Ultimately, more than 5,900 questions were rejected by the advisory committee, the Census Bureau, and the forerunner of the Office of Management and Budget. One issue with suggested new questions was that the “population schedules” where census takers wrote down respondents’ information were already overcrowded. Adding questions would require the removal of others.
In addition, by the 1930s, members of the public were increasingly reluctant to answer so many questions on surveys despite the desire by many groups to gain these statistics. A cartoon published before the 1920 Census illustrates the point.
The Census Bureau and its advisers developed a solution to respondent reluctance and the overcrowding of the form. They fundamentally altered the way U.S. censuses were conducted by adding a sample of the population. A set of supplementary questions would be asked of only a subset of the population (roughly 5 percent of the population). Later the population schedules that included the subset of questions became known as the long form, which was replaced by the American Community Survey (ACS). Every year, the ACS surveys a small percentage of addresses to produce timely statistics about our nation’s social, economic and housing characteristics.
Public outreach was also heightened for the 1940 Census. The Census Bureau’s public relations department distributed thousands of posters, created radio plays, ran newsreels, and spoke with journalists. A 1940 Life magazine article worked with the Census Bureau’s public relations staff to explain how the answers from the census questions would help businesses, schools, and governments plan for future demand.
From the Three Stooges and Life magazine to Saturday Night Live, the once-a-decade census always finds a way into our national dialogue. As it has since 1790, its questions reach directly into every household. The census, as historian Margo Anderson notes, serves as one of very few truly universal events for Americans.
In addition to the other pop culture examples mentioned above, it is no wonder then that recent decades have also seen a Christopher Walken Saturday Night Live skit on the census in 2000 and Colbert Report and Daily Show features in 2010. The next census will be in 2020. If history is any guide, it will generate its own pop culture references.
Genealogists, Start Your Engines!
By right of a 1957 ruling, the United States releases individual census reports to the public 72 years after the Census is completed. This means that each year that ends in “2” sees a new Census data set released. On April 2, 2012, we released the 1940 US Census of Population and Housing. It is an odd event for an organization devoted to keeping every data record we collect confidential, in fulfillment of our strong laws protecting those data.
The 1940 Census data are of key interest to genealogists around the world, as they use them to make more discoveries about their family tree. Over the past decade, there have been enormous advances that help genealogists pursue their passions of tracking down their family histories. Census forms around the world have been digitized and indexed, so that it is common now to enter into website the name of your ancestor and a few bits of other biographical details and within a few clicks see the digitized image of the census form that captured a description of an ancestral family unit.
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