Night of the census taker
(By James Burnett, The Boston Globe, October 18, 2009)
IN THE HIERARCHY of scary-looking devices, the Census Bureau’s new handheld computers fall somewhere below the staple remover, and only a little above the hole punch. The boxy units, about the size of a checkbook, allow the department’s field workers to collect and transmit information electronically, including GPS positions, so houses and apartments get placed in the right location in its records. In early April, when census agents began the address canvassing that is the initial phase of every decennial count, they carried these handhelds for the first time. This milestone initially stirred the same buzz as an Agriculture Department report on projected avocado yields.
But as census canvassers took their handheld computers down city streets and exurban cul-de-sacs and backcountry lanes, something started to happen. “They show up at your house, and you look down, and you ask what they are doing,” says Alex Jones, the syndicated radio host. “And they say, ‘Oh, just getting a GPS reading.’ Regardless of your political affiliation, there’s just something inherently creepy about that.”
Creeped out, people were. Hypotheses flew on right-wing websites and talk radio: The feds wanted the coordinates of American homes in order to facilitate an eventual roundup of dissenters. Or the GPS readings were for when the White House, under the cover of an unspecified calamity, invites in the UN soldiers - who, after all, won’t be able to read American street signs. Or for when the authorities, cutting to the chase, call in unmanned Predator strikes against undesirables.
That’s how it’s gone for the Census Bureau all year. Its objective in the 2010 Census, as it has been going back to the inaugural census in 1790, is to produce the most complete possible accounting of the US population. That goal, never easy to achieve, has in recent decades been complicated by hard-to-count minority and immigrant groups and an increasingly transient general population. This time around it faces the added wild card of hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina and the foreclosure crisis.
Now, on top of all that, the bureau is confronting what former director Kenneth Prewitt regards as an “unprecedented” resistance to the census itself. The GPS units are these objectors’ most fantastical bogeyman, but the Census Bureau, just by trying to do its job, has served up several others. Since well before the September death of department field worker Bill Sparkman - found strung from a tree in Kentucky with “Fed” scrawled on his chest - brought the issue to mainstream attention, the critics have been constructing an alternative paradigm, in which the census is not the benign bureaucratic exercise it pretends to be but instead a citizen-tracking, election-manipulating project controlled by Barack Obama, administered by his minions at ACORN, and aimed at advancing the agenda of Big Government while trampling personal freedom.
It can all sound like the plot line for a lost Robert Ludlum novel, and indeed, the anti-census claims are easy to knock down on factual grounds. But the roots of the concerns are genuine, and trace back to the fundamental American conflict between a democratic government’s need for information and citizens’ desire for privacy. Humdrum as it seems, the U.S. Census has always ridden that fault line. Heading into 2010, the question, and it’s not an idle one, is whether we’re merely witnessing a particularly fevered installment of a long-running national debate, or the arrival of a United States where even such a seemingly basic act of government is just another thing that a fractious populace refuses to agree on.
COUNTING PEOPLE IS one of the first jobs America assigned to its young federal government. The Constitution calls for an enumeration of the population every 10 years “in such manner as [Congress] shall by law direct,” and the stakes of that effort are huge. The results determine how many seats states get in the House of Representatives, as well as where a lot of federal money - currently more than $400 billion - gets spent. Over time, Congress has also employed the census to collect figures on everything from home ownership to commuting habits, and use them to shape policy. To the census’s admirers, it qualifies as a singularly potent expression of national ideals. Writing in “The American People,” a book about the 2000 Census, Prewitt put it this way: “As a civic event with the ambition to include every person in the nation, the only such civic event in America’s democracy, the census counts.”
