The Shady Side of Fifty: Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States 9780773574618

Citation preview

the shady side of fifty

This page intentionally left blank

The Shady Side of Fifty Age and Old Age in Late Victorian Canada and the United States lisa dillon

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca G

G

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3323-3 Legal deposit first quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been provided by the Université de Montréal. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dillon, Lisa Y. (Lisa Yvette), 1966– The shady side of fifty : age and old age in late Victorian Canada and the United States / Lisa Dillon. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3323-3 1. Old age – Canada – History – 19th century. 2. Old age – United States – History – 19th century. 3. Older people – Canada – Statistics. 4. Older people – United States – Statistics. i. Title. hq1064.c3d45 2008

305.260971

c2007-907678-5

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 Sabon

Contents

Tables and Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

1 Introduction

3

2 The Organization of Age: Age and Old Age in the Canadian and US Censuses, 1870–1901 32 3 The Expression of Age: Age(Mis)reporting in the Canadian and US Censuses 75 4 Ambiguity and Discontinuity in the Lives of Elderly Women 5 Thresholds of Old Age among Men 6 Grandmothers and Grandfathers 7 Conclusion Notes

283

Bibliography Index

272

329

305

180

215

133

This page intentionally left blank

ures

Tables and Figures

tables 2.1 Historical published census volumes, 1870/71 and 1900/01, United States and Canada 47 2.2 Type of age categories used, 1870, United States 67 2.3 Type of age categories used, 1871, Canada 68 2.4 Type of age categories used, 1900, United States 69 2.5 Type of age categories used, 1901, Canada 74 3.1 Distribution of persons who did not report an age, 1870–1901 US and Canada (%) 84 3.2 Distribution of characteristics of persons who did not report an age, and who reported neither age nor year of birth, 1900 US, and 1901 Canada (%) 85 3.3 Age heaping, Myer’s Blended Method, summary index of preference for all terminal digits, 1870 US, 1871 Canada, 1900 US, 1901 Canada 93 3.4 Distribution of relationship to household head, 1870 US, 1871 Canada, 1900 US, 1901 Canada (%) 94 3.5 Age heaping ratios, 1870–1901 US and Canada 96 3.6 Number of persons reporting ages ending in 0 for every one person reporting an age ending in 9, 1870–1901 US and Canada 97 3.7 Persons reporting an age ending in 0, persons aged 15+ years, 1870–1901 US and Canada (%) 102 3.8 Distribution of discrepancies between reported age and age calculated from year of birth, 1900 US and 1901 Canada 115 3.9 Logistic regression on the probability of reporting an age ending in 0, on selected characteristics: persons aged 15+ years, 1870–1901 US and Canada (Odds Ratios) 122

viii

Tables and Figures

3.10 Logistic regression on the probability of reporting an age ending in 0, on selected characteristics: persons aged 65+ years, 1870–1901 US and Canada (Odds Ratios) 128 4.1 Distribution of women aged 65+ years among predominant marital and household statuses, 1870–1901 US and Canada, 2000 US, 2001 Canada (%) 141 4.2 Distribution of women 65+ years by select characteristics, 1870–1901 US and Canada (%) 148 4.3 Distribution of women aged 65+ years among predominant household statuses by bordering regions, 1870–1901 US and Canada (%) 152 4.4 Distribution of husbands’ occupations and property ownership, wives 65+ years, by urban-rural status, 1900 US, and 1901 Canada (%) 158 4.5 Distribution of women and men 65+ years by marital status, 1870–1901 US and Canada (%) 161 4.6 Distribution of widows 65+ years among predominant household statuses by bordering regions, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 163 4.7 Distribution of widows 65+ years and heading households by number of surviving children and number of children coresident, 1900 US (%) 168 4.8 Logistic regression on the probability of heading an empty nest or living as parent of household head, on selected characteristics: widows aged 65+ years, 1900 New England and 1901 Maritimes and Quebec (Odds Ratios) 174 5.1 Distribution of men 65+ years among predominant marital and household statuses, 1870 US, 1871 Canada, 1900 US, 1901 Canada (%) 187 5.2 Distribution of men 65+ years and heading households, by select characteristics, 1870 US, 1871 Canada, 1900 US, 1901 Canada (%) 189 5.3 Thresholds of household headship, 1870–1901 US and Canada 203 5.4 Change in household headship by age group, men 60 to 80+ (%) 204 5.5 Logistic regression on the probability of being a household head, on selected characteristics: men 65+ years (Odds Ratios) 207 5.6 Logistic regression on the probability of being a household head, on selected characteristics: men 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 209 5.7 Logistic regression on the probability of being a household head, on selected characteristics: men 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 210

Tables and Figures

ix

6.1 Distribution of ever-married women 65+ years living with grandchildren, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 222 6.2 Distribution of ever-married men 65+ years living with grandchildren, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 222 6.3 Distribution of ever-married women 65+ years living with grandchildren, by grandmother type and select characteristics (%) 226 6.4 Distribution of ever-married women 65+ years living with grandchildren, by grandmother type and select characteristics (%) 228 6.5 Distribution of ever-married men 65+ years living with grandchildren, by grandfather type and select characteristics (%) 230 6.6 Distribution of ever-married men 65+ years living with grandchildren, by grandfather type and select characteristics (%) 232 6.7 Logistic regression on the probability of living with children and grandchildren, on selected characteristics: ever-married women 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 235 6.8 Logistic regression on the probability of living with grandchildren only on selected characteristics: ever-married women aged 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 237 6.9 Logistic regression on the probability of living with children and grandchildren, on selected characteristics: ever-married men 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 239 6.10 Logistic regression on the probability of living with grandchildren only, on selected characteristics: ever-married men aged 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 241 6.11 Parent and grandparent coresidential patterns, 1900 US and 1901 Canada 251 6.12 Mean number of grandchildren, by grandparent-head age gap, 1900 US and 1901 Canada 253 6.13 Distribution of characteristics, household heads with children and spouses of household heads with children, by grandmother presence, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 256 6.14 Distribution of characteristics, household heads with children and spouses of household heads with children, by grandfather presence, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 257 6.15 Logistic regression on the probability of attending school, on selected characteristics: children aged 5 to 14 years living with male household head, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 262 6.16 Logistic regression on the probability of attending school, on selected characteristics: children aged 5 to 14 years living with female household head, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 266

x

Tables and Figures

6.17 Logistic regression on the probability of reporting an occupation on selected characteristics: female household heads with coresident children, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (Odds Ratios) 268

figures 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11

Distribution of ages by sex, 1870 US (%) 90 Distribution of ages by sex, 1871 Canada (%) 90 Distribution of ages by sex, 1900 US (%) 91 Distribution of ages by sex, 1901 Canada (%) 91 Distribution of age discrepancies within age group, 1900 US (%) 117 Distribution of age discrepancies within age group, 1901 Canada (%) 117 Mean age of youngest child by own age, women aged 65+ years, 1900 US and 1901 Canada 150 Distribution of rural wives 65+ years by husband’s occupation and property-ownership, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 159 Men heading households by age, 1870 US and 1871 Canada (%) 192 Men heading households by age, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 192 Men who head, head and own, and head and rent a household, by age, 1900 US (%) 194 Men who head households and who own property, by age, 1901 Canada (%) 194 Men listing an occupation, by age, 1870 US and 1871 Canada (%) 196 Men listing an occupation, by age, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 196 Men living with a spouse by age, 1870 US and 1871 Canada (%) 199 Men living with a spouse, by age, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 199 Men who head a household which includes children, by age, 1870 US and 1871 Canada (%) 201 Men who head a household that includes children, by age, 1900 US and 1901 Canada (%) 201 Men heading households, by age, 1901 and 1996 Canada (%) 204

ents

Acknowledgments

This book has been almost two decades in the making, developing from a master’s memoir through various conference papers, then emerging as a phd dissertation, dismantled and refitted during postdoctoral revisions and reconstructed in the course of further conference papers and articles, and finally appearing as this monograph. The resulting narrative is in part an experiment to integrate two census-based approaches to understanding historical patterns: quantitative analysis of historical census data to discern the behaviour of ordinary persons and discourse analysis of census texts to explore the representation of both census concepts and census respondents. My attempt to combine these two approaches is inspired by the work of Canadian and US researchers, and I have had the good fortune to learn from and work with several of these scholars in both countries. Professors, mentors, colleagues, friends, and family have all provided the immeasurable support needed to initiate and sustain this project over the years. The Department of History at the University of Minnesota provided an exceptional academic environment in which to learn the skills of a historian. My phd advisor, Steven Ruggles, guided me through the process of researching and writing a doctoral dissertation, providing frank criticism of my research design and sharing in my enthusiasm for the results. His consistent encouragement, optimism, and good humour made graduate school enjoyable. As a research assistant with the Minnesota Historical Census Projects, I not only learned skills in processing and interpreting census data but also benefited from the uncommonly friendly and stimulating environment of the census research assistant office, a room that served as an intellectual and emotional home-on-campus during my five years at Minnesota. Remembering

xii

Acknowledgments

that data are much more fun to analyze than to enter, special thanks are owed to the data entry operators who worked to create the ipums census database, as well as the 1871 and 1901 Canadian census microdata at York University and the University of Victoria. From 1988 to 2003, numerous student research assistants from Carleton University, McGill University, the University of Minnesota, Université de Montréal, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria, and York University have worked to transform the nineteenth-century US and Canadian censuses into usable databases; the research conducted for this book would not have been possible without their efforts. I would also like to thank my professors at the University of Minnesota, including Rus Menard, Deborah Levison, and Robert McCaa, who taught me to think critically as a historian, provided guidance with demographic measures, and supplied valuable constructive criticism. Renewed contacts with Canadian colleagues during my postdoctoral studies with the Canadian Families Project, the University of Victoria, and the Institute of Canadian Studies (ics), University of Ottawa, inspired me to explore new data sources and reconceptualize my research approach. Eric Sager and Peter Baskerville welcomed me to the Canadian Families Project’s L-Hut headquarters at the University of Victoria for a postdoctoral sojourn during which they provided expert guidance on the complexities of the 1901 Canadian census as well as the challenge of transforming a thesis into a book. Gordon Darroch, who graciously made available the 1871 Canadian census microdata, provided invaluable guidance in the use of these data, as well as more general insights into the process of researching and writing social history. This association with the Canadian Families Project continued during my post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Canadian Studies. At the ics, Chad Gaffield offered invaluable mentorship and support, provided constructive criticism of several chapter drafts, and encouraged me to apply discourse analysis to the study of historical censuses. This approach was also expertly modelled by Bruce Curtis in his important work The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840 1875 (2001). I thank the staff of the ics, particularly Angela Mattiacci, for making the Institute a welcoming and stimulating environment in which to continue my work with nineteenth-century Canadian census microdata; Angela, you are missed. During my time at the ics, the Genealogical Society of Utah made an incredible gift to the Canadian historical community: 4.3 million cases on a plate, drawn from the 1881 Census of Canada. I thank our Latter-

