The Racist Origins of Silicon Valley
A century ago, America loved eugenics and was obsessed with protecting its
"superior" Anglo-American stock from the threat of immigration. Out of this
nativist vortex, the first computer was born.
Yasha Levine
About a year ago, OneZero published my dive into a corner of Americas
long-forgotten history a history of the US census and the racist origins
of modern computer technology. Given the times, I figure its worth a
repost. Because I still think this side of computer history is not known
nearly well enough.
The story starts in the 1880s, when the first commercial computer was
invented by an American engineer named Herman Hollerith (thats him up there
on business trip in St. Petersburg). It takes you on journey through the
racial politics of early 20th century America and ends up in Nazi Germany
and the Holocaust, while making a brief stop at Steven Bannon and Donald
Trumps nativist palace.
A century ago, America was in love with eugenics. It was consumed by fears
of race suicide and obsessed with the need to safe-guard its superior
Anglo-American stock from the millions of immigrants arriving on its shores.
Out of this vortex of nativist fears, the worlds first rudimentary punch
card computer was born built on order from the U.S. government for the
1890 census.
The quote in the picture above comes from a letter Herman Hollerith wrote
explaining why he ended up going with a punch card design over a
continuous ticker tape for his newfangled computation device: it would make
analyzing the racial attributes of the population much easier. The trouble
was that if, for example, you wanted any statistics regarding Chinamen, you
would have to run miles of paper to count a few Chinamen, he explained.
Racial data was front and center in his mind as he perfected his invention.
Ultimately, Holleriths technology would form the backbone of IBM, the
oldest computer company in the world a company that is still ubiquitous in
business and government, and is embedded in Americas state security
apparatus. IBMs origin story, which goes back over 130 years, offers a
glimpse into how computers, surveillance, and racist government policies
have been linked from the very beginning.
I stumbled on all of this while researching the origins of computers for my
book, Surveillance Valley. I was myself surprised by how dark and nuanced
that history is.
At the turn of 20th century, systemic anti-black racism and repression was
obviously deep and pervaded all spheres of life in America. But the
racialized thinking of that age was more expansive than that.
People forget what an openly proto-fascist country America was before World
War II. You could say that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis ruined it for
everyone. Because until they came along and took their racist theories just
a tad too far (and then lost the war), these same ideas enjoyed wide
popularity in all sectors of society.
For instance: everyone loved eugenics! Americans cheered human selective
breeding programs, and the most respected members of society advocated for
forced sterilization and the banning of immigrants deemed to be genetically
unfit. It was seen as scientific progress the wave of the future! Over
thirty states passed legislation that regulated forced sterilization on
genetic and social grounds. These laws were affirmed by the Supreme Court
and are still on the books today.
America in the early 20th century was like a racialized steampunk version of
Gattaca. You could tell people were really into this stuff when men
voluntarily enrolled their wives and kids into Fitter Families and Better
Babies contests organized in county fairs. They showcased their families in
front of crowds right alongside their hogs and cows and bragged about
the superior breeding of their familial specimens. No joke.
Just look at this 1926 article from the Milwaukee Sentinel:
A lot of this race-based eugenics stuff got toned down after World War II.
But it didnt disappear, it was (mostly) toned down and transmuted into
scientific racism and eugenics like the much celebrated the Bell Curve
theory of the 1990s or the data-based genetic obsession of Silicon Valley
today.
Anyway, heres the article. Its a long one!
Yasha Levine
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The Racist Origins of Americas Tech Industry
How the tools built to conduct the U.S. Census fueled Nazi genocide,
internment, and state-sanctioned racism and helped usher in the digital
age
On a freezing day in December 1896, an American inventor by the name of
Herman Hollerith rushed to catch a train out of the Russian city of St.
Petersburg. He wore a fur cap and a thick fur-lined coat with a huge collar
buttoned up all the way over his ears. It covered his mouth as well as his
big droopy mustache leaving just a bit of pink flesh peeking out at the
world.
Hollerith was a hypochondriac who preferred staying at home with his wife
and mother-in-law, tinkering with inventions. He hated travel, and he hated
traveling in Europe most of all. Like a 19th-century version of a tech bro,
he was obsessed with efficiency and mocked the locals for being bogged down
by time-wasting traditions. They are all living in what happened thousands
of years ago, he wrote to his wife from Italy. I saw them cutting lumber
on the road from Naples to Pompeii, and, when I got to Pompeii, I found
paintings on walls showing exactly the same way of cutting lumber.
