census, eugenics, computers
May 8, 2019 1:17 PM Subscribe
"A racial category for Chinese was added after railroad companies began importing cheap, exploitable laborers from China. Categories for “mulatto” came after the abolition of slavery caused a panic about the dangers of racial mixing. Questions about mental health and race were first added at the behest of a Southern senator right before the outbreak of Civil War. The results seemed to show that free blacks living in Northern states were on average 11 times more likely to be insane than Southern blacks living in slavery. Such questionable statistics were taken up by Southern politicians to bolster racist theories and argue against abolition." [A longread on Hollerith, eugenics in the US, Nazi Germany and more]
I feel fairly certain that categories for black people and their quantity of white heritage existed during slavery, considering one of the preferred ways of making more slaves was to rape the ones you already owned.
posted by Autumnheart at 4:35 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Autumnheart at 4:35 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
Somewhat related, the pseudo-science of Eugenics was the topic on Fresh Air today. Good stuff to maybe get prejudiced relatives to listen to, if they are open to learning a little history. (and if you have such relatives, who are not hard to find these days)
posted by puddledork at 4:49 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by puddledork at 4:49 PM on May 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
Like puddledork, this post also got me thinking of the Fresh Air program today - here's a link to the show, an interview with Daniel Okrent and discussion of themes in new book Guarded Gate.
posted by exogenous at 5:43 PM on May 8, 2019
posted by exogenous at 5:43 PM on May 8, 2019
A far more likely explanation for a greater proportion of insanity among free northern blacks than that freedom somehow drove them insane is that when slaves became too mentally ill to work or otherwise be exploited, slave owners simply turned them out, and the survivors filtered up North.
Which would give the lie to yet another facet of the myth of the benign paternalism of slavery.
posted by jamjam at 6:29 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
Which would give the lie to yet another facet of the myth of the benign paternalism of slavery.
posted by jamjam at 6:29 PM on May 8, 2019 [9 favorites]
Or that designations of mental fitness were inherently biased towards societal utility as defined by that society's inherently-biased institutions...
posted by turbowombat at 6:37 PM on May 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
posted by turbowombat at 6:37 PM on May 8, 2019 [6 favorites]
No, the data was false. The 1840 census was more complicated than the previous one and typeset in a way that encouraged all `insane or idiot' family members to be ticked as black `insane or idiot' family members. Even while the results were being trumpeted by the slavocracy it was pointed out that ``many of the towns reported to harbor insane blacks in fact had no black population at all! A study of the printed statistics of other northern states turned up the same pattern.'' (From A Calculating People, Patricia Cline Cohen, other excellent topics too, q.v.)
posted by clew at 7:06 PM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]
posted by clew at 7:06 PM on May 8, 2019 [24 favorites]
^ Oh my god, I was interested in this so I googled and found this paper with an image of the form and its eighty horizontal columns and wow..
The revelation of Jarvis’ findings fueled a storm of protest. Representative and former President John Quincy Adams, citing the “atrocious misrepresentations” of the Census, demanded that Calhoun, who as Secretary of State was responsible for the Census, make the needed corrections. Adams wrote in his diary that Calhoun “writhed like a trodden rattlesnake on the exposure of his false report to the House that no material errors have been discovered in the census of 1840.” Nevertheless Calhoun refused to change the reported census results, calling them “unimpeachable.” Despite “the manifest and palpable, not to say gross errors” of the 1840 census, the results were allowed to stand.
A. The importance of UX research & design.
B. The story sounds awfully familiar, where have I heard about an outrageous report about an official function going wrong being filed away and never acted on...
posted by bleep at 9:24 PM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
The revelation of Jarvis’ findings fueled a storm of protest. Representative and former President John Quincy Adams, citing the “atrocious misrepresentations” of the Census, demanded that Calhoun, who as Secretary of State was responsible for the Census, make the needed corrections. Adams wrote in his diary that Calhoun “writhed like a trodden rattlesnake on the exposure of his false report to the House that no material errors have been discovered in the census of 1840.” Nevertheless Calhoun refused to change the reported census results, calling them “unimpeachable.” Despite “the manifest and palpable, not to say gross errors” of the 1840 census, the results were allowed to stand.
