Making America Count

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illicit Professor of History, San Francisco State University My father is a mathematician whose bedtime stories were often problems: "A man had a four-gallon container and a six-gallon container, and he needed to measure...

...States and localities produced gazeteers at least partly to this aim, and the Federal government kept track of trade and the population...

...The rise of so-called "mental arithmetic," still primarily of value in commerce, marked the growth of public education and the diminishing importance of the elitist academy...

...all, it appeared, was movement and interrelationship...

...She adds that the "errors of 1840 did nothing to diminish the infatuation with numbers...

...Increasingly," Cohen writes, "what the colonial administrators measured is what they thought they should control...

...Freed of a slavish reliance on rules, enthusiasts maintained, the pupil would find his own techniques of rapid ciphering...

...The elevation of arithmetic to the status of an essential skill, plus the introduction of the decimal monetary system, made reckoners obsolete by the second decade of the 19th century...

...To be sure, 17th-century Puritans had been concerned, one might say obsessed, with mortality, and Massachusetts already had vital registration laws on the books in the 1640s...

...The business world was becoming increasingly all male in this era, and the stereotype of women as domestic not public, intuitive as opposed to reasonable, encouraged the presumption that the new discipline was beyond their capabilities...

...A minority, however, supported or opposed inoculation on strictly medical grounds, and whether pro or anti sought to invoke statistical support (although their carelessness in bandying about figures testified to a low level of numeracy...

...He had a background in navigation and surveying, was committed to the scientific method of Francis Bacon, and maintained a wide range of contacts that included Rene Descartes...

...To take the most controversial example, insanity was found to be rampant among Northern blacks, illustrating, apparently, that freedom was detrimental to this race...

...By the time the next epidemic hit Boston three decades later, the Providential argument had fallen apart...

...Activists like Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher battled in vain against the prejudice...

...the simultaneous and related ascent of capitalism, facilitating trading in remote lands and the great 16th-century inflation and population explosion at home...

...During the Restoration the Lords of Trade, the chief administrative unit for the British territories, demanded population totals from governors in the West Indies and Newfoundland-A prelude to a continuing desire for demographic and commercial statistics...

...And since the early manuals emphasized memory rather than reason, numbers were looked down upon at Eton, Harrow, Oxford, and Cambridge until the 19th century...

...It was no accident that the understanding of society through numbers coincided with the reform in school curricula, or that, in addition, the first statistical manual appeared in this period...

...The author also had to have psychological sophistication, a characteristic most historians spurn and few meet...

...In Cohen's judgment, this new mental activity, the search for precision and finitude, should be seen as a response to social upheaval: the rise of nationalism under the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, accompanied by the government's assertion of a right to regulate economic activity...

...one set up the equation 7:21:: 19, then multiplied the 21 by the 19 and divided by the -instead of having them determine the cost of one yard...

...Moral and political reformers in particular seemed convinced that the mere presentation of statistics constituted an effective attack on a problem, be it prostitution, drunkenness or slavery...

...The strictures were partially jettisoned only when the teaching profession was feminized in the 1840s...

...He will discover what is to be done, and invent a way to do it," claimed an 1821 text...

...And with Americans now turning considerable attention to education in general, many began to think that the process of mastering mathematics should develop the rational faculty...

...Furthermore, math was thought too difficult to explain, so that where it was part of the academic program it was taught by rote rather than understanding...

...Our skill was Patricia Cline Cohen's subject, numeracy????the quick and ready use of numbers...

...The answer is that its author had to be not only literate, an attribute historians have always appreciated, but numerate, a skill just recently admitted to have any bearing on historical analysis...

...Only certain organizations in the New World seemed interested in counting: The Virginia Company took censuses and drew up ship list totals...

...If the republican experiment promoted a concern for the education of the citizenry, it also needed hard information that proved its worth...

...Now they were manifestly inapplicable...

...At least another hundred years passed before any sort of quantification was utilized, for instance, in politics and government...

...Numbers commanded respect because they measured and weighed the very aspects of American life of which the people were most proud...

...Despite the fact that anyone could see almost all the victims were children, some ministers felt compelled to compile charts demonstrating that-to quote Reverend Jabez Fitch...

...Other parents, I heard, read to their children from the Bible or Dickens, enhancing their literacy...

...Teaching was simplified to concentrate on drilling the four basic operations, and concretized by giving the students tangible objects, such as counters, to manipulate...

...Providence made such a remarkable Distinction in striking chiefly children...

...Prodded by Petty, Parliament mandated a census in 1694...

...A New England medical specialist on madness, though, noticed that 133 black lunatics were reported in residence at the all-white asylum at Worcester, Massachusetts...

...For retailers and tradesmen there were "ready reckoners," books with hundreds of tables listing multiples of various unit prices...

...It is not hard to see how expanding overseas exploration and trade fostered an interest in numbers among sailors and navigators starting in the early years of Elizabeth's reign...

...and the Protestant Reformation...

...Formany, indeed, enumerating was tantamount to curing...

...Moreover, a consensus had developed in favor of the government nurturing economic growth, and this function depended on garnering accurate statistics...

...Texts in these fields were followed, again not surprisingly, by books applying computation and measurement techniques to business...

...The numbers fascination was not carried across the Atlantic by the early colonists...

...In 1790 and again in 1800, James Madison attempted to expand the purview of the national census to include several types of sociological data, but encountered overwhelming opposition from legislators who saw his distinctions within the social order as divisive...

