When Congress debated an amendment to the 1910 census bill that would have mandated using McSweeney’s scheme, the strongest objection came from the American Jewish Committee in New York. “Their schedule of races is a purely arbitrary one and will not be supported by any modern anthropologists,” the committee wrote to Senator Simon Guggenheim, of Colorado. “American citizens are American citizens and as such their racial and religious affiliations are nobody’s business. There is no understanding of the meaning of the word ‘race’ which justifies the investigation which it is proposed the Census Bureau shall undertake.” In the Senate, Guggenheim declared, “I was born in Philadelphia. Under this census bill they put me down as a Hebrew, not as an American.” The amendment was defeated.
The color and racial taxonomies of the American census are no more absurd than the color and racial taxonomies of federal-government policy, because they have historically been an instrument of that policy. In 1924, the Indian Citizenship Act declared all Native peoples born in the United States to be citizens of the United States, and the federal government established the U.S. Border Control. The 1930 census manifested concern with the possibility that Mexicans who had entered the United States illegally might try to pass as Indian. To defeat those attempts, the 1930 census introduced, as a race, the category of “Mexican.” (“In order to obtain separated figures for this racial group, it has been decided that all persons born in Mexico, or having parents born in Mexico, who are definitely not white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese, should be returned as Mexican.”) Six years later, an edict issued by the Census Bureau (which had become a permanent office, under the Department of Commerce) reversed that ruling, effective with the 1940 census: “Mexicans are Whites and must be classified as ‘White.’ This order does not admit any further discussion, and must be followed to the letter.” Mexicans, as a category, disappeared.
Censuses restructure the relationship between a people and their rulers. “Before the Nazis could set about destroying the Jewish race,” Whitby writes, “they had to construct it.” This they did by taking census in the nineteen-thirties. “We are recording the individual characteristics of every single member of the nation onto a little card,” the head of an I.B.M. subsidiary in Germany explained, in 1934. Questions on the Nazi censuses of 1938 and 1939 were those the U.S. Congress had considered, and rejected, for Jews but had left intact for other “races and peoples”: “Were or are any of the grandparents full-Jewish by race?” Then began the deportations, the movement of people from punch cards to boxcars.