One hundred years ago March 6, Congress established a permanent "Census Office" in the Interior Department. Its mission: to carry out a continuing program of censuses and other data collection activities. Four months later, about 900 workers, who were wrapping up the 1900 census in a nondescript building near the U.S. Capitol, became permanent federal employees.

    Before then, taking the census of population in the years ending in "0" had been a temporary affair, with the political party in power rewarding tens of thousands of loyalists with temporary jobs. After the data were published, the office would shut down until the next census.

    "By 1900, a century of census machinery, forms, reports and assorted materials were stored in Washington between counts," said census historian Margo J. Anderson, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "Congress realized that the nation wanted much more from their premier statistical activity than a simple headcount. Out of that realization and extensive lobbying by data users came the legislation to create a permanent Census Office."

    In 1903, the renamed Bureau of the Census was transferred to the new Department of Commerce and Labor. There women in long skirts and blouses and men in white shirts and ties pored over punch cards and punches, electric tabulating machines and sorters in open-bay offices cooled by slow-moving ceiling fans.

    Using the 1900 census as a base, the new Census Bureau issued intercensal population estimates. It also collected data on cotton ginnings, forestry products and deaths, and published something called "the social statistics of cities." In 1913, when the Labor Department split off from Commerce, the bureau continued with the Commerce Department, where it remains today.

    On Wednesday, March 6, 2002, the Census Bureau, whose headquarters was transferred in 1942 to the Washington, D.C., suburb of Suitland, Md., marked its 100^th birthday with an in-house ceremony featuring a color guard, a centennial quilt, a large cake and the singing of a newly composed census anthem.

Pioneer and innovator

    "During the last 100 years, while our country has grown, the Census Bureau has been a leader and an innovator," said Commerce Secretary Don Evans. "The public servants at the bureau have continuously improved not only how the census counts America's population, but also how it tracks our economic, demographic and social trends, which are critical to the economic security of this country."

    Over the years, the Census Bureau statistically documented a fast-changing society as the population soared from 80 million in 1902 to 284 million in 2001.

     As a pioneer in data processing, the bureau in 1951 made the leap from punch card machines to the vacuum tubes, blinking lights and whirring sounds of UNIVAC I, or Universal Automatic Computer. UNIVAC I, the first electronic 

computer used by a civilian government agency, helped process the 1950 census. It also ushered in the computer era.

    In the early 1950s, to speed up questionnaire processing, the Census Bureau and the National Bureau of Standards developed film optical-sensing machines to read the darkened little circles on microfilm of completed census questionnaires. In Census 2000, a highly sophisticated, optical data-capture system achieved a 99-percent accuracy rate in record time. In 2010, enumerators may be equipped with mobile computing devices, with Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers to help them locate housing units by their geographic coordinates.

    The Census Bureau has repeatedly broken new ground in statistical and survey methodology, a branch of mathematics. Probability sampling in the 1940 census allowed the addition of a number of questions for a small percentage of the enumerated population without imposing excessive burden on all. Currently, in addition to a 1-in-6 long form sample during the decennial census, the bureau conducts about 120 surveys a year and publishes about 1,500 reports.

    Throughout its first 100 years, the bureau also earned a reputation for scrupulously guarding the confidentiality of respondents' answers, something it regards as vital in obtaining their continued participation in its censuses and surveys.

Current Population Survey

    The Current Population Survey (CPS) is probably the best known and most widely used of all continuing federal household surveys.

    The CPS originated in 1940 as the Work Projects Administration's (WPA) Sample Survey of Unemployment, the first attempt to measure unemployment in the United States on a continuing basis. The Census Bureau took over the 20,000-household survey in 1942 (when the WPA was abolished) and retitled it the Monthly Report on the Labor Force. Refined and enlarged several times since then and given its current name in 1947, the survey's focus changed from unemployment in the final Depression years to employment following World War II.

    Today, not only is the CPS the source of the official employment and unemployment numbers, it also produces a variety of other social and demographic statistics, such as school enrollment, fertility, migration, income and poverty, voting registration and turnout and, more recently, computer use. The CPS also estimates those covered by pension plans and those owed alimony or child support.

