While there was an abundance of letters, diaries, and published memoirs left behind by Wall Street’s elite, it was more difficult to find sources that would allow me to understand how life unfolded for its rank and file. My solution was to use the Minneapolis Population Center’s IPUMS data from the 1900 and 1910 Census to build samples of workers in the financial sector in the New York metropolitan area. This enabled me to gather demographic data on more than 1100 workers. I then grouped workers into categories according to their household structure, their marital status, and their age to learn about the “typical” experience of most Wall Street workers, creating a richer context for understanding those sources I had been able to find, such as the correspondence of would-be stockbroker William T. Conley and the handwritten autobiography of bank clerk Edward Simpson.

Above all, the quantitative analysis showed a sharp distinction between younger unmarried men living with their families (roughly 30% of the workforce) and married men who had established their own households (roughly 40%). The written sources made clear that most unmarried workers were vividly aware of this distinction and believed marriage was of particular importance for defining their own identities on Wall Street: the ability to support a non-working wife signaled that a man had achieved a modicum of success and was ready to further prove his manhood by fathering children. Most previous research into white-collar masculinity has tended to focus on sources focused on office life rather than home life, and thus scholars have not framed research around the question of how ideas about family life shaped workers’ ideas—and particularly male workers’ ideas—about their careers.

This problem of analysis has been compounded by the compromises scholars of the middle class have had to make—to focus on either the neighborhood while ignoring work conditions or the work environment at the expense of home life. White-collar workers tended to be broadly scattered, making data collection infeasible in an era before easily accessible digitized sources. Studies of industrial communities, by contrast, have generally been able to accomplish both goals at once because the bulk of workers tended to live near the factories that employed them. Demographic analysis is particularly important in order to indicate the kinds of trajectories white-collar workers would have seen around them and raise questions about how this affected the ways they imagined their futures unfolding.

Nonetheless, my IPUMS research left me with the question of how I might obtain richer texture to the lives of Wall Street’s white-collar workers beyond the variables encoded in its dataset. My search eventually led me to the Brown Brothers Harriman Records at the New-York Historical Society.