The American Census: A Social History - Softcover

Anderson, Margo J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300195427 ISBN 13: 9780300195422

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2015

Synopsis

This book is the first social history of the census from its origins to the present and has become the standard history of the population census in the United States. The second edition has been updated to trace census developments since 1980, including the undercount controversies, the arrival of the American Community Survey, and innovations of the digital age. Margo J. Anderson’s scholarly text effectively bridges the fields of history and public policy, demonstrating how the census both reflects the country’s extraordinary demographic character and constitutes an influential tool for policy making. Her book is essential reading for all those who use census data, historical or current, in their studies or work.

About this title

About the Author

Margo Anderson is Distinguished Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and is widely regarded as a major authority on the census, both inside and outside academia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The American Census

A Social History

By Margo J. Anderson

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-19542-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
CHAPTER 1. The Census and the New Nation: Apportionment, Congress, and the Progress of the United States, 7, 
CHAPTER 2. Sectional Crisis and Census Reform in the 1850s, 40, 
CHAPTER 3. Counting Slaves and Freedmen: War and Reconstruction by the Numbers, 64, 
CHAPTER 4. The Census and Industrial America in the Gilded Age, 86, 
CHAPTER 5. Building the Federal Statistical System in the Early Twentieth Century, 115, 
CHAPTER 6. The Tribal Twenties: National Origins, Malapportionment, and Cheating by the Numbers, 133, 
CHAPTER 7. Counting the Unemployed and the Crisis of the Great Depression, 156, 
CHAPTER 8. War, Welfare, and the Census: Statistics for the American Century, 185, 
CHAPTER 9. Reapportionment, Funds Allocations, and the Census, 209, 
CHAPTER 10. Census Undercount and the Politics of Counting, 1970–1980, 224, 
CHAPTER 11. The Undercount Controversies Continue, 239, 
CHAPTER 12. The Census and the American Community Survey, 251, 
Conclusion, 266, 
Appendix 1. US Population and Area, 1790–2010, 273, 
Appendix 2. Growth and Cost of the Decennial Census, 1790–2010, 274, 
Appendix 3. Congressional Apportionment, 1789–2010, 276, 
Appendix 4. Chronology of the States of the Union, 280, 
Notes, 283, 
Index, 325, 

CHAPTER 1

The Census and the New Nation

Apportionment, Congress, and the Progress of the United States

The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of inhabitants.

— ADAM SMITH, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

To apportion, is to distribute by right measure; to set off in just parts; to assign in due and proper proportion.

— DANIEL WEBSTER, Senate speech, 1832

In May 1787, delegates from the original thirteen American states convened in Philadelphia to discuss amendments to the Articles of Confederation. National government under the articles had been cumbersome and unsatisfactory for some time, and the Philadelphia Convention was one of several efforts to strengthen the powers of Congress and resolve some of the many issues of finance, trade, and sovereignty that had plagued the infant United States since independence. Nevertheless, the charge to the delegates was perhaps both modest and somewhat imprecise: to revise the articles. Few observers expected the results that were published when the convention adjourned in the late summer of 1787 — namely, a completely new, theoretically complex, and breathtakingly innovative national governmental structure to be presented for ratification to the states.

Ever since, political commentators and historians have analyzed and debated, praised or condemned, and wondered over the document that the framers produced. It remains the fundamental basis of the American government and has been amended surprisingly little since. The Constitution of 1787 created the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. It created a bicameral legislature to accommodate the conflicting pressures between those who wanted representation by states and those who wanted direct popular representation in Congress. The president was to be elected nationally, but indirectly, through the mechanism of the Electoral College. A national judiciary oversaw conflicts rooted in the federal character of the American republic, for example, between the national government and states, among the states themselves, or among citizens of different states. A complex set of checks and balances among the elements of the new government guarded liberty and protected the states and the individual citizens from infringements of power by the new, more powerful national government. The proposed Constitution was a far more ambitious document than had been contemplated in the months before the convention.