Acknowledgments

xiii

day Saints compatriots and their legions of volunteers for transcribing this as well as the 1880 US census in their entirety and for generously making these data available free of charge to researchers and genealogists alike. Further thanks are owed to my colleagues on the North Atlantic Population Project (napp), who have helped me to understand and re-evaluate census categories and census history in the course of integrating our national historical censuses. The lively exchanges and camaraderie of the napp meetings have provided considerable encouragement in working with this complex primary source. The intense labour to synthesize new research in a refashioned manuscript was conducted after I was hired to teach historical demography in the Département de Démographie, Université de Montréal. I thank the Université de Montréal for providing me with the time off courses and conference travel funds necessary to complete this book. My colleagues at the Département de Démographie have created an exceptional new academic home in which to further my knowledge of demographic and social behaviour. Bertrand Desjardins of the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (prdh) has educated me in the use of the Registre de la population du Québec ancien; this and his general enthusiasm for historical demography and the future of the prdh is greatly appreciated. As prdh research co-ordinator, Alexandre Bujold relieved me from day-to-day census project tasks, allowing me to focus on final book revisions; for his capable supervisory presence at the prdh I am truly grateful. prdh programmer Denis Duval provided invaluable technical assistance with the census microdata as well as encouragement for the revisionist census enterprise. As a new professor in the Montreal network of universities, I have also benefited from the advice and support of colleagues associated with the Montreal History Group meetings, including Danielle Gauvreau, Magda Fahrni, José Igartua, Sherry Olson, and Patricia Thornton. The research presented in this book has been financially supported by a Canada-US Fulbright Fellowship, doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, two dissertation fellowship grants from the Department of History at the University of Minnesota, a Canadian Families Project postdoctoral fellowship and a research start-up grant from the Université de Montréal, while a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant provided funding for census database development. The Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada through their Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme have made the publication of this work possible. Preliminary

xiv

Acknowledgments

versions of my book chapters have been presented at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, the “Old Age in Pre-Industrial Society” conference in Ithaca and the Carleton Conference on the History of the Family, as well as at various conferences of the Canadian Historical Association, the Social Science History Association, and the Canadian Families Project. Portions of this book have appeared previously in article form. Parts of chapter 4 appear in Bob Hesketh and Chris Hackett, eds., “Elderly Women in Late Victorian Canada,” Canada: Confederation to Present (cdRom), University of Alberta, 2001. Chapter 5 has been previously published in Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager, eds., “Boundaries of Age: Exploring the Patterns of Young-Old Age among Men, Canada and the United States, 1870–1901” (2007). In addition, the Toronto Globe and Mail gave permission to cite material from the Globe, 10 January 1852. Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of my manuscript for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions, editor Claire Gigantes for clarifying and refining my prose, and the staff of McGill-Queen’s University Press, including Jonathan Crago and Joan McGilvray, for guiding me through the publication process. Of course, the debts surrounding this book transcend the academic milieu. For many years, my close friends Cheryl Francis, Mair Ann Gault, Christabelle Sethna, and Sarah Spencer have provided unstinting encouragement for my academic endeavours. My parents, Melvyn Dillon and Carol Crompton Dillon, my brother and sisters, Matthew Dillon, Laurie Dillon Schalk, and Leigh Dillon Scatchard, my in-laws Kathleen Cottam Dillon, Bruce Scatchard, and Andrew Schalk, and my nieces and nephews Alexa Dillon, Evan Dillon, Emily Scatchard, Luke Scatchard, and Lucy Schalk have provided constant love and support, as well as ideas, reflections, and inspiration for many of the themes explored in this work. In turn, Gustavo Chávez Major has provided the perfect motivation to complete this project and embark on some new ones. I am truly grateful for the constant encouragement given to me by this broad circle of kith and kin. This book is dedicated to my grandparents, William Dillon, Mary Leah Buckland Dillon, George Crompton, and Sylvia Roper Crompton.

the shady side of fifty

This page intentionally left blank

1 Introduction

Turn-of-the-century census officials knew very well that census respondents occasionally reported the wrong age, intentionally or otherwise. This anomaly and others had become clear in fifty years of harnessing social conditions to the census page. Since the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of census enumerators fanned out across Canada and the United States on a decennial basis, attempting the nearly impossible: to enumerate a mobile, far-flung, modestly literate, and sometimes resistant population with often inadequate materials and limited instructions. Coping with these enormous challenges, enumerators in both countries produced scores of census manuscripts that formed the basis of statistical tabulations. These tabulations and the censuses themselves were criticized as often as they were celebrated. In both the past and the present, Canadian and US censuses have been critiqued on the basis of their technical shortcomings and their intellectual underpinnings. To historical opponents, censuses could be used as tools of ethnocentric aggrandizement; today, the historical censuses are often portrayed as exercises in colonial domination and social control. The asking of age, on the other hand, was readily encouraged by contemporary observers, and by the time the US census bureau commissioned a systematic study of US age reporting patterns in the 1900 census, this characteristic was established as a cornerstone of census inquiry. The first thorough study of US census age reporting was undertaken by a young economist, Allyn Young, whose work and life serve as a thematic touchstone for this history of age and old age in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. Young must have been a diligent and persistent scholar of economics to work through the age responses declared in the 1900 US census. His motivation is clear, for this analysis

4

The Shady Side of Fifty

served as the basis of his doctoral thesis and facilitated his entrance into the academic profession. Whether Young connected his analyses of age reporting and fertility patterns to his own personal experience of aging remains less clear. Young articulated the importance of age and aging as demographic phenomena: “For the purpose of a scientific study of the population,” he wrote in a supplementary report to the 1900 US published census, “the classification by age is only less important and fundamental than that based on sex.”1 Twenty years later, he corresponded with birth control activist Margaret Sanger on the related subject of contraception and population growth, asserting the negative effects of uncontrolled fertility on the economic welfare of the United States.2 Over the course of those twenty years, Young confronted the impact of aging on his personal life in important ways, temporarily residing with his wife’s aging parents and subsequently taking his widowed father-inlaw into his home.3 Did Young reflect on his multigenerational family as he contemplated population issues? Young’s thoughts on aging as a personal experience slip under the radar; in many ways, so have the census age responses themselves. Today, social science historians and demographers who avail themselves of historical census data use information on age to classify their chosen population subgroups and to control for age-based change in their analyses. With the census manuscripts now transformed into individual-level data, such scholars can perform many age-based analyses Allyn Young likely experienced but never dreamed of addressing in the course of his work: family life cycle changes, age thresholds and multigenerational coresidence. Yet somehow in these studies, age itself becomes obscured. To understand the plight of the underprivileged and the ways in which they sought to cope with or resist discrimination, social historians have highlighted gender, race, ethnicity, and class. The meaning of age, a social characteristic shared by every Canadian and American, has aroused less critical attention, even as social science historians and demographers dutifully enter this variable in their crosstabulations and regressions and routinely report the significant effect of age on various socioeconomic and demographic behaviours. Lacking the tools of the modern-day social scientist, Young nevertheless demonstrated sensitivity to age as a constructed identifier in a way that has remained largely the province of government statisticians. Wedded to the notion of accuracy, statisticians past and present worry about the quality of census age reporting because they recognize tensions about aging, and the impact of those tensions on information provision.

Introduction

5

the subject, specified Few concerns about aging are actually new; dissatisfaction with aging and concerns about old age security existed long before youth culture and falling fertility made such issues predominant. Accordingly, scholars working in two parallel academic traditions have pursued the historical study of old age, some focusing on the images and status of elderly persons, others analyzing the living arrangements and economic status of older men and women. These studies usually concentrate on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, during which countries such as Canada and the United States underwent rapid social, demographic and economic change. These researchers have identified multiple and often conflicting images of the elderly; they have established the important role of the elderly in the family, the changing nature of their economic fortunes, and the ways in which social characteristics such as gender, race, and class shaped their lives. The history of old age itself, however, remains fragmented, largely because the two historical fields responsible for the study of old age have not taken full advantage of each other’s theoretical perspectives and primary sources. The social science historiography of old age seldom confronts age itself as a constructed category of analysis, while scholars interested in deconstructing old age have not turned their attention to the census itself as a site of knowledge production about age. Finally, the socioeconomic experiences of ordinary elderly women and men across nineteenth-century Canada also remain largely unknown. Recent theoretical and methodological advances in intellectual history and historical demography present a new opportunity to remedy these gaps and to revisit old age both conceptually and empirically. Drawing upon a valuable and complex primary source, the nominal censuses of the late nineteenth century and turn of the century, this monograph offers new insights on the complexities of aging in Canada and the United States from 1870 to 1901. Examining the census in turn as a qualitative document and as a source of quantitative data, this book explores old age both as a concept and as a lived experience, highlighting the evolution of old age phases. Thus, the main contribution of this work is to integrate social science analysis of historical census microdata with a discourse analysis of the ways in which census officials, enumerators, and respondents constituted ideas about age and old age during the nineteenth century. This study is based on a fully integrated set of census data from Canada and the United States in 1870,

