Democracy's Data by Dan Bouk

Author:Dan Bouk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The honor—or maybe shame—of being the private person who resisted the census most publicly would go to Herbert Mace. He tried his best to be a martyr for freedom and privacy. But even so, not many people noticed.

Among those who did was Weldon F. Heald, another Los Angeles resident (from Altadena). To Heald, Mace’s protest missed the point. “Mr. Mace,” he explained in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, “as far as the census is concerned, is a digit who is arrogating to himself a personality out of place in statistics.”84

To know America, each American had to submit to being known. Promises of confidentiality tried to assure these individuals that their particularities would not be subject to indiscreet scrutiny—no one (apart from the Census Bureau’s employees) would even ever see Mace’s answers, or anyone else’s. Such promises were a means of securing reliable statistics.

But Mace and Tobey—and (perhaps more sympathetically) Doud and Dearborn and many, many others—worried more about their privacy than about the nation’s statistics. So they prevaricated or held their tongues or fudged or hid the truth.

In the coming years, fears that personal data might be misused proved to be devastatingly reasonable—but it wasn’t the people who wrote to Charles W. Tobey whose data was turned against them, and the income questions weren’t the problem. War was coming, and the census was about to be weaponized against people it was meant to serve.

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