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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
Copyright © 2022 by Dan Bouk
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint lines from “Madam and the Census Man” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, Associate Editor, copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