6

The Shady Side of Fifty

1871, 1900, and 1901 and offers the first truly consistent international comparison of the nineteenth-century elderly’s age reporting patterns, socioeconomic characteristics, and living arrangements.

social and cultural histories of old age and of the census Old Age Historiography in the United States The following study of the construction and experience of old age in Canada and the United States draws upon a rich literature on the social and demographic history of old age. This literature has evolved from concerns about the impact of modernization on the status of the elderly, to interest in their relative levels of dependence and agency, to curiosity about the elderly’s diverse experiences. Many American scholars, particularly those writing before 1980, have emphasized the dependence of nineteenth-century elders on their children. By focusing on the impact of modernization, David Hackett Fischer and W. Andrew Achenbaum set the agenda for historical research on the elderly, centring their own and subsequent debates on the argument that the elderly’s status in the family and in American society had declined over the past two hundred years.4 Fischer and Achenbaum, joined by John Demos, Daniel Scott Smith, and Tamara Hareven, disagreed about the causes and periodization of this change in status; their arguments are summarized in Carole Haber and Brian Gratton’s synthesis, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History, (1994). However, American historians of the 1970s all founded their research upon the assumption that the status of the elderly had indeed declined by the end of the nineteenth century. Subsequent research on social welfare provision for the aged was modelled on the same question of status, producing top-down studies that focused on welfare providers’ attempts to control the elderly and delimit their identity.5 Like the cultural studies of the 1970s, early work on social welfare provision for the aged attempted to identify a single status for this group, ignoring their diversity.6 Furthermore, these historians’ emphasis on status and social control denied the elderly’s own agency.7 The field of old age history in the United States began to transcend its preoccupation with declension when historians turned from cultural evidence to routinely generated data such as the manuscript census. This work dovetailed with more general work on the household struc-

Introduction

7

ture of Victorian Americans. Research on the living arrangements of the elderly focused on changes in households across the family life cycle and the individual life course, the absence of empty nests, and distinctions in household patterns on the basis of gender, class, and race. During the late 1970s and 1980s, life course historians such as Lutz Berkner, Glen Elder, Howard Chudacoff, and Tamara Hareven qualified Peter Laslett’s emphasis on the predominance of the nuclear family household structure in Western societies by pointing out that many individuals experienced a variety of living arrangements throughout the course of their lives.8 In doing so, these historians argued that many aged women and men had experienced far fewer discontinuities in work and family life than was originally supposed. For example, Howard Chudacoff and Tamara Hareven asserted that the elderly in fact rarely experienced an empty nest.9 These historians also began to highlight differences among the elderly. In “Life Course, Norms and the Family System of Older Americans in 1900 (1979),” Daniel Scott Smith used the 1900 Public Use Microdata Set to examine the impact of various factors such as sex, marital status, and work status on the elderly’s living arrangements.10 Smith asserted that the coresidence of the elderly with children was not primarily forced by economic necessity; indeed, the black elderly, as the most economically deprived group, were less likely to live with children than any other group.11 Some of these scholars still made assumptions about the dependence of the elderly. E.A. Hammel asked “in what kinds of groups have the elderly been nurtured” and described them as a “general social burden.”12 Howard Chudacoff and Tamara Hareven as well as Daniel Scott Smith conveyed the same view of the elderly and portrayed the family as “the basic support system,”13 the “welfare institution,”14 for older people before the turn of the century. However, these historians implicitly countered the status-declension thesis by emphasizing the elderly’s overall familial integration. Furthermore, by using their demographic data to analyze internal differences among the elderly, these historians made it impossible for old age historians to ignore the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. By the 1990s a growing number of historians maintained that old age did not herald inactivity and absolute dependence. Andrejs Plakans and Charles Weatherell described aged peasants at Pinkenhof, a midnineteenth-century eastern European farm estate, and the “dozens of light but important chores farmstead life entailed.”15 They argued that, in performing these tasks, aged farmers “maintained a link with the

8

The Shady Side of Fifty

world of work that was rarely, if ever, severed.” Research by Steven Ruggles marked another development in the historiography of old age in the United States and made further inroads in the declension thesis. He did so partly by demonstrating the irrelevance of declension in light of the demographic and economic realities of the elderly’s living patterns, and partly by highlighting how Victorian family values increasingly esteemed multigenerational family connections. In his 1987 study Prolonged Connections, Ruggles used microsimulation models to postulate high rates of extended family living in the nineteenth-century United States, arguing that demographic transitions at the time had increased the biological opportunities for the formation of extended families.16 Discovering a greater proportion of extended families among the bourgeoisie than among the industrial working class, Ruggles asserted that the extended family was a luxury rather than a functional strategy.17 In his 1994 article “The Transformation of American Family Structure,” Ruggles turned to the fuller and longer-range data available in the Integrated Public-Use Microdata Series (ipums). He concluded again that scholars must account for demographic conditions and the resultant pool of available kin alongside economic and cultural influences when studying family and household composition.18 Distinguishing the households of black and white Americans, Ruggles discovered that, during the nineteenth century, elderly persons of high economic status were most likely to reside with their children. In this article and in subsequent research, Ruggles argued that the association between high economic status and multigenerational coresidence had reversed by the late twentieth century, when it was the poorest elderly persons who most often lived with kin.19 Alongside Ruggles’s intensive and long-term studies of the elderly’s living arrangements, new research by US economic historians delineated the elderly’s increasing ability to provide for their own retirement through improving wages, the wages of children, and pensions. On the basis of their research on the elderly’s living arrangements and income, scholars such as Brian Gratton, Carole Haber, Frances Rotondo, and Cheryl Elman concluded that the elderly during the late nineteenth century were neither burdens upon their children nor dependents of the state. Rather, they contended that the Industrial Revolution and the steadily increasing wages it brought actually improved the elderly’s ability to provide for their own retirement.20 Using data from US budgetary surveys and censuses, Gratton and Rotondo argued that the late-nineteenth-century elderly could avoid indigence by tapping into

Introduction

9

their children’s earnings.21 Cheryl Elman found that the presence of nonnuclear elders, such as grandparents, in American homes in 1910 increased the odds that teens would be in school and concluded that these elderly individuals were not a burden to the household. Instead, she argued, “Older persons could be and no doubt were productive by helping with child care and family activities such as housework, gardening or farm chores ... freeing up time of other [household] members.”22 Carole Haber and Brian Gratton described large numbers of elderly persons in the late nineteenth century who sold their rural farms or urban businesses and moved to villages in order to live autonomously in their old age.23 In more general economic histories of nineteenthcentury rural America, Jeremy Atack, Peter Passell, and Allan Kulikoff emphasized the role of aged farmers in ensuring their children’s future by bequesting farm property or some other kind of wealth. Collectively, research by Smith, Hareven, Ruggles, Gratton, Elman, Rotondo, and Elman has established the association between high economic status and multigenerational coresidence, the influence of demographic opportunity on living arrangements, and the economic dynamics of urban multigenerational coresidence. Taking advantage of a newly available long-term series of national-level census microdata and the important socioeconomic variables featured in these data, these researchers often emphasized national rather than regional patterns. They did not usually consider the economic exchanges of noncoresidential relatives, downplayed the basic impact of age itself on the elderly’s behavioural patterns in favour of race and class effects, and did not situate the household patterns of the American elderly in their continental context. In fact, north of the forty-ninth parallel, many elderly persons of the late nineteenth century faced challenges similar to those that confronted the American aged. Old Age Historiography in Canada The history of old age is a fairly new field in Canada. Until the 1990s, Canadian scholars writing on old age presented top-down bureaucratic histories or focused on the present rather than the past. They described the fate of the elderly at the hands of old age home managers or chronicled the rising proportion of the elderly in the Canadian population.24 By the late 1980s, however, a few Canadian historians began to take an interest in the perspectives and strategies of the elderly themselves. Most did so by studying how the elderly or their families used institu-

10

The Shady Side of Fifty

tions such as poorhouses and old age homes to their own advantage.25 James Snell has revised the history of pension policies in twentiethcentury Canada by exploring how the elderly reacted to Canada’s pension apparatus, forming interest groups to petition for increases in pension payments.26 Edgar-André Montigny produced a sensitive account of the elderly’s economic status, family and institutional experiences, and shifts in government policy toward the elderly in late nineteenthcentury Ontario. Examining elderly persons living in Brockville, St Catharine’s, and Kingston, Montigny determined that the majority of elderly persons lived independently and were no more or less financially secure than younger persons.27 Canadian studies of the nineteenth-century family, household structure and family economics also tended to portray the Victorian elderly as empowered and important decision makers. Canada’s social historians often adopted a family strategies perspective that emphasized cooperation between generations: “By necessity, the generations have exhibited mutual solidarity. Children have needed the assistance of their parents to establish themselves, and parents have needed their children’s assistance to ensure their material well-being in old age.”28 Historians such as Gérard Bouchard, J.I. Little, David Gagan, Gordon Darroch, Lee Soltow, and Bruce Elliott documented the tremendous energy parents devoted to establishing all their children on landholdings close to the family farm.29 They pictured the elderly as paternal gatekeepers, responsible for the fates of their children. Research by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton provides evidence of ethnic differences in intergenerational family practices; children in Montreal’s Irish families, for example, tended to marry later than their French-Canadian counterparts, with the result that they spent a longer period of time remitting wages to their parents.30 Historians north and south of the forty-ninth parallel now try to cope with the limitations of the family strategies perspective by paying greater attention to intrafamilial conflict and inequity, often based on gendered roles.31 The Diversity of Old Age The most important lesson to emerge from social science history research on aging and the aged concerns the diversity of the lives of the elderly. The identities and life conditions of elderly women and men in late Victorian Canada and the United States varied considerably. Men were family patriarchs, widowers, or husbands; farmers at the height of