For all his grumbling about travel, the inventor had come far in his own
life. Hollerith was only 36 years old and had been raised in a modest home
by a widowed mother in New York, yet he had just spent weeks rubbing
shoulders with aristocrats from one the most exotic royal dynasties in the
world. And now he was on his way back home with a fat and juicy contract for
his new business venture.
A few years earlier, Russian Czar Nicholas II issued an imperial decree
ordering his ministers to carry out the Russian Empires first countrywide
census. With the 1897 deadline looming, they were scrambling to comply. They
knew it was going to be a monumental task and perhaps an impossible one.
The Russian Empire had a population estimated between 100 million and 200
million people, a range that might tell you why the czar needed to carry out
a census. It stretched from Europe through the full length of Asia, a
landmass almost three times the size of the United States. To count all
these people, census takers would have to travel to extremely isolated
regions and poll people in dozens of different languages. And there was
trouble brewing already. Tatar Muslim communities in Southern Russia saw the
planned count as a secret czarist plot to convert them to Christianity,
while some Russian Orthodox sects saw the census as a sign of the Antichrist
and vowed they would sooner burn themselves alive than submit to such
blasphemy.
Making the count was just the half of it. The data also needed to be tallied
and analyzed. The czar wanted the census to be as modern as possible
including information on age, literacy, gender, nationality, place of birth,
residency, and occupation. It was a bureaucrats worst nightmare.
The people in charge of the census knew the only way to finish the job in a
reasonable amount of time would be to use the most advanced technology on
the market. And thats where the 36-year-old Hollerith came in.
A few years earlier, working for the U.S. Census Bureau, Hollerith had
developed the worlds first functional mass-produced computer: the Hollerith
tabulator. An electromechanical device about the size of large desk and
dresser, it used punch cards and a clever arrangement of gears, sorters,
electrical contacts, and dials to process data with blazing speed and
accuracy. What had taken years by hand could be done in a matter of months.
As one U.S. newspaper described it, with [the devices] aid some 15 young
ladies can count accurately half a million of names in a day.
Russia was not the only country interested in Holleriths computer
technology. He had set up shop in New York just a few years earlier but was
already known in rarified bureaucratic circles around the globe. Canada,
Germany, and Norway were eager to lease his machines. A company in Austria
was trying to pirate his designs and offer them to European governments at a
lower cost.
Holleriths tabulators could work with any kind of data and adapt to any
large information-intensive corporate enterprise. Railroad and insurance
companies were lining up outside Holleriths door for their own custom-built
data solutions.
Holleriths invention caught the zeitgeist of the Second Industrial
Revolution a time of rapid automation and mechanization. It was an era of
railroads, giant steamer ships, telegraphs, radio, electricity, massive
factories, and unprecedented real-time international communication. Shipping
schedules, train timetables, complex banking data, actuary tables, social
welfare programs, and government budgets were all proliferating faster than
humans could keep track of them. Information was king, and data processing
was in constant demand.
Within a few years, Hollerith was the multimillionaire owner of a company
that would eventually launch the U.S. computer industry. A few decades after
returning from Russia, his technology would form the backbone of
International Business Machines, or IBM a global conglomerate that for
almost a century would be synonymous with information processing and
computer technology. Sold under IBMs brand name, Holleriths technology
would power civilian governments, militaries, and corporations around the
world, crunching numbers into the Cold War and all the way to the dawn of
the internet in the 1960s. The world did not simply use Holleriths
tabulators; it became addicted to them and was shaped by them.
Hollerith was hailed as a genius. Many believed his invention was part of a
larger data-driven technology revolution that would lead to a better, more
efficient, and more harmonious world. One leading American statistician
predicted it would usher in an age of universal justice and make
international wars impossible.
But for all the utopian talk about Holleriths computers, the technology had
dark roots.
Dreaming of MAGA
The U.S. Census specifically mandated by the Constitution to take place
every 10 years is back in the news not only because the next count kicks
off in 2020 but because, as it often has in the past, the census is a
political flashpoint with inevitable racial undertones.
The current controversy revolves around a plan devised by Donald Trumps
former advisor Steve Bannon to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census
form. On the surface, it seems like an inconsequential detail. But there is
wide agreement that adding it will have profound political implications for
a decade to come.
Aggregated population data provided by the census is a critical component in
our democratic system. Its most important function is to apportion
Congressional representation for the coming decade, but it also determines
the structure of the Electoral College and guides the distribution of
hundreds of billions in federal spending. Objections to the addition of a
citizenship question are based on concerns about undercounting. The fear,
widely shared by former census officials, is that asking people for their
citizenship status will push some immigrants and Latinos to avoid taking
part in the census altogether. A large enough undercount of a specific
minority or socio-economic group will skew how seats are apportioned in the
House of Representatives, shifting political power and federal resources
away from districts where these groups reside.
