What Can’t You Ask on the Census?

BRIAN: This is BackStory. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. Today on the T keeping tabs. We’re looking at times when Americans have gone to great lengths to keep an eye on each other and how they’ve justified doing so.

BRIAN: In the late 1950s, the Census Bureau unwittingly ignited a major controversy about how much information gathering is too much. They proposed adding one very simple question to the 1960 Census. What is your religion?

PETER: This question has never been on the Census before. And organizations like the a ACLU were immediately suspicious. Were an individual person’s religious beliefs really any of the government’s business?

BRIAN: But one group, Catholics, saw this as a golden opportunity. In the pages of major newspapers, Catholic organizations made a practical argument for the new question. They said that they needed better demographic information about their parishioners. They needed up-to-date data that would help them build parochial schools and hospitals right where they were needed.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: They also had sort of another argument that you see in the archives BUT you don’t see in the public releases.

BRIAN: This is Karen Schultz, an historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: And this was sort of a deeper question about Catholics’ place in America. Catholics were always thought of as something less than Americans, a group that couldn’t necessarily participate in free-thinking democracy because they were subject to the orders of their priests or their bishops or their archbishops.

BRIAN: Sure. This is a huge issue even for John F. Kennedy when he runs for the presidency.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Absolutely. And this debate happens right before– this is three, four years before John F. Kennedy runs. And Catholics see this as, well, if we get all this data, we’ll show how good Catholics have been.

They’ve been excellent taxpayers in the democratic society. They’ve been participants in several of the largest cities and civic undertakings in American history. And if they were able to show that they were more numerous in those big Northeastern cities that were still the cultural capitals the United States– cities like Chicago and New York and Boston– then they might be able to exert their political strength.

BRIAN: And what is the actual language they used internally to argue for this?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Well, of the largest force sort of backing this question was this organization called the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the NCWC– basically the political arm of the Catholic Church in America.

And so in these NCWC documents that I dug up in the archives, they say things like Catholics should use every proper lobbying technique available to get this question affected it on the 1960 Census.

They identified groups out there that will come out against this, and we need to counteract the actions of those groups. And the group, of course, is unnamed. We know that it’ll turn out to be the Jews.

BRIAN: So tell me about the religious opposition to putting this question on the Census.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: So the collection of Jewish organizations– the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee– all sorts of these organizations start crafting a defense against including this question on the 1960 Census.

They start writing letters to the newspapers, they start writing letters to the Census Bureau. And they craft an argument that basically circles around the First Amendment, that because people who choose not to answer questions in a decennial Census will be punished by law, we will be forced to reveal where all the Jews live, where all the minority religious organizations live, and this will impede in people’s willingness to practice those faiths.

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Now, you have to understand the specter of the Holocaust is hovering over all of us, and Nazi Germany used census bureaus and computerized data tablets and things like that in order to identify and locate Jews and other persecuted minorities.

And Jews are not afraid to make these arguments. They’ll say things like look at what happened in Nazi Germany if you’re not concerned about government tabulating data on what kind of person you are and what kind of things you believe.

BRIAN: So Kevin, I understand that one of the concerns for some of the Jewish groups was combining all the data in the Census is to provide a profile by religion– I think it’s referred to as cross-tabulation. So you could put together the fact that somebody was Jewish and their occupation, for instance.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Yeah, absolutely. That was one of the primary concerns. I have a letter from a rabbi from Philadelphia who asks, do you want the following questions answered by no less an authority than the US Government?

What is the average Jewish income? How many Jewish bankers are there in the US?

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: So they were extremely concerned about cross-tabulations, especially for the reason stated there, that, just at this moment where they were being finally socially accepted, all of a sudden this data would come out revealing questions about Jewish income, Jewish banking.

BRIAN: And showing them to be really different than other Americans.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: In all the worst ways that the stereotypes had this.

BRIAN: Yes.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Yeah, absolutely.

BRIAN: So what kinds of techniques did the Jewish organizations use to enter the battle?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: The first thing they do is they cause such a stink that it poses the threat of disrupting the actual 1960 Census itself.

BRIAN: In essence, they’re threatening civil disobedience, really. Go ahead. This is wrong, go ahead. Arrest me for not answering the question.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Exactly. Me and not only the 3% of Americans that are Jews, but we’re going to go around and cause a big stink so that people will also refuse to answer questions about the highest level of grade completed, what kind of occupation they have– things like that that make people feel like the government is getting a little too close to their own personal interests.