Introduction

11

property owning or labourers at increasing risk of unemployment; Catholics or Protestants; immigrants or native-born; household heads or household dependents. Elderly women could be matriarchs or dependents in a child’s household; wives or widows; grandmothers or spinsters; privileged members of the bourgeoisie or impoverished aboriginal women. The lives of aged women and men were shaped by personal and social characteristics such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, religion, geography, family history, past fertility, the health conditions and mortality rates of their community, ethnic affiliation, churchgoing, wealth, and property. Economic opportunity, demography, cultural patterns, and social practices divided and compartmentalized the Canadian and American elderly in various ways. Age, on the other hand, was the one factor that united them. Each Canadian and American who survived infancy, childhood diseases, accidents in adolescence and young adulthood, and giving birth to their own children faced growing old. Yet as a result of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, aging happened in different ways and at different paces; aging was, and continues to be, individualized. The role of age itself tends to be somewhat minimized by social science historians, largely because gender, race, class, and marital status loom so large as preconditions on the elderly’s day-to-day experiences. Once the subject of study is defined as elderly persons, age itself often becomes an invisible category. However, new analytic tools are now emerging that encourage more direct attention to the role of age in the lives of elderly women and men. Age as a Constructed Category of Analysis Historical research on the elderly and their families evolved steadily during the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s. The field drew largely upon the approaches and methods of the “new social history” of the 1970s, quantitative history, and historical demography. Research on aging emphasizes variously individual agency, differential analysis, demographic opportunity, and the structural influences of socioeconomic contexts. A parallel development in academic historical research concerned the growing use of discourse analysis. Discourse analysis is an intellectual approach intent on uncovering layers of constructed meaning. Scholars who conduct discourse analysis focus on the way historical actors and institutions use language to create, perpetuate, and circulate meaning and identities. Discourses often function by establish-

12

The Shady Side of Fifty

ing differences and practising exclusion.32 Such differences can be established explicitly or implicitly. In a classic article on the subject, Joan Scott stated that deconstructionists must emphasize the complexity of the constructed meanings they uncover; according to Scott, “meaning is multidimensional, established relationally.”33 Indeed, discourses should be understood in relation to other, opposing discourses; discourses occur “in contrast and opposition to other groups of utterances.”34 Meanings, including differences, are constructed in both private and public contexts characterized by unequal relations of power, relations described by Michel Foucault as political.35 Social norms and meanings have always been subject to contestation.36 Accordingly, historians who conduct discourse analysis emphasize the ongoing importance of individual agency, “the subject’s ability to reflect on the social discourse and challenge its determinations,” as well as the continuing need to understand the use of language and construction of meanings in relation to lived social experiences.37 In a 2000 special issue of Histoire sociale/Social History, Mariana Valverde lamented Canadian historians’ timidity in integrating discourse analysis into their work. One of Valverde’s most important practical points is that discourse analysis should be brought to bear not only on the subjects of sexism and racism in which “rhetorical” discourse seems obvious but also on “texts that are not obviously “rhetorical” and information formats that are not textual.”38 Her examples were perhaps tongue-in-cheek – “the discourse of federal tax-cutting or the administrative details of municipal licensing schemes” – but her recommendation was not.39 As discussed later in this chapter and in chapter 2, nineteenth-century censuses constitute an entirely appropriate source in this regard, both as products of government projects to represent populations in particular ways and as the result of census respondents’ and enumerators’ interventions in the representation process. Discourse analysis and related approaches that explore the construction of gender and racialization also suggest how a revisioning of age and aging might be undertaken in the context of nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. “Feminist scholarship has correctly insisted upon the social construction of gender,” explains Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. “It is now widely accepted that all societies promote identities and roles taken to be appropriate to the genders and, normally, present those identities and roles as natural emanations of sexual difference.”40 Scott explains the difficulty with which the naturalized category of gender could be questioned: “Those who do criticize it (and

Introduction

13

there were those who did) have a difficult time challenging its authority for they seem to be disputing nature instead of social construction.”41 As Sara Mills argues, what is possible to say “seems self-evident and natural, this naturalness is a result of what has been excluded, that which is almost unsayable.”42 Societies also promoted identities and roles for persons on the basis of age; those same identities and roles were also constructed as natural. As we shall see in chapters 4 through 6, the very diversity of the elderly’s lives disputed the roles that had been constructed for them. Discourse analysis, which emphasizes “the ambiguity and instability of meaning,” allows for such diversity. 43 Finally, studies of gender, class and racialization suggest the importance of examining the interconnectedness of age with other constructed identities. Scott explains how sexual difference became a way of creating class: “If we look closely at the ‘languages of class’ of the nineteenth century we find they are built with, in terms of, references to sexual difference.”44 Timothy Stanley argues that history cannot be understood without seeing how racism conditioned social experience and the dividing up of people into privileged and unprivileged groups; he posits racism as “a fundamental structuring of social experience ... a generalized social phenomenon.”45 David Roediger demonstrates how social experience is best understood through the interactive workings of what we might otherwise term separate identities. For example, workers in the nineteenth-century United States responded to the insecurities of the capitalist labour market by emphasizing their whiteness, through language and blackface minstrelsy.46 By exploring how “race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience ... Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other,” Anne McClintock broadens our notion of race, asserting that “imperialism and the invention of race were fundamental aspects of Western, industrial modernity.”47 McClintock likens colonial imperialism to industrial imperialism and goes on to describe how this industrial imperialism was applied to the domestic sphere, creating values surrounding classification and quantification, and the rationalization of time. McClintock described such values as “the Victorian fetish for measurement, order and boundary.”48 Nineteenth-century classification systems served a methodological purpose by allowing contemporaries to structure meanings in particular ways, establishing what is and is not true, real, and thinkable.49 Such regulation in fact evokes processes central to the mission of the Canadian and US censuses, the enumeration of age being one of many measurements constituted by census officials.

14

The Shady Side of Fifty

Historians who study images of and attitudes about old age in the past have analyzed these subjects through classification and description of images and texts rather than through deconstructionist analysis. For example, in The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (1992), Thomas Cole addresses connections between physical and spiritual conceptions of aging, starting in early modern Europe and moving on to the United States from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. Examining art, iconography, poetry, literature, sermons, and essays, Cole chronicles changes in philosophical perceptions of old age, describing the shift from veneration to sentimentalization of the elderly, and the late nineteenth century’s splitting of old age into two states, one healthy and civilized and the other sinful, diseased, and dependent. Cole contextualizes these changes within the rise of the middle class and Victorian morality, the demise of communal traditions, and the onset of socioeconomic changes that reduced patriarchal power. In the context of Canada, a paper by Edgar-André Montigny explores a complementary source, the diaries of two elderly women who were members of Toronto’s elite. Montigny’s findings oppose images of elderly women’s lives as passive and boring; instead, Wilmot Cumberland and Ellen Osler’s diaries show how actively involved they were in their husbands’ and children’s lives. “Women’s activities as kin keepers,” writes Montigny, “were a vital part of an upper class family’s survival strategies.”50 A more recent set of essays edited by Susannah Ottaway, L.A. Botelho, and Katharine Kittredge attempts to relate elite and popular images of the elderly in the past to their social conditions; above all, these essays emphasize the diversity of the elderly.51 Most researchers who have explored historical images of old age face a common challenge: by consulting qualitative textual sources produced by artists, philosophers, and writers, historians have been forced to focus on old age images generated by members of the literate elite. Patrice Bourdelais took an entirely different approach to studying the invention of old age in France, focusing on the evolution of received old age thresholds and the concept of population aging.52 While Bourdelais often focused on definitions of old age found in elite literary texts, paying closer attention to the particular numeric thresholds specified in these texts, he also emphasized the importance of government statistical documents, namely, census manuscripts and census tabulations, in defining old age thresholds and in reinforcing the intellectual importance of measuring old age. Bourdelais’s study is impressive in its scope, moving from the pre-Enlightenment era to the twentieth century. Alter-

Introduction

15

natively, a deeper understanding of the construction of old age would benefit from closer study of census documents in conjunction with census microdata during a more circumscribed time period. Corrine T. Field’s evocative analysis of mid-nineteenth-century American women’s rights rhetoric also focuses on the social construction of age thresholds.53 Field explains how age twenty-one, the age of majority, became invested with “democratic” social meaning by politicians seeking a way to replace property qualifications for white men’s suffrage. By insisting that this threshold of adulthood also be extended to women and black Americans, contemporary activists exposed the contradiction inherent in the new suffrage laws. While portraying suffrage based on the age of majority as “democratic,” politicians nevertheless located this age identity in a hierarchy in which race and gender both outranked age. Field’s analysis demonstrates three important facts: that the meaning of age is socially constructed through the establishment of difference; that this social construction combined with the construction of gender and race identities in such a way as to perpetuate social inequalities; and that the social construction of age was nevertheless contested. Taken together, discourse analyses, studies of gender, class, and race, and recent research on the cultural history of aging encourage researchers to render visible the previously invisible, to study hitherto unseen connections among different constructed human categories, to recognize the complexity and diversity of the aging experience, and to connect the construction of old age to nineteenth-century discourses that lauded rationalization, classification, and counting. Accordingly, this book pays attention to the ways in which age concepts and identities were constituted through the definition of age categories and the associations of particular words with old age and age (mis)reporting patterns, while juxtaposing the construction of knowledge surrounding old age with the social experiences of the elderly themselves, in particular the phases of old age. The Canadian and US censuses, in their various forms, provide the qualitative and quantitative material necessary for this investigation. As census researchers have demonstrated, however, the nature, quality, and authorship of censuses must also be scrutinized. Historiography of Nineteenth-Century Censuses Today, historians devote considerable energy to documenting and critiquing the nineteenth-century censuses. Issues addressed by these scholars can be linked to late-nineteenth-century census retrospectives

