During the 1840s, the ‘infant statistical community’ began to lobby for a ‘more professional national statistical system’, one that could ask and answer more detailed questions about the population (Anderson 1988: 33). This entailed a shift in the unit of analysis from the household to the individual, and the centralisation of the bureaucracies of information-gathering in Washington.
Debated in the context of increasing hostility between free and slave states, these proposals generated more than administrative interest. The 1840 census was widely recognised to have been a ‘complete fiasco’, the product of ‘errors, frauds and political machinations’ by pro-slavery campaigners determined to prove that blacks could not cope with freedom (Cohen 1982: 177-8). In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her compendium of the evidence her novel had drawn upon, Harriet Beecher Stowe devoted an appendix to the 1840 census which she entitled ‘Facts vs Figures’. If, in the past, figures did not lie, she noted ironically, ‘this arose from no native innocence of disposition, but simply from want of occasion or opportunity’ (Stowe 1853: 17). The changes to the 1850 census represented an attempt to restore legitimacy to the process, but they also initiated a broader shift in perspective from households (and heads of households) to a dual focus on the individual and the aggregate. ‘Pushing toward a new level of social knowledge, the census forged a direct relationship with named individuals, including women and children’ – and, in 1850 and 1860, slaves (Wilson 2008: 7). The changes also led to a massive expansion in data collection, one that as the population grew became increasingly difficult to administer. The 1880 census took eight years of hand-counting to
The Great American Novel and the Census 55
tabulate, and it became clear that something had to be done if the count was to keep up and Congress was to retain legitimacy (Anderson 1988: 45, 84). An
‘interest in demographical data’ was also intensifying in many other quarters, from industry to the nascent social sciences (Herbst 1993: 18). Gradually the
‘purpose of the census’ was changing (Anderson 1988: 85).
The dual needs of a full and fast population count and more complex analysis were both answered by the introduction in 1890 of a mechanised system. After experimenting with a machine using perforated tape, a Census Office clerk called Herman Hollerith adapted a technology that had been used by French weavers since the early part of the century: punch cards fed into an electrical tabulating machine. Enumerators gathered data from around the country as usual, then clerks (mainly women) transferred information about each individual onto a single card which was fed into the tabulating machine (manually until 1900). The tabulator used as ‘spring-actuated needles’ (one for each hole) over a plate of cups partially filled with mercury: wherever there was a hole in the card the needle dipped down into the mercury closing a circuit (Hollerith 1894: 679). The number of circuits were counted and the data then cross-tabulated. Scientific American marvelled that the Census Office
Fig. 1. ‘Electrical Counting Machines’. 1890. Scientific American, August 30: detail from the cover.
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had been transformed from a ‘great counting house’ into a ‘vast machine shop’ (‘Mechanical Work’ 1902: 275).
Today we’re used to having details about ourselves translated into code, but at the end of the nineteenth century the process seemed miraculous.
Scientific American wondered at the fact that ‘by the special location of a hole within the limits of certain boundary lines on the card it means one thing, and in another position it means another thing’. ‘Until its values are explained and understood’, the card was simply ‘a very insignificant and blind piece of pasteboard’ (275). The surface of each card – ‘3 ¼ inches by 6 ⅝ inches’ –
‘was divided into 288 imaginary spaces ¼ inch square’ (Hollerith 1894: 679).
As Hollerith later explained:
To each of these spaces some particular value or meaning is assigned; a hole in one place meaning a white person, in another a black. Here a hole means a certain age-group, there it gives the exact year in that group. A combination of two holes in another part of the card indicates the occupation of the particular individual. (679)
The introduction of the punch card added a further layer of mediation between individuals and the state, its arrangement of holes functioning as
‘intermediary instrumentalities’ between the ‘enumerator’s return sheet’ (the product of face-to-face interaction until 1970) and the ‘tabulating machine’
(‘Mechanical Work’ 1902: 275). But if punch cards pioneered the digital understanding of identity through a ‘mere “on” or “off”, “yes or “not-yes”
response’ (Gaddis 2002: 17), it wasn’t until they became ‘ubiquitous’ in the 1940s and 1950s (MacBride 1967: 24) that this process – the translation of
‘personality’ into a ‘combination of holes and nicks’ on a ‘classification card’
(Vonnegut 2012: 72, 70, 206) – came to be seen as sinister. In 1964, protesting students at Berkeley adopted the warning that IBM typically printed on punch cards: ‘I am a U.C. student! Please don’t fold, spindle or mutilate me!’
