In a nationwide network of nondescript office buildings, the country`s official photographer is preparing to take its decennial Polaroid of the populace, the largest and most important picture for which Americans pose, if not the most flattering.
The statistical snapshot has been taken each 10 years from the time of the first presidential George to that of the second, making it, along with war and taxes, one of the longest-running federal institutions. Within its broad borders fit the faces of every living human in the country, save a few million souls who are difficult to locate, have something to hide or are just plain antisocial.
This is not some K mart special: a few 5-by-7s, with warts and moles airbrushed away, for $9.95. The 1990 census, the most expensive ever, will end up costing $2.6 billion, roughly $10.40 per head. In its 24 offices across the country, the U.S. Bureau of the Census will employ 480,000 people, less than the Defense Department (3.3 million) and the Postal Service (764,000) but about as many as the nation`s 7,700 McDonald`s (around 460,000). Its impossible dream is to count everybody, and it expects to come within one percent of realizing it.
This time out, the U.S. population should check in at 250 million, up about 10 percent from the 226 million counted in 1980. The number could go even higher if census bureau researchers manage the truly impossible: to flush Elvis out of hiding.
After scrutinizing who the people are in the group portrait and where they are standing, state and federal agencies will redistribute booty, legislatures will redraw political districts, regions of the country will gain and lose power. States with swelling populations will send an expanded corps of congresspersons to Washington, the better to guide inflated federal contracts into their borders; those whose numbers are dwindling will play a frantic game of musical chairs in which one representative, or maybe two, ends up sitting on the floor.
The census will spark dozens of lawsuits, a primarily black, Hispanic and urban chorus chanting, ”You forgot about me”-a refrain that can fill dozens of pages when translated into lawyerese. Already, the next head count still a year away, Chicago and New York, among others, are suing the census bureau in one case and helping to defend it in another, both cases hinging on whether the final tally should include residents the bureau is unable officially to count: some undocumented aliens and homeless people, for example.
Chicago once again will witness the aldermanic shuffle, a poorly choreographed, clumsily executed dance for power. It was this post-census dance, to the beat of a redistricting lawsuit, that finally allowed Harold Washington to get his City Council majority in 1987. It is this dance that may give the city at least one and as many as four more predominately Hispanic wards after 1990.
Although there is talk that the 1990 census may result in Illinois` first Hispanic U.S. congressional district, it also seems likely that the state will lose 2 of its 22 seats in the House of Representatives, according to estimates by the Washington consulting firm that was contracted by the Illinois legislature to redraw the state`s districts after 1980.
Kimball Brace, the president of Election Data Services, says that California, Texas and Florida look to be the big winners, standing to gain six, three and three seats, and giving them approximately one-fourth of the 435 votes in the House. New York may lose three as the nation`s population continues to migrate South and Southwest, in search of sunshine or nachos. Republicans, Brace says, seem likely to gain power as the population keeps moving to the suburbs and their sedate, status quo-encouraging lifestyle.
While all this political shifting is going on, demographers and market researchers will be having a field day at their desks. When the survey tallying is completed, in 1991, available to numbers crunchers will be everything from the country`s racial profile to the number of its citizens living in mobile homes.
One thing they will lack is up-to-date plumbing data. Question H25, ”How many bathrooms do you have?” will not be asked this time, the victim of a federal paperwork reduction law. ”A complete bathroom,” the 1980
questionnaire explains (italics theirs), ”is a room with flush toilet, bathtub or shower, and wash basin with piped water.”
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”If you want to know anything about life in the United States, the major source of information for anyone is the U.S. census,” says Douglas S. Massey, director of the University of Chicago`s Population Research Center. ”It`s a major tool of just about everything in the U.S.”
The census, adds William Kruskal, a statistics professor at the same university, is ”the biggest statistical operation in the government, perhaps in the country, perhaps in the world, for that matter.”
In a paper published in 1983, Kruskal argues that the census goes beyond the accumulation of data. It is, he writes, ”one of the few national, secular ceremonies in a Western world with not many encompassing ceremonies . . . left to it.”
The census is personal and universal; ”painless, and even beneficial”;
mandated by the Constitution; and takes place at intervals far enough apart to make it ”both routine and something of a novelty,” he says.
”We enter the census system as individual identities with our handfuls of personal characteristics; then later we receive back from the census a group snapshot of ourselves at the ceremonial date,” he writes.
”The snapshot, I must say, is like many family pictures, a little blurry but recognizable and fascinating to compare across the decades.”
In the paper, Kruskal quotes New Yorker writer E.J. Kahn Jr., from his book ”The American People/The Findings of the 1970 Census”: ”The Census Bureau is the only arm of the federal government whose operators touch (at least in theory) the life of every single person physically present in the United States at a given moment in history.”
Martha Farnsworth Riche, a senior editor of American Demographics magazine, compares the census to a long look in the mirror.
”We need this once-every-ten-year reality therapy,” she says. ”I notice Barbara Bush was saying she still sees the pretty 16-year-old” when she sees her reflection. ”Every now and then you`ve got to look in the mirror and see what`s really there.
”When we see that portrait, it makes us stop and maybe acknowledge changes that we kind of knew were going on but hadn`t really adjusted to.”
As an example, she says, the 1990 census will include questions that make it possible for respondents to define more accurately the nature of household relationships. This will help indicate the number of blended families as opposed to traditional families, as well as the number of unmarried couples and unmarried gay couples.
”Very few people realize that even among middle-aged people, one in four are single,” Riche says. ”Business planners, schools just sort of assume that if you`re middle aged, you`re married.
”We`re splintering into more and more diverse households,” she says,
”but we still make a lot of decisions on the basis of a so-called `norm.`
And I think people will have to see the numbers before they realize that,
`Hey, everybody isn`t in a traditional family.` ”
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For all the census` focus on people, a story about it can very easily become one of forms and folders, pamphlets and worksheets, reports and bulletins-a swamp of numbers and sociological classifications committed to paper in neat charts and tables.
Using its data, the bureau publishes reports on most any group you can imagine, and a reporter undertaking such a story soon finds himself neck-deep in printed matter: Ask a question, get a booklet. At a census bureau regional office in suburban Westchester, temporarily rented for the 1990 effort, a good portion of the desks, even, are made of paper: a cardboard slab laid across two cardboard pedestals.
”We are a paper mill,” acknowledges Angele Johnson, information specialist for the bureau`s Chicago regional office.
A new development for 1990 may trim the bureau`s paperwork a bit. Known as TIGER, for Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, it is, in simple terms, a $275 million map, one that seems likely to have significant impact on everything from fast-and-easy recall of census data to political redistricting to market research to the efficiency of delivery services.
The first nationwide computer mapping system, it is revolutionary because the same symbology and scale are used mapwide, providing a seamless digital representation of the entire nation. After the 1990 census, workers will add survey results to the map. The resulting TIGER database will be available to the public; already, private firms and universities are writing the software for it.
TIGER-created by the bureau and the United States Geological Survey on deadline during the past seven years (and still being refined as this is being written)-will provide for the first time ”the statistical geography of the country all the way down to the block level,” says Scott Deuel, geographic coordinator for the bureau`s Chicago region.
It is a bold and massive undertaking, ”the sort of thing someone in the private sector can`t do,” says Deuel. However, he adds, ”once it`s produced, it`s very cheap to maintain.”
”It is basically a method of handling spatial data,” says Michael Dobson, Rand McNally`s vice president of cartographic services and a consultant to the census bureau on TIGER. ”For instance, you could enter a data base and say to it, `Show me areas of the City of Chicago that have education level of college, population density of X, and an average income of $47,000.` ”