16

The Shady Side of Fifty

on earlier censuses. Nineteenth-century census officials themselves were aware of the evolutionary character of the census. They valued information provided by earlier enumerations but were also aware of their shortcomings. For example, Joseph-Charles Taché, director of the 1871 Canadian census, critiqued the 1852 and 1861 Canadian censuses for mixing de jure and de facto enumeration practices. De jure censuses recorded individuals in the households in which they were found on the day of enumeration, whereas de facto enumerations counted individuals in the household in which they normally resided. The censuses of England, Wales, and Scotland followed the de jure enumeration procedure, whereas the censuses of the United States and the post-1861 censuses of Canada adopted the de facto enumeration practice.54 In contrast, the early Canadian nominal censuses mixed the two approaches by instructing enumerators to record persons in their usual place of residence, as well as strangers who chanced to stay in the house the night of the enumeration. Taché asserted that the 1861 Canadian census overcounted the population as a result.55 Likewise, US census superintendent Francis A. Walker was critical of the 1870 US census, describing errors of underenumeration and inaccuracy in the enumeration of occupation, marriage, age, and literacy and expressing doubts that wives, servants, or children who responded to the enumerator could give accurate answers.56 Nineteenth-century criticisms of censuses in both countries centred on underenumeration, the worst cases concerning the 1861 census of Canada West, Montreal, Philadelphia, and New York, and the American South in 1870.57 In the United States, the Association for the Advancement of Women critiqued the underenumeration of women’s work.58 One hundred years later, scholars pioneering the “new” social history of the 1970s brought renewed attention to the construction of historical censuses to understand the idiosyncracies of this routinely generated primary source that formed the basis of newly emerging data sets. These critiques, published between 1970 and the present, fall into four somewhat overlapping categories. The first set of critiques sought to understand particular problems of census production by examining enumerator instructions, introductions to the census volumes themselves, Statistical Yearbooks, reports of the Minister of Agriculture, correspondence among census officials and enumerators, parliamentary debates, and comments by individual enumerators on census returns. A range of journal articles that addressed the US manuscript censuses discussed problems of underenumeration and their implications for studies

Introduction

17

of social and economic mobility and voting.59 In particular, the authors have identified which groups are most likely to be underenumerated, namely, the poor, urban dwellers, boarders, immigrants, migrants, labourers, black Americans, and those who had voted for a losing party. The Canadian critical literature on the census has contested the usefulness of information on literacy, detected errors of land unit terminology in the published 1851–52 census, and discussed the challenges posed by inexperienced clerks and enumerators, the division of enumeration areas, migrating persons who escaped enumeration, and inconsistent enumerator instructions regarding industrial establishments.60 The treatment and ignorance of women’s work in nineteenth-century enumerations is a topic of continuing interest among economic historians, particularly the omission of women’s farm labour, boarding-house keeping, and piecework from the census.61 At the same time, north and south of the border, researchers have found women’s factory work to have been fairly well enumerated.62 Other scholars have focused on the interpretation of census-based identities and census responses, such as the identification of farmers, the definition of households, the quality of literacy responses, and the relationship between census occupations and class.63 Finally, a large number of articles have focused on the construction of data sets based on the historical census.64 Such articles normally focus on pertinent methodological issues such as sample design and occupational classification. However, this research has also discussed the historical questions that motivated the creation of these data, emphasizing the importance of interpreting census information in historical context.65 This methodological literature also explored various difficulties germane to the construction of the census manuscripts and to the study of nineteenth-century populations, such as legibility, the presence of transient migrants with no family connections, age heaping, nonconsecutive household numbers, age discrepancies between sources, name misspelling, the enumeration of Quebecoise women with their maiden names, and ambiguities in the census such as absent spouses or the incidence of multiple occupations.66 A second group of scholars interested in critiquing the historical censuses has described the institutional evolution of census bureaucracies. In both Canada and the United States, scholars have produced sweeping yet fairly detailed institutional histories of census bureaucracies. Margo Anderson’s history of the US census set the decennial US censuses from 1790 to 1980 in political context, largely focusing on the congressional debates and decisions that shaped the census.67 Diana

18

The Shady Side of Fifty

Magnuson’s doctoral thesis, The Making of a Modern Census: The United States Census of Population, 1790–1940 (1995) focused more directly on the role of census superintendents, arguing that the census evolved as a result of the direct influence of a relatively small number of individuals. Edward Higgs chronicled the administrative procedures and changing content of the nineteenth-century censuses of England and Wales.68 David Worton’s 1998 monograph The Dominion Bureau of Statistics: A History of Canada’s Central Statistical Office and Its Antecedents, 1841–1972, included information on the origins, purposes, organization, and major changes in Canadian census taking. The book concentrated on the place of the Canadian census within the general statistical activities of the Canadian government. While Worton’s book resembled Anderson’s monograph in terms of subject material, it did not situate Canadian census taking within Canadian political, social, and intellectual history to the same degree. Sylvia Wargon’s history of Statistics Canada described the evolution of the department during the twentieth century as part of the broader evolution of the demography profession in Canada.69 Wargon’s work is in part a prosopography, highlighting the role of many particular demographers; her text and footnotes are rich with personal anecdotes about the professionalization of demography in Canada and the range of collegial networks that fostered demographic work within Statistics Canada and in universities. A third body of more recent work on the census has drawn upon theories of inequalities of power, governmentality, and the social production of knowledge. According to these researchers, the census is not an objective record created by the state to furnish facts about its population but is rather a document shaped in particular ways by its creators.70 In The History of Sexuality (1980), Michel Foucault explicitly identified techniques of demographic measurement as one of the tools of biopower, the power of the state to undertake “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.”71 Social history instructs us that the reproduction of gender and racial hierarchies was integral to population control. As a result, the concept of biopower can be understood in broad terms as a project whose goals include reproducing extant gendered and racialized systems of power for the benefit of elites and the state. National wellbeing, gendered and racialized systems of power, population and population measurement instruments constitute interlinked entities and concepts. Studying historical censuses, regardless of the century in which

Introduction

19

they originate, involves understanding their relationship to the population itself, to political agendas about population levels and population health, and to gender and race. The intersection of census enumeration and racialized social structures illuminates both how the census is constructed and how it constructs populations in turn. In the past and present, the census has been used to reinforce racial categorization. For example, in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson discusses the “(confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state” in creating racial categories and subcategories to describe the nonwhite Indian colonial population.72 In this instance, the British government used the census not only as a tool to measure the Indian colonial population but also as a means to construct that population, assigning Indians to discrete racial categories that served British interests and did not necessarily reflect Southeast Asian self-identity. The census has also been manipulated to depict normative rather than deviant behaviour. For example, according to Samuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Philip Morgan, the widowed status of black women living without husbands in the 1910 US census was likely overreported. The authors did not interpret this pattern as a bid by black women to manipulate their image in accordance with white social expectations: “We cannot determine whether the errors were made by the census enumerator, the woman herself, or some other respondent.”73 These researchers focused more on methodology and results than on the manifestation of gender and racial disparities and norms in the US census. Patricia Cline Cohen and Margo Anderson examine the ways US census makers both reproduced racist assumptions and reinforced racism, gathering and publishing minimal or false information on the black population.74 In this way, US census officials naturalized the deprived circumstances of African Americans and hindered research projects by abolitionists by asking fewer questions of slaves.75 Nancy Shoemaker has extended such analysis to the treatment of Amerindians within the US census. Shoemaker explains that enumerators in 1900 and 1910 tended to fit American Indians into predetermined categories: “Determining boundaries of the household, the sequence of individuals listed within it, and their relationships to each other, enumerators had the power to make Indian families appear more like Euroamerican families.”76 Nancy Folbre and Marjorie Abel applied a similar analysis to the reporting of occupations in the nineteenth-century US censuses, locating the bias not in “enumerators’ mistakes or self-reporting error”

20

The Shady Side of Fifty

but more significantly in “the very terminology of the census.”77 In British census historiography, Edward Higgs has examined how enumerators, census office clerks, and census officials engaged in the social construction of knowledge, from the definition of a census householder or worker to the Victorian classification systems that grouped and divided people.78 Alan Brookes identified propagandist motives behind the 1861 census of New Brunswick, arguing that “the province wanted to be able to boast how much it had grown during the previous decade.”79 It is Bruce Curtis, however, who has led the Canadian field of research on the social and political construction of the Canadian census, particularly with respect to ethnicity. In The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (2000), Curtis argued that “census making involves identifying political subjects and centralizing knowledge.”80 He examined documentation surrounding the Canadian censuses between 1840 and 1875 to understand the ways census makers effected Canadian population counts in the service of political projects such as demonstrating the growth of the FrenchCanadian population. Drawing upon Foucault’s theories, Curtis explained that nineteenth-century census makers applied a “normalizing judgement” to social relations, “grouping subjects together to form a ‘population’ whose elements may then be selectively disaggregated and made the objects of social policy and projects.” In his interpretations, Curtis agreed with Foucault about the basic fact of government intervention in populations yet maintained that Foucault wrongly naturalized populations as an external object. Instead, Curtis suggested that researchers interested in examining political practices “hold consistently to an understanding of ‘population’ as the variety of ways in which social relations are subjected to authoritative categorization and configuration by state agencies.” According to Curtis, “populations” and “correct population totals” do not exist as natural objects; rather, population counts tend to be the product of census design.81 A fourth group of scholars has extended the deconstructionist approach to include census respondents more routinely as part of the community that used the census in accordance with its preconceptions to construct populations. The work of the Canadian Families Project on the 1901 Census of Canada, along with Peter Baskerville and Eric Sager’s work on the 1891 and 1901 Canadian censuses, is emblematic of this approach. On the one hand, Baskerville and Sager explain, “the census was more than a count of population: it was a means by which

