who brazenly lied to truant officers to accomplish this purpose. When "at length they are cornered by the school officers, and there is no other escape, often they scrabble together what few things they have, and move away to some other place where they are unknown, and where they hope by a repetition of the same deceits to escape the schools entirely, and keep the children right on in the mills." If, on the other hand, they finally did surrender their children to the schools, "then the stolid indifference of the children wears out the teacher with what seems to be an idle task."

French Canadians did "have one good trait. They are indefatigable workers, and docile." They would take any job and work any number of hours. They lived, Wright went on, "in the most beggarly way" in order to "carry out of the country what they can thus save." Their only amusements, so far as the males were concerned, were "drinking, smoking and lounging." This is what Wright meant by "Chinese." He meant that the Canadian French were "so sordid and low a people" that Massachusetts should amend its laws so "that these people will either be coerced to conform to our established ways or else go where the already established ways of the country do please them." This was precisely the solution those calling for an end to Chinese immigration were about to enact on the federal level.

For any public official to castigate them in such unbridled terms would have been bad enough. The fact that it was Carroll D. Wright, one of the most respected men in the state, and that he presented this outpouring of insult and abuse as the result of his Bureau's careful investigations made the situation even worse. Worst of all, according to Worcester newspaper editor Ferdinand Gagnon, was the fact that Americans in general shared Wright's low opinion of the French Canadians. Such people, he editorialized, base "their judgments on the exterior of life [and] do not find among the mass of our people that varnish of civilization which means more to them than the noblest of sentiments [found] under the humblest of circumstances." Yankees and other immigrants as well looked upon the French Canadians "with a begrudging eye" because "we are too numerous" and "are willing to work dirt cheap."

H.A. Dubuque, a young attorney living in Fall River, added that Wright could insult the French Canadians with impunity because "we are weak today, without a voice in the English-language press to defend us and without influence in political circles." So, even though Gagnon and other French-Canadian spokespeople called upon their compatriots to protest against Wright's Report, they did not hold out much hope that anything would happen. But something did happen. Wright was nettled by the accusation that he had maligned the French Canadians without giving them a chance to defend themselves. As a gesture of "good faith," he offered them "a full and free opportunity to present such testimony as they might have showing their progress in the United States." His bureau would hold a public hearing on the question. As further proof of his good faith, Wright promised that the French Canadians could choose one of their own to chair the meeting -- attorney H.A. Dubuque would be their selection -- and that the chair could then determine which witnesses to call and what evidence to admit. Finally, Wright promised to print the entire transcript of the hearing in his next Report.

It was an extraordinary opportunity Wright presented to the French Canadians, nothing less than a chance to prove they were "a white people." What did being "white" mean? The arguments they made and Wright's response provide as detailed a definition as Wright's diatribe had for what it meant to be called "Chinese."

Ferdinand Gagnon took the lead in preparing for the hearing. His Le Travailleur was the oldest and most influential French-language paper in New England, and he sent questionaires to pastors, journalists, and other leading French Canadians in over forty Massachusetts cities and towns asking for detailed information on how many of their fellow Canadiens owned real estate, were naturalized U.S. citizens, held public office, or owned their own businesses. How many of the children attended public schools? How many went to French-language parochial schools? There was a striking meeting of the minds here. Gagnon's plan was to confront Wright with exactly the sort of statistical evidence the bureau chief was famous for compiling himself. And he amassed exactly sort of data that matched Wright's indictment. Had Wright said that the French Canadians "care nothing for our institutions"? Gagnon would list every one of his compatriots who had become a citizen or run for public office. Had Wright charged that the French Canadians cared nothing for their children's education? He would count every child in public and parochial schools. And so with most of Wright's attacks upon the group. Proving yourself "white," in short, meant showing that you behaved like Yankees.

Gagnon was even prepared to acknowledge an element of truth in Wright's negative characterization of the group. In his first editorial on the subject, he had written that ". . . to be just . . . the conduct of large numbers of us lays us open to the criticism." Dubuque made a similar admission: "Colonel Wright reproaches us for certain failings which the French-Canadian press has already recognized." Typical emigrants, Gagnon testified at the hearing, were poor and "burdened with a family." They had no real choice "but to go to the textile factories, and there accept what is offered to them." Often the wages were so low that they "are obliged to send children to the mills against the law of humanity, and, in Massachusetts, against State law" where they sometimes earned thirty cents a day for nine or ten hours of work. Who was to blame for this, Gagnon demanded. "Is it not the manufacturer" who complains "of the ignorance of the Canadian children" but still tries "to get them at their mills for a few cents a day?" Rather than blame the victims, he went on, the manufacturers should "cut the evil at its root, and refuse employment to these poor little ones, pay a little more to the adult members of these families, and give the children a chance to have an education." Whether Gagnon realized it or not, this echoed Wright's own proposal for a minimum wage.

