The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses

Social Research, Summer, 2001 by William Seltzer, Margo Anderson

Although they seem to have been largely ignored in the demographic literature, a number of historians have referred to the results of these special censuses. Most relevant for the concerns of this paper are three nontreaty censuses carried out by special agents working under the auspices of the United States War Department in connection with the forced expulsion of Native American populations from their lands east of the Mississippi River pursuant to the Indian Removal Act of 1830. These three nontreaty censuses were: the 1835 census of the Eastern Cherokee (Foreman, 1953 [1934]: 250), the Choctaw census of 1830 (47-48), and the Creek census of 1833 (111).

The extent to which special censuses were sometimes used as instruments of control is clear from a 1901 memoir describing a census carried out in the San Carlos Indian Reservation in what is now Arizona:

   In 1884 a complete census had been made, the tribes being enumerated under
   their head chiefs and each camp of Indians of the same tribe under its head
   man. Brass tags of different shapes with one shape for each tribe had been
   provided. The band or subdivision of a tribe was designated by a letter of
   the alphabet, and each [mem]ber of a band had his number, stamped by the
   provost officer on the tag of the proper shape and given to each Indian
   whose name was recorded in books kept for the purpose. Each man was
   required to wear his tag at all times and to produce it when called
   upon.... Any failure to comply with these regulations was severely
   punished, and in a short time the system worked to the perfection I found
   it on my arrival (Elliot, 1948: 98).

Elliot also made clear one motive for and use of the census and tag link: "Any American who would attempt to burden himself or his memory with a number of Indian names would soon be hopelessly lost, but tag numbers and the records made it very simple to locate a special individual" (1948: 98). Describing the successful use of the brass tags in wrapping up an investigation of! some off-reservation Indian deer poachers, Elliot noted "the officer ... called the band of Indians together and walking down the line without a word, only looking at their tags, selected the men he wanted.... The chief and all his band were astonished but promptly complied and their [sic] culprits were duly punished" (100-101). (Hochschild [1998: 163] recounts an almost identical system that required rubber workers in the Belgian Congo in the early 1900s to wear numbered metal tags so that it could be determined if each person's daily production quota was made.)

Internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II

The history of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is well known (see, for example, Daniels, 1981; Irons, 1983; U.S. Commission, 1997; Weglyn, 1996 [1976]). Yet only recently (Seltzer and Anderson, 2000) have the activities of the United States Census Bureau in the internment been examined systematically by those with a technical understanding about how population data systems operate. The Census Bureau tabulated, published, and widely disseminated a series of special releases, the first of which was released two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which provided extensive data on people of Japanese ancestry based on the race item in the 1940 Census. The Census Bureau also gave direct assistance to the military authorities on the West Coast by: (1) providing tract-level tabulations of Japanese Americans from the 1940 Census in January 1942; (2) posting, beginning in late February 1942, one of the most senior members of the bureau's technical staff, Calvert Dedrick, to San Francisco to assist in the evacuation and internment effort; (3) making available census-block maps showing the number of Japanese American enumerated as residing in each block; and (4) strongly supporting, through the efforts of Dedrick and the bureau's director, J. C. Capt, an ultimately unsuccessful proposal to establish a national population-registration system for military and statistical uses in the early months of the war. Despite accusations that microdata were released (Toland, 1982), the bureau has denied the charge and no definitive evidence to the contrary has emerged. Nevertheless, there now seems to be general agreement that the provision of mesodata and professional expertise violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the promises embodied in the census confidentiality laws (Prewitt, 2000).