The Trump administration has claimed that the citizenship question is being
added for a good cause: to help the federal government enforce the Voting
Rights Act and protect minorities from voter discrimination. But many
immigrant advocates dont buy this logic. They see the citizenship question
as part and parcel of Trumps larger anti-immigrant agenda.
Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino
Elected and Appointed Officials, put it this way: The decision by Secretary
of Commerce Wilbur Ross to force the last-minute addition of an untested
question on citizenship will result in an undercount of Latinos. While we do
not know the true motivation behind these actions, we know the impact: as a
consequence of these actions, Census 2020 is on track to significantly
undercount the Latino population in the United States.
Others are more direct.
Our president, the face of our federal government, which oversees the
census, has based his candidacy on a deeply anti-immigrant platform, says
Betsy Plum, vice president of policy at the New York Immigration Coalition,
one of the organizations trying to stop the Trump administration from adding
the question. What the citizenship question did was it took a much broader
fear and focused it right onto the census. The risk to a place like New
Yorks congressional representation cannot be understated.
Demographic shifts are already expected to result in Northeastern states
losing several congressional seats, and the added question may make the
situation worse. I think this is absolutely the intent of really
weaponizing the census against immigrant communities. Places like New York
and places like California are very much the target.
But there is another, less discussed dimension to the issue. Based on a
close reading of internal Department of Commerce documents tied to the
census citizen question proposal, it appears the Trump administration wants
to use the census to construct a first-of-its-kind citizenship registry for
the entire U.S. population a decision that arguably exceeds the legal
authority of the census.
It was deep in the documentation that was released, Robert Groves, a
former Census Bureau director who headed the National Academies committee
convened to investigate the 2020 census, told me by telephone. No one
picked up on it much. But the term registry in our world means not a
collection of data for statistical purposes but rather to know the identity
of particular people in order to use that knowledge to affect their lives.
Given the administrations posture toward immigration, the fact that it
wants to build a comprehensive citizenship database is highly concerning. To
Groves, it clearly signals a bright line being crossed.
Multiple states have challenged the Trump administrations plans, and their
lawsuits are headed to the Supreme Court, which is scheduled to hear the
case in April. Meanwhile, at an oversight hearing in March, Democratic U.S.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dug into Wilbur Ross, Trumps
multi-millionaire Secretary of Commerce, who oversees the U.S Census Bureau.
She accused him of conspiring with nativists and white supremacists to add
the citizenship question and of overstepping his authority. Why are we
violating law to include this question? she demanded.
Whatever the courts ultimately decide, the latest debate over the census is
hardly new. For most of its history, the census and the constitutionally
mandated government bureaucracy that carries it out has been intertwined
with nativism, bigotry, and fear of the other.
The dark and ugly history of the census makes it a uniquely telling
weathervane of race politics in America. That the census simultaneously
played a central role in the development of the computer age more than 130
years ago makes it doubly relevant, offering a glimpse into how computers,
surveillance, and racist government policies have been linked from the very
beginning.
Counting for democracy
Governments have been counting their people since the beginning of recorded
history. You can find descriptions of censuses in the Old Testament, on
Sumerian cuneiform tablets, and in the writings of the ancient Greeks. There
were censuses in pre-modern Europe. Most American colonies kept population
records, too. Governments counted people for two main reasons: raising state
revenue and waging war. They needed to know who and what to tax, and they
needed to know how many fighting-age men could be mobilized. It was the U.S.
Constitution that added a third and novel reason for counting people:
representational democracy.
When the drafters of the U.S. governments founding set of principles met in
Philadelphia in 1787, one of the first things they hammered out was a clause
mandating that the population be counted every 10 years. This directive for
a decennial census appears up at the top of the Constitution, long before
the document gets around to laying out the structure of the government. To
the framers of the Constitution, the census came first because it determined
taxation and the balance of congressional political power.
Under the Constitution, the number of seats in the House of Representatives
apportioned to each state would be based on population, which meant the
government needed to know the precise number of people living in each state.
The first census took place in 1790 and was overseen by Thomas Jefferson,
who was then serving as Secretary of State. It was mostly a straightforward
head count designed to meet the constitutional mandate. The whole enterprise
was expected to take no more than nine months to complete. But despite its
simplicity and our nations tiny population, it took nearly two years to
fully tabulate. And it only got worse from there.
