The Year of the Census - 14 April 2000

Just one year after the Constitution of the United States came into effect, Congress decided it was time to discover how many human beings were alive in the former colonial territory and could now call themselves Americans.

In simpler words: it was time to count the population. And Congress passed, in 1790, something called the Census Act.

And the first count taken in that year revealed there were 3,929,000 breathing living people or as my old golf pro used to say when I asked him how he was: "Above ground and mobile."

Well today there are 248 millions, or I should say were, at last count which was for 1990. The Act required a census to be taken every 10 years and today the guess is that the round figure is well over 260 millions.

So: this year's census. I don't believe that in more than half a century of this correspondence I ever talked before about the American census because I suppose there's never been much of a news or a social story in it.

The census was called, people filled in or, here, "filled out" the forms, sent them back, many millions were called on by newly appointed counters who went door to door doing for the sick, the disabled, the very old, the reluctant, what most people had done willingly for themselves.

But this year, not to talk about the current census would be to miss a national story that is hot, contentious, hilarious, absurd, comic and like so many other recent debates in American society springs from a new or more widespread popular concern for, not to say obsession with, rights - individual rights.

People who never in their lives pronounced the word "constitutional" now use it everyday with much heat and spittle, claiming as "rights" many things which are not even mentioned in the Constitution.

It used to be taken for granted that filling in - filling out - the census form was a normal duty of citizenship. The word "duty", by the way, seems to have vanished from public discourse.

But a tremendous hullabaloo has arisen over the question, not previously shouted out loud, of whether being required to answer many questions on the census forms isn't an invasion of individual privacy.

Now in debates, I mean actual debates in Congress and elsewhere, you'll often hear law makers or lawyers in trials talk about the sacredness of the right to privacy. This is a rhetorical device - an attempt to sway emotions. The speakers don't usually go on about it because the Constitution does not mention any right of privacy.

But came in the early 1970s the dreadful Watergate affair, when President Nixon was able to cover up a criminal conspiracy for so long because for so long he claimed time and again that he was not subject to the law which could make him reveal the content of dialogue, conversations, about public business taped in his presidential office.

And many of those conversations were exclusively about covering up a bungled attempt to steal or tape confidential material from the files of the Democratic - the opposition - Party.

It sounds like a simple petty criminal blunder but it came to entail paying out enormous sums of hush money to the burglars and others in the conspiracy. And where did those enormous monies come from? From a public fund that raised money for the re-election of President Nixon.

Well the Supreme Court decided that the White House tapes were government files and constituted therefore, on Mr Nixon's part, perjury, obstruction of justice and criminal misuse of government documents. If only Mr Nixon had remembered sometimes to shut off his recording machine he might be there still.

Anyway after the Watergate mess, which for the first time in history saw a president resign in disgrace, that same year - 1974 - Congress passed an Invasion of Privacy Act and ever since public men from the president down have been very careful about using private papers, phone calls, tapes, whatever as evidence to incriminate someone.

With this act in place and well publicised there has been, in the past 20 years or more, growing awareness on the part of the public of how much some outsider - an insurance company, a bank, a department store, real estate broker - has a right or doesn't have a right to know about you.

And with the arrival of the internet this awareness has grown into a general fear, almost a paranoia, that somebody somewhere is going to know too much and take advantage of you.

Not least, and especially after President Reagan's successful if vague campaign to, as he put it, to "get government off our backs", people are questioning how much the government has a right to know about you and your private life, resources, relationships and so on.

So suddenly what could more lustily feed this fear, this apprehension, than the year of the census?

Ten years ago, maybe back to 1790, most people obediently answered the questions on the census form and then went about their business without a second thought.

But let it be noted, as a footnote to American history, that a fairly new immigrant in, I believe, Pennsylvania - a refugee from a dictatorship - received this year's census form and at once cried: "What is this - a police state?"

The forms themselves vary, of course, from decade to decade.

This year the 2000 census forms ask many of the questions they've asked for years, for centuries, but for the first time the census bureau reports: "There is a growing segment of the population which seems to think that we're invading people's privacy."

So much so that while the forms were supposed to be returned by last Tuesday only 60% are so far in. The official date has therefore been moved on to the end of April, by which time the bureau will send off 500,000 counters to go begging from door to door and many of those people expect the door to be shut in their faces.

I ought to say that this time there are two forms distributed arbitrarily - a simple one with about eight questions and another form with pages and pages, 53 questions, and it takes an intelligent, educated, hard-concentrating responder about 40 minutes to answer.

Most people who get the short form, I must say, are only too happy about it when they hear that the other form pokes into everything from your health, income, prosperity, to the number of flushing toilets in your home, to details about family mental illness and other revealing clinical details.

Well, popular discontent on several grounds but mainly the invasion of privacy, of fear of government harassment got so bad that last Friday the Senate of the United States approved a resolution - the resolution has no binding force - urging that "no American will be prosecuted, fined or in any way harassed by the federal government."

This resolution is saying, in effect: 'Go ahead, tick everything off, don't be afraid.' Yet the gorgeous irony in it is that the resolution gives any respondent permission to skip - that's to refuse to answer - one of the three or four most basic questions in any country's census, the question: "What is your race?"

Indeed the first grumblings about this year's census forms started with what has become, in the past 40-odd years ever since the end of racial segregation, what's become perhaps the touchiest of social questions.

Once Negroes disliked being called Negroes we adopted "blacks" as acceptable.

Many, especially the more literate, preferred to call themselves or be called African-Americans.

But then, after a flood of Asian immigrants on the West Coast from Vietnam and Cambodia, Hong Kong, Korea - many of them wished to have a separate identification.

The young golfing star Tiger Woods for instance does not like being called black or Asian exclusively. He once described himself as African-Asian-Thai-American. His father was a black soldier, his mother a Thai - once Siamese.

Unlike the immigrants of a century ago exactly, whom President Teddy Roosevelt urged to forget their hyphens - "Let's have," he said, "no more Italian-Americans, German-Americans, Russian-Americans" - the last quarter century's wave of immigrants, from the Caribbean especially, has wanted to preserve their origins and be known as (for a violent example) Cuban-Americans.

So the census bureau, under pressure from the Senate and the politically correct, has given up on asking people, perhaps, the most informative question of all.

In one thing and only one has the bureau shown, of all things, a single flash of common sense: they have abandoned the usage of "Native American" for "American Indian" after a far-reaching tidal wave of protests from Americans who, like my wife, insist that having been born here they are nothing but native Americans.

I have to say that this first blow for common sense in this rigmarole about race was struck by the current chieftain of an Indian tribe - the relic of an Indian tribe - in New England.

He was invited to do the annual commencement speech at a famous college which was founded in the 18th century for the education of local Indians. He accepted on one condition: that the invitation forms to the accompanying banquet should be changed and he should be described, not as a famous native American but as simply the first American Indian to address the college.

PS the final twist to the story, which might have been added by Anatole France or better Woody Allen, was given last week when a famous American was sued for releasing to the public private letters of a woman who has accused him of sexually groping her.

The man says the letters show a more amicable relationship. A federal judge says that they are public papers since they were kept in the White House and the man has violated the Privacy Act.

The man's name is William Jefferson Clinton.

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