Yet from the beginning, there have also been Americans who’ve wanted nothing to do with it. George Washington, for instance, was miffed that the inaugural census put the population at only 3,929,214 - he’d hoped to break 4 million, knowing that the bigger the number, the stronger the deterrent to would-be attackers. Washington partly blamed the shortfall on residents who’d ducked the process, some citing religious reasons for their non-compliance. As the country, and census tactics, evolved, so too did the grounds for defiance. In 1940, as the US pulled out of the Depression, Congress authorized for the first time asking people how much money respondents earned. “Needless to say,” says the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Margo Anderson, author of “The American Census: A Social History,” “when the public got wind of that, there was a huge debate.” Two decades later, future National Review senior editor William Rickenbacker would earn notoriety, and a $100 fine, for refusing to fill out his long-form questionnaire. (He railed against its intrusiveness in a letter to the secretary of commerce, whom he addressed “Dear Snoopchief.”)
More recently the Census Bureau has triggered political fencing matches over its statistical methods. To compensate for undercounting immigrants and poor members of racial minorities, who disproportionately fail to participate, the agency in 1990 and 2000 sought to use the technique called statistical sampling, which would adjust the “hard count” by consulting a subsequent survey showing how many people had been missed. Both times, those plans were blocked by Republicans worried that such sampling would bolster the size of traditionally Democratic voting blocs.
In a sense, this year’s controversies echo the tradition of protesting the census’s mission. But they are also different, in both form and volume. Thanks to the Internet (and with an assist from partisan broadcasters), the Census Bureau is contending not with individual dissenters, but with a collective and vocal resistance whose arguments challenge the legitimacy of federal census-taking itself.
The movement began to take shape last winter, after President Obama announced his first nominee for commerce secretary, the official to whom the Census Bureau traditionally reports. Obama’s pick, New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg, raised alarm among some minority advocates, who noted that Gregg had opposed increases to census funding and could not be trusted to do everything necessary to reduce undercounts. To mollify those critics, White House spokesman Ben LaBolt indicated that for 2010, the census director would now “work closely with White House senior management.” To some census observers - especially those observing from GOP congressional seats - this looked like a power grab, and Gregg mentioned the move when he withdrew from consideration the following week. The Obama team backed off, stressing that the new commerce nominee, former Washington Governor Gary Locke, would oversee the census as usual. But by then, aided by Republican spin, the notion had taken hold: Obama wanted control of the Census, and had put chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel in charge of rigging the 2010 results.
That theory gained momentum on March 18, when Fox News reported that ACORN, the community organizing group beset with voter-registration fraud allegations, had signed on as one of the Census Bureau’s national partners, and would among other things help put out word about the more than 1 million temporary workers the bureau needs to hire to complete next year’s count. Though ACORN would be just one of 100,000 groups expected to come aboard as a census partner, and although its staffers would not be doing any actual canvassing or enumerating themselves, its involvement fed the growing right-wing suspicions.
Such was the atmosphere that the census canvassers and their GPS devices walked into in April. A woman named Jane Lesko, who heads the Idaho chapter of the conservative Eagle Forum, encountered one of the field workers at her rural property. “The woman{hellip}said that her supervisor told them that they could climb locked gates with “NO TRESPASSING” signs on them,” she wrote in the “alert” she subsequently sent out to her members via e-mail. Her missive was picked up by anti-government websites, and before long came to the attention of conservative activist and online radio host Douglas Gibbs, who invited Lesko onto his show and advanced the aforementioned possible UN-soldiers-connection in a post on his blog.
“We’re talking government here,” says Gibbs in an interview. “Why would they want these coordinates? The first answer is to more easily find people. I’m not trying to be a conspiratorialist or anything like that. I’m just asking the question.”As he sees it, once Washington decided it wanted these GPS readings, the way to go about obtaining them was obvious. “People don’t really question the Census Bureau,” he says.
By that logic, it’s the very innocuousness of the 2010 count that makes it suspect. But how to combat such a sneaky enemy? After all, as Lesko points out, now that the government has your GPS position locked in its databanks, it’s not like you can “have it back.”