With every passing decade, the census took longer to complete. It was filled
with errors and undercounts, which led to nasty scandals and accusations
that the data was being manipulated for political ends. By the end of the
1800s, the bureaucratic problem had become untenable: The census was taking
nearly 10 years to complete, meaning the results were outdated even before
they came in.
When the first census was carried out, there were 3.9 million people living
in 13 states. By 1890, the U.S. encompassed 42 states and had a population
of 63 million increasing 16 times over in the span of a century. Never
before had a country swelled so much so quickly. Still doing their work the
old-fashioned way with pen and paper census workers struggled to keep
up. They were drowning in data.
Meanwhile, on top of having to enumerate a rapidly growing population,
government officials began to cram the census with more and more questions:
data on occupations, literacy levels, criminal histories, medical
conditions, home ownership, economic trends, and a whole lot of probing
about peoples race and immigration status.
As the 19th century drew to a close, census officials had started
transforming what should have been a simple head count into a system of
racial surveillance.
Anglo-American superiority
It was a different U.S. back then: smaller and mostly rural and rapidly
expanding along the western frontier. The Civil War had come to an end, and
with it, the U.S. Army shifted its resources to fighting and exterminating
Native Americans west of the Mississippi. Transcontinental railroads were
connecting huge swaths of the country shrinking time and space and
shifting economic power to a new set of financial and railroad business
elites.
The countrys demographics and race politics were rapidly changing, too.
Slavery had been abolished, allowing millions of blacks to freely move,
attempt to take charge of their own destinies, and play a role in the
countrys political life. Immigration was making itself felt. Well into the
19th century, free immigration into the U.S. had been largely dominated by
English settlers. But starting in the 1850s, that pattern began changing
drastically. Millions of Irish peasants streamed into the country to escape
the potato famine, which killed over one million people. Millions more were
fleeing the crushing poverty of Southern Italy and the eastern territories
of the Russian Empire. Chinese laborers were arriving on the West Coast en
masse to build U.S. railroads.
This influx was a boon to an emerging industrial oligarchy, a source of
never-ending cheap labor. But it was also a source of political instability.
Widespread inequality and exploitation led to massively popular movements
for change. There were labor protests and strikes, the emergence of the
populist movement, and a nationwide self-help organization created by
dirt-poor farmers. Socialist and anarchist ideas achieved broad adherence.
Black civil rights activism emerged.
Americas political establishment looked on this instability, social unrest,
and change with horror. They saw the masses of free blacks and Chinese,
Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants and their tattered clothes, alien
languages, unnatural religions, and demands for better treatment and
political rights as a threat.
Grasping about for solutions, many settled on various strains of race
science quackery. So-called social Darwinists relied on a twisted version of
the theory of evolution to explain why the poor and marginalized should
remain that way while the wealthy and successful deserved to rule
unchallenged. Taking this notion a step further, adherents of eugenics
fervently believed that naturally superior Anglo-Americans were on the verge
of being wiped out due to the high birth rates of degenerate and immigrant
stock. To head off this threat, they advocated strict controls on
reproduction breeding humans for quality in the same way that farmers did
cows and horses.
These were not fringe ideas but were firmly embraced by the American
cultural and political mainstream. From future presidents like Theodore
Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, and Calvin Coolidge to robber barons like J.P.
Morgan and Leland Stanford to writers like H.G. Wells and progressive
activists like Margaret Sanger, eugenics was all the rage.
In the first decades of the 20th century, 32 states passed sterilization
laws to deal with the threat of genetic degradation laws that were upheld
by the Supreme Court. And few worried more about the threat of genetic
degradation than the officials at the U.S. Census Bureau.
Purity police
Born into a wealthy Boston family, Francis A. Walker served in the Civil War
as a general, dabbled in journalism, and ultimately made a name for himself
as an influential Progressive Era economist and statistician who would later
become president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a professional economist, Walker had a keen interest in the nations
changing demographics and he was horrified by what he saw. Like most
upper-class Americans at the time, Walker believed that the countrys
original English colonists had evolved to be the most superior race on the
planet superior even to the original English race from which they sprang.
To him, Anglo-Americans stood on the pinnacle of the worlds race pyramid.
He and his people were as far ahead of the English as the English were
ahead of any other branch of the Teutonic race, which was in turn far ahead
of the Slavs or the Celts, he wrote.
