Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

Historian Bouk (How Our Days Became Numbered) delivers a painstaking and penetrating analysis of the 1940 census. Uncovering “stories in the data,” Bouk parses the bureaucratic processes behind the creation and execution of the census, which contained 30 questions—including, for the first time ever, a column for marking the respondent’s wage income—asked by roughly 120,000 enumerators about 131 million U.S. residents. He also delves into the streamlining of responses to conform to highly specific categories of population, race, and household organization, and makes incisive connections between this mass-produced government questionnaire and the decades-long legacy of New Deal social programs, the conduct of the U.S. before and after its entry into WWII, and how the census (“the factory of American facts”) has evolved through the present-day. On a darker note, Bouk contends that the 1940 census upheld white supremacy by undercounting Black residents in cities and classifying Mexican Americans as “white,” and explains how it contributed to the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Combining lucid statistical analysis and empathetic profiles of enumerators and respondents, this is a rewarding deep dive into how the census works. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Aevitas Creative. (Aug.)