Counting on Relief: Industrializing the Statistical Interviewer during the New Deal

Abstract

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.

Data at the doorstep

“…The countryside was subject to data collection as well, due to the highly influential prices of grain, which were carefully managed and monitored. Accounting practices were actively promoted in farms, and during the Gilded Age reporters from the rural communities themselves produced highly sensitive economic indicators about the estimated yield, before the state's enumerators took over and turned agrarian statistics into a veritable industry (D'Onofrio 2016; Didier 2011Didier , 2020.…”

“…While enquêtes, which were organized by politically appointed commissions, could take on the form of travels or the form of a court hearing (Stieda 1832;Fallati 1846;Embden et al 1877), the census and private initiatives had to be more complex. The statistical bureaus of the nation-state no longer relied on estimations from tax returns, parish books or the numbers given by trusted informants (Löwenfeld-Russ 1926;Yeo 2002;Didier 2011). Instead, trained enumerators were sent from door to door and counting techniques were standardized and optimized.…”