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Racial Reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, Half-Breeds, Mixed Parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2008

Jennifer L. Hochschild
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Brenna Marea Powell
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Abstract

Between 1850 and 1930, demographic upheaval in the United States was connected to reorganization of the racial order. Socially and politically recognized boundaries between groups shifted, new groups emerged, others disappeared, and notions of who belonged in which category changed. All recognized racial groups—blacks, whites, Indians, Asians, Mexicans and others—were affected. This article investigates how and why census racial classification policies changed during this period, only to stabilize abruptly before World War II. In the context of demographic transformations and their political consequences, we find that census policy in any given year was driven by a combination of scientific, political, and ideological motivations.

Based on this analysis, we rethink existing theoretical approaches to censuses and racial classification, arguing that a nation's census is deeply implicated in and helps to construct its social and political order. Censuses provide the concepts, taxonomy, and substantive information by which a nation understands its component parts as well as the contours of the whole; censuses both create the image and provide the mirror of that image for a nation's self-reflection. We conclude by outlining the meaning of this period in American history for current and future debates over race and classification.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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63. Annual Report of the Secretary of Interior. 51st Cong. 2nd Sess., House Exec. Doc. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1889), 2724; qtd. in Magnuson, “Making of a Modern Census,” 8. See App. Table A2 for information on the expansion of the scope of the census since its inception.

64. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2002), 27.

65. As one reader of this article has commented, the silences in the historical record sometimes speak as loudly as the spoken or written word. This is one of those occasions; we have no information on why there were no clear instructions to enumerators on how to determine fractions of black blood. Perhaps the Census Office assumed that everyone was practiced in distinguishing fractions of black blood, or it was so hostile to this Congressional mandate (see below) that it simply refused to waste any unnecessary resources on an impossible task. Analysis of the 1890 census is made more difficult by the fact that most of the original schedules for that year were later destroyed in a fire (Anderson, The American Census).

66. U.S. House of Representatives, 50th Cong., 1st Sess., H.R. 11036, A Bill to Ascertain and Exhibit the Physical Effects Upon the Offspring Resulting from the Amalgamation of Human Species (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1888), 1.

67. Qtd. in Nobles, Shades of Citizenship, 58; see also Ardizzone, “Red Blooded Americans,” 188.

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85. For more detail, see Mezey, “Erasure and Recognition.”

86. U.S. Census Office, The Statistics of the Population of the United States … From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), xii.

87. U.S. House of Representatives, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., Report of the Ninth Census (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1870), 51.

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89. Moreover, due to treaty obligations, any policy choice would need to be negotiated with the Chinese (and later Japanese) governments. The fact that foreign sovereign powers continued to claim responsibility for their citizens residing in the United States arguably enhanced Americans' perception of Asian immigrants as foreign subjects, not assimilable new Americans.

90. U.S. Senate, 44th Cong., 2nd sess. Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), v, vii.

91. On Chinese exclusion see, among other works, Gyory, Andrew, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Tichenor, Daniel, Dividing Lines: The Politics of Immigration Control in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Zolberg, Aristide, A Nation by Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Lee, Erika, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

92. U.S. House of Representatives, 45th Cong., 1st sess. Chinese Immigration: An Address to the People of the United States upon the Social, Moral, and Political Effect of Chinese Immigration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 8.

93. U.S. Congress, 44th Cong, 2nd Sess. Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 1238.

94. U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Cong., 2nd Sess. Chinese Immigration (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891), 68, 118.

95. Ibid., 153. A few speakers or officials conceded that if the number of Japanese immigrants began to approach that of the Chinese, they might well change their views (e.g. ibid., 342). But everyone preferred to postpone that issue for the future—when it did, in fact, arise, with the predictable outcome of exclusion.

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97. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables: Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 176.

98. Steuart, William, “The Conduct of the Fourteenth Census,” Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association 17 (1921): 575CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

99. Leonard, Karen, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi-Mexican-Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Melendy, H. Brett, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977)Google Scholar.

100. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population 1910: Volume 1, General Report and Analysis (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913), 129.

101. The term “Hindu” may have derived from popular terminology for language (“Hindustani”) or geographic location (“Hindustan”), but it is not clear why this term was chosen instead of other possibilities. Confusion was the dominant feature: for example, enumerators recorded incorrect language for Punjabi immigrants (Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices), and Muslim immigrants from South Asia were assigned a wide variety of mother tongues and countries of birth (Vivek Bald, “Overlapping Diasporas, Multiracial Lives: South Asian Muslims in U.S. Communities of Color, 1880–1950,” Souls 8 [2006]: 3–18).

102. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population 1910, 126.