He and his compatriots at the hearing also endorsed Wright's ten-hour measure and for the same reason. It was a more appropriate solution than blaming French Canadians for their own misfortunes. It was galling to Gagnon and the others that the same manufacturers who recruited cheap labor "at the bottom of our French Canadian country" should then "say that the French Canadians have been an obstacle to the system of ten hours of labor." The worst that could be said was that the "Canadians are peaceful, law-abiding citizens; and they accept the wages fixed by the liberality, or sometimes the cupidity and avarice, of the manufacturers." Were they "docile," as Wright had charged? "All they ask," he had written, "is to be set to work, and they care little who rules them or how they are ruled." H.A. Dubuque, who chaired the hearing, offered this defense. The ten-hour movement had begun with a strike in Fall River in 1874. It led to "intimidation, violation of law, rows, public demonstrations, which were converting the whole city into a state of rebellion." French Canadians, he went on, "wherever a strike has taken place," have "never taken part . . . and have staid [sic] at home like good law-abiding citizens." Their refusal to join their fellow workers "has created a prejudice against them, and made other nationalities believe they were opposed to the ten-hour law."

Docile or simply law-abiding, French Canadians still posed a danger to the ten-hour measure, Wright observed. It was not that they formally opposed it, he explained. Rather "manufacturers objected to taking up any reformatory movements for the elevation of a people that were not going to stay among them." The charge, as he had phrased it in his previous report, was that French Canadians were not "a stream of stable settlers," but a "horde of industrial invaders." Has it not "been the policy of . . . whom you might call the principal men [among the French Canadians] to advocate the doctrine of repatriation" he asked Gagnon, referring to the efforts of the province of Quebec to lure emigrants back with the promise of free land. "Yes, sir," Gagnon replied. "I have been an agent myself." But, Gagnon went on, "every thing is stopped" because so few families were interested in returning to Canada.

Repatriation, the Reverend J.B.V. Millette of Nashua, New Hampshire, interjected, "was a total failure." What was the policy of the Catholic Church on this, Wright asked the priest. "The Church in Canada," Millette replied, "as represented by its bishops and priests, has done all in its power to stop immigration . . . ." What about the Church here, Wright wanted to know. "How does the establishment of French Catholic churches in America affect the permanency of the French people here?" "It brings on what in Canada was feared," Millette answered. This was a moment of epiphany for Wright, a moment when, as the philosopher William James would say, truth happened to an idea. Was he correct to think, Wright asked, that "during the last five years" the French Canadians in the United States have been passing through "a transitional state?" He did not mean simply that repatriation had failed, he explained. What he really wanted to know was if "the gradual establishment of churches here" was leading to "the permanency of the French population" in New England. The answer on all sides, including from Worcester's Father Primeau, was yes.

As the pastor of H.A. Dubuque's church in Fall River, the Reverend B.J.B. Bedard, phrased it, "It is quite natural for the clergy in Canada to desire the people living in Canada to stay there; but I do believe the American clergymen will be the first to raise their voice in favor of the permanent settlement of American citizens in the United States." Not only did the priests encourage naturalization, he went on, they urged their parishioners to "own property, real estate."

Wright somehow, despite his previous disdain for the French, grasped the full import of what Bedard and the others told him. Indeed he grasped it more fully than they did themselves, as their reaction to his next Report would demonstrate. For it he wrote a "Resumé" which he attached to the transcript of the hearing. "When immigration began in earnest," the Canadians "came, as a rule, with not only the exhortation of the French Catholic priest of Canada to return when they had acquired some means, but with their own promises to the priest that they would return" still ringing in their ears. It did not take long, however, before "another influence began to be felt. The French Canadian loves his church, and is loyal to it." French-speaking parishes began to spring up, and the curé "coming from Canada, it may be on missionary work, to take charge of the growing parish, soon found himself permanently established in New England, and his natural desire was to see his flock grow and prosper." With "strong French churches established," Wright observed, "repatriation is a failure."

It was "very gratifying," Wright wrote, "to know that a wide and rapidly growing movement has arisen among the French Canadians within the past few years, towards becoming citizens, fully identified with us as a permanent and honorable part of our people." Indeed, he continued, their "complete assimilation with the American people is but a question of time." They were white, that is, because they were well launched down the road which would soon leave them indistinguishable from New England's Yankee residents.

