YOU CAN COUNT ON US

I’M TALKING ABOUT THE CENSUS, not just matters of communal reliance. Indeed, John Lanchester offers 6500 words in “Get a Rabbit,” London Review of Books, September 21, 2023. Here are tidbits on portions of this extensive four-book review, especially those pertaining to the U.S. Census over its history. 

Etymology. A census consists of data, of statistics about a community, region, or country. Lanchester writes, “At their heart, statistics exist to do what their etymology suggests: help states to understand themselves. In the short term, the word comes from the German: statistik, of or pertaining to the state or government.”

“Go back far enough,” Lanchester observes, “and it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ‘sta-’. That has a huge range of meanings linked to the idea of being set down, being firm, standing: it is present everywhere from ‘cost’ to ‘understand’, via ‘destitute’, ‘epistemology’, ‘metastatis’ and ‘system.’ ”

Census Histories. Lanchester recounts, “In 1949, when the Communist Party found itself in charge of China after winning the civil war, it had one of the most basic problems imaginable: it didn’t know how many people it had in its charge or where they lived….The project of bringing about a socialist state in China ‘hinged, to a large degree, on being able to resolve this crisis of counting.’ And, as Lenin wrote, ‘socialism is first of all a matter of accounting.’ ”

Lanchester says, “The principle of the census is easy to understand, and its utility is easy to understand too—in fact, once you think about it, it’s difficult to imagine how a country can govern itself without knowing the basic data concerning how many people it contains, how old they are and where they live. (Reality often gets in the way. Especially civil wars. The winner in the no-census stakes is Lebanon, which hasn’t had one since 1932.)”

Our U.S. Census. “The census,” observes Lanchester, “is a bedrock of democracy in the US; it is mandated in the first article of the US constitution. A census is supposed to be the purest form of enumeration, an exercise in counting and nothing else. It is the bare brick of numbers – at least, that’s the idea.”

Image from Stuart Johnson & Associates.

3/5 of a Person. Lanchester notes, “In the case of the US census, what stands out most sharply as a ‘fact’ is race. During slavery, the enslaved were counted in the census as three-fifths of a person, for the purpose of allocating seats in Congress, but weren’t named, other than as property of a named owner. The census treated free African Americans in the same way as everyone else, with the ‘head of household’ the only person named until the 1850 census, which was the first to name every individual citizen—though the enslaved were still only enumerated.”

For instance, Lanchester recounts Frederick Douglass’s census history: an unnamed male slave in 1830—thus 3/5 of a person, a named head of household in 1840 New Bedford, Massachusetts. His wife and daughter wouldn’t be included by name until 1850.  

The 1920 Census. Lamentably, the status of race and ethnicity did not end there. Lanchester says, “Contemporary arguments about racial ‘degeneration’ and the changing composition of the US population fed directly into the census of 1920, in which almost half the form was devoted to questions about where people were born and what their parents’ mother tongue was.”

Lanchester cites, “ ‘In the ensuing decade, nativist voices in Congress used that data to draw attention to the growing population of foreign-born Americans who hailed from ‘“undesirable races”– especially Italians, Eastern Europeans and Russian Jews—and to frame that population as a problem.’ ”

Much of Lanchester’s article has U.K. focus, though, of course, census concerns are still part of American politics of gerrymandering. 

Our More Recent Censuses. The U.S. National Archives is an accessible and excellent source of our country’s censuses. As an example, since April 2, 2012, the 1940 population census schedules have been available for research.

 Among the wealth of information is a list of Questions Asked on the 1940 Census. Several of them are obviously 1940’s dated: “whether the person worked for the CCC, WPA, or NYA the week of March 24-30, 1940.” Others seem more than a bit intrusive by modern standards: “for all women who are or have been married, has this woman been married more than once and age at first marriage.”

And What About Lanchester’s “Rabbit”? John Lanchester’s LRB article is titled, “Get a Rabbit,” with the reason given well into the article: He says, “This leaves open the question of what the state does with all the things it counts. A big part of the answer is that it uses them to raise taxes, and to decide how those taxes are spent.”

“If you want a pet,” Lanchester notes, “get a rabbit—they’re 20 percent cheaper than other pets because they don’t attract sales tax, being edible.” ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023