Census, Federal

Census, Federal. The decennial population census originated in the 1787 federal Constitution as a mechanism for determining each state's political representation in the House of Representatives and electoral college. The Constitution (art. 1, sec. 2) specifies that representatives and direct taxes are “apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers” and goes on to require a census every ten years to determine those numbers. The census counted everyone in the country, except “Indians not taxed.” The Constitution reduced the slave population count in each state to three‐fifths of the total before adding it to the free population count for purposes of representation (the Three‐Fifths Compromise). These provisions embedded race classifications in the census. The United States thus became the first nation to conduct a regular population census and use it to apportion legislative seats.

The nation successfully managed the allocation of political representation as it grew from thirteen states with 3.9 million people in 1790 to fifty states with a quarter of a billion people in 1990. From 1790 to 1840, the State Department conducted the census, sending U.S. marshals' assistants to all households to tally the number of persons in the household, in broad demographic categories of age, sex, and social status. From 1850 to 1900, a Census Office in the Interior Department conducted the census. In 1850, Congress mandated an individual‐level count that collected detailed information on Americans' demographic, social, and economic situations. Since 1910, the Bureau of the Census, housed in the Commerce Department, has taken the census. In 1890, a system of machine tabulation automated much of the work. UNIVAC, the first nondefense computer, tabulated the 1950 census. Today, the census is taken primarily by mail. In 1990, the bureau introduced the TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) system to provide maps and a list of every address in the United States.

Government, the private sector, and scholars use census data for planning; market forecasting; and social, economic and political analysis. By the late twentieth century, these uses were as important as the original political functions and congressional interests still shaped the questions asked and the data reported.

At times, the census became enmeshed in political controversies of such magnitude that it was challenged. When the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery, it also abolished the Three‐Fifths Compromise and gave southern states full representation for the newly freed African American population in Congress. After the Civil War, Northerners realized that white Southerners would not permit the freed slaves to vote unless further federal protections were put in place. Hence Congress wrote provisions to guarantee voting rights into the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. In 1920, members of Congress from rural states that were slated to lose representation to states with growing urban populations attacked the census. For the first and only time, Congress did not reapportion itself after the 1920 census. From the late 1960s, big‐city mayors and civil rights leaders charged that the census undercounted minorities and the poor. As the 2000 census loomed, partisan wrangling erupted over the Census Bureau's proposal to use statistical sampling techniques to supplement traditional counting techniques. As the census became politicized, ironically, this mechanism designed to defuse the contentiousness surrounding the allocation of political representation itself became embroiled in broader controversies about the distribution of power in American society.
See also Civil Rights Movement; Demography; Federal Government, Legislative Branch: House of Representatives; Urbanization.

Bibliography

Margo Anderson , The American Census: A Social History, 1988.
Harvey Choldin , Looking for the Last Percent: The Controversy over Census Undercounts, 1994.
Margo Anderson and and Stephen E. Fienberg , Who Counts? The Politics of Census Taking in Contemporary America, 1999.

Margo Anderson