Census History
1790
1790 America was a land of small farmers and craftsmen. Although commerce and regional trade networks were part of the new American economy, these developments rarely effected the average person's life. Most people lived as subsistance farmers, or near to it. In the average farmer's life, sophisticated commerce practices were absent. Complex accounting was absent. Advanced mathematics was absent. As one historian has put it, 1790 America was numerically illiterate. People simply didn't think of numbers as we do today.
Considering this, it is amazing to discover the U.S. Census, a modern leader in statistical and computational sophistication, was born into this pre-numerate age. Look closer, however, and any reader will discover that the early censuses shows its origins. Born of an innumerate people, the First U.S. Census of 1790 is at once an historical marvel and a methodological failure. The census was conceived out of necessity and optimism, but it was a design beyond the mathematical abilities of its creator.
The census was an afterthought. After much furious debate at the Philadelphia Constitution, it was decided that the House of Representatives would be based on states' population, which the framers then realized would necessitate a count of those states' populations. Mentioned in the Constitution in passing as an "actual Enumeration", the census does not appear to have been well thought through. On the ground, it turned out to be a logistical and mathematical nightmare. Congress expected that it would take nine months. It took eighteen. Most of the population lived in isolated, rural areas. Survey takers were often surprised to find that town and county boundaries had been left undefined, and isolated hamlets and households were unmapped. A distance today covered in under an hour would have taken a day on horseback, more without a map. The population was hard to get to, and once finally located, was resistant. The census was not popular. Associated with taxes and military drafts, it was greated with great suspicion.
A year and a half after commencement and with numbers in hand, Congress set itself to the task of apportioning the House. Everyone was shocked to discover that the numbers were ambiguous. With only a slight manipulation of how to round up or down, the numbers produced wildly different distributions of House Representatives. With no clear idea as to whether one method of rounding was more fair than another, Congress was left with exactly what it had hoped to avoid - a political battle over House apportionment. The nation's leaders had not done the math beforehand.
The technical naivity of the framers has haunted the census to modern tday. In 1998 the Republican-led House and the Clinton administration ended up in the Supreme Court asking the unlikely question, Must the census actually be a census?
A census, as opposed to a sample survey, is defined by the fact that every person is questioned, not just 5% or 10% or 20%. Because we know today that samples can be more accurate than censuses, the Clinton administration wanted to adjust the final census results according to the results of a survey taken together with the census. The administration made the argument, in effect, that the framers didn't understand what they were doing. The didn't know they had the option of taking a survey. The administration lost the battle, and the census today remains a true census.
The census was ultimately not the clean, mathematical apportionment tool it was expected to be. Even at the outset, however, the first census was more than a simple, logistical head count for apportionment. The population was broken down into seven simple categories according to race, gender, age, and ensalvement . This may be an unimpressive list compared to that of today's census, but it belies a hard fought political battle over the very purpose of the census. Most early politicians thought any additional questions a waste of time and resources, but a small group led by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson believed that the census could be used as a democratic tool to inform the government about its people.
The census was the first and is still the largest and most influential national social survey of the United States. What began as a battle to add four questions to the census grew into a project that today sets global standard for statistical sophistication and public data dissemination.