...Thus, although numeracy's march forward could hardly be described as rapid, the belief in objectivity through measurement was gradually gaining adherence...

...Cohen expertly analyzes how mistakes could have been honestly, if stupidly, made...

...Nevertheless, the Madisonian point of view won out by 1820, as the concept of separate classes became acceptable...

...The celebration of growth was the celebration of republican institutions...

...This is such a sensible book that one may wonder why it was not written sooner...

...This perception was closely connected to a fresh emphasis on the loving bond between mother and child, which in turn was seen as a reason to teach girls to read-literate women, it was realized, made better mothers...

...Certainly the best feature of Cohen's consistently superior study is her attention to the relationship between numeracy and culture, Besides the central point that Americans counted, she reminds us, what and how they counted is significant...

...All the same, a look at the 1840 census-An unprecedentedly elaborate survey that was meant to document half a century's advancement and instead fueled the fires of sectional controversy-shows serious gaps in the gatherers' statistical skills...

...The first skirmish on this issue actually had taken place during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721...

...What progress numeracy made in pre-Revolutionary America stemmed, interestingly, from a gradual change in the community's thinking about divine intervention in human affairs-particularly death...

...promotional literature quantified with abandon...

...Women gave the fictions of forced servitude, he opined, and men the facts...

...The populace, more knowledgeable about numbers, had become convinced by statistical evidence that inoculation was safe...

...For the settlers themselves, mathematics remained elusive and difficult even in the 18th century, when the population and economy grew at an astounding rate...

...Though Arabic numerals began to be used in England by the mid-16th century, arithmetical curiosity was initially restricted to a few practical professions...

...One could show not simply how many perished but that the victims were the young and strong-thereby proving through a novel method the traditional belief in an omniscient God who ordained everyone's time on earth...

...By the 1830s, foreign visitors were remarking the United States' preoccupation with measuring, counting and calculating...

...The famous Rule of Three, for instance, told students that to solve the problem, "If 7 yards of cloth cost 21 shillings, how much do 19yards cost...

...In accepting numeracy, England was looking both backward and forward, adjusting to rapid change by trying to impose a traditional structure on it...

...The Aristotelian systems of classification that had previously seemed to bring order to life applied to static objects and situations with discreet characteristics...

...Cohen possesses all three qualities, and in A Calculating People they are put to illuminating use...

...With calculated mortality rates, it was possible to outline the dimensions of the calamity in a new and more profound way...

...Most Bostonians then objected to inoculation on the grounds that it removed jurisdiction over life and death from God's hands...

...In other developments, local clergy began to count their communicants as early as the mid-16th century-Albeit more as a method for reminding people of their religious obligations than as a numerical exercise...

...Quantification emerged in the 17th century as an alternative way to make sense of the world," says Cohen, "a way that would account for activities newly perceived in the interstices of the classical world...

...Unfortunately for contemporary and subsequent counters, the poll was tied to a revenue act...

...Unfortunately, such logic did not carry over to arithmetic, therefore females were not given the opportunity to attain numeracy as well...

...The publication of his investigation in a Boston medical journal (and of others elsewhere) was unhappily insufficient to counter the ammunition handed to slavery advocates, and Secretary of State John C. Calhoun outfoxed Congressman John Quincy Adams' attempt to have the Executive Branch look into the allegations...

...Literacy became widespread in the Anglo-American world between the 16th-18th centuries, while numeracy's critical period was the 17th-19th...

...Statistics signaled America's rising power and glory," Cohen writes...

...Landlubbers, somewhat analogously, developed a new enthusiasm for surveying about the same time...

...Nevertheless, Sir William Petty, an Englishman whose faith in the unbiased accuracy of figures was naively complete, originated the term "political arithmetic" in his late 17th century quest for social and economic data...

...As Cohen, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, observes, "Commercial life both triggered and then limited the development of numeracy in England...

...This set him off on a search for other mistakes, and he found that many Northern towns with exclusively white populations were listed as the homes of black idiots...

...Arithmetic began to be widely taught in this country between 1800-20, reflecting the "deep shifts in American attitudes toward commerce, democracy and gender relations...

...Inevitably, debate soon centered on whether humans had any business attempting to alter Providential patterns...

...After the turn of the 17th century, military muster lists of able-bodied men became common in England and America...

...Yet it was not until the diphtheria epidemic of 1735 that loss of life was recorded in the aggregate...

...The memory system was largely abandoned...

...The religious notion of infant damnation was being displaced by the psychological view of children as a special class of human being passing through different stages of intellectual development...

...Cohen is properly cautious in discussing the impact of proliferating numeracy on the relaxation of religious dogmatism, and on increased acceptance of taking the necessary steps for a long life in this world: "If quantitative reasoning alone did not effect this change in attitude, it may be argued that demographic reality, in the form of improved mortality, or, more precisely, a general sense of demographic reality, conflicted with established religious ideas, and it may further be argued that the growing awareness of this conflict may have induced people to perceive numerical argument as realistic...

...Probably owing to the spread of numeracy in the early part of the century, statistics continued to be equated with truth and to satisfy a deep need for certainty...

...Previously, as in England, schoolmasters had looked upon the subject with disdain as a mere business tool...

...Indicative of the prevailing attitude was the reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin voiced by a male who had compiled a book of statistics on slavery...

...Faith in the ability of youngsters to master heretofore arcane mathematical steps signaled a change in the concept of childhood, too...