How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding--particularly its social construction of race--is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population.
By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict.
And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe--and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.
"Acknowledgments Note on Illustrations and Tables Note on Terminology Introduction Part I: The Origins of the U.S. Census: From Enumeration of Voters and Taxpayers to ""Social Statistics,"" 1790-1840 Chapter 1: The Creation of the Federal Census by the Constitution of the United States: A Political Instrument Chapter 2: The First Developments of the National Census (1800-1830) Chapter 3: The Census of 1840: Science, Politics and ""Insanity"" of Free Blacks Part II: Slaves, Former Slaves, Blacks, and Mulattoes: Identification of the Individual and the Statistical Segregation of Populations (1850-1865) Chapter 4: Whether to Name or Count Slaves: The Refusal of Identification Chapter 5: Color, Race, and Origin of Slaves and Free Persons: ""White,"" ""Black,"" ""Mulatto"" in the Censuses of 1850 and 1860 Chapter 6: Color and Status of Slaves: Legal Definition and Census Practice Chapter 7: Census Data for 1850 and 1860 and the Defeat of the South Part III: The Rise of Immigration and the Racialization of Society: The Adaptation of the Census to the Diversity of the American Population (1850-1900) Chapter 8: Modernization, Standardization, and Internationalization: From the Censuses of J. C. G. Kennedy (1850 and 1860) to the First Census of Francis A. Walker (1870) Chapter 9: From Slavery to Liberty: The Future of the Black Race or Racial Mixing as Degeneration Chapter 10: From ""Mulatto"" to the ""One Drop Rule"" (1870-1900) Chapter 11: The Slow Integration of Indians into U.S. Population Statistics in the Nineteenth Century Chapter 12: The Chinese and Japanese in the Census: Nationalities That Are Also Races Chapter 13: Immigration, Nativism, and Statistics (1850-1900) Part IV: Apogee and Decline of Ethnic Statistics (1900-1940) Chapter 14: The Disappearance of the ""Mulatto"" as the End of Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United States Chapter 15: The Question of Racial Mixing in the American Possessions: National Norm and Local Resistance Chapter 16: New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the ""Mexican"" Race: Interest in ""Minor Races"" Chapter 17: From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of National Origins Part V: The Population and the Census: Representation, Negotiation, and Segmentation (1900-1940) Chapter 18: The Census and African Americans within and outside the Bureau Chapter 19: Women as Census Workers and as Relays in the Field Chapter 20: Ethnic Marketing of Population Statistics Epilogue: The Fortunes of Census Classifications (1940-2000) Conclusion Notes Abbreviations Sources and Bibliography Index"
Paul Schor is an associate professor of history at the Université de Paris.
Reviews for Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation
"""Paul Schor has written a superb book on the history of population counting in the American census since 1790. The story is told in depth, systematically and comprehensively, using deep archival exploration of government sources, explication of long-forgotten debates about the supposed inferiority of people from some 'races' or 'national origins' compared to others, and the alleged threats of people from various parts of the world to the true American experiment. It's a cautionary tale in the context of our current policy questions about immigration, citizenship, racism, and the future of American society"" -- Margo J. Anderson, author of The American Census: A Social History ""An informed account of the twists and turns in the long history of Census efforts to color-code Americans-to get it right. We learn that 'getting it right' has not happened and probably cannot happen, a deeply instructive lesson about the space in which the census meets politics"" -- Kenneth Prewitt, Director of the US Census Bureau, 1998-2000 ""Through the painstaking reconstruction of Congressional debates, internal Census Bureau reflection on racial classification, and the grassroots practices of enumeration, Paul Schor presents a startling insight: that official US racial categories which appear to have been stable over time-because they were used continuously from one census to the next with little overt change-in fact embodied varying meanings and notions of difference depending on their historical context. The result is an unparalleled history of US census racial classification that offers new empirical knowledge and understandings of the categories that Americans live with to this day"" -- Ann Morning, author of The Nature of Race: How Scientists Think and Teach about Human Difference It has become commonplace to identify racial categories as being social constructs, and Counting Americans offers extensive documentation of this claim."" -- Population and Development Review, Vol. 44.1 ""[T]here is plenty of meat there to satisfy the most voracious 'clio-vore.' This reading will appeal especially to social scientists, who, like this reviewer, have made use of postwar census data in their own work, but are likely to know little of the fascinating history and evolution of the Census Bureau's own development and its ever-changing questionnaires and published reports from earlier times.""--John Graham, H-Socialisms ""For scholars who consult the US Census in their research, historian Schor's outstanding book is invaluable....The research is impeccable, especially Schor's use of congressional archives to determine political thinking over a period of almost a century and a half. Most revealing is the author's discussion of the division between the North and South concerning blacks during slavery and Reconstruction....Essential.""--CHOICE"
