DEMOCRACY’S DATA: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them
By Dan Bouk
Illustrated. 384 pages. MCD. $30.
The U.S. census has inspired a surprising amount of poetry, Dan Bouk notes in his endearingly nerdy new book, “Democracy’s Data.” And I doubt this is because “census” rhymes with so many relevant words: fences, defenses, Mike Pence’s.
Along with an anonymous bard who warned “As you’d shun the undertaker/Lady, shun the census taker,” Bouk cites Langston Hughes’s Alberta K. Johnson, from his 1944 poem “Madam and the Census Man”: a Black woman who insists that her middle initial not be spelled out as K-A-Y, as the official suggests it must be, but rather the initial christened by her mother. (“You leave my name/Just that way!”)
In Bouk’s and other scholars’ interpretation, this is a powerful bit of protest against centuries of Black people being misidentified, undercounted and downright erased from the public record. A historian who has also studied computational mathematics, he believes passionately in the ideals of the census, but reveals in often head-smacking detail how badly it has failed society. Native Americans were long excluded in particularly baroque fashion and ethnic classification abetted among other horrors the roundup of Japanese Americans to internment camps and the deportation of Mexican immigrants.
In theory, counting the population seems so basic, so neutral: a math problem, albeit “a serious slog” of one. But the numerical is political, with representation and resources at stake. Bouk shows how, from its beginnings, the census has been subject to partisan interests: years ago on the local level, with supervisors doling out census jobs to “friends” inclined to massage the numbers (“the corruption of ‘friend,’ he writes, “is much older than Facebook”). More recently Donald J. Trump’s administration sought unsuccessfully to insert a question about citizenship status to the survey, which civil rights advocates argued would discourage participation.
Though he specializes in bureaucracies and quantification, or as he puts it “modern things shrouded in cloaks of boringness,” Bouk himself has a poet’s flair for wordplay. His first book, about life insurance, was called “How Our Days Became Numbered” (2015), and might have been the best thing to happen to actuarial tables since Barbara Stanwyck showed off her anklet in “Double Indemnity.” Bouk writes in the new book of his grandparents telling “‘seamy’ stories of love,” starting with their meet-cute over a pair of crooked stockings, and how the census has “created statistical holes alongside statistical wholes.”
He zeroes in on the 1940 census, partly because it was the most recent one he could get his hands on; since legislation passed in 1978, records are kept private for 72 years, then about around the average life expectancy (The 1950 account was released in April, and on sites like ancestry.com, you are invited to have at it).
The 1940 version was textually rich, with more than 30 questions (the 2020 census had only 10) and contextually rich, with plenty of advertising materials encouraging the public to take part. The P.R. was necessary in a time of European dictatorship, though fear that the government was compiling “dossiers” may now seems quaint in an era of data breaches and doxxing.
Back then there was also lots of potential for drama large and small, given that the census was conducted by “enumerators” who went door to door and collected answers in their own variably legible penmanship. The data was then fed back to Question Men and (mostly female) card punchers back in the home office and spat out as proto-Big Data. Such a hands-on process was unimaginable in 2020, because of the pandemic, and because digital natives won’t even answer the phone, let alone a knock.
A central preoccupation for Bouk is this lost “doorstop encounter”— the enumerator being invited in for coffee, given a carton of eggs or fiercely mistrusted, lied to or turned away — and how such interactions affected the census individually or in noticeable clumps. “Negotiations and tweaks aren’t beside the point,” he writes, but “part of the data.” Counting the population of America, it seems, is akin to both conducting a symphony and watching a jazz ensemble go to town.
Bouk is as interested in what official data has hidden, by both design and error, as what it has recorded. The census, he reminds, is not counting individuals but households, each of which is expected to have a “head.” So what happens if your house is under a tent, on a boat or out on the street? What if you didn’t feel comfortable explaining your relationship to your cohabitants? (Bouk’s own family is one that the 1940 census would have struggled to capture: his partner, formerly named Liz, underwent gender transition not long ago and is now known as Lucas. Bouk doesn’t remember which of them he designated as the head.)
Tolerance of different arrangements may have grown, but most of the census’s physical pageantry — the maps, the machines, the broadsheets covered in handwriting, the bound leather books, all illustrated here — is eroded forever. Fragility of digital data and mounting mistrust in government has Bouk concerned about the whole operation’s future, but this is a man of buoyant optimism. The book’s straightforward title undersells its playful contents. “Democracy’s Data” is ruminative and rich; it makes the dull old census a feast for the senses.