He believed that the influx of poor immigrants from Ireland and Italy as
well as Jews and Slavs from Eastern Europe was diluting the United States
superior racial stock and threatening to drag American genetic superiority
back into a cesspool of degradation and decline. He blamed these immigrants
vast hordes of brutalized peasants for the social and political unrest
that was happening around him.
They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in
the struggle for existence, he declared. They have none of the ideas and
aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of
self-care and self-government.
He not only pushed to restrict immigration in order to prevent what he
viewed as Anglo-American race suicide, but also advocated forced
sterilization. We must strain out of the blood of the race more of the
taint inherited from a bad and vicious past, he wrote. The scientific
treatment which is applied to physical diseases must be extended to mental
and moral disease, and a wholesome surgery and cautery must be enforced by
the whole power of the state for the good of all.
In addition to his other contributions to U.S. life, Walker served as
superintendent of both the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Census.
Limits of technology
The census had been a racial instrument from its inception, beginning with
the original constitutional clause that instructed census officials to count
black slaves separately from whites and to assign them a value of only
three-fifths of a person.
With each decade, new racial categories were invented and added to the
mix: free colored males and females and mulatto were counted, including
subdivisions like including quadroon and octoroon. Categories for
Chinese, Hindoo, and Japanese were added, as were foreign and native
born designations for whites. The census slowly expanded to collect other
demographic data, including literacy levels, unemployment statistics, and
medical ailments, such as those who were deaf, dumb, and blind and the
insane and idiotic. All of it was broken down by race.
Most of these questions were included in a haphazard fashion. They were
overtly political, added in response to whatever particular racial fear
gripped the national ruling elite at the time.
The census needed to improve drastically. What it needed was a talented
inventor, someone young and ambitious who would be able to come up with a
method to automate tabulation and data analysis. Someone like Herman
Hollerith.
A racial category for Chinese was added after railroad companies began
importing cheap, exploitable laborers from China. Categories for mulatto
came after the abolition of slavery caused a panic about the dangers of
racial mixing. Questions about mental health and race were first added at
the behest of a Southern senator right before the outbreak of Civil War. The
results seemed to show that free blacks living in Northern states were on
average 11 times more likely to be insane than Southern blacks living in
slavery. Such questionable statistics were taken up by Southern politicians
to bolster racist theories and argue against abolition.
To Walker, these early efforts didnt go nearly far enough. As an economist
and statistician, he wanted to collect and process more data and to
professionalize and standardize the effort. He wanted it to be a proper,
scientific national inventory not a haphazard collection of facts.
But his dreams kept running up against a hard limit: technology. The census
was still counted and analyzed by hand. The work was slow and limited.
Sophisticated analysis was next to impossible.
The census needed to improve drastically. What it needed was a talented
inventor, someone young and ambitious who would be able to come up with a
method to automate tabulation and data analysis.
Someone like Herman Hollerith.
The inventor
Hollerith was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1860. His father, a classics
teacher, died when he was a child, and he was raised by his mother. In 1879,
when he graduated from the Columbia School of Mines with a degree in
engineering, he was immediately recruited to help compile economic
statistics for the 1880 census, which was being run by Walker.
At his new job, Hollerith, who had developed a reputation as an inventive
engineer in college, was encouraged by senior census officials to study the
enumeration process and come up with a solution to speed it up. After the
1880 census was complete, he quit his job for a teaching position at MIT
following Walker, who had recently been appointed president.
Hollerith kept tinkering with his invention, and before long, he came up
with a design that separated the enumeration process into parts. The first
involved converting data into a format that could be read by a machine. This
he accomplished by punching holes on a piece of paper. The second step
involved processing the data. This was accomplished by feeding the paper
through a machine that, through a combination of pins and dials, read the
number and position of the holes. At first, Hollerith experimented with
using a continuous strip of paper like the recent invention of ticker
tape, which was widely used to transmit stock prices via telegraph. But he
wasnt happy with the results.
The trouble was that if, for example, you wanted any statistics regarding
Chinamen, you would have to run miles of paper to count a few Chinamen,
Hollerith later explained in a letter. Race was never far from his mind when
working on his contraption.
He eventually hit upon a much better idea: Each person would be represented
by their own punch card an idea he picked up while taking a train. I was
traveling in the West and I had a ticket with what I think was called a
punch photograph
the conductor
punched out a description of the
individual, as light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc., he explained,
noting that hed simply done the same thing.
The dawn of data
In March 1890, Holleriths machines were installed at the Inter-Ocean
Building on Ninth Street in Washington, D.C., not far from the White House.
He oversaw the installation himself, running around and barking orders to
workmen who were hoisting creaky wooden crates from the street to the third
floor.
