Logo of United States Census Bureau. Photo retrieved from census.gov.
By Jonathan Garcia
The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed within this article represent those of the author, not the Stony Brook Undergraduate History Journal. Our journal is dedicated to maintaining a neutral historical perspective, while providing historians with a chance to publish their conclusions.
The census has occurred without fail for the past two hundred and thirty years, but last year’s twenty-fourth Decennial Census posed unique challenges for those involved in such a massive undertaking. The politicization of census questions, the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme weather, record distrust in government, and unreliable technology were just some of the myriad of difficulties this census faced. In the spring, I became one of approximately half a million temporary workers the Census Bureau hired to execute this decade’s count during the summer and fall. My duties took me from the modest Levitt houses of my hometown to massive apartment buildings in low-income neighborhoods and the palatial estates of the North Shore. I interacted with hundreds of people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and political affiliations. I experienced firsthand the pitfalls and unprecedented challenges this census presented.
In the nascent days of the United States during the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation that would govern the young nation-state. The Articles created a loose collection of confederated states with a weak central government that would eventually cause the downfall of the early republic. In 1787, the Founding Fathers convened for the Constitutional Convention at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where they constructed a more robust federal government capable of strengthening and unifying the states more cohesively. In the newly drafted Constitution, the framers called for a decennial census to count every free person living in the country to apportion taxes and Congressional seats. Today, the Census Bureau is responsible for accurately counting nearly a third of a billion people in order to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid and provide a snapshot of the country’s demographics.
The First United States Congress authorized the collection of data for the 1790 Census during George Washington’s first term and assigned this duty to the United States Marshals under the direction of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.[1] The first census called for the name of the head of the household, the number of people meeting certain age and gender criteria, and the number of slaves in the home.[2] One question asked respondents to identify the number of males above and under the age of sixteen living in the home, presumably to assess the country’s military capability in the future. According to the Three-Fifths Compromise, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person to give the southern states more representation, while aiming to placate the northern states by not counting them as whole people.[3] Even before the Marshals conducted the first census, its content and structure were hotly debated. The census’ use as a political tool is as old as the country itself. There have always been people within the government with a vested interest in seeing questions and data skewed or manipulated for political gain.
The Constitutional mandate to enumerate the population remains the census’ primary function. However, that is not its only function and its range of questions is ever-expanding to meet the needs of a growing country. As Europe endured famine and revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States’ population exploded due to a new wave of immigration. To handle such a massive influx of people, Congress established a “census board whose membership consisted of the secretary of state, the attorney general, and the postmaster general” for the 1850 Census.[4] Congress devolved much of the actual enumeration to local Marshals, but they did add new inquiries. For the first time, the census required the names of all people in the household and collected various “social statistics” like wages, property value, and education.[5] For the rest of the nineteenth century, data collection through the census increased and its role became more centralized within the federal government. At the turn of the twentieth century, Congress enacted legislation that established the United States Census Bureau as a permanent office within the Department of the Interior (it was later moved to the Department of Commerce). Congress also provided for the employment of Bureau officials, thus creating much of the census’ modern bureaucratic apparatus.[6]
Advancements in technology, rapid population, and territorial growth contributed to the expansion of the federal government to manage a modern industrialized nation that eclipsed one hundred million people at the end of the First World War. After 1850, census questions became more numerous and intrusive, inquiring about things like place of birth, immigration status, and native language. Presumably, the intent behind these additions was innocuous: a simple attempt to discern the nation’s demographics. However, xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiments were pervasive, leaving a lane open for the government to use census data for nefarious purposes. The First Red Scare during the interwar period and general American distaste for Slavic, Mediterranean, and Asian immigrants precipitated a wave of nativist panic in the United States. In 1921, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which restricted the number of immigrants to “3 percent of the total number of foreign-born persons from that country recorded in the 1910 census,” meaning that Western and Northern European immigrants had a much higher quota because there were so many more of them living in the United States already.[7] In 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act imposed even more stringent restrictions, with quotas reduced to two percent per country as of the 1890 Census and a complete ban on Asian immigrants.[8] These two acts were watershed moments in United States immigration law and the census, as they marked the first use of immigration quotas based on national origin. The laws did not violate any established norms about the confidentiality of census data, though, as these acts used aggregate or “macro” data that did not give away any personal information of specific individuals. However, these laws did set a precedent for the government to use census data in times of crisis, whether that “crisis” be contrived or not.