103. U.S. House of Representatives, 51st Cong., 1st Sess. Enumeration of the Chinese Population of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 1.

104. Ibid.

105. U.S. Senate, 51st Cong., 1st Sess. Congressional Record—Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), 2979.

106. Ibid., 2982.

107. If only to show that partisan politics is never far from ideology, the Democratic Senator Eustis went on to deplore the need, if this bill passed, “to have hundreds of additional Republican enumerators…. If they want to increase the expenditures for this census and to increase their vast army of enumerators, it can be done without presenting to the Chinese residents of our country chromos and engravings. A leather tag would be much cheaper. I have no doubt that you could buy one for 10 cents and tie it to a string and let a Chinaman wear it around his neck” (ibid., 2980).

108. Ibid.

109. Mezey, “Erasure and Recognition,” 1730.

110. Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Census, 202.

111. Walker, Francis, Discussions in Economics and Statistics, vol. 2: Statistics, National Growth, and Social Economics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1899), 447Google Scholar.

112. Ibid., 439.

113. Ibid., 417–26; for a refutation, also using census data, see Gillette, J. M., “Immigration and the Increase of Population in the United States,” Social Forces 5 (1926): 3751CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114. Kennedy, Argument Adverse, 7, 12.

115. Anderson, The American Census, 133.

116. Memo by Durand, quoted in Steuart, “The Conduct of the Fourteenth Census,” 574.

117. Ibid., 575.

118. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Measuring America, 15, 37.

119. Ibid., 28. Emphasis in original.

120. Ibid., 37.

121. Walker, Discussions in Economics and Statistics, 424.

122. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Reports, 176.

123. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Circular of Information Concerning Tentative Program of the Bureau of the Census. (Washington, DC, Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1914), 2, 5.

124. Perlmann, ‘Race or People”

125. Qtd. in Ibid.

126. Senator Dillingham's Immigration Commission is outside the purview of this article, but it of course contributed the famous and then-authoritative Dictionary of Races or Peoples to the mix (U.S. Immigration Commission, Dictionary of Races or Peoples [Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1969, orig. 1911]).

127. Qtd. in Perlmann, Race or People.

128. Jacobson, Matthew, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar; King, Making Americans; Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: C. Scribner, 1916)Google Scholar.

129. Haller, John, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Larson, Edward, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Kevles, Daniel, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

130. Seltzer and Anderson, Excluding Indians Not Taxed. As one census historian put it, “One does not have to be an expert to sense that these numbers do not describe real people” (Alterman, Counting People, 293).

131. U.S. Census Office, The Statistics of the Population of the United States (1872), xiii.

132. Public policies reflected this distinction. Every state with at least a 5 percent black population enacted laws banning marriage between blacks and whites (Kennedy, Randall, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption [New York: Pantheon, 2003], 219Google Scholar), while state laws against Indian-white marriage were comparatively rare (Ingersoll, Thomas, To Intermix With Our White Brothers: Indian Mixed Bloods in the United States from Earliest Times to the Indian Removal [Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005], 241Google Scholar).

133. The census's inquiry into Indians' racial mixture coincided with increased attention in other realms of federal policy. The government “continued to discourage racial intermarriage on or near Indian reservations, for the sake of civilizing the Indians, … by encouraging mixed individuals to give up their tribal status and be separated from their tribes” (Ingersoll, To Intermix With Our White Brothers): 243–44.

134. U.S. Census Office, Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (except Alaska) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1894), 131.

135. Boas, Franz, “The Census of the North American Indians,” in The Federal Census: Critical Essays by Members of the American Economic Association, ed. American Economic Association, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1899), 51Google Scholar.

136. Katherine Moos, “Race Theory in American Ethnology: Roland Dixon and Alfred Kroeber, 1900–1930” (Senior thesis, Harvard University 1975).

137. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Measuring America, 56.

138. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Indian Population in the United States and Alaska, 1910 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 35. Dixon was remembered for this contribution to anthropology. His obituary in the journal of the American Philosophical Society praised the 1910 special census as “the most complete and accurate enumeration of the Indian population by stocks and tribes,” and called his analysis “probably the most valuable work extant dealing with the vital statistics of racially mixed marriages” (Hooton, Earnest, “Roland Burrage Dixon,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 75 [1935]: 772Google Scholar).

139. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Indian Population 1930 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937), 1, 70.

140. Gratton, Brian and Gutman, Myron, “Hispanics in the United States, 1850–1990: Estimates of Population Size and National Origin,” Historical Methods 33 (2000): 137–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Schor, “Mobilising for Pure Prestige?” provides similar data for 1910 and 1920.

141. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population, Volume II: General Report, Statistics by Subjects (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1933), 27. For discussions of closing the “front door” of European immigration while leaving open the “back door” of Mexican migration, see Zolberg, A Nation by Design; Ngai, Mae, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Montejano, David, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

142. U.S. House of Representatives, 70th Cong., 1st Sess. Hearings on A Bill to Provide for the Fifteenth and Subsequent Decennial Censuses, Pts. 1 and 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1928), part. 2, 301.

143. Qtd. in Schor, “Mobilising for Pure Prestige?”, fn. 6.

144. Ibid., 99.

145. Qtd. in Schor, “Changing Racial Categories,” 7.

146. Siegel, Jacob and Passel, Jeffrey, Coverage of the Hispanic Population of the United States in the 1970 Census: A Methodological Analysis (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1979), 7Google Scholar.

147. Qtd. in Márquez, Benjamin, LULAC: The Evolution of a Mexican American Political Organization (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 3233Google Scholar.

148. Fox, Cybelle, The Boundaries of Social Citizenship: Race, Immigration and the American Welfare State, 1900–1950 (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007)Google Scholar.

149. Marian Smith, “Other Considerations at Work: The Question of Mexican Eligibility to U.S. Naturalization before 1940,” presented at Organization of American Historians, Memphis TN, 3 Apr. 2003; Ngai, Impossible Subjects; Hattam, Ethnic Shadows.

150. Qtd. in Schor, “Mobilising for Pure Prestige?,” 99–100.

151. Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Census, Preface.

152. Alba, Richard and Denton, Nancy, “Old and New Landscapes of Diversity: The Residential Patterns of Immigrant Minorities,” in Not Just Black and White: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in the United States, ed. Foner, Nancy and Fredrickson, George (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004)Google Scholar; Kraly, Ellen and Hirschman, Charles, “Immigrants, Cities, and Opportunities: Some Historical Insights from Social Demography,” in The Immigration Experience in the United States: Policy Implications, ed. Powers, Mary and Macisco, John, Jr. (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1994)Google Scholar.

153. Authors' calculations from Sutch, Richard and Carter, Susan, eds. Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present, Millennial Edition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Cf8–64Google Scholar; these figures do not include territories outside the continental United States.

154. Ibid., table Ac1–42.

155. Joseph Ferrie, “Internal Migration,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, 1:493.

156. Hoxie, Frederick, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Snipp, American Indians.

157. Over 600,000 men died in the American Civil War, out of a population of 31,000,000. The same proportion of casualties (almost 2 percent) implies a mortality rate of well over 3,000,000 for the 1960 population of over 179,000,000.

158. Alternatively, if one considers relative rather than absolute increases in size, the United States increases in size from its current 3.7 million to over 8 million square miles.

159. Qtd. in Munroe, James Phinney, A Life of Francis Amasa Walker (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1923), 197–98Google Scholar.

160. However, see Magnuson, “Making of a Modern Census” on the constituency pressures that it did face.

161. Our thanks, here and elsewhere, to Kenneth Prewitt for giving us the census-eye view of material that we tend to approach from our vantage point as social scientists.

162. Steuart, “Conduct of the Fourteenth Census,” 572; Migration News, “Census, Welfare, California, New York City,” University of California, Davis, 22 Dec. 2004. Accessible at: http://migration.ucdavis.edu/mn/.

163. ESRI “Trends in the U.S. Multiracial Population from 1990–2000” (ESRI, 2005). Accessible at: www.esri.com/data/resources/literature.html.

164. Reynolds Farley, “The Declining Multiple Race Population of the United States: The American Community Survey, 2000–2005,” presented at Population Association of America, New York City, 29–31 Mar. 2007.

165. Francis Lieber, 1836 Memorial to Congress. Qtd. in Magnuson, “Making of a Modern Census,” 25.

166. Eckler, The Bureau of the Census, 121.

167. Office of Management and Budget, Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity (Washington, DC: Executive Office of the President, OMB Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, 1997).

168. Hispanicity returned to the national census in 1970, when a 5 percent sample was asked if their “origin or descent” were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or Other Spanish. The full population was asked about “Spanish/Hispanic origin or descent” in 1980, with answer categories identifying three nationalities (one of which was “Mexican, Mexican-American, Chicano”). In 1990, additional nationalities appeared as examples of “other Spanish/Hispanic.” In short, Hispanic ethnicity on recent censuses encompasses nationality, panethnicity, continent, political identity (“Chicano”), and a catch-all “other.”

169. Hochschild, Jennifer, “Multiple Racial Identifiers in the 2000 Census, and Then What?” in The New Race Question: How the Census Counts Multiracial Individuals, ed. Perlmann, Joel and Waters, Mary (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 340–53Google Scholar.