So the Census Bureau is petrified that Americans will just refused to answer the question, and they don’t want to go around persecuting all these Americans for refusing to do it. They really encourage people to do it, and they don’t want it to be sort of a negative thing.

And actually this threat that there will be the civil disobedience and that Americans in mass will refuse to answer the Census question is enough of a threat to scare the Census Bureau.

So in 1957, they actually declare that they will not have a question on religion in the 1960 Census. So that happens very, very quickly.

Now, there’s a little kink in the story, which is while this debate was going on, the Census Bureau was starting to learn how to gather data. And how they do that is by posing questions in the field. So they did a couple surveys, some very small surveys– one of 431 homes in the Milwaukee area and then a much larger one of about 40,000 homes across the United States.

BRIAN: So this is before the issue was decided and they’re beginning to test how they would ask this question?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Exactly. So they encouraged the debate, and while the debate is going on, they also start testing questions in the field. So they collect this data in 1957, and this has all the cross-tabulations that the Jewish groups are fearful for.

And what the Census Bureau recognizes is that this is a contentious debate right now. And what they decide to do is release two reports. The first report is just going to be a couple pages. You can find it at your local library now. And it’s just going to talk about the number of Jews, the number of Catholics, generally where they live.

But they’re not going to have the cross-tabulation data on income and profession– things like that that the Jewish organizations are concerned about.

And what this first report does for American Jewish groups is it makes them hypersensitive about the second report that’s going to come out that’s going to have all the cross-tabulation data.

So this is where their second technique comes in. What they do is they look for– and this is quoting– “like-minded others who are going to be opposed to the tabulation of religious data.”

And basically they go through their American history textbook and see which religious groups, except for the Catholics, had been persecuted. And they start writing letters to the leaders of those organizations.

They find out that there’s a senator from Utah who’s Mormon, and they write letters saying, you don’t want the American government finding out where all the Mormons are and how much money they make and where they live and how many children they have– these kinds of things.

And sure enough, this second strategy is incredibly effective. All of a sudden, this becomes sort of a national debate in the halls of Congress. And then the second report, which they said was delayed because of rewriting, sits and sits and sits in the Bureau of the Census Hall for up to two months.

And then finally, two months later, a very plain letter comes that you can look in the archives and see, and it says, “In consultation with the president, we’ve decided that we are not going to release the second report.”

BRIAN: Wow.

KEVIN SCHULTZ: Well, this leads to this incredible scene where the head of the Census, Robert Burgess and Conrad Taeuber, have already been invited to go to the conference of the American Sociological Association to talk about the data.

And they get up there in front of their panel and they basically read the report saying we’re not allowed to talk about the data that we had intended to talk about. And people ask them questions, and they say repeatedly no comment, no comment, no comment.

So the sociologists get angry. They say, this is the first time that the federal government has actually gone through the process of writing a report and then suppressed it due to politics.

BRIAN: Yeah. So you’ve referred to politics. Kevin, was there something about the argument made by the Jewish groups opposing asking this question that really resonated more broadly that helped them win the day?

KEVIN SCHULTZ: I think the Jewish organizations recognized the importance of falling back on the strong American tradition of liberal individualism, of we are all individuals, we do not want to have a large entity like the government looking over our shoulder the whole time and placing us in whatever groups it sees fit.

So they used this language, citing the First Amendment right to privacy, citing the fact that Americans are standing on their own as individuals.

Catholics, on the other hand, they were pulling from a different American tradition. Catholics themselves have a longstanding history of advocating the benefits of a community and talking in terms of is it good for the lowest member of the community as well as the well-to-do members of the community.

And so Catholics were much less interested in the concern about an individual having their privacy impinged upon and more interested in the question of how will this data help the community? Where should we place the schools? Where should we place these hospitals?

But I think the communal argument that the Catholics were making lost out a bit perhaps because of the language of the Cold War that was then going on, where communism is, by definition, sort of a communal way of structuring your economy. And here in America, we’re opposed all things communist, so therefore we can’t side with that kind of argument.

BRIAN: Kevil Schultz is an historian at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His book is Tri-Faith America– How Catholics and Jews Held Post-War America to its Protestant Promise.