    "The decennial censuses and the Current Population Survey are two data pillars of the demographic research community," said Marta Tienda, president of the Population Association of America (PAA). "In particular, the release of microdata and summary tape files has revolutionized demographic research by permitting analysts to manipulate data in ways that were not possible with published tabulations.

    "Collaborative projects between demographers and bureau staff subsequently produced electronic public-use microdata files from several pre-1960 censuses, including many from the 19^th century -- before the Census Bureau was established," Tienda said. "In response to congressional and research needs, the bureau has also conducted complex longitudinal surveys, such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation, which permit fine-grained analyses of fertility, welfare participation, migration, family structure, labor force activity, income and poverty, using recent innovations in statistical methodology."

Economic statistics

    Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has called the economic census, which the Census Bureau conducts every five years, "indispensable to understanding America's economy."

    "The United States has a strong economic system," said Barbara Bryant, Census Bureau director from 1989 to 1993. "In large degree, this is because of the historical availability of good population and economic data. These data fuel economic growth. They monitor, measure and lead social change. They are the products of 22 decennial censuses, and -- for the last 100 years -- surveys and censuses conducted by the Census Bureau."

    The 1905 Census of Manufactures was the first census to be taken separately from the decennial population census. Censuses covering retail and wholesale trade and construction industries were added in 1930, the service trades in 1933. The 1954 Economic Census marked the first time the various economic censuses were integrated, providing comparable data across economic sectors. It also was the first economic census taken by mail. The bureau compiled its mailing lists using administrative records from other federal agencies.

    The range of industries covered in the economic censuses expanded between 1967 and 1992. The census of construction industries began on a regular basis in 1967; and the scope of the census of service industries, introduced in 1933, was broadened in 1967, 1977 and 1987. With the addition of censuses of transportation, communications and utilities, and of financial, insurance and real estate industries in 1992, the economic census and the separate censuses of governments and of agriculture (the latter now conducted by the U.S. Agriculture Department) covered about 98 percent of the nation's economic activity.

    Since analysis of monthly trade data was transferred to the Census Bureau in 1941, the bureau has assumed responsibility for seven other current surveys -- six monthly and one quarterly -- in the economic indicator series. These surveys measure short-term change, as well as trends in construction and housing, retail and wholesale trade, manufacturers' shipments, inventories and orders, and finance. They are used by the Bureau of Economic Analysis in its estimates of monthly and quarterly economic growth.

    (In its fiscal 2003 budget request, the Census Bureau asked for $3 million to launch a new quarterly economic indicator report on dynamic industries such as Internet and software publishing, telecommunications and technology-related services.)

    "During the last century, many of the advances made in economics depended upon complementary advances in statistics profiling our economy and our society," Robert Lucas, president of the American Economic Association, said. "In like fashion, advances in the science of economics have gone forward hand in hand with advances in the science of statistics. The Census Bureau has been a rich source of the statistics required by economics and a fertile home for the development of statistical technique."

And TIGER, too

    During the 1980s, the bureau developed the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER) system to meet the geographic needs of the agency's census and household survey programs. Since then, its staff has worked with state, local, and tribal governments to update the inventory of streets, street names, address ranges and boundaries for all governments.

    It used this home-grown processing system to assign the addresses of nearly 120 million living quarters in Census 2000 and 22 million businesses in the 2002 Economic Census to the correct geographic entity. TIGER enabled the bureau to produce more than 20 million maps to guide data collection work and the geographic entity "labels" that appear in all Census Bureau data tabulations, making them more understandable to users. Since 1989, the public extract of TIGER, called the TIGER/Line® files, has provided the "data" foundation for the burgeoning geographic information system industry in the United States, freeing it up to focus more on developing innovative display and analysis tools rather than geographic base information.

    Improvements in accuracy and processing will make the Census Bureau's data collection operations more efficient by allowing field staff to use GPS technologies to resolve the most vexing remaining issues: finding the correct housing unit to visit from among the many housing units and structures nearby and assuring that each one is assigned to the correct geographic location.

Regional offices

    The Census Bureau inherited its initial field structure in 1942 when it took over the WPA employment survey. When the Census Bureau introduced sampling in the CPS, the field structure consisted of five regional offices and 68 district offices, one for each of the CPS' primary sampling units.