Introduction

21

the state codified and sanctioned certain values, including gender and status divisions of labour.” On the other hand, they note that by creating fourteen questions on work, the 1901 census offered respondents “a wider range of choices” and “a greater opportunity for self-definition than previous censuses allowed.”82 The Canadian Families Project historians have more readily recognized the role of Canadians themselves in constructing the historical censuses, perhaps in part because they draw upon the theoretical orientation of social history, which emphasizes the agency of the working class, women, and other groups. After all, the field of social history originally aimed to use routinely generated sources such as the census to recover “the great majority of people who left no intentional traces or records.”83 I argue that there is a fourth phase in historical census analysis that seeks to integrate perspectives developed in earlier efforts while continuing to make careful use of the census for empirical quantitative research. The work of scholars such as Baskerville, Sager and Chad Gaffield demonstrate several elements of discourse analysis as applied to the historical census. Baskerville and Sager, for example, have explored the role played by the census in establishing unemployment as a real and important event. Unemployment in turn-of-the-century Canada was conceptually nonexistent until it was animated by pro-labour newspapers, union policy platforms, and royal commissions.84 In addition, many census scholars today recognize the census as the product of multiple, at times opposing, voices: “The census, therefore, is a dialogue between people and state occurring at a specific moment in the history of a predominantly rural northern nation-state, containing within it more than one cultural nation, many languages, and an emerging urban working class.”85 Gaffield demonstrates how 1901 Canadian census officials strove to classify all Canadians into “singular and exclusive categories” that permitted only certain types of realities, such as a single mother tongue. Nevertheless, competing social realities, such as children who grew up with one anglophone and one francophone parent, forced enumerators and census bureau civil servants to choose one mother tongue, usually the language of the father. In other instances, census respondents reported multiple mother tongues or mother tongues that did not conform to census bureau expectations. Gaffield interprets such responses as resistance to unilinear census categories, and as evidence that turn-of-the-century census respondents construed themselves in more complex ways than did census bureaucrats.86

22

The Shady Side of Fifty

It is important to distinguish between discourse analysis of the historical census and source criticism of historical census manuscripts. Source criticism of historical censuses is the critiquing activity practised by the first set of census scholars described in this section. Scholars engaged in source criticism identify errors, inconsistencies, and deficiencies in a source that might pose roadblocks to research. Such critiques are, according to Curtis, interrogations effected “in a workaday spirit and with the intention of achieving a better grasp of particular empirical problems.”87 Source criticism regards language in more descriptive terms, as “simply expressive, as transparent, as a vehicle of communication,” while discourse analysis acknowledges discourse “as a system with its own rules and constraints, and with its own determining effect on the way that individuals think and express themselves.”88 A source criticism of the historical census, for example, would note the underenumeration of the poor, urban dwellers, migrants, and blacks. In such analysis, census content is understood simply in terms of who is and is not included in the recorded document. A discourse analysis of census treatment of minority populations would move beyond description to a more in-depth analysis of the way such groups were constituted within the census imaginary. Discourse analysis would address the formulation of instructions to the enumerator for the recording of persons of mixed black-white ancestry as simply black or indigenous, delineating how the instructions were structured to exclude certain identities, such as multiracialism. Discourse analysis would explore how and to what extent the instructions themselves operated to perpetuate and circulate “uni-racialism” as the only permitted truth about racial identity. Source criticism and discourse analysis of primary source documents can be confused because discourse analysis, like source criticism, begins with an understanding of what is and is not present in a primary source, and because both activities share a concern with the social context within which texts are produced. Discourse analysis, however, then picks up where source criticism leaves off. It transcends source criticism by specifying the ways in which language itself structures meaning, by discussing the significance of this structuring effort, by demonstrating how discourse is used to exercise power through the establishment of permitted meanings, and by showing how such meanings are contested, sometimes within the context of the same document. As sites of knowledge production where professional and governmental definitions of age and old age contested popular understandings

Introduction

23

of these concepts, the nineteenth-century censuses of Canada and the United States offer an appropriate corpus for discourse analysis of age identities. Age is a fundamental artefact of demographic measurement and part of the primary scaffolding upon which censuses are built. Concepts of age, however, are freighted with tremendous meaning relating to norms of life-course progression, youth and maturity, survival and decay, and longevity and death. The very presence of age as an important substructure within the census schedules and published census tables suggests its own importance in the creation of census and population concepts. Examining the construction of age within the Canadian and US censuses helps us understand the extent to which age was judged a knowledge priority by census officials, enumerators, and respondents, and the ways in which old age and old people were accorded attention by government census bureaus. The following exploration of age and old age in late-nineteenth-century Canada and the United States is inspired by recent Canadian work on the historical census and undertakes discourse analysis and empirical quantitative research by way of the census. In chapters 2 and 3, I seek to understand how census officials and census respondents in turn constructed age and old age. Examining the construction of age in enumerator instructions, published census volumes and manuscript census responses will help us understand how age, old age, and elderly persons were constituted in the scientific and popular imaginary of Canada and the United States.

north american context: why undertake a comparative study? Census taking and census making transcended time and space. Colonial governments used censuses to extend and reinforce power over foreign peoples, while the nineteenth-century Canadian and US governments alike employed censuses to track population growth and economic development. The evolution of these censuses occurred not in isolation but rather internationally. At meetings of the International Statistical Congress between 1853 and 1876, delegates discussed census standards based on the recommendations of Belgian administrator Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quetelet. Quetelet revived the proposition that censuses enumerate not only heads of households but all household members. The Canadian and US censuses alike changed at midcentury to ask questions concerning every individual in the household.

24

The Shady Side of Fifty

US census superintendent Joseph Kennedy became a national statistical expert in part through his interactions with European statisticians. Kennedy travelled in Europe during the summer of 1851 to study the census methods of England, France, Belgium, Austria, and Prussia; he attended meetings of the International Statistical Congress and corresponded with European colleagues for decades.89 Canadian government officials were urged by imperial authorities to emulate standards advocated at the 1857 International Statistical Congress as part of a broader international effort of “world making.”90 In 1901 the Canadian Census Bureau moved its enumeration date up three days to conform with the timing of the census of England and Wales.91 On the other hand, from 1871 onward the Canadian census was taken not as a de facto enumeration, as was the practice in England and Wales, but rather as a de jure enumeration: “The de jure principle was resorted to, for the same reasons that induced our neighbours of the United States to adopt it, amongst others, as being better fitted to the circumstances of special difficulties of organization, of immense extent of territory, and of federal political institutions.”92 In this principle, the Canadian census differed from all others in the British Empire, and British statisticians frequently remarked upon the difference.93 In other respects, the Canadian census differed from both the English and US censuses. Beginning in 1871 the Canadian census asked questions on both religion and ethnicity, permitting counts of the French and English populations of Canada. In contrast, the US census consistently asked a question on race. The Canadian census asked questions about race more sporadically, in 1852, 1861, and in 1901. Finally, Canadian census takers in 1901 surpassed their English and American counterparts with respect to questions about the workforce, probably in response to Canadian strike activity between 1898 and 1900.94 Thus, there were both similarities and differences in the ways the Canadian and US governments structured their censuses in accordance with their understanding of the particular composition of their populations and their respective knowledge needs. Cross-border commonalities in census-taking practices reflected other similarities between Canada and the United States during the late nineteenth century. Both countries were “New World” nations with high rates of immigration and high proportions of rural dwellers; in each nation, waged labourers concentrated their efforts in primary resources or manufacturing. At the same time, both marked and subtle differences distinguished the two North American nations. Far more

Introduction

25

Americans than Canadians lived in urban areas, worked as professionals, and hailed from places other than the British Isles.95 Comparatively weak immigration during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries as well as net outmigration from 1860 to the turn of the century left Canada less than one-tenth the size of her southern neighbour.96 Canada was, from the perspective of many of her inhabitants, a newer nation. Whereas American sociopolitical ideology had been shaped in the cauldron of revolution and racial conflict, Canadian ideology was variously rooted in loyalism, Catholicism, ethnic and language conflict, and the exultation of “Anglo-Saxon northerness.”97 While both nations shared a Victorian ethos of gendered social roles and family privacy, middle-class anglophone Canadians more consciously explained their behaviour in terms of their British heritage.98 Neither nation had yet developed comprehensive federal-level social welfare structures; both had largely left social welfare to local authorities, private charity, and churches.99 The United States’ higher proportion of urban centres offered a more mature private charity apparatus than that found in English Canada. Conversely, the Catholic church in Quebec had a developed a denser array of orphanages, schools, old age homes, poorhouses, and hospitals than one could find in any other province or state. This grouping of national similarities and differences make these countries eminently suitable for a “most-similar nations” comparative analysis, which considers age and the elderly in the comparative Canadian-US context. This strategy is explained by Ann Shola Orloff as one that “minimizes variation along potentially explanatory dimensions” in order to “specify the causal role of [a] particular factor or set of factors.”100 The comparative approach adopted in this monograph seeks to transcend simple national comparisons to understand “a more varied sense of the elements that make up the diversity of historical experience.”101 We know that the lives and household patterns of the elderly differed according to social group, gender, marital status, and region; we need now to explore not just diversity but diversities. The past experiences of the elderly in particular and families in general during the nineteenth century are rarely considered together in the Canadian-US context. US historians prefer to highlight contrasts with England and Europe.102 As Béatrice Craig observes, “in the eyes of Americans, Canada in her entirety might as well be situated on another planet.”103 Allan Kulikoff related the changing family systems of the late-nineteenth-century United States to unique American events: the

