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The Question Men
A conference convened at 10:00 a.m. sharp on March 3, 1939, in Washington, D.C., to design a frame for a democracy’s data.
Before any count could be made, before any households could be visited, the framework and values that would guide that count and those visits had to be hashed out. There is a story behind the census questionnaire itself, a story of the people whose worldviews determined what personal details would be recorded and which would be ignored. To really understand a data set we need to learn as much as we can about its designers: Where did they come from? What did they dream and desire? And who wasn’t invited to help frame the data? Whose experiences and values were simply brushed aside?
To comprehend the official intentions that structured the 1940 census, we have to learn more about the men who gathered in that conference room on the morning of March 3, 1939.
The 10:00 a.m. start made it possible for the New Yorkers attending the conference to sleep in their own beds the night before and still arrive on time. One of those New Yorkers was conference chairman Dr. Louis I. Dublin, who worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company with the title “Third Vice-President and Statistician.” Dublin would have taken a train that morning, probably riding in a comfortable Pullman car. Then he would have hailed a taxi to take him to the Census Bureau’s office in the Department of Commerce.1
Did Dublin think about how much Washington, D.C., had changed since the last census conference ten years earlier? He had chaired that conference too. At that time, in Dublin’s New York City, the construction craze had peaked. Dublin’s office hovered high above Madison Square Park in the Metropolitan Life Tower—at seven hundred feet, once (briefly) the tallest building in the world—which paled in comparison to the skyscrapers that followed it in the twenties, each taller than the last, driven heavenward by the ambitions of investors and speculators.2 A handful of the country’s richest men put together $50 million and incorporated Empire State to build a 1,250-foot marvel of an office building. The punishment for such dreams of Icarus came swiftly. They signed on the dotted line in 1929, just in time to witness the stock market’s collapse. It would be decades before the Empire State Building turned a profit.3 No one was in a hurry to build any more towers in New York.
Plans for a growing Washington, D.C., had also been hatched in the heady twenties but only became a reality in the early thirties. No one built skyscrapers in D.C., as they had in New York. Instead, the federal government made space for itself in long, grand buildings of monumental white stone. Dublin would have seen the most change along Pennsylvania Avenue, the broad thoroughfare that links the White House to the Capitol. The Post Office department suddenly had neighbors in magnificent classical structures. Rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue, Dublin would have seen the National Archives looming like a Greek temple to American history, then the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Labor, all new. His taxi would have pulled over to let him out a little before the avenue dead-ended at the Treasury Department. There, stretching three massive city blocks, stood the new Department of Commerce building. It was hewn from sixty thousand tons of Indiana limestone and Connecticut granite and roofed by six acres of terra-cotta tiles. When it first opened its doors, a headline in The Washington Post read: “Size of Building Baffles Writers.”4
A little before ten, Dublin entered the Commerce building, passing a row of Greek columns, only to be greeted inside by more Greek columns. Someone had probably met him at the door, maybe even the director of the census, William Lane Austin. The men then proceeded to the building’s auditorium so that the two-day conference could begin.
Looking around the room, Dublin encountered more evidence of the growth of the federal government.5 He saw representatives from old and established institutions such as the War and Navy departments (founded in 1789 and 1798) and the Departments of Agriculture (founded in 1862), Interior (founded in 1849), and Labor (1913). Beside them, surrounding them, stood representatives of a new kind of government institution, men from the Works Progress Administration (WPA, 1935), the Federal Power Commission (1920), the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (1932), the Federal Housing Administration (1934), the Social Security Board (1935), the Veterans Administration (1930), and the Central Statistical Board (1933). Commentators remarked on the alphabet soup created by Herbert Hoover’s New Era and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a soup of new institutions known by their acronyms. To understand how government was growing and changing, one had only to study one’s ABCs—that is, the lists of new administrations, boards, and commissions.
Even with representatives of all those different government agencies in attendance, the Census Bureau’s contingent was bigger.