    In the 1950s, when the CPS sample was increased, the district offices were closed, supervisory staff relocated to 17 regional offices and greater emphasis placed on statistical quality control procedures. The number of regional offices was reduced to 12 in the 1960s, and these offices have been in their current locations since 1973. They are: Boston; New York; Philadelphia; Charlotte, N.C.; Atlanta; Detroit; Chicago; Kansas City, Kan.; Dallas; Denver; Seattle; and Los Angeles.

    Arthur Dukakis, 71, the regional office director in Boston for the past 32 years, began to work for the Census Bureau in 1959. Before the advent of the high-speed data processing systems, he said, not only censuses but surveys, too, were conducted on paper.

    "Everything was paper," Dukakis said. "The regions would get their delivery every month for each survey. We would then take that paper and mail it out to the interviewers; so that was another operation. Then the interviewers would complete their assignment and mail the paper back to us, and then we would take the paper here and mail it to headquarters or to Jeffersonville, Ind. (the Census Bureau's data processing center, which became permanent in the 1960s).

    "Sometimes paper would get lost. Say we had a CPS assignment. We had closed out on Friday, and we were waiting for Mrs. Jones paperwork to come in from Albany, N.Y., and somehow the post office lost it. So we had to go out and redo that assignment. There was no waiting until Monday or Tuesday of the following week. We don't have that problem now because it's all on the computer."

Headquarters

    How the Census Bureau came to be headquartered in Suitland, a working-class suburb east of Washington that was named after Col. Samuel Taylor Suit, a 19^th-century Maryland legislator, businessman and gentleman farmer, is the stuff of legend.

    During its early years, the Census Bureau moved often. It stayed in the Emery Building near the U.S. Capitol until 1914, when it moved to the old Commerce Building at 19^th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. For the next nine years, it occupied temporary quarters near the Washington Mall. The bureau moved to the main Commerce Department Building at 14^th Street and Constitution Avenue in 1933. Then, in 1940, census workers moved into a "permanent quarters" on Virginia Avenue, between 2^nd and 3^rd streets.

    But when the head of the Office of Price Administration refused to move into a new building constructed in Suitland, the census director, thinking it would be a temporary arrangement, offered to house his agency in the spurned Suitland structure. After the war, he reasoned, the Census Bureau could return to Washington.

    Ed Goldfield, who worked at the Virginia Avenue location, recalled a trip to the wilds of Suitland in 1940:

    "Several of my colleagues and I piled into my car one Saturday and drove out to Suitland. We were told that to go to Suitland, you were to go east on Pennsylvania Avenue, and when you got beyond the district line, ask the natives if they could direct you to Suitland. We did that, but most of the natives had not heard of Suitland either.

    "We finally found it on a tract of land with farmhouses and barns on it and a big hole in the middle of a field where they were building the new building. We arrived by taking Suitland Road, which was then a narrow dirt road."

    Two years later, the Census Bureau staff, most of whom lived in Washington, decamped to Suitland. The headquarters staff, currently about 4,285 strong, has occupied three or four buildings in the Suitland federal complex ever since. Its neighbors are: the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Washington National Records Center. After 60 years, the General Services Administration recently announced it will build two new Census Bureau headquarters buildings scheduled for completion and occupancy in 2006 and 2007. They will rise near the bureau's current offices.

Lunch bells and dress codes

    Thirty years ago, key punchers worked three shifts around the clock. The work day for the rest of the staff was 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. A bell rang to signal the beginning and end of the workday and of a half-hour lunch break.

    Marie Pees, a veteran programmer who started working at the bureau in 1969, said, "There were no locked doors; nobody had keys. ... There were no guards, there were no gate posts, nothing, not even fences. ... There was a dress code when I came in '69: women were expected to wear dresses or skirts; most guys wore nice slacks and a shirt and tie. ... You didn't see anyone in shorts or sandals. And there was no air-conditioning, except for a few executive offices."