During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, a decree that authorized the War Department to designate areas on the West Coast as military zones. This led to the internment of tens of thousands of people in camps, most of whom were Japanese-Americans.[9] Several laws going back nearly a century ensured the confidentiality of census data, but the Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily repealed such protections, allowing the President to make “special investigations and reports of census…as may be needed in connection with the conduct of the war.”[10] In practice, this meant that the Census Bureau would provide the authorities with the necessary information to assist in the roundup of Japanese-Americans. The Bureau has acknowledged that it provided aggregate data like neighborhood and block-by-block demographics, but they insist to this day that they never gave up any “microdata” like names or addresses. Despite their claims, new evidence suggests that Bureau officials did, in fact, divulge names and addresses of Japanese-Americans living in Washington, D.C. and possibly in the Pacific Northwest and California.[11] A search of “internment” yields no relevant results on the Bureau’s website and an official infographic on the history of census privacy protection mentions the War Powers Act’s repeal of confidentiality “in the name of the war effort” in 1942 and the Act’s expiration in 1947, but leaves the time between 1942 and 1947 completely blank.[12] As someone who took the Oath of Non-Disclosure, I am liable for up to five years in federal prison and a quarter of a million dollar fine if I were ever to disclose any personally identifiable information, yet the Bureau has never apologized or even taken any responsibility for their complicity in Japanese internment.
The federal government has done more than enough to erode the public’s trust in it, especially in the past twenty years. The USA PATRIOT Act enacted during the Bush administration, the NSA surveillance which Edward Snowden exposed during the Obama administration, and the draconian immigration policies pursued by the Trump administration all legitimized the fears of people across the political spectrum. Polling data reveals that a dismal 17 percent of the public trusts Washington to do what is right most of the time, one of the lowest figures in recorded history.[13] Specifically regarding the census, there has been much consternation surrounding it from significant portions of the population. The conservative reaction to the 2008 election saw the Republican Party take back the House of Representatives in 2010. The TEA Party movement mobilized voters around the country with a fiscally conservative message that warned of big government and excessive spending under an Obama presidency. When enumerators fanned out across the country for the 2010 census, anti-government activists and groups proudly recorded their refusal to cooperate with census takers and posted the videos online for all to see. A major plank in Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign revolved around curbing illegal immigration, and, as such, his administration moved to add a citizenship question to the census form, a question that has been purposely left off since 1950 to avoid scaring the public and suppressing responses. The Supreme Court upheld the administration’s ability to reinstate the citizenship question but rejected its reasoning as “contrived and pretextual” to suppress Hispanic response rates and hurt Democrats during reapportionment.[14] The administration could not come up with a legitimate reason to add the question in time, so ultimately, they decided to leave it off the form.
The Supreme Court handed down that decision in the summer of 2019, and by spring 2020, census operations began with hundreds of millions of census forms sent out all over the country. Generally, about two-thirds of households respond on their own, with the remaining one-third falling under the Non-Response Followup Operation (NRFU). Initially, the Bureau planned NRFU to start on May 13th but delayed it due to the COVID-19 pandemic.[15] When operations finally began in mid-summer, much of the public was not keen on opening its doors for strangers to talk for up to ten minutes. Armed with one cloth mask, a travel-size bottle of hand sanitizer, and not nearly enough safety training, enumerators across the country interacted with a skittish citizenry often hostile to our work. COVID-19 concerns were listed in our phone application as a potential reason for refusal we could mark down, but in my experience it was not all that common. Several people insisted on talking to me through a window or did not open the door at all, but almost no one wore a mask.
By far, the most common reason for refusal was “not interested/did not want to be bothered,” which shocked me because that is not a legally legitimate excuse. While there are laws on the books prohibiting the refusal of census questionnaires, they are practically never enforced. While working around the majority-minority area of New Cassel, I sometimes encountered families nervous about divulging information for fear of deportation. They usually were assuaged by my assurances that their information is strictly confidential and can not be used against them in any way. Admittedly, I was surprised by the apparent number of constitutional lawyers and deficit hawks in my hometown who would lecture me on the illegality of the census questions and the amount of tax dollars spent on sending me to their homes several times. The political circus that envelops nearly everything in the age of Trump was also apparent, as I was met with a few outlandish conspiracy theories, with one man shouting at his wife not to tell me anything because “that’s how they screw you over with the election!” Luckily, I only worked in Nassau County and not in the deep South, where I have heard horror stories involving threats with firearms. I was never physically menaced, but I did see a sign on one person’s house that read “NO TRESPASSING: THIS HOUSE DOES NOT CALL 9-1-1” with a drawing of a gun pointed at me.
The 2020 Census marked the first time that enumerators recorded data via a mobile device rather than a paper form. At orientation, each enumerator received an iPhone 8 with a Field Data Capture (FDC) application where we would enter all of our data. Each workday, the app automatically gave the user a list of addresses to visit that day. The computer generated lists would often send users to dangerous areas or houses that do not even exist. In California, enumeration had to halt in several ZIP codes because of wildfires, but the app still instructed workers to go there regardless. The app uses satellite imaging to identify certain structures as houses, even though they may not actually be residences. When I worked in Kings Point, I went to a massive estate where there was supposed to be a second and third unit attached to the main one. After some searching, I found the owner riding around in a golf cart, and he assured me that those were not residences but a guest house and a pool house.