What convinced Wright was not Gagnon's survey. It would have been easy, he commented in his "Resumé," to dispute the accuracy of the data. Instead he printed it as gathered, as a courtesy. Its accuracy was not important. What was important was that the French Canadians, at the urging of their priests, were becoming citizens, were becoming property owners, and were showing no interest in repatriation to Quebec. Even more important to Wright, and this is where his grasp of their situation outraced that of the French Canadians themselves, was the fact that their efforts to remain Canadian were a stage in their assimilation. Their commitment to making their lives in New England, he wrote, is "strongly shown in the building of churches, the establishment of schools, societies, literary associations, etc." The growth of newspapers like Le Travailleur, with its masthead proclaiming devotion to "faith, language, and fatherland," also testified to the Canadians' ultimate assimilation. Ethnic institutions, Wright's interrogation of the clergy convinced him, promoted assimilation because they contributed to the permanency of the French-Canadian communities. The fact that the parishes were Catholic, that the schools, newspapers, and societies were Francophone, that all celebrated a French-Canadian identity was incidental. Assimilation was "but a question of time."

This was a hard truth, one the Canadians were not prepared to acknowledge. "The Colonel deceives himself," fumed Le Messager of Lewiston, Maine in an editorial reprinted in Le Travailleur. "No one assimilates less than a Frenchman." Others before Wright "have offered them [Canadians] the kiss of peace in return for [them abandoning] their religious convictions or their fidelity to the traditions of their fathers," but history shows that the Canadian "is never a traitor to his country." Of course, Wright had not demanded, as Le Messager misleadingly claimed, that the French Canadians "abandon everything that is dear to them: their language, their religion, their customs." Nor had he insisted "that they forget Canada." He had done something far worse. He had written that they were in the process of doing these very things of their own volition, that assimilation was an inevitable consequence of their success in making a place for themselves in the United States. Far from assailing their religion, he had said that it was the French-Canadian parish which was the key to the whole process.

Wright's 1882 Report gave even greater offense than that of 1881 in which he had called them "Chinese" because it directly challenged the French Canadians' own vision of themselves. It was the vision of Father Primeau's sermon. As Le Messager phrased it, Canadians viewed themselves as "detached, regarded as strangers, not speaking the language of the country" while "framing, in the United States, a new fatherland whose point of reference is the memory of the dear and venerable fatherland." Canadians wanted to believe that they could be in, but not of, the United States. "Looked upon as strangers, they want to revive these memories and at the side of the Canadian church they will build the parochial school and the convent." Their task was to build a French-speaking, Catholic community in which they could perpetuate the customs of their parents. Their parishes, schools, convents, societies, newspapers, all were proof that they were succeeding. Wright's 1882 Report so irritated them because he offered an alternative reading. They really had abandoned Quebec, just as those who stayed behind, had accused them of doing. Their patriotism to the "old fatherland" was a matter of show, not substance. Their "Canadian" institutions were just so much evidence of the roots that they were so quickly sinking in New England's soil. What he did, in short, was voice their own misgivings and fears.

Unlike his surveys and other statistical investigations, Wright's analysis of the "Canadian French" and the process of assimilation won him no praise. The Canadians themselves denounced his Report. And concerned native-born New Englanders simply failed to heed his assurances that the proliferation of ethnic institutions were in fact signs of the eventual assimilation of the group in question. Instead they flocked to organizations like the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution that catered to their view of themselves as the "real" Americans. Yet Wright had happened upon an important insight. The same visible signs of "foreignness" -- the newspapers in a strange language, the shops featuring strange delicacies, the parades and fêtes in honor of Saint Jean-Baptiste or celebrating Mardi Gras, the churches with services in Latin and sermons in French -- that alarmed nativists that newcomers would refuse to become Americans and that reassured immigrants that they were true to the "old fatherland" were in fact signs of permanent attachment to the United States.

Father Primeau was one of those who unintentionally persuaded Wright of this. He had struggled for years with his flock to build up Notre-Dame-Des-Canadiens. He had lived in the church basement in those early days, insisting that a convent and a school were more important than a rectory. He had taken only half his salary because he would ask no sacrifice of his parishioners he would not ask of himself. All of this was so that they could remain true to "faith, language, and fatherland." Yet, at the very first meeting with Worcester's Canadians, Primeau had informed them that the new parish would be run on "American" principles. We are not in Canada, he had told them. In Canada there were parish councils, elected by the parishioner, which controlled the budget and held the deeds to church property. Here, the property would belong to the bishop. Here, he would control the budget. He would instruct their children in French and in Canadian history, he promised. And he was as good as his word. But he would also start a naturalization club. He would interpret the community to the Yankee community. He would defend their good name. But they would have to defend it themselves too. They would have to vote. People who have a vote are respected here. They were Americans now.