(Lubar 1992: 44-8).
In 1890, however, the punch-card census was welcomed as a ‘manifestation of American efficiency and technological ingenuity’ (Heide 2009:15), an
‘interesting alliance of the abstract and concrete’ (‘Census’ 1890: 132). The Census Office reported the total population – nearly sixty-three million – after just six weeks, and thirty-two volumes of data appeared within the year (Anderson 1988: 85). But the Hollerith machine did not only revolutionize the speed of the process. It changed the nature of the inquiry itself. By the end of century, although the census remained what it had been since 1790 – a
‘political apportionment mechanism’ – it had also become what it remains today, an invaluable resource for inquiry into the ‘overall state of American society’ (85). The census had always been an ‘organized counting’, motivated by specific anxieties and ambitions (Prewitt 2013: 4), but it was the punch-card
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revolution that made the decennial count an effective ‘instrument for social investigation’ and social change (Du Bois 1978: 66).
The census was also an instrument for, or rather a provocation to, narrative, as commentators rushed to suggest what ‘wonderful story’ lurked within its columns of figures (Wellman 1900: 470). Novelists also joined in.
In Equality, Edward Bellamy’s 1897 sequel to Looking Backward, ‘hard, cold statistics’ initiate the tale of ‘the subversion of the American Republic by the plutocracy’. At one point, the protagonist is shown a set of tables ‘prepared in 1893 by a census official from the returns of the United States census’ in order to demonstrate that ‘out of sixty-two billions of wealth in the country a group of millionaires and multimillionaires, representing three one-hundredths of one percent of the population, owned twelve billions, or one fifth’. Add in the
‘rich and well-to-do’, and the remaining 91% of the population can be ‘classed as the poor’ (Bellamy 1897: 320-1).
Not every novelist used statistics for quite such direct educational purposes. Sinclair Lewis evokes the census for largely satirical purposes.
In 1920 Lewis had published Main Street, a novel set in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, a ‘town of a few thousand’, so small that you can walk around it in thirty-two minutes. ‘This is America’, Lewis declared (Lewis 1920: n.p.).
Only it wasn’t. One of the notable landmarks recorded by the 1920 census was the fact that a small majority of Americans – 51.2% – now lived in cities (Boehm and Corey 2015: 184). Before the year was out, Lewis set to work on Babbitt, another self-conscious attempt at the Great American Novel, but one that caught up with the data. ‘I want the novel to be the G.A.N.’, he wrote to a friend, ‘in so far as it crystallizes and makes real the Average Capable American’ (Lewis 1952: 59). His eponymous hero was a real-estate salesman obsessed with the position of his medium-sized city in the national rankings.
It is true that even with our 361,000, or practically 362,000, population, there are, by the last census, almost a score of larger cities in the United States. […] if by the next census we do not stand at least tenth, then I’ll be the first to request any knocker to remove my shirt and to eat the same, with the compliments of G.F. Babbitt, Esquire! (Lewis 2002: 181)
In these examples, census data is offered as a particular kind of logistical medium that the capacious form of the novel can absorb and employ for its own (utopian or satirical) purposes. But although Lewis originally planned to confine the action of Babbitt to a single (census?) day, neither he nor Bellamy suggests that the novel itself should be thought of as counting the nation.
Other aspirants to the Great American Novel, however, approached the challenge of national coverage from a different perspective.
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