26

The Shady Side of Fifty

Revolution and the Civil War. “We have emphasized the American Revolution, arguing that the origins of yeoman and rural capitalist classes can be traced to the egalitarian impulses that conflict incited. The history of rural America in the nineteenth century would have been far different without it. The Civil War completed the bourgeois revolution begun by the Revolution.”104 Seymour Martin Lipset argued in 1963 that the distinct political heritage of the United States and Canada induced in Americans a love of independence and in Canadians respect for authority. In contrast, historians today blur the boundary between Canada and the United States, exploring both similarities and differences. Robynne Healey described Upper Canadian loyalist ideals as a gradual “assimilative process” grounded first in family choices; Beth LaDow portrayed a transnational North American West, in which farmers in Montana and Saskatchewan developed shared economies and social lives; Karen Balcom illustrated the shared strategies of Canadian and American female child welfare reformers to end cross-border baby smuggling; and Randy William Widdis explored Canadians as a crossborder people for many of whom “the border was largely irrelevant in social terms.”105 According to Bruno Ramirez and James Snell, the proximity of the United States facilitated Canadians’ search for work and higher wages, while the porous border enabled Canadian and US couples seeking divorce or a quick marriage to achieve their conjugal goals by means of a brief international trip.106 Canadian scholars frequently include comparisons to the United States in their research, especially comparisons to the American Northeast and Old Northwest.107 David Gagan and Alan Brookes pictured the mid- to late-nineteenth-century United States as a land of plentiful work opportunities when compared to Ontario and Nova Scotia. Based on his findings for Peel County, Gagan suggested that young men in many rural Ontario counties experienced limited access to land by the 1870s, whereas “in America, the farmers’ frontier lasted until 1890.”108 Alan Brookes made a similar argument when examining the behaviour of youth in late-nineteenth-century Canning, Nova Scotia, where the limited availability of farmland coupled with general economic decline sparked an exodus to the United States.109 Both Gagan and Brookes maintain that restricted economic opportunities prolonged children’s state of dependence in their parents’ households, bringing about “a change in both household and family structure, and in individual experience.”110 Though they emphasized relatively restricted Canadian opportunities during the late nineteenth century, neither Gagan nor Brookes

Introduction

27

made the sort of systematic comparison of Victorian Canadian and American household structure that would permit us to compare the situations of aging family members. Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow have recently disputed Gagan’s theory that a crisis in land availability occurred in mid-nineteenth-century rural Ontario, asserting that Ontarians’ rapid rise in land ownership with age shows they “continued to pursue a landed family patrimony as if the option remained viable.”111 Darroch and Soltow emphasized Canadian-American similarities by demonstrating virtually identical rates of property ownership in Ontario and the northern United States in 1870 and 1871.112 However, like Gagan and Brookes, Darroch and Soltow left comparisons of Canadian and American household patterns to speculation. Such speculation has formed the basis of work by two historians of French Canada, Béatrice Craig and Gérard Bouchard. Theorizing more broadly, these historians argued that the northern United States and Canada can be seen as a regional unit in which the predominance of family farming led to common forms of family reproduction. Bouchard contended that an “open system” of family reproduction, marked by parents’ steady efforts to establish all their sons on farms of their own in return for security in old age, characterized Canada and the northern American states alike.113 Craig noted that eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Canadians and Americans adopted common family strategies to cope with the similar challenges of establishing their children. She counselled social historians of Quebec, English Canada, and the United States to engage in more comparative research of these regions in order to enrich their understanding of the mores, motivations, and behaviour of North American families.114 This North American investigation of age and the elderly complements both previous and current research agendas concerning transatlantic family patterns. Comparing family patterns across boundaries has traditionally helped scholars to understand the relationships among economies, cultures, and household strategies. In fact, comparing and contrasting work from different countries has often led to major theoretical breakthroughs in the historiography of the family. Essays collected in one of the earliest volumes on this topic, Household and Family in Past Time (1972), prompted Peter Laslett to conclude that a “Western Family type” of relatively late marriages and small nuclear families dominated preindustrial Europe, as well as North America, and contrasted with family types in southern and Mediterranean Europe.115 Research by Steven Ruggles and Richard Wall highlight

28

The Shady Side of Fifty

transatlantic differences. According to Ruggles, the great majority of American elderly men and women who could have lived with their children and grandchildren actually did. Wall, on the other hand, maintains that the majority of the nineteenth-century English elderly lived apart from their kin.116 In the concluding essay to Aging in the Past: Demography, Society and Old Age (1995), David Kertzer once again emphasized transatlantic similarities. After comparing studies of the elderly and their families in Britain, Europe and the United States, Kertzer discussed the neolocal model of household formation, in which children formed new households upon marriage, as well as the stem-family model, in which one child remained with his or her new partner in the parental home. Kertzer described both models as overly reductive and proposed instead a new model for mature households in the past: nuclear reincorporation, in which children who had earlier left their parents’ household subsequently coresided with a widowed or feeble parent.117 Comparing secondary works on family history has led to significant theoretical advances. However, in the absence of directly comparable household measures, insights drawn on the basis of secondarysource surveys are inconclusive. In my previous research, I have addressed this lacuna in the field of old age historical demography, demonstrating that the seemingly distinct American pattern discovered by Ruggles was actually part of a broader North American experience.118 General comparisons of the living arrangements of elderly Canadians in 1871 to those of elderly Americans in 1850 and 1880 showed that similar proportions of women and men over sixty-five headed households, lived with their spouse only, or lived in three-generational households. Systematic differences in the proportion of elderly persons residing with children were linked to the tendency of Canadian sons and daughters to marry and leave home two to three years later than their US counterparts. If, as Daniel Scott Smith asserted in 1993, neolocal marriage and independent household formation serve as the “core, cultural rule” at the heart of the northwestern European family model, and if, as he also stated, the timing of these marriages is a secondary feature, preliminary evidence from mid-nineteenth-century Canada and the United States emphasizes the similarity of the lives of elderly women and men across North America.119 This new comparative analysis of aging across Canada and the US from 1870 to 1901 explores the diverse core elements of old age identities and experiences during the late nineteenth century. Comparing

Introduction

29

diversities in old age across Canada and the United States will also help to reveal the ways gender, racial, ethnic, and class identities combined with age to structure the opportunities and life conditions of elderly women and men. While historical censuses were designed in part to reinforce gendered and racialized systems of power, these same censuses gathered information that can be used cautiously to explore the divergent experiences of aged persons.

data and methodology The heart of this research project rests in the manuscript census, associated census administrative documents and reports, and census microdata, which together form a body of routinely generated qualitative and quantitative primary evidence. At first glance, the incompatible format and coding of the Canadian and American census data sets pose many obstacles to comparative research. To realize the research requirements of this study, I have adopted a new methodology that facilitates comparative demographic history. Following the initiative of the Minnesota Historical Census Projects, which integrated eleven American census public-use microdata samples (pums) from 1850 to 2000, I have joined the 1870 and 1900 pums with similar Canadian data sets drawn from the censuses of 1871 and 1901. These census years represent the first nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century years for which Canadian historical census samples have been made available.120 The 1870–1901 period also encompasses important social, demographic, and economic changes, such as urbanization and fertility decline, that influenced the residential arrangements of elderly persons. The resulting integrated data set features over 600,000 individuals. US data have been made available by the Minnesota Population Center. The 1871 Canadian national sample, representing 1.7 percent of the total Canadian population in 1871, was created by Gordon Darroch and Michael Ornstein at the Institute of Social Research, York University, in 1979. The sample density of the 1871 database reflects the inclusion of several oversamples; in this comparative project I used the base sample which provided 24,000 observations.121 The 1901 Canadian national file representing five percent of the Canadian population in that year was created by the Canadian Families Project at the University of Victoria and was publicly released in 2001.122 Harmonizing these four microdata sets has been, quite frankly, a hell of a job, absorbing hundreds of hours of programming time over the

30

The Shady Side of Fifty

course of several years. Marshalling data representing different census years and countries, data in various states of cleanliness created by separate projects with distinct agendas and procedures, is a formidable task. The fringe benefit of forging a harmonized data set across two countries is that it teaches one to be sensitive to the sometimes shifting and unstable nature of data, which reflects the disorderliness of human life and the challenges to coherent statistical observation. To cope with these obstacles, I have adopted several procedures: creating multiple versions of variables in order to examine socioeconomic behaviour from a variety of perspectives; examining the original, verbal responses of individual respondents as well as coded versions of these variables that reduce the verbal responses to a restricted and manageable set of values; and confining more advanced analyses to the 1900/01 census years, in which a wider variety of variables are available, based on questions that had been more precisely defined to the enumerators. The resulting harmonized census data facilitate study of the diversities of old age and the interactive dynamics of age, gender, class, race, and ethnicity. The fully integrated nature of this data set permits the study of old age in relation to nationality and time period, alongside other characteristics such as marital status, gender, and occupational class status. These data also offer information at the regional, state, and provincial levels, allowing us to explore not only national but also regional, state, and provincial similarities and differences. This in turn allows us to view North America both as a continent of distinct nations and as a collection of regions. The reliability of these comparative measures makes this study of the elderly and their families during the late Victorian era truly unique. Previous Canadian, American, and English demographic family histories have used different measurement schemes, analyzing family formation sometimes at the individual level and sometimes at the household level. Such studies have also employed diverse classifications of individual characteristics such as occupation, making historians’ findings difficult to compare. In contrast, the results of this comparative study are based on comparable data. Though census data help us to understand socioeconomic behaviour, they shed little light on the motivations and feelings that underlay such behaviour. Therefore, the qualitative and quantitative census analyses in these studies are occasionally complemented by evidence from nineteenth-century and turn-of-the-century diaries and letters written between 1850 and 1920. This personal testimony either appears in published collections or is held at the provincial archives of Ontario