A. The importance of UX research & design.
B. The story sounds awfully familiar, where have I heard about an outrageous report about an official function going wrong being filed away and never acted on...
posted by bleep at 9:24 PM on May 8, 2019 [8 favorites]
Maybe this is tangential, but I find it weird and sometimes a bit jarring that although the general trend in historiography seems to be towards more nuanced, broader, more social, less "Great Men"-centric theories, when it comes time to pick out a villain it seems we fall back on the same old narratives. That is, progress is a group effort but evil is apparently an individual event.
Hollerith was a pretty canny businessman but he didn't create the mechanical data-processing revolution any more than Bill Gates personally created the PC revolution a little less than a century later. (And IBM's Thomas Watson didn't invent the computer any more than Ray Kroc invented the hamburger.) They were people who happened to be standing in the right place at the right time and had the right means--social and financial capital--to ride a wave of technical progress, much of which was the natural consequence of progress in various fields (metallurgy, electronics, precision manufacturing, statistics, gears and power transmission, etc.). They might have seen the future a little earlier than their contemporaries, but they certainly weren't the only ones capable of seeing it.
As the article notes, Hollerith wasn't the first to use punched-paper to represent data for mechanical processing; ticker tape and teletype machines did that, and were in wide use by 1880. Charles Babbage built and Ada Lovelace programmed the first mechanical computers more than two decades before Hollerith was even born.
Hollerith deserves some credit for devising the discrete paper punchcard, which shaped the form of computing machinery for decades (and continues to do so; there's a reason the default width of a character-based terminal window is what it is, which you can trace back, eventually, to Hollerith's decision to model the first punchcards off of a then-common US bank note). But similar things were in use; Hollerith credits railroad tickets as an inspiration, and there were other systems which used edge-punched or notched cards for sorting.
The field was evolving rapidly; Hollerith may also have been the first to use electricity to sense and tabulate holes in cards rather than purely mechanical means (or at least, he got a patent for it, which is not always the same thing), but it's hard to imagine someone else not coming up with the idea pretty quickly, if he'd gotten run over by a carriage or died of typhoid or whatever. And a less savvy or less-well-connected businessman might not have been able to get the government funding that Hollerith did via the Census Bureau for 1890, but electronic tabulation was such a step up from mechanical or hand tabulation that it was only a matter of time before someone saw the obvious application.
It's not so much that Hollerith or IBM enabled efficient, mechanized bureaucracy -- it's that burgeoning nations and their bureaucracies created a huge demand for more efficient ways to process data. The data was there, the need to process it was there, and the result was a vacuum into which anyone with a suitable solution could have stepped. Hollerith made it there first, and that first-mover advantage, combined later with Watson's managerial acumen, created a lead that persisted (in the form of IBM) for decades. But had either men not been there, it's ridiculous to imagine that someone else wouldn't have stepped in.
As for Dehomag (the German subsidiary of IBM), they seem largely guilty of doing a vile job well, where someone else might have done the same job more poorly or less efficiently. The underlying demand by the Nazi party to track, locate, and eventually exterminate its Jewish population would not have disappeared had Watson ended operations in Germany when the Nazis came to power. Perhaps another contractor, in doing a worse job because they might have had to work around IBM's patents for its machinery, would have allowed more people to escape, or perhaps the Gestapo would have just cast a wider net. Other genocides past and since have been carried out with far more primitive technology. (Stalin's executioners did just fine with paper dossiers and rubber stamps, and if a few people were murdered for having the wrong last name, it didn't seem to slow them down much.)
It's not hard to construct a counternarrative, that the reliance on foreign-made equipment may have retarded the domestic German computing-machinery industry. If the Germans had taken all the money that went out the door in the 30s to IBM via Dehomag and IBM Zurich, and instead given it to Konrad Zuse, they might have ended up with a wartime advantage in mechanical computers and their associated cryptographic applications. As it was, they didn't and the US advantage in mechanical computers probably assisted in breaking Enigma and other mechanical ciphers.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:31 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
Hollerith was a pretty canny businessman but he didn't create the mechanical data-processing revolution any more than Bill Gates personally created the PC revolution a little less than a century later. (And IBM's Thomas Watson didn't invent the computer any more than Ray Kroc invented the hamburger.) They were people who happened to be standing in the right place at the right time and had the right means--social and financial capital--to ride a wave of technical progress, much of which was the natural consequence of progress in various fields (metallurgy, electronics, precision manufacturing, statistics, gears and power transmission, etc.). They might have seen the future a little earlier than their contemporaries, but they certainly weren't the only ones capable of seeing it.
