1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Wright, Carroll Davidson

WRIGHT, CARROLL DAVIDSON (1840-1909), American statistician, was born at Dunbarton, New Hampshire, on the 25th of July 1840. He began to study law in 1860, but in 1862 enlisted as a private in a New Hampshire volunteer regiment. He became colonel in 1864, and served as assistant-adjutant-general of a brigade in the Shenandoah Valley campaign. He was admitted to the New Hampshire bar after the war, and in 1867 became a member of the Massachusetts and United States bars. From 1872 to 1873 he served in the Senate of Massachusetts, and from 1873 to 1878 he was chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. He was U.S. commissioner of labour from 1885 to 1905, and in 1893 was placed in charge of the Eleventh Census. In 1894 he was chairman of the commission which investigated the great railway strike of Chicago, and in 1902 was a member of the Anthracite Strike Commission. He was honorary professor of social economics in the Catholic university of America from 1895 to 1904; in 1900 became professor of statistics and social economics in Columbian (now George Washington) University, from 1900 to 1901 was university lecturer on wage statistics at Harvard, and in 1903 was a member of the special committee appointed to revise the labour laws of Massachusetts. In 1902 he was chosen president of Clark College, Worcester, Mass., where he was also professor of statistics and social economics from 1904 until his death. Dr Wright was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1903, and in 1907 received the Cross of the Legion of Honour for his work in improving industrial conditions, a similar honour having been conferred upon him in 1906 by the Italian government. He died on the 20th of February 1909.

His publications include The Factory System of the United States (1880); Relation of Political Economy to the Labor Question (1882); History of Wages and Prices in Massachusetts, 1752-1883 (1885); The Industrial Evolution of the United States (1887); Outline of Practical Sociology (1899); Battles of Labor (1906); and numerous pamphlets and monographs on social and economic topics.