Accounting for Everybody

With the census seven weeks old and still unfinished, the nation was acting as apprehensive as a housewife getting a new hairdo. Many a city had a horrible premonition that it wasn't going to look as flashy as it had hoped when it finally got to the mirror. The alarm over a short count was greatest on the West Coast; city officials were using everything but moose calls and native beaters to get every last bum and baby located, quizzed and accounted for.

San Francisco, mortally afraid that it would be credited with fewer than the 827,000 inhabitants who were officially counted during a special census in 1945, was sending cops, firemen, and meter readers out to track down uncounted citizens. Seattle, which has 508,096 names in its city directory, had a fevered hunch that the census count would be less than a half million (1940 pop. 368,000). Its city council appropriated $800 to provide enumerators with free bus fares. Idaho Falls cried that it had been robbed by census-takers of 15% of its population.

Cities in other parts of the country showed the same anxieties. Scranton, Pa., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Sioux City, Iowa, were all demanding their rights and the Census Bureau expected dozens of anguished cries from the bleachers in the next few weeks. Not all of this was injured civic pride. Most cities get state tax money on a population basis and their officials thought they saw the Government depriving them of good, hard cash.

Meanwhile most people seemed to be as anxious as their mayors to get themselves counted. The average citizen had taken to asking: "Have you got counted yet?" and discussing the operation as if he had had his appendix removed.

But there were some complaints. Many citizens concluded that the census questions were either too general or subject to too much loose interpretation. Novelist Ben Ames (Leave Her to Heaven) Williams took delight in answering with literal honesty, told the census taker he had been last employed in 1912, had never finished high school (he had studied under a tutor) and that, counting meditation, he had toiled 112 hours the previous week.

None of this meant that the nation wasn't just wild to see how it looked in 1950; after all, like the woman with the new hairdo, discontented factions could always blame the operator, the solution, the curlers or the state of the weather until the next time.

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