The app would often send you back to a house you visited the previous day, even when they had refused to cooperate. Consequently, I would often have to go back to addresses which I knew would be impossible to get any information from, often resulting in plenty of swearing and invective directed my way. There is a way to mark addresses as “dangerous” to ensure that enumerators do not have to revisit an address, but this cannot be done without an explicit threat. Even in such a case (or after three unsuccessful visits), the app would prompt the enumerator to return to the area in search of a “proxy,” often a neighbor who may know something about the residents of that dwelling. This seldom worked, though, as very few people know or are willing to give up personal information about their neighbors. A majority of the time I would have to resort to looking for proxies because most people did not answer the door even after repeated visits. This process is very time consuming and significantly slowed down our progress. That is why there was pushback from enumerators when the Trump administration announced that it would end census operations on October 15th, more than two weeks earlier than the previous deadline. The White House reasoned that the deadline had to be changed to deliver the results to Washington by the December 31st deadline, but critics say it was a cynical attempt “to engineer an undercount in Democratic-leaning areas with high immigrant and Latino populations,” groups which are historically undercounted and less likely to self-respond.[16] Irrespective of the President’s intent, ceasing operations two weeks earlier than anticipated will undoubtedly lead to a less accurate count than if field operations ended on October 31st, meaning that the administration sacrificed accuracy for expediency or worse, for political gain, if the accusations leveled by his detractors are true.
The U.S. Marshals conducted the first census in 1790, counting some 3.9 million inhabitants.[17] Two hundred and thirty years later in 2020, this census is expected to count approximately 330 million people, about eighty times the number of people in the first census. The Constitution’s framers understood the importance of an accurate census, as the clause providing for it is the fourth sentence of Article I. The federal government’s power grew along with the country, with lawmakers in Washington often using census data to advance particular policy goals and push agendas. Whether it be to restrict immigration, intern Japanese-Americans, or purposely undercount certain populations for political gain, the census’ use as a tool is not new. What is novel, however, is the COVID-19 pandemic, the record distrust of government, and the hyper-polarization of our politics that has made the challenges presented by his census so unprecedented. Thankfully, I did not have to weather the triple-digit temperatures down South or choke in the smoke-filled air of California, but nonetheless my work did paint a rather bleak picture of the state of the country. In the midst of varying levels of lockdown conditions and with a high-stakes election looming, people were (and remain) on edge and leery not just of the government, but of strangers. In the last decade, social media’s proliferation has paradoxically both widened our social circles and made us more insular. Donald Trump’s election entrenched and radicalized peoples’ political positions and a once-in-a-century pandemic has engendered fear of outsiders. Apathy and fear seem to be the predominant emotions of the day. At a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying from a highly contagious pathogen and the country as a whole faces an economic downturn, many are not interested when the government literally comes knocking at their door.
Endnotes
[1] Wright, Carroll D., and William C. Hunt. “First Census: 1790.” In The History and Growth of the United States Census, 13, 16. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/wright-hunt.pdf.
[2] Ibid.
[3] U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 2, cl. 3.
[4] Census History Staff. 1850 Overview – History – U.S. Census Bureau, 2019. https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1850.html.
[5] U.S. Congress, An Act to Provide for A Permanent Census Office (1902), 57th Cong., 1st sess.,https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/57th-congress/session-1/c57s1ch139.pdf
[6] ibid.
[7] “Emergency Quota Law (1921).” Immigration History, August 20, 2019. https://immigrationhistory.org/item/%E2%80%8B1921-emergency-quota-law/.
[8] Office of the Historian. “Milestones: 1921-1936- The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act).” U.S. Department of State. U.S. Department of State. Accessed December 13, 2020. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act.
[9] Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=74
[10] U.S. Congress. United States Code: Second War Powers Act, 1942, 50a U.S.C. §§ 633-645 Suppl. 1 1946. 1946. Periodical. https://www.loc.gov/item/uscode1946-006050a008/
[11] Minkel, JR. “Confirmed: The U.S. Census Bureau Gave Up Names of Japanese-Americans in WWII.” Scientific American. Scientific American, March 30, 2007. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/.
[12] “A History of Census Privacy Protections.” census.gov, 2001. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/history-privacy-protection102019.pdf.
[13] “Public Trust in Government: 1958-2019.” Pew Research Center – U.S. Politics & Policy. Pew Research Center, April 11, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/public-trust-in-government-1958-2019/.
[14] Denniston, Lyle. “It’s Final: No Citizenship Question on 2020 Census.” National Constitution Center – constitutioncenter.org, July 3, 2019. https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/its-final-no-citizenship-question-on-2020-census.
[15] “2020 Census Operational Adjustments Due to COVID-19.” 2020Census.gov, 2020. https://2020census.gov/en/news-events/operational-adjustments-covid-19.html.
[16] Wolfe, Jan. “U.S. Supreme Court Allows Trump to Wind down Census Early.” Reuters. Thomson Reuters, October 14, 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-trump-census/u-s-supreme-court-allows-trump-to-wind-down-census-early-idUSKBN26Z0JM.
[17] Census History Staff. 1790 Overview – History – U.S. Census Bureau, 2019. Accessed December 15, 2020. https://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1790.html.