    When Pees began writing code for the UNIVAC mainframe, "everybody in the bureau used it," so programmers had to schedule time on it. Programs were on tape, as were data input and output files. Since there were a limited number of tapes, programmers were constantly being called on to blank all the tapes they could. The first program she worked on, Pees said, took  18 months to complete; today it would take her a week or less to write a program for the same set of tables.

    In 1960, the census files were on metal oxide tapes; in 1970, on seven-track tapes; and then, in 1980 and 1990, on nine-track magnetic tapes. Now all files are stored on IBM cartridges and these are in the process of being changed over to virtual disk memory.

    "I guess my legacy to the agency is to try to put all of that information into a standard format," Pees said. "I've had a lot of help. And we think we have successfully converted '60, '70, '80 and '90 individual (census) record files -- 100 percent and sample -- into a systematic format that looks pretty much like 2000.

    "So in 2032, when we can release the 1960 file, it will be there in an electronic format that is as current with current standards of industry production as we can make it. There's no question that the industry standard may change in the next 30 years; it very likely will two or three times over," Pees said. "So I'm hoping that whoever picks up where I leave off can just continue changing them as they change."

Users

    Users of Census Bureau data have ranged from the sophisticated to the neophyte. Pees, who handled special tabulations for users, once found herself compiling data for different groups of census blocks for opposite sides in a class-action lawsuit.

    "It could have gotten a little interesting had I been called to testify in any way," she said.

    The census user community has grown in line with the proliferation of census data and the "democratization" of the data through CD-ROM in 1990 and the Internet in 1994. Among the various user groups are government economists and community planners, direct-mail marketers and emergency medical technicians, academics and budding demographers.

    "As one who has proudly ripped off its data for 40 years, I salute the 100^th birthday of the Census Bureau, and the consummate professionals who make it work so well, year after year, decade after decade, and now, century after century," said Ben Wattenberg, author and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

    "In the course of writing seven books on the American circumstance, I have asked the Census Bureau experts many questions on many topics, and have never received anything but prompt, precise, thoughtful and often wise answers."

    Besides Congress, other federal government agencies are among the Census Bureau's principal customers.

    "While each of the statistical agencies within the United States government has a unique role in our system," said Janet L. Norwood, former U.S. commissioner of labor statistics, "the relationships between them and the Bureau of the Census have served the American people well. The long-standing cooperation between the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the two largest statistical agencies in our system, has been especially important; the country is richer for it, and the public interest has been well-served."

    "... the Census Bureau has demonstrated extraordinary reflexivity in responding to the diverse needs and interests of researchers, politicians, practitioners and the general public," said the PAA's Tienda. "The art of balancing competing interests to produce hundreds of multipurpose data products for the 'cyber society' we have become is a formidable achievement."


The future

    Because of the constitutional role of the census in providing the numbers used to apportion the U.S. House of Representatives and to redraw the lines for congressional and state political districts, the Census Bureau occasionally has found itself in the midst of political controversy.

    "In the 1920s, Congress found the census results so unpalatable that they refused to reapportion seats in the House among the states," historian Anderson said. "More recently, the controversies surrounding the census undercount have prompted state and local government officials and even members of Congress to sue the Census Bureau and its parent agency, the Department of Commerce, to force changes in counting procedures. So far, the courts have supported the bureau."

    The Census Bureau prides itself on calling the numbers as it sees them. It resists outside efforts to politicize its findings.

    Vincent Barabba, the only two-time director in the bureau's history (1973-76 and 1979-81), said, "As the nation's, if not the world's pre-eminent statistical agency, the bureau is open about the errors it identifies and their sources. It quite precisely estimates the extent to which these errors exist and informs society of everything there is to know about them.

    "As such, the Census Bureau is the epitome of a learning organization in that it is constantly learning. Because of that learning, society has benefitted through improved understanding of its current conditions and the identification of underlying trends reflecting change that is not only inevitable, but also increasing in its rate and complexity."

    William G. Barron Jr., who worked for Norwood at BLS and has headed the Census Bureau since February 2001 as acting director, said, "I think the nation's thirst for what the Census Bureau does best -- that is, the production of reliable, relevant and timely statistics that accurately describe our people and our economy and point the way to a secure future -- cannot help but grow. I know the Census Bureau is already trying to anticipate this demand."