As the article notes, Hollerith wasn't the first to use punched-paper to represent data for mechanical processing; ticker tape and teletype machines did that, and were in wide use by 1880. Charles Babbage built and Ada Lovelace programmed the first mechanical computers more than two decades before Hollerith was even born.
Hollerith deserves some credit for devising the discrete paper punchcard, which shaped the form of computing machinery for decades (and continues to do so; there's a reason the default width of a character-based terminal window is what it is, which you can trace back, eventually, to Hollerith's decision to model the first punchcards off of a then-common US bank note). But similar things were in use; Hollerith credits railroad tickets as an inspiration, and there were other systems which used edge-punched or notched cards for sorting.
The field was evolving rapidly; Hollerith may also have been the first to use electricity to sense and tabulate holes in cards rather than purely mechanical means (or at least, he got a patent for it, which is not always the same thing), but it's hard to imagine someone else not coming up with the idea pretty quickly, if he'd gotten run over by a carriage or died of typhoid or whatever. And a less savvy or less-well-connected businessman might not have been able to get the government funding that Hollerith did via the Census Bureau for 1890, but electronic tabulation was such a step up from mechanical or hand tabulation that it was only a matter of time before someone saw the obvious application.
It's not so much that Hollerith or IBM enabled efficient, mechanized bureaucracy -- it's that burgeoning nations and their bureaucracies created a huge demand for more efficient ways to process data. The data was there, the need to process it was there, and the result was a vacuum into which anyone with a suitable solution could have stepped. Hollerith made it there first, and that first-mover advantage, combined later with Watson's managerial acumen, created a lead that persisted (in the form of IBM) for decades. But had either men not been there, it's ridiculous to imagine that someone else wouldn't have stepped in.
As for Dehomag (the German subsidiary of IBM), they seem largely guilty of doing a vile job well, where someone else might have done the same job more poorly or less efficiently. The underlying demand by the Nazi party to track, locate, and eventually exterminate its Jewish population would not have disappeared had Watson ended operations in Germany when the Nazis came to power. Perhaps another contractor, in doing a worse job because they might have had to work around IBM's patents for its machinery, would have allowed more people to escape, or perhaps the Gestapo would have just cast a wider net. Other genocides past and since have been carried out with far more primitive technology. (Stalin's executioners did just fine with paper dossiers and rubber stamps, and if a few people were murdered for having the wrong last name, it didn't seem to slow them down much.)
It's not hard to construct a counternarrative, that the reliance on foreign-made equipment may have retarded the domestic German computing-machinery industry. If the Germans had taken all the money that went out the door in the 30s to IBM via Dehomag and IBM Zurich, and instead given it to Konrad Zuse, they might have ended up with a wartime advantage in mechanical computers and their associated cryptographic applications. As it was, they didn't and the US advantage in mechanical computers probably assisted in breaking Enigma and other mechanical ciphers.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:31 AM on May 9, 2019 [7 favorites]
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I own a copy of the 1903 Statistical Atlas of the United States (link goes to gorgeous high res scans), compiled from the census of 1900, which has over 100 color plates. As a data viz geek, it's one of my prized posessions. The fact that the heads of the Census Bureau would not have welcomed me into the country does rather diminish any positive feelings of course, but on the other hand, statistics gathered a century ago to whip up nativist fears can be used today as ammunition against them. You cannot look at these graphs and pretend that we are currently facing an unprecedented crisis of mass immigration compared to historical levels in 1900. It's strangely comforting knowing your demographic hasn't been written out of the history of the country, even knowing the intentions behind the writing. The alternative to being feared is being invisible.
Anyway, lest this thread turn into a general luddite skepticism toward population statistics and new ways of gathering and reporting them, let's remember that these same tools were also being used, in the same era, to fight inequality and racial injustice.
posted by hyperbolic at 3:36 PM on May 8, 2019 [14 favorites]