Counting Americans

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 variousinterests 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 Statesduring 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.

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, 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, 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, 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, [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.

Paul Schor is an associate professor of history at the Université de Paris.