Everyone else in the room was there at the invitation of the secretary of commerce himself: Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s longtime aides, had signed each letter inviting its recipient to the two-day conference in Washington, D.C. “This census involves the vital interests of business, Government, and the general public alike,” wrote Hopkins. Accepting this invitation meant the recipient would “share with us [the Department of Commerce] this joint responsibility to assure the maximum of value and usefulness to all interests concerned.”6
The census director, separately, insisted that the event was not “under any circumstances” supposed to be a “field day” for the federal employees. He had selected Dublin to lift up the voices of the rest of the people in the room—those representing what the director called “the public interests.”7
Who, after all, was the census for, if not the public?
According to a 1940 filmstrip called Know Your U.S.A., the census provided “unbiased facts to measure markets for business and the farmer, the plans of school and health officials, the needs of local governments; facts to guide the lawmakers; facts from which a free people can count its gains and chart its future.” It closed with the census slogan that year: “You cannot know your country, unless your country knows you.”8
This was a charming slogan. It’s even Socratic, if we twist it a bit: The unexamined country is not worth living in. But to live in an examined country means that everyone in the nation must answer the knock on the door, invite an interviewer inside, and tell the truth.
Today, the census sells itself with less romance, appealing instead to the immediate material consequences of the count. The census, we hear, decides who has power in Congress, who gets a say in the Electoral College, and how trillions of dollars in federal funds are allocated. Answer the census, we’re told, or else. Or else, our votes won’t matter as much as they should. Or else, fire stations will go unbuilt. Or else, the shelves of libraries will stand empty. Or else, the poor will go hungry and won’t be able to see a doctor. “You cannot know your country, unless your country knows you” and “Get counted or your community suffers” differ less than they might seem to at first, because even in 1940 it was clear that the “self-knowledge” the census offered had significant political and economic value.
The public interests represented in the Commerce auditorium included General R. E. Wood, who was listed in the census as an executive of a “Mail Order House,” which was a little like listing Jeff Bezos as the manager of a delivery company.9 Wood chaired the board of the biggest, most popular, and most important mail-order firm: Sears, Roebuck and Co. Americans of all walks of life could peruse the Sears catalog, find an appealing flannel shirt or a dress made from new fabric fibers (like rayon!), maybe a rifle or a radio, an eighty-rod roll of barbed wire, or even a windmill, and have it delivered anywhere in the nation.10 The revolutionary egalitarianism of the U.S. Postal Service, which by virtue of its low-cost service bound the backwoods and delta plains to industrial centers and big cities, made Sears possible. (The postal service also depended on the census, to decide where to open branches and how to allocate resources.) Now Wood as its chief was engineering the addition to its mail-order business of a brick-and-mortar empire. As he steered Sears, Wood studied the census.11 He and Sears couldn’t know its markets unless the census knew each American.
Wood was a natural choice for this meeting. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies had come under significant fire from some big business groups, and those policies had no greater enemy than the du Ponts and the groups, like the National Association of Manufacturers, buoyed by their chemicals, plastics, and explosives fortune.12 But that didn’t mean everyone in the corporate world hated Roosevelt. Wood had been an early and enthusiastic supporter and had taken it upon himself to build relationships between the new administration and big business, beginning by recruiting his friends and colleagues to serve on a Committee to Rebuild Price and Purchasing Power in 1933. Money men had disliked or distrusted Roosevelt’s early decision to leave the gold standard, because they disliked inflation and the way it devalued the interest they earned. But Wood joined Roosevelt’s side—he believed inflation, and greater purchasing power, were necessary to revive the depressed nation’s economy. He (and Sears) also needed the rural customers they relied on to have enough money to order more goods.13
Alongside Wood in that auditorium, Dublin would have seen other business leaders whom the director of the census and the secretary of commerce had seen fit to invite. There was the president of the American Retail Federation, Dr. David R. Craig. Even the National Association of Manufacturers sent a representative, the organization’s secretary, Noel Sargent. Whether they liked the administration or not, these men wanted a say in the census. They must have agreed with the sentiment spoken by a Census Bureau official a few months later: “We cannot escape the fact that markets are people.”14 To know America as a market, the census had to interview every American and ask the right questions.