Introduction

31

and Manitoba and the Ohio and Minnesota state archives. These stories of aging lend a personal dimension to the analyses discussed here, contextualizing household and life course patterns, describing individual feelings about family relationships, and illustrating women’s and men’s emotional reactions to aging itself. This monograph begins with a study of the construction of age and old age by census officials, examining enumerator instructions and census statistics to understand how the Canadian and US census bureaus defined age and the extent to which they constituted age as a social object by including it in tabulations. Chapter 3 reverses the angle of study to explore this subject from the bottom up, analyzing patterns of age misreporting in relation to age itself, family relationships, gender, class, and race. The fourth and fifth chapters compare the characteristics and family statuses of elderly women and men in Canada and the United States; chapter 4 focuses on the continuities and discontinuities of female aging while chapter 5 highlights the thresholds of male old age. Finally, chapter 6 studies the socioeconomic dimensions of grandparenting, as well as the role of grandparents within three-generational households. Canadian and US social historians and demographers have alternately critiqued and deconstructed the historical censuses, drawn upon them to build data sets, and then used the data sets as the basis of their research. Instead of viewing these intellectual activities as separate processes, this monograph integrates insights drawn from each task. Chad Gaffield anticipated this approach in 1988. Describing the development of the Vancouver Island Project during the early 1980s, Gaffield wrote, “Slowly, we came to see the possibilities of an integrated research process characterized by a dynamic continuum beginning with the creation of records and extending to their ultimate use when they become redefined as historical sources.”123 The logical extension of this dynamic continuum is to question the very distinction between “quantitative” and “qualitative” research methods.124 This study envisions the critique of historical censuses, the process and particular decision making involved in constructing historical census databases, and the analysis of historical census data as a dynamic continuum. Research results based on census data must be interpreted in the light of the original construction of the census by census officials, census enumerators, and census respondents and in the light of the construction of census microdata. This investigative process has proven key to uncovering the hidden history of age and old age in Canada and the United States.

on of Age

2 The Organization of Age: Age and Old Age in the Canadian and US Censuses, 1870–1901 Thirty-four columns stretch across each manuscript page of the 1901 Canadian census; age at last birthday is the tenth column from the left, nestled between year and place of birth. Looking down any given page, the numeric responses to this question appear fairly predictable: threequarters of the responses fall between zero and forty and the sequence of numbers reflects the enumeration of Canadians in their family groupings, as well as the incidence of widowhood, high fertility rates, and the coresidence of other adults: 48, 38, 12, 11, 7; 44, 21, 19, 17, 16, 14, 12, 10, 7, 5; 80, 55, 18, 20, 25. The age column in the census is one of the easiest fields to reproduce in a database, with far fewer variations to interpret compared to other string variables, such as occupation. In the 1881 Census of Canada, data entry volunteers transcribed over 48,000 distinct occupational titles, compared to 2,021 variations on age. Yet the simplicity of age statements on the manuscript censuses masks the complexity of age concepts in nineteenth-century Canada and the United States: how age was represented, what age was called upon to measure, and the extent to which age became intertwined with other social characteristics in these rapidly evolving societies. Age is not only a number but also a concept, as subject to historical construction as gender or race. Expressions of age in the late-nineteenthcentury censuses were generated within an intellectual and social context fraught with contradiction. Between 1870 and 1901, changing educational and labour practices both reflected and promoted consciousness of age. At the same time, Canadian and US census officials, enumerators, and respondents constructed age and the elderly in diverse ways, embedding their preconceptions about age within the enumerator instructions, on the census forms, in age responses on the census, and in the aggregate

The Organization of Age

33

statistics that came after. This chapter explores the organization of age by census officials in Canada and the United States in instructions to enumerators and on census forms as well as the treatment of age in subsequent published census volumes. The census, as an instrument of population measurement and control, worked to reproduce a variety of hierarchies and systems of power; these hierarchies included not only gender, race, and ethnicity but also age. Hierarchies of age were reproduced within the census and census publications in diverse ways: age was variously represented as an expression of biopower, the power of the state to control populations; as a characteristic interlinked with other demographic indicators; and as an exception.

the functions of age and the need for age precision As the Canadian and US censuses evolved, information on age became one of the key elements of population measurement and control. Although the Canadian and American censuses diverged in numerous ways across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the census bureaus in both countries have consistently requested age alongside a set of core variables, including first and last name, sex, and occupation. However, responses to the age question did not always pass muster. Turn-of-thecentury census officials were well aware that census respondents often gave chronologically inaccurate age information. At the turn of the century Allyn Young, a University of Wisconsin phd in economics, produced detailed studies of American census age reporting. When he was 24, Young took leave from his doctoral program to work as an assistant in the Division of Methods and Results at the US census bureau in Washington.1 Turning his attention to age heaping in the 1900 US census returns, Young tackled questions about how best to group persons in quinquennial age groups and determined that census reports of the number of young children were flawed due to overstatement of children’s ages.2 According to his biographer, Charles Blitch, Young is an unsung hero of American economics whose lasting place in the field was somewhat obscured by his tendency to publish in nonprofessional journals and to explore a wide variety of topics, and by his tragically premature death of influenza when he was 52.3 Young was one of the first scholars to unpack the diverse factors associated with age misreporting, and his findings anticipate several results that I will explore in further detail in chapter 3. Young’s statis-

34

The Shady Side of Fifty

tics bureau successors proved somewhat less eager to study and accommodate age misreporting. Instead, twentieth-century census officials found peremptory ways to deal with age rounding. The date-of-birth question was abandoned in both countries after the turn-of-the-century censuses and was restored after 1960, a period that marked the maturing of demography as a profession. In 1960 the US census bureau actually substituted date of birth for age on its decennial census return; in subsequent censuses, it asked for age in combination with date of birth. Since 1971 Statistics Canada (the former Dominion Bureau of Statistics) has abandoned the age question altogether, asking for date of birth rather than age as part of an effort to improve age reporting. Federal statisticians probably concluded that errors were less likely to occur if they themselves calculated people’s true ages based on their dates of birth. Sylvia Wargon explains that Statistics Canada made such modifications as part of overall changes to the content and procedures of Canada’s federal census; according to Wargon, these changes were “a natural response to changing times, advances in scientific survey methods, and improvements in computer and electronic technology.”4 Demographers have had reason to be concerned about statements of age in censuses, vital records, and other government documents because age misreporting can gravely affect statistics. For example, mortality measures based on elderly persons who round up or overstate their ages will be overly optimistic, while fertility indices based on populations that overreport the number of women at risk of bearing children will be in error.5 Contemporary age misreporting problems include age exaggeration among elderly African Americans and overreporting of African and Asian females in childbearing years. However, twentiethcentury changes in the framing of the age question reflect not only the concern of demographers to improve the accuracy of their statistics but also demographers’ naturalization of age as a biological absolute, a number that is be understood to have only one “correct,” “true” value for each individual, based on their precise moment of birth. For the statisticians, variations in age reporting constituted statistical noise to be corrected and nothing more.

early historical censuses and age: the military and reproductive potential of the nation Three centuries before Statistics Canada gave up on the age question altogether, colonial governments initiated the use of age information for

The Organization of Age

35

state purposes. Pre-nineteenth-century censuses focused on age in two major ways, each of which served to inform the state on potential sources of biopower. According to Michel Foucault, the biopower of the state was its power to undertake “numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.”6 Such control was achieved in part through the taking of national censuses; these censuses included questions about age in order to distinguish men capable of bearing arms and to identify women of child-bearing age. Age was thus understood as a characteristic that demonstrated the military and reproductive potential of a nation, the two fundamental ways in which a nation sustained itself. This rationale is clearly stated in the late-seventeenth-century communications of French military engineer Maréchel de Vauban and the French minister of finance Jean Colbert to Jean Talon, Intendant of New France, in which they explained the need to take a census of the new colony.7 Attention was focused on people in young and mid-adulthood, those viewed necessary to sustain the population. A century later, the earliest United States censuses also focused on the military potential of the country and population increase in the question pertaining to age. The household-based enumeration forms for the US censuses from 1790 to 1840 grouped information on household members, including their age. In 1790 the US census requested information on age for free white males only, and even in the case of the free white males the 1790 census asked only for the total number of males over and under sixteen in each family. The interest of US scientists in the use of age to understand characteristics of the population soon transcended this narrow concern for the military potential of the nation. In January 1800, the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences communicated a memorial to Congress arguing that it would be important “to present and future generations ... to observe the progress of the population in this country,” and accordingly requested further age breakdowns.8 The academy members may have been influenced by Thomas Malthus’s recently published Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which remarked on high rates of population increase in the new United States.9 Like the Maréchal de Vauban, these scientists recognized the collection of information on age as a key element in understanding population increase. The age categories requested by the Connecticut academy indicate an interest in both the youngest and the oldest populations, with young, middle-aged and young-old adults collapsed into three larger groups;

36

The Shady Side of Fifty

thus: the number of children under 2 years, 2 to 5, 16 to 30, 30 to 50, 50 to 70, 70 to 80, 80 to 90, 90 to 100, and 100 or more. The American Philosophical Society, whose letter was signed among others by Thomas Jefferson, also articulated the importance of recording greater detail on the ages of men and women in order to calculate “the ordinary duration of life in these States, the chances of life for every epoch thereof, and the ratio of the increase of their population; firmly believing that the result will be sensibly different from what is presented by the tables of other countries”10 This letter requested even further detail on the ages of the adult population, asking the number of persons “2, 5, 10, 16, 21 and 25 years of age, and every term of five years from thence to one hundred.”11 Carroll Wright notes that although the Senate forwarded these letters to the committee in charge of preparing the law authorizing the 1800 census, there is no further printed acknowledgment by the committee of this advice.12 Between 1800 and 1840, however, the US census enumerations gradually increased the level of detail requested on age. Race and age intersected in the US census to reflect the lower priority accorded American blacks, probably to avoid furnishing information to the abolitionist cause.13 The new age categories also allowed for greater study of youths and white persons than older and black persons. In 1800 and 1810 the US census asked the number of free white males and females in the household in five categories: those under 10; 10 to 15; 16 to 25; 26 to 44; and 45 or more. The census of 1820 added a category for free white males and females aged 16 to 18, and also asked the ages of black Americans for the first time. The 1820 census organized black Americans into four age categories rather than the six provided for whites; while it provided separate columns for the enumeration of slaves and “free colored persons,” it applied the same level of age detail to both groups.14 Thus, the age categories employed by the US census from 1800 to 1820 reinforced a sharp knowledge divide between white and black persons. These age categories also reveal that US census organizers continued to prioritize the counting of children and youth, men capable of bearing arms, and women of child-bearing age. Congress continued to receive messages that encouraged greater attention to the percentage of young and elderly persons in the population. In his 1828 message to Congress, President John Quincy Adams suggested that “