Counting on the Census?
Skerry, Peter
man, though he took on and defeated fighters like Jess Willard (6' 6", z5o pounds) and Luis Angel Firpo (6' 3", 23o pounds). Beat them badly, in Willard's case flooring him seven times and...
...Next, he advocates that statisticians be given flexibility to determine the demographic techniques used, and that demographic snapshots be taken more often so that less will ride on the once-every-ten-years mega-count...
...And why do the media pile on the bandwagon, such as when the New York Times called a court ruling against sampling a The American Spectator " J w l y / A u g u s t 2 o o o 91 "setback for the democratic process" or when the Washington Post called the minority undercount "indefensible...
...No matter what the Census Bureau decides on adjustment for 20o0, the outcome will most certainly be challenged legally, as it has in years past...
...Census was designed by the Founders to determine congressional apportionment and tax-burden distribution-two decidedly political spheres-making the Census Bureau's recent attempts to portray itself as nonpolitical wrongheaded...
...And what about the undercount...
...In the midst of such controversies, the Census Bureau, which likes to see itself as nonpartisan, can't win...
...N ZZZIIZZIIIZZIIZZZZZIZIIZ2ZZIZIIZ21ZZZIIIIII211ZIZZZIZZZIIIIIIIIZIIIZI One Nation, Under Count Counting on the Census...
...This is an ambitious book, filled with smart insights, and it's fun to read...
...First, Skerry argues Congress should give the bureau explicit directions about what it wants the census to demonstrate...
...The social gospel advocates, far more secular and worldly, were on the other side in that struggle...
...Fogel writes...
...He teaches at the University of Chicago and appears to know a lot about many, many things, including nutrition and its relation to body size...
...But wouldn't it have been neat if the Manassa Mauler had worn at least one-sixth of a Star of David on those spotless white boxing trunks...
...It is thanks to these large stakes that Congress and the media have questioned a great many technical and procedural decisions made regarding the last three decennial tallies: How will minorities be categorized...
...Which brings us to reawakening number four, which Fogel says began in the 196o's and blossomed in the 198o's and 199o's...
...The fact is, the modern census is more than a head count...
...So...Max Baer wasn't the first uncircumcised Jewish heavyweight champion after all...
...And in The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, he explains how religion and politics have interacted to produce four separate periods in American history, the last of them unfolding before us today...
...This will guarantee that the census remains contentious, since more likely than not the court challenges will be flamed as an issue of rights--the right to be counted, the right to be represented, e t c . - rather than one of technical public policy...
...The problem for Fogel, however, is that he's less interested in these folks and their leaders (such as Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday) than he is in the modernists who advocated a new social gospel...
...Minority leaders need to stir up the pot to gain dues-paying members and organize their communities...
...roughly 189o to 193o...
...Our family," he told Roger Kahn, "was pretty strongly Irish, with Cherokee Indian blood on both sides and a Jewish strain from my father's grandmother, Rachel Solomon...
...its figures help to determine the disposition of federal funding...
...and its population numbers are used to decide how 435 congressional seats are apportioned to the states...
...This awakening-in the sense of enthusiastic revival meetings and mass conversions-took place only among traditional Protestants, dubbed fundamentalists...
...How intrusive should long-form census questions on income, marital status, or family structure be...
...after all, how is counting the nation's population every ten years a political exercise...
...But there's one big problem...
...By creating a more accurate count of the entire population, adjustment could actually lower the ratio of minorities to whites, but there's no way to tell if or to what extent that will happen until the count is completed and analyzed...
...Skew acknowledges undereounting occurs-how could it not in a nation of such mobile people?-but points out that the national undercount has steadily improved to the point that less than 2 percent of the population was missed in 198o and 199 o. Minority undercounts, too, have improved, just not as quickly as the white undercount...
...Months later, the politics of the decennial enumeration remain with us...
...It "provided much of the popular ideological foundation" for the American revolution, FRED BARNES is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and co-host of"The Beltway Boys" on the Fox News Channel...
...charging racism in the census is a low-cost, easy way to do it...
...Race, Group Identity, and the Evasion of Politics Peter Skerry Brookings Institution / 248 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY TracyRobinson C ensus Day--during which all American households were supposed to fill out and return their forms- came and went on the first of April...
...The fourth religious awakening of intense, emotional Christianity that Fogel cites as the source of the current distinctive era in polities hasn't really occurred, at least not in the United States...
...Because it was this social gospel crowd that had the political clout to create "the basis for the welfare state," provide "the ideological foundation and political drive" for labor and civil rights reforms, and lay the groundwork for the feminist agenda of the late 196o's and early 197o's...
...But it wasn't the Biblical faith of the social gospelers that was intensified...
...The first religious revival erupted in the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century and is associated with New England preacher Jonathan Edwards and English evangelist George Whitefield...
...Fogel argues their goals often coincided with those of the fundamentalists...
...Those difficult issues are properly dealt with in the private, not the public, realm...