Dublin, a vice president for the nation’s largest life insurer, could hold his own among the business elite, and he probably realized that he’d been selected because he could talk more or less comfortably with the other people in that auditorium too. Dublin had crafted a career by building bridges among business, progressive reform, and academic science. He’d earned a Ph.D.—in biology—from Columbia and was lured to Metropolitan by a visionary executive committed to building a “New Socialism.” Instead of a socialism dependent on government action and state control, this socialism entrusted the fate of the masses to enlightened corporations. The title of the history of Metropolitan Life that Dublin would soon publish was “A Family of Thirty Million,” where thirty million referred to the number of Americans insured by the company. But Metropolitan did not merely insure a fifth of the country’s entire population against an untimely death, offering a form of savings and security to people who seldom had access to a bank. It also offered free visits to doctors and nurses, introduced and made normal (even obligatory) the yearly physical exam, campaigned for improved sanitary conditions, and distributed millions of pamphlets filled with health advice or explaining important medical concepts like the germ theory of disease. Dublin’s corporate ascent began with the job of justifying the expense of all that “socialistic” activity. It had been his job to prove that health care was a good investment.15
Dublin began building an economic case for health interventions, and yet that case was soon deemed superfluous by his superiors. Even before he could finish gathering his evidence, Metropolitan Life’s “welfare work” had already proved its value to the company through the goodwill it garnered and the publicity it accrued. The age of “corporate responsibility” as advertising was dawning. The warm glow of good works raised Dublin’s profile too, both inside and outside the company. He grew to the status of public intellectual, building for the nation an economic justification for all health work. Under his hand, the Metropolitan Statistical Bureau blossomed into one of the most trusted sources for American statistics, second only to the Census Bureau. Reformers looked in vain in the census to discover how many people died in car crashes or lost limbs to industrial accidents. But Dublin had access to reliable figures in his employer’s private statistical stash, and through the Metropolitan Life’s Statistical Bulletin he made them widely available.
Margaret Scattergood probably read the Statistical Bulletin. She was in that auditorium with Louis Dublin because William Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), had sent her as his representative. Scattergood was an AFL researcher, which meant she did for the nation’s unions what the CIA did for the national government—that was how she would describe her work a decade later to CIA officials. Scattergood’s analogy was apt.16 She worked for the AFL gathering intelligence about employers that might give an edge to its members—mostly men in skilled trades, who enjoyed a higher status than other workers—as they fought for a living wage, for reasonable hours, for safer working conditions. But the AFL also kept a wary distance from state power—it offered workers an alternative to the government, or at least it had done so until the Great Depression made grudging cooperation with the New Deal necessary.
By contrast, Scattergood’s colleagues at the meeting, Ralph Hetzel and Sidney B. Katz of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, sat in the auditorium as representatives of a group firmly allied with the president and his agenda. Progressive leaders in the union movement had left the AFL in 1935 to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) for all workers, independent of old hierarchies of craft and skill. Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act in 1935, putting the power of the federal government behind the rights of workers to band together and bargain collectively. It was a decisive move and one that further empowered the CIO in its campaigns to sign up steelworkers, autoworkers, garment workers, and the rest of America’s growing industrial army—even government workers, including those in the Census Bureau. In 1936, the previously nonpartisan trade unions came out strong for Roosevelt, linking his administration to the cause of unionism through unprecedented slogans like “The President Wants You to Organize.”17 The unions had earned a place in the Department of Commerce auditorium, a place to campaign for data about the masses, for the masses. Your country can’t be organized, unless your country knows you.
As Dublin surveyed the rest of the faces before him, he saw the newest breed of political actor in the room: the academics and professional statisticians or, in a label sometimes used for them, the “brains.” From the beginning of his presidency, Roosevelt had relied on professors to give him advice and shape his policy. A reporter for The New York Times dubbed a group of those close advisors, all from Columbia University, the “Brains Trust” (shortened to “Brain Trust” later).18
Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did not invent the idea that university scientists should guide the apparatus of state. The notion dates back at least to Abraham Lincoln, to the founding of the land-grant colleges and universities. Those institutions—now often marked by an “A&M” or “State” in their names, like Texas A&M and Michigan State—focused on agricultural and mechanical (that is, engineering) sciences, funded by endowments of federal land, land often recently taken from Native Americans.19 In the late nineteenth century the federal government established special “experiment stations” within these universities to support and encourage original research that would be of use to the nation, its business, its people, and its government.