Soon the property was transformed from a nondescript office space into the
bustling headquarters of the 11th census. Hundreds of clerks worked around
the clock in shifts, taking raw census data collected in the field and
transferring it onto cards using specially designed hole punch machines and
then passing the cards to another set of clerks who worked the tabulators
and sorters. Holleriths machines clanked away all day and all night, with
clerks crammed together like sweatshops workers.
Newspapers sent their correspondents to gawk at these futuristic
contraptions. Because of the miserable track record of earlier censuses, the
press was awash with predictions of incompetence and failure. They were
wrong.
The 1890 census the nations 11th was the most ambitious yet. It
contained 35 questions, 10 more than the previous census, on a whole range
of data: literacy levels, sizes of household, professions, the value of a
familys property, and whether they rented or owned. Perhaps most important
was the racial dimension. The census collected stats on native and
foreign-born Americans and broke them into multiple racial categories:
white, colored, Chinese, Japanese and civilized Indian (i.e., a Native
American no longer living in a tribal society). It was the first census to
include a complete count of Native Americans living on tribal lands. It
asked for data on unemployment history, fertility rates, citizenship status,
criminal history, literacy, and English language proficiency.
Despite the long list of questions and requirements for calculating a whole
slew of new stats, including birth, unemployment, and causes of death
divided up by race, the basic population count was completed in just six
weeks. It would take a full four years to finish tabulating and editing all
other categories of data and release the reports. It was an amazing
improvement over the previous census, which took nearly a decade.
It wasnt just the speed that set Holleriths invention apart. It was its
ability to mine and sift through data and even combine multiple data points.
Such fine-grained analysis on a mass scale was completely unprecedented, and
it made Holleriths machines an immediate hit with the United States
race-obsessed political class.
Robert Porter, head of the 1890 census, who had overseen the adoption of
Holleriths tabulator machines, was deeply impressed by their power to sort
immigrant and non-white populations based on numerous demographic variables.
He was particularly pleased about being able to analyze the three things
most feared by the race suicide crowd: immigration rates, immigrant
fertility rates, and mixed race marriages (or what the census called the
conjugal condition), all of which could be broken down by age, race,
literacy levels, and naturalization status.
Simon Newton Dexter North, a longtime wool industry lobbyist who would head
the 1900 census, was also dazzled by the power of Holleriths tabulators.
Like Walker and other census colleagues, he was obsessed with immigration
and cross-breeding. He believed they were diluting the countrys superior
Anglo-American stock and destabilizing society.
This immigration is profoundly affecting our civilization, our
institutions, our habits and our ideals, he warned in 1914. It has
transplanted here alien tongues, alien religions, and alien theories of
government; it has been a powerful influence in the rapid disappearance of
the Puritanical outlook upon life.
North believed that bureaucrats and statisticians like him were fighting a
new kind of war a war for Americas genetic purity. And Holleriths
tabulator technology was a vital weapon an epoch-making invention
without which this fight would be lost.
Feeding the nativist beast
Overnight, Holleriths tabulator technology had transformed census taking
from a simple head count into something that looked very much like a crude
form of mass surveillance. To the race-obsessed political class, it was a
revolutionary development. They could finally put the nations ethnic makeup
under the microscope. The data seemed to confirm the nativists worst fears:
Poor, illiterate immigrants were swarming Americas cities, breeding like
rabbits, and outstripping native Anglo-American birth rates.
Immediately following the census, the states and the federal government
passed a flurry of laws that heavily restricted immigration.
It started with the Immigration Act of 1891, which set up the first federal
agency to oversee immigration and border control and turned an unused island
on the southern tip of Manhattan into an elaborate screening center for
immigrants. It continued through the passage of a half-dozen major
immigration bills, including one that stripped women of U.S. citizenship if
they married non-naturalized foreigners, culminating in the Immigration Act
of 1924 a landmark piece of legislation that introduced race immigration
quotas.
This suite of laws gave immigration officials the power to ban just about
anyone, including idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded persons or those
who exhibited constitutional psychopathic inferiority or were mentally or
physically defective. Anarchists and socialists were banned outright as was
anyone from the Asiatic Barred Zone, which included most of Asia, the
sub-continent, the Middle East, and parts of eastern Russia. Meanwhile,
immigration from European countries was constrained by hard limits based on
the 1890 census the first census processed by Hollerith technology.
Combined with the anti-Chinese bills passed in the late 19th century, these
new laws created a virtual wall around the U.S. Immigration rates plunged.