...Beyond that, everyone concerned should have "a more realistic appreciation of the limits of what the census can reasonably be expected to do...
...Another route is policy making by litigation, or going to court...
...Peter Ske W, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says such controversy is to be expected...
...The initial awakenings are ones we all know...
...In Counting on the Census...
...The demographic information that results helps us understand what our population looks like and how it has changed over time...
...Activists and politicians concerned about race have focused on statistical adjustment, urging the bureau to use sampling and other statistical techniques to compensate for minorities who are missed by the count...
...But wait: there remains one part of the Dempsey rdsum6 that this thinking fan, for one, was unacquainted with--his decidedly mixed ethnic origins...
...The second occurred The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism Robert William Fogel U~iversity of Chicago Press 320 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY Fred Barnes among Protestant sects, mostly in the North, and is identified with the antislavery movement and the desire to create a righteous land to which Jesus Christ would return in the Second Coming...
...Skerry believes such dramatic confrontations are related more to minority power and rights issues than they are to the census itself...
...In truth, this didn't happen often...
...Though secular himself, he's interested in the role of religion in spurring historic changes in America...
...Should respondents be able to cheek off more than one ethnic category at a time...
...By leaving the details up to the supposed experts at the Census Bureau--part of the Commerce Department, which is, of course, headed by a political appointee--Congress has allowed the party in power in the executive branch to do what it will with the count...
...Even religious leaders who have called repeatedly for a reawakening don't believe it has happened, and they're better judges than Fogel...
...The census is "inescapably a political undertaking," Skerry says, which means it will undoubtedly get tangled up in the public battles of the day...
...the spirit of the Western frontier come East to win his fortune...
...Should statistical methods be used to compensate for the disproportionate numbers of minorities who fail to be counted, or should we stick to the "actual enumeration" mentioned in the Constitution...
...I think he's on the high side with this estimate, but the real problem is that the embrace of orthodox Christianity by millions of middle-class Americans during the past two decades doesn't truly constitute a reawakening...
...The biggest political achievement of the fundamentalists was Prohibition...
...Congress has mandated that specific, accurate numbers be collected, but has not expressly legislated how it should be done...
...Beat them badly, in Willard's case flooring him seven times and shattering his cheekbone...
...Again, Joyce Carol Oates, the thinb ing fan's fight buff, would look back at those years and write: Has there ever been a fighter quite like the young Dempsey?--the very embodiment of hunger, rage, the will to do hurt...
...Still, Skerry deftly shows that adjustment is not a panacea, as it creates both winners and losers...
...So, what should be done...
...Adjustment would produce all sorts of unpredictable results," he warns...
...By the end of the 198o's, enthusiastic religion had about 60 million adherents, representing one-third of the electorate," he notes...
...Outside the ring, however, there was the Dempsey known by all who met him as a genial, fun-loving man-about-town, a gent who went out of his way to avoid hurting people (as when the macho Ernest Hemingway challenged him to a sparring match and Dempsey laughed it off--a humanitarian snub for which the writer never forgave him...
...Fogel starts to get in trouble with the .. third awakening, which lasted from R obert William Fogel is a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has written brilliantly about American slavery and the impact of railroad building in the nineteenth century...
...At its core, the census problem is a problem of legislative delegation...
...N The Big Sleep Continues...
...It was their political dreams that were awakened...
...Instead, many Christians were either 92 July~August 2000 _9 The American Spectator...
...Overwrought perhaps, but such is the Dempsey remembered in history, the Manassa Mauler whose "will to do hurt" produced the first million-dollar gates as hot-eyed crowds came to see him destroy, in turn, Georges Carpentier, Firpo, Billy Miske, and Tommy Gibbons...
...It also spawned the women's suffrage movement and the initial effort to ban liquor...
...To many, politics and the census do not logically seem connected...
...Skerry writes that "to accept the need for [census] data should also be to accept as inevitable both their limitations, and the constant political maneuvering that goes into their collection, interpretation, and publication...
...Statistics in and of themselves cannot effectively promote racial harmony or empowerment, and reducing the undercount will not solve lingering feelings of inequality...
...It was an exercise in ferocity that not only made Dempsey heavyweight champion but so stunned the sports world that, as John Lardner later observed: The public suddenly saw him in a new light, the two-handed fighter who stormed forward, a flame of pure fire in the ring, strong, native, affable, easy of speech, close to the people in word and deed and feeling...
...vidual, patriotic duty, appealed to the unending appetites of communities for federal dollars-was attacked this time around...
...If an adjusted census may not give black, Asian, or Hispanic political leaders the results they desire-i.e., higher population figures for their groups -why, then, do they challenge a non-adjusted census as racist...
...Even its television advertising strategy--which, rather than portraying census cooperation as an indiTRACY ROBINSON is deputy editor of The American Spectator...
...In recent decades, racial issues have been in the forefront of politics, so naturally the controversy has carried over to the census...
...he notes that the U.S...
Vol. 33 • July 2000 • No. 6