But the idea of a university that served the state was not originally American; it was German. All the great research universities of the nineteenth century grew up in German-speaking lands. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a great philologist in his own right and brother to a famous world explorer (Alexander), founded the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University) on the model of the University of Göttingen, where he had studied. Humboldt thus sowed in Prussia the seeds of an intellectual revolution. These new universities still had lecture halls where charismatic professors could profess their beliefs or just read aloud from rare books, but they also offered new kinds of spaces, like seminar rooms filled with maps or codices for the close and collaborative study of documents; museums and libraries, where whole universes of experience were to be collected; and, of course, laboratories filled with Bunsen burners (named for the German chemist Robert Bunsen) and glass beakers. New academic celebrities arose too, stars who would be recruited and poached by the Göttingens and Berlins, stars who published widely, stars who attracted (and sometimes trained) streams of eager graduate students.20
Americans joined those streams of graduate students entering German universities, or, it would be more accurate to say, they flooded Germany’s universities. American students—and their money—buoyed the German university system further. What American universities are today, German universities were then. American students lit their Bunsen burners in German laboratories, learning how to make chemical fertilizers and artificial dyes. They learned, too, how the same nitrogen that made plants grow faster could create devastating explosives. They sat in German seminar rooms around massive wooden tables, working out the origins of words and meanings, studying the past as stored in official documents. Germany was actually a much newer nation-state than was the United States—it was united only in 1873 at the end of the Franco-Prussian war. From the fervor of the new-kindled nationalism grew a new kind of social science, fact-filled and ethically rich, devoted to the study of nations and states. One of those American students who made the Atlantic crossing was W.E.B. Du Bois, whose 1899 social survey The Philadelphia Negro introduced the German style of social science to the study of race in the United States and whose masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk was cousin to the sort of fieldwork done by the Brothers Grimm to capture the spirit/soul (Geist) of many European nations (Volk).21 The data-driven methods of German social science entered the Census Bureau at the turn of the century too, borne by the first generation of professional scientists to run the newly permanent Census office—men like Walter F. Willcox, who studied in Berlin, and Joseph A. Hill, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Halle (located near Leipzig).22
The biggest “brain” in the Commerce Department auditorium hailed from Princeton University. Frank W. Notestein had earned a Ph.D. under Walter Willcox before getting the nod to head the Office of Population Research, a research center housed at Princeton but funded entirely by external foundation grants. It was a think tank that used the money of America’s robber barons to develop new theories about how populations change and to train—one postdoctoral researcher at a time—a generation of mathematically sophisticated, data-driven demographers. Many of Notestein’s chief patrons joined him in the auditorium, the first and foremost being Frederick Osborn. Officially, Osborn represented the Eugenics Research Association at the meeting. Behind the scenes, Osborn rubbed elbows with the Roosevelts, sat on elite boards, and arranged for the funding that ran the Office of Population Research. Osborn championed eugenics, and he believed demography would provide the tools to make eugenic policies succeed.
Eugenics has become a dirty word these days (and with good reason), but in the early twentieth century the term commanded the respect of towering figures in science.23 It was the study of selective human breeding bent on “improving” the population. It was thought, for instance, that such people would not have “defects” that would lead to poverty (as if being poor were an inborn biological trait). It was likewise believed that a better person would be white. Such beliefs were treated as serious science, and they became deadly serious. Across the Atlantic, Hitler’s Nazi regime made eugenics central to its policies, often borrowing American laws and practices in doing so. Still, Osborn worked to show that his eugenics was different; it depended less on forced sterilization or government edicts saying who could or couldn’t have children and instead sought to engineer society so that only the already well-off, who he believed were necessarily superior, would reproduce. As the historian Emily Klancher Merchant has explained, he reasoned that “manipulating the social and economic contexts in which childbearing decisions were made in order to encourage some people to have more children and other people to have fewer children was perfectly fine.”24 Osborn believed demography (and data) could make possible this kind of eugenic nudging—for example, distributing contraception at no cost to the poor while doling out college scholarships to the children of college graduates.
Copyright © 2022 by Dan Bouk