Nevertheless, the drafters of the new Constitution necessarily drew on the experience — and in particular the frustrations — of the Confederation era to guide their deliberations and goals. They knew that national government under the articles had continually stumbled over the same set of issues. Whether during the War for Independence or during the quieter years after 1783, Congress had had trouble raising revenue. It theoretically had the authority to force the states to provide funds for the national government, but the state legislatures always seemed to be able to find some reason to object, or raise less, or postpone the tax. Similarly, sectional issues between North and South seemed to underlie much of the wrangling in Congress; the continuation of the institution of slavery was the most obvious sore point. Third, small states and large states looked upon one another jealously. The large resented the equal voting authority of the small in Congress; the small feared the bullying of the large. States with claims to western lands feuded with those that had no such future bounty. States that needed access to the Mississippi River for trade worried national diplomatic efforts might not protect their interests.

In short, because of the different traditions among the former colonies, the infant United States faced difficult questions about the proper apportionment of power and representation among the states, among the citizens of the various states, and between the national government and the individual citizen or state. Because much of the land area of the infant nation had not yet been settled, the framers had to determine how to incorporate both new people and new states into the United States, and how to accommodate the relative shifting of power and resources within the nation in the future.

The creation of a periodic national census to measure the relative strength of the population in the different parts of the country was one of the mechanisms to address these problems. It seems today one of the least controversial innovations of the Constitution and even in 1787, the new national census was not terribly controversial. Compared with the huge and contentious literature — both contemporary and historical — about other elements of the Constitution, the debates on the census clause were tame. Nevertheless, the relevant sections of article 1, sections 2 and 9, introduced a fundamental new tool of representative government.

Article 1 of the Constitution defined the legislative branch of the federal government. Section 1 created the bicameral Congress. The Senate was composed of two representatives from each state; the House of Representatives was elected by the people. Section 2 detailed the composition of the House. Paragraph 3 of section 2 defined the method for apportioning members of the House of Representatives among the states: "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

The paragraph continued by describing how the census itself was to be conducted: "The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct." Since the new national government would convene before the first census would be taken, the paragraph also defined the temporary House apportionment for the first Congress. Paragraph 4 of article 1, section 9, contained the other relevant mention of the new census: "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."

With these paragraphs, the framers laid the groundwork for the apportionment system and the demographic leg of what has come to be called the federal statistical system. At the time, several questions surrounded the new apportionment tool. One fear revolved around worries that the old biblical taboo on censuses would make people reluctant to be counted, and that the census would not work. Lacking direct evidence of such reluctance, though, the delegates decided to worry about that problem only if it arose. The potential advantages gained from coupling the apportionment of taxation and representation outweighed such objections. Such a coupling was one of the classic checks and balances of the Constitution. Large states would receive more House representation, but would pay more taxes. The coupling would guard against fraud in the census. Local areas that might wish to overestimate their population to gain representation would pay the penalty of raising their tax burden. Likewise, areas which tried to evade taxes through undercounting their population in the census would lose representation in Congress.

But this well-known characteristic of the new census mechanism was just the most obvious aspect of the innovation. There was much more to the census clauses, both at the time, and in the long run, that has proved to be more important. First, the census was to be taken automatically each decade by the federal government itself, despite the fact that most government functions that reached down to the local level remained reserved to the states. Congress had the authority to determine its own rules and membership, and determining the apportionment base logically flowed from the authority of Congress. On the other hand, the constitutional provision constrained Congress itself by mandating the frequency of census-taking. The framers rejected proposals in the constitutional convention to permit Congress to determine when or how it should reapportion its own membership. The framers were aware of the experience of the Continental Congress asking the states to take censuses for apportionment purposes. Either states did not comply or the methods were not uniform across the states. Nevertheless, it would not be easy for the federal government — in the absence of a developed system of federal officials on the local level — to take a national census. The constitutional imperative was so strong that the framers were willing to wrestle with the logistics of the problem.

Second, the framers and Americans were already aware of the problem of rapid and differential population growth among the subdivisions of the country and the impact of population change on representation. Much of the contemporary and historical debate about representation in the new nation revolved around the theories of virtual and actual representation, representation by orders or corporate units, and the nature of sovereignty. But another aspect of this discussion concerned the problem of growth itself and the trajectory of the American population over time. By the late eighteenth century, Americans knew that the population was growing dramatically, even if they did not yet have very precise measures.

We know now that the colonial population grew from about 250,000 in 1700 to 2.9 million in 1780. Benjamin Franklin at midcentury had predicted that the population would double every generation. Revolutionary war propaganda used demographic data to show that the infant United States had a large and growing population and could withstand war with England for many years. At the time, by contrast, English commentators feared that that their population was stationary or declining. And during the war years, the colonies had made repeated estimates of their populations to determine their war readiness and tax capacity.

