The Tenth Census in Twenty-Two Volumes

1888 · Hand-Tallied Report Volumes · Work 693 of 1,871

The Tenth Census in Twenty-Two Volumes, 1888, Hand-Tallied Report Volumes

A complete row of twenty-two uniform report volumes of 1888 standing on a long oak table in a corridor of a government statistical office in Washington, heavy quarto volumes about thirty centimetres tall in dark cloth, held between two cast-iron bookends, the row well over one metre long, the spines showing only dull gold lines, the last volume lying beside the row still wrapped in brown packing paper, behind the table bundles of tallied ruled sheets tied with tape stacked edge-on up to the ceiling, a clerk seen from behind in a waistcoat, black sateen sleeve protectors, dusty light slanting from a tall side window on the right, plain painted plaster walls.

What it was used for
The tenth census of the United States, taken in 1880, appeared as a series of 22 volumes; the Library of Congress dates the set to 1883-88. It went far beyond counting heads: population by states, counties and minor civil divisions, broken down by race, sex, age, nativity and occupation, plus volumes on manufactures, agriculture, agencies of transportation, valuation and taxation, mortality, and summaries on newspapers, schools and illiteracy, on what were then called the dependent, defective and delinquent classes, and on the social statistics of selected cities. Bulletins with advance figures appeared from 1880 to 1883.
What was new
What was new was the scale. The 1870 census had already covered wealth, taxation, agriculture, manufactures and mining; in 1880 it supplied an even broader description of a country's economy and living conditions, compiled by specialists for particular subjects. The barb is the price of that. Tabulating the 1880 results took between about seven years and almost a decade. The last volume came out in 1888, two years before the next census. And the Bureau explicitly justifies the switch to Hollerith's punched-card machine for 1890 by the delays of the 1880 hand count: the work was so comprehensive that it barely finished in time.

What the sources leave open: The figure of 22 volumes and the span 1883-88 come from the Library of Congress research guide. The Census Bureau's own publication list for 1880 is incomplete: it names only six volumes and ends at 1885. On the length of the tabulation the sources give about seven years and almost a decade.

Further reading