THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 15
U.S. Border Control. The 1930 census
manifested concern with the possibil-
ity 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 ra-
cial group, it has been decided that all
persons born in Mexico, or having par-
ents born in Mexico, who are definitely
not white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or
Japanese, should be returned as Mexi-
can.”) Six years later, an edict issued by
the Census Bureau (which had become
a permanent office, under the Depart-
ment of Commerce) reversed that ruling,
effective with the 1940 census: “Mexi-
cans are Whites and must be classified
as ‘White.’ This order does not admit
any further discussion, and must be fol-
lowed to the letter.” Mexicans, as a cat-
egory, disappeared.
Censuses restructure the relationship
between a people and their rulers. “Be-
fore the Nazis could set about destroy-
ing the Jewish race,” Whitby writes,
“they had to construct it.” This they did
by taking census in the nineteen-thir-
ties. “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 ex-
plained, in 1934. Questions on the Nazi
censuses of 1938 and 1939 were those the
U.S. Congress had considered, and re-
jected, 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.
S
ecretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross
was born in 1937. He first appeared
on a U.S. census in 1940, when he was
two years old, a baby with teeth. On
April 1, 1940, a Monday, a census-taker
named Henry H. Brennan, employed
by the Department of Commerce,
counted the people on Fourth Avenue
in North Bergen, New Jersey, by walk-
ing down the street and knocking on
doors. His job was to “visit every house,
building, tent, cabin, hut, or other place
in which any person might live or stay,
to insure that no person is omitted from
the enumeration.” Brennan reported
that, on that day, two-year-old Wilbur
Ross was living with his father, a lawyer,
thirty-two; his mother, Agnes, twenty-
seven; and an uncle named Joseph Cran-
well, thirty-nine, at No. 1135. Their rented
house stood near the corner of Seventy-
ninth Street, about a block away from
a baseball diamond.
The 1940 census asked a question
about “color or race.” Brennan listed
everyone on little Wilbur Ross’s stretch
of Fourth Avenue as “white.” The 1940
census also asked about place of birth.
Ross, his parents, and Cranwell were
all born in New Jersey. Most people on
Ross’s street were born in either New
Jersey or New York, but about a third
of them were born in another country.
The 1940 census was the last U.S. cen-
sus to ask about the citizenship of “ev-
eryone foreign born.” Most of the peo-
ple on Ross’s street who had been born
in other countries were U.S. citizens.
The exceptions included, a few doors
down, at 1132 Fourth Avenue, Arendt
Herland, forty-three, born in Norway.
Under the category “Citizenship of the
foreign-born,” Brennan listed Herland
as “naturalized.” Sophie Julus, born in
Poland, a widow residing at 1145 Fourth
Avenue with her American-born
daughter and grandchildren, he listed
as an “alien.” Otto Schultz, fifty-two,
and living at 1159 Fourth Avenue, was
born in Germany. Brennan listed him
as “having first papers.” It is not clear
whether the census-taker asked to see
those papers.
Personal details recorded by census-
takers are closed to the public—closed,
even, to all government agencies except
the Census Bureau itself—for a man-
datory term of seventy-two years, an ac-
tuarial lifetime. Until then, individu-
al-level answers are strictly confidential.
But Wilbur Ross is so old—he is the
oldest person ever to have been seated
in a President’s Cabinet—that his first
census record is searchable. The 1940
U.S. census, the most recent that has
been made available to the public, was
released by the National Archives on
April 2, 2012, right on schedule.
Nevertheless, long before that, the
confidentiality of the 1940 census had
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