Over the summer, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, provided possible recourse, declaring a kind of info-blockade. In June, she told the Washington Times that she planned to answer only the first question on the 2010 form, which asks how many people live at your address. Bachmann claimed, incorrectly, that the Constitution authorized the Census to count people and nothing more. The other queries, she said, were overly intrusive. Later, during an interview with Fox News’s Glenn Beck - who has taken up census concerns as a favorite story - she mentioned that it was census data that aided the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Paranoid thinking, like lint, has a way of balling up with like elements. Eventually everything to do with the 2010 Census started to look like a plot. On Aug. 26, a week before the fracas over President Obama’s back-to-school speech surfaced, USA Today published an article about the Census Bureau’s “Census in Schools” outreach effort, which distributes posters and lesson plans to public schools nationwide in a bid to boost participation.
On her blog, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin offered an alternative take. Her headline: “Meet Obama’s newest Census collectors: Your kids!”
THE CENSUS BUREAU, of course, doesn’t want to scare people. It wants to count them. And it sees its job as to do so by all available means - “by hook or by crook,” says Martha Riche, who preceded Ken Prewitt as bureau director.
Most of the elements of the supposed Obama-led plot to hijack the 2010 Census had their origins long before Obama’s presidency. The handheld computers were approved during the Bush administration in a bid to boost efficiency; the partnership program made controversial this year by ACORN’s involvement was created by Riche prior to the 2000 Census as a cheap way to halt a decline in mail-back rates. It was the same rationale that prompted the bureau that year to start emphasizing that it’s against the law to ignore the census - which, this time around, has only further provoked those wary of government coercion. Census in Schools dates back even farther, and was designed to reach families whose bilingual children are the home’s only English speakers. (And while intrusiveness is very much in the eye of the beholder, next year’s census will be the first in 70 years to omit the long form, which asks finer-graded questions about lifestyle and socioeconomic status.)
Not that pointing any of that out would change the minds of current census critics. Sarah Igo, a Vanderbilt historian who has studied the census as part of her research into perceptions of public surveys, notes that how the bureau’s actions are perceived is always influenced by the broader national mood. “When the data is collected every 10 years,” she says, “attitudes toward the government get projected onto what is ostensibly a non-political agency.” Amid a health care debate that has some Americans worried about bureaucrats inserting themselves between patients and their doctors - and in the wake of an Iraq invasion and massive bank bailout that stirred unease with unchecked Washington power on both sides of the political spectrum - perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the early stages of the 2010 Census have met stubborn pushback.
At the same time, to attribute the resistance to the present political climate might be to overlook the emergence of a more fundamental challenge for the Census Bureau. The agency hasn’t changed how it handles personal information: The paper forms and corresponding electronic records that show how you, as an individual, answered the agency’s questions (the “microdata,” in agency parlance) are sealed for 72 years to maintain privacy and confidentiality. But as the Census Bureau has adopted new tools in pursuit of its mandate - and opponents have gained a powerful tool with the blogosphere - it has inevitably become a bigger and scarier-looking target. In its files, the satellite readings that canvassers collected with their handhelds are paired with addresses, not their occupants’ names - another layer of protection for individuals. That doesn’t sound so reassuring, though, to privacy-minded homeowners who glance outside to see a government worker pointing a GPS device at their door.
It’s less than six months to go before next April 1, Census Day for 2010, the day to which the next national count will be pegged. By then, asks Anderson, the census historian, “Will we have worked ourselves through this debate and made some decisions about how to deal with it?” In her view, it’s too early to say, though precedent does offer census proponents some cause for optimism. For all the debate over the income questions in 1940, ultimately, a compromise was struck - people who felt uncomfortable telling a stranger what they earned would be handed a card on which they could privately enter that information and submit it by mail. What’s more, says Anderson, “When it came down to it most people didn’t mind, and did volunteer the answer to their enumerator.”
While the activists urging defiance of the 2010 Census have one American impulse on their side, those who hope to see everyone counted can play to another. We like being left alone, but perhaps even more, we also like to feel that we count. And in past fights over the census, it’s the latter urge that has won out. “Americans have on balance always come around,” says Anderson, “and been more concerned about getting into the census than getting out of it.”