The data provided by Holleriths invention did not cause the racism,
nativism, and eugenics that saw class and poverty through the lens of
breeding rather than politics and economic policy. But it gave those fears
concrete shape and it provided data to which those fears could be hitched.
To some U.S. bureaucrats, this data-driven eugenics system was just the
beginning. North, who directed the U.S. Census Bureau from 1903 to 1909,
dreamed of the day when detailed racial data could be collected and analyzed
for the whole world and be used to guide human genetic development.
The need for restraining the genetically deficient classes and families
from the function of reproduction, is recognized as imperative, he wrote in
1918 from his perch at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as
World War I was coming to an end. It is the dream of the true statistician
that the day will some time arrive when the facts of demography will be
available on identical bases for the entire globe. When that dream is
realized, when comparable international statistics actually and everywhere
exist, then we shall know the laws which determine human progress and can
effectively apply them.
His dream would soon be realized in Europe.
Hollerith goes global
The immediate success of his invention made Hollerith wealthy and famous.
But that was just the beginning. In 1911, he sold his Tabulating Machine
Company for a $2.3 million to Charles Flint, an infamous venture capitalist
known in his day as the Father of Trusts.
Flint bought out Hollerith, combined his company with several other
businesses that made precision mechanical contraptions clocks, cash
registers, coffee grinders, and butcher scales to create a computational
monopoly and handed this new conglomerate over to an ambitious young
executive by the name of Thomas J. Watson.
As Hollerith slowly went senile in retirement, Watson ruthlessly leveraged
the aging inventors computer technology to crush competition and establish
a global monopoly in the early computation market. The result was
International Business Machines, the company we now know as IBM, founded in
1911.
Installed in factories, corporate offices, and city and military
bureaucracies, his tabulator computers not only sped up accounting but
greatly reduced labor costs. Businesses and local and federal government
agencies ordered Hollerith machines by the truckload. Insurance companies
relied on them for accounting and calculating actuary tables. Railroads used
them to route freight and work out schedules. At one railroad company, a
single Hollerith machine operated by two people replaced the full time work
of 20 clerks. They personified the blazing efficiency and automation of the
technological revolution sweeping the Progressive Era.
Nowhere was this as obvious as the Social Security Administration, one of
the signature programs of the New Deal.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law on
Aug. 14, 1935, creating Americas first old-age pension program. The Social
Security Act brought about a massive need for accounting and data processing
for both businesses and the federal government. Businesses suddenly had to
keep meticulous records on their employees. They needed to track salaries
and Social Security contributions and file that information with the federal
government. The government, in turn, had to process all that data. It needed
to monitor contributions to each individual Social Security account over the
lifetime of each individual. And then, when they hit retirement age, it had
to cut monthly checks to millions of Americans.
As soon as the legislation passed, businesses queued up at IBM to get the
proper tabulator payroll systems to meet federal accounting requirements.
Phones at IBMs sales offices rang off the hook. A Woolworth executive
complained to IBM that handing the paperwork to comply with the Social
Security Act alone would cost the company a quarter of a million dollars a
year $4.5 million today.
IBM won the contract to oversee accounting for the Social Security
Administration, beating out competitors like Remington Rand. It was the only
computer company at the time that had the experience and production capacity
to undertake a project of that size. As one official IBM history put it,
the Social Security project catapulted IBM from a midsize corporation to
the global leader in information technology.
Naturally, the military was a big fan of the technology. In peacetime, the
Department of War used the machines to keep track of enlistment data and
track military pensions. When the U.S. entered the war, IBMs Hollerith tech
became a vital part of the Allied military effort.
Hollerith machines were involved in almost every part of the war, from
designing the atomic bomb to managing troop deployment. Special portable
IBM machines installed on trucks landed with U.S. troops in Normandy,
Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy. They were used on the home front as well.
Hollerith tabulators were a big hit all over the world. But one country was
particularly enamored with them: Nazi Germany.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S Census Bureau hauled out the
punch cards from the 1940 census and reprocessed them to produce
block-by-block population lists on Japanese-Americans in a half-dozen
states, including California. Ultimately 130,000 Japanese-Americans were
forced to move to concentration camps.
The head of the Census Bureau at the time, James Clyde Capt, was ecstatic
with the data they were able to generate. For instance, he wrote to a
subordinate, if the data showed there were 801 Japs in a community and
[authorities] only found 800 of them, then they have something to check up
on.
Nazis and numbers
Hollerith tabulators were a big hit all over the world. But one country was
particularly enamored with them: Nazi Germany.
