“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 didn’t 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.

Herman Hollerith, inventor of the punch card system. Image: Bettmann/Getty

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 wasn’t 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 he’d simply done the same thing.

The dawn of data

In March 1890, Hollerith’s 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. Hollerith’s 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.

It would take a full four years to finish and release the reports. It was an amazing improvement over the previous census, which took nearly a decade.

The 1890 census — the nation’s 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 family’s 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 wasn’t just the speed that set Hollerith’s 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 Hollerith’s 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 Hollerith’s 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.

Hollerith tabulator in use at the U.S. Census office circa 1900. Photo: PhotoQuest/Getty

Simon Newton Dexter North, a longtime wool industry lobbyist who would head the 1900 census, was also dazzled by the power of Hollerith’s tabulators. Like Walker and other census colleagues, he was obsessed with immigration and cross-breeding. He believed they were diluting the country’s 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 America’s genetic purity. And Hollerith’s tabulator technology was a vital weapon — an “epoch-making” invention — without which this fight would be lost.

Feeding the nativist beast

Overnight, Hollerith’s 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 nation’s ethnic makeup under the microscope. The data seemed to confirm the nativists’ worst fears: Poor, illiterate immigrants were swarming America’s 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.

North 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. His dream would soon be realized in Europe.

The data provided by Hollerith’s 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 inventor’s 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 America’s 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 IBM’s 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.