The framers built into the new federal Constitution a method for periodic reassessment of the basis for political representation and taxation and hence for shifting power and resources among the constituent elements of the polity. Just as regular and periodic elections would provide smooth mechanisms for shifting political power within the nation, so too would the periodic census and reapportionments adjust the power and burdens among the people. The census would operate according to its own decennial rhythm — somewhat divorced from the other electoral mechanisms. Every twenty years a census coincided with a presidential election. Congressional elections would coincide with a census once every ten years.

Third, the Constitution made population the measure of both political power and tax capacity. During the revolutionary era, Americans struggled to define both the appropriate basis for legislative representation and taxation and the more practical question of how to calculate it. The original formulation for legislative representation under the articles was simple: each colony or state had one vote. It was not a particularly satisfying rule, but it worked sufficiently well that the United States gained independence from Britain.

Devising a fair and robust system of taxation was another matter. Theoretically, the framers argued that tax capacity was a function of wealth. Large and rich states should pay more than small and poor ones. Formally, article 8 of the Articles of Confederation governed tax assessments on the states. It mandated that "All charges of war and all other expenses" for the United States were to be paid for by the states "in proportion to the value of all land within each State, granted to or surveyed for any person." A land census was supposed to determine the exact figures. Congress, however, never managed to implement this article or the land censuses, or to collect sufficient revenue to support the national government. Problems arose at several points. First, measuring wealth was not easy. If land were the measure, how did one accommodate improved versus unimproved holdings or fertile versus barren acreage? What about mercantile wealth?

In the spring of 1783, Congress debated a proposal to change article 8 of the Articles of Confederation to create a tax assessment system based on population. The rationale for the proposed change was that population was more easily measured and was highly correlated with wealth in any case. In so doing, Congress confronted the problem of who precisely was to be counted in such an assessment system and, in particular, confronted the issue of whether and how to count Indians, slaves, and indentured servants. The treatment of Indians was perfunctory. Without debate, the members mandated that "Indians not paying taxes" were excluded from a population count. Indentured servants were included in the "free population" despite their servitude. The rub came when the members confronted counting slaves. Were slaves to be considered equivalent to free persons for the purposes of tax assessment?

Northerners were in favor of a full assessment of slaves for tax purposes; Southerners proposed various ratios of slaves to free persons for tax assessment. The argument was wide-ranging and turned on the whether to set a ratio, and if so, what ratio, and whether any ratio was legitimate. The discussion illustrated contemporary attitudes toward the "value" of the slave and free populations and signaled that any provision that became entangled in debate about slavery was contentious. As James Madison reported, Northerners defended a one-to-one or high ratio on the ground that "the expence of feeding & cloathing them [slaves] was as far below that incident to freemen as their industry & and ingenuity were below those of freeman; and that the warm climate within which the States having slaves lay, compared with the rigorous climate & inferior fertility of the others, ought to have great weight in the case & that the exports of the former States were greater than of the latter." In turn, as Madison continued, "On the other side it was said that Slaves were not put to labour as young as the children of laboring families — that, having no interest in their labor, they did as little as possible, & omitted every exertion of thought requisite to facilitate & expedite it; that if the exports of the States having slaves exceeded those of the others, their imports were in proportion, slaves being employed wholly in agriculture, not in manufactures; & that in fact the balance of trade formerly was much more against the So. States than the others."

On March 28, 1783, Congress debated ratios of one to four, one to three, one to two, three to five, two to three, three to four, and one to one and could not reach consensus. Several days later, the members returned to the issue and approved a motion to change the assessment system from one based on land to one based on population, with a state's slave population counted at a ratio of three-fifths of its free population. The final proposal read: "All charges of war and all other expences that have been or shall be incurred for the common defence or general welfare, and allowed by the United States in Congress assembled, except so far as shall be otherwise provided for, shall be defrayed out of a common treasury, which shall be supplied by the several states in proportion to the whole number of white and other free citizens and inhabitants, of every age, sex and condition, including those bound to servitude for a term of years, and three-fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians, not paying taxes, in each State; which number shall be triennially taken and transmitted to the United States in Congress assembled, in such mode as they shall direct and appoint."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300195427
• ISBN 13: 9780300195422
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 344