Adolf Hitler came to power on the back of the economic devastation that
followed Germanys defeat in World War I. To Hitler, however, the problem
plaguing Germany was not economic or political. It was racial. As he put it
in Mein Kampf: The state is a racial organism and not an economic
organization. The reason Germany had fallen so far, he argued, was its
failure to tend to its racial purity. There were only about a half-million
Jews in Germany in 1933 less than 1% of the population but he singled
them out as the root cause of all of the nations problems.
Hitler and the Nazis drew much of their inspiration from the U.S. eugenics
movement and the system of institutional racism that had arisen in slaverys
wake. Their solution was to isolate the so-called mongrels, then
continuously monitor the racial purity of the German people to keep the volk
free of further contamination.
The only problem: How to tell who is really pure and who is not?
The U.S. had a ready solution. IBMs German subsidiary landed its first
major contract the same year Hitler became chancellor. The 1933 Nazi census
was pushed through by Hitler as an emergency genetic stock-taking of the
German people. Along with numerous other data points, the census focused on
collecting fertility data for German women particularly women of good
Aryan stock. Also included in the census was a special count of religiously
observant Jews, or Glaubensjuden.
Nazi officials wanted the entire count, estimated to be about 65 million
people, to be done in just four months. It was a monumental task, and German
IBM officials worked around the clock to finish it. So important was the
success of the contract to IBM that CEO Thomas J. Watson personally toured
the giant Berlin warehouse where hundreds of female clerks worked in
rotating seven-hour shifts 24 hours a day.
Watson came away greatly impressed with the work of his German managers.
They had pulled off a seemingly impossible assignment, one that was
complicated by a custom-enlarged punch card format necessary for political
considerations IBMs coded explanation for the extra data demands the
Nazi regime required.
As Hitlers Nazi Party tightened its grip on Germany, it launched all sorts
of additional data-gathering programs to purify the German nation. And IBM
helped them do it.
[T]he precondition for every deportation was accurate knowledge of how many
Jews in a particular district fitted the racial and demographic descriptions
in Berlins quotas, write David Martin Luebke and Sybil Milton in Locating
the Victim, a study into Nazi use of the tabulator machines. Armed with
these data, they said, the Gestapo often proved able to anticipate with
remarkable accuracy the total number of deportees for each racial, status,
and age category.
Germanys vast state bureaucracy and its military and rearmament programs,
including the countrys growing concentration camp/slave labor system, also
required data processing services. By the time the U.S. officially entered
the war in 1941, IBMs German subsidiary had grown to employ 10,000 people
and served 300 different German government agencies. The Nazi Party
Treasury; the SS; the War Ministry; the Reichsbank; the Reichspost; the
Armaments Ministry; the Navy, Army and Air Force; and the Reich Statistical
Office the list of IBMs clients went on and on.
Indeed, the Third Reich would open startling statistical venues for
Hollerith machines never before instituted perhaps never before even
imagined, wrote Edwin Black in IBM and the Holocaust, his pioneering 2001
exposé of the forgotten business ties between IBM and Nazi Germany. In
Hitlers Germany, the statistical and census community, overrun with
doctrinaire Nazis, publicly boasted about the new demographic breakthroughs
their equipment would achieve. (IBM has criticized Blacks reporting
methods, and has said that its German subsidiary largely came under Nazi
control before and during the war.)
Demand for Hollerith tabulators was so robust that IBM was forced to open a
new factory in Berlin to crank out all the new machines. At the facilitys
christening ceremony, which was attended by a top U.S. IBM executive and the
elite of the Nazi Party, the head of IBMs German subsidiary gave a rousing
speech about the important role that Hollerith tabulators played in Hitlers
drive to purify Germany and cleanse it of inferior racial stock.
We are very much like the physician, in that we dissect, cell by cell, the
German cultural body, he said. We report every individual
characteristic
on a little card. These are not dead cards, quite to the
contrary, they prove later on that they come to life when the cards are
sorted at a rate of 25,000 per hour according to certain characteristics.
These characteristics are grouped like the organs of our cultural body, and
they will be calculated and determined with the help of our tabulating
machine.
On the surface, it may seem like the story of Herman Hollerith and the U.S.
census are historical relics, an echo from a bygone era. But this history
reveals an uncomfortable and fundamental truth about computer technology. We
can thank nativism and the census for helping to bring the computer age into
existence. And as the battle over the 2020 census makes clear, the drive to
tally up our neighbors, to sort them into categories and turn them into
statistics, still carries the seed of our own dehumanization.
