I searched quickly on the internet and found this nifty history of US Census Tabulation and Processing, but it focuses on the mechanical aspects of it is all.
The Constitution mandates a census every 10 years. The 1880 census took 7 years to tally, but AFAIK it was just the laborious process that delayed the results; the numbers still accurately reflected the country as it was in 1880.
Has a war or anything else ever kept the census from taking place as mandated?
U.S. census, no. Some of the state censuses that used to be taken have been delayed. For example, regarding the 1895 Kansas state census:
Awesome; thanks for the confirmation slash2k.
The 1890 Census was lost to a fire and extreme mismanagement on the part of Congress and the Census Bureau
The census has always been held. However, the reapportionment of Congress that should follow was skipped in the 1920s because of politics.
Thank you. Your cite says it wasn’t the whole census, just parts of it.
It was the 1921 fire that damaged most of the general schedules, with the then-director of the census estimating 25 percent destroyed and half of the remainder damaged, especially by water poured on the fire. No real effort was made to salvage the fire-damaged volumes, and in 1932 they were listed for destruction as part of a larger request to Congress to destroy papers no longer needed for current business. Apparently nobody recognized the historical significance, and Congress duly approved the list.
slash2k, is it known whether the information, or at least some of it, had been copied anywhere else?
The statistical summaries and tabulations had been published years earlier, but no, the actual lists of names are not known to have been copied. Only about one-hundredth of one percent (6,160 names out of 69,979,755 originally enumerated) survive for the general population schedules, although about half of the veterans’ schedules are still extant.
Ironically, 1890 was the first year in some decades which local government did NOT receive their own copy. In 1880, one copy went to the Census Bureau and another was prepared for the local courthouse; in 1850, 1860, and 1870, the state, the county, and the feds all received copies.
Thanks, slash2k.
Yes, that was really bad timing for the year to choose not to provide local copies, wasn’t it? though of course they couldn’t know that that was the year it would matter. It’s much easier to do so now, of course; I presume that the whole thing is now stored in multiple computers, and hope there are hardcopies in multiple places. (I was going to say that I presumed the whole thing’s available online, but of course not all of it’s supposed to be publicly available for some time due to privacy issues – is it 99 years?)
Seventy-two years: the 1940 census was released in April 2012, and the National Archives is already making plans to release the 1950 census in April 2022.
I’m not sure what paper copies have been retained of recent censuses. The 1940 census, for example, is available digitally, but this was prepared from the microfilm, and I know the other mid-century censuses (1950, 60, 70) were all microfilmed for permanent preservation quite early, so I suspect the paper returns were discarded long ago, but I don’t know that for sure. Probably the more recent ones such as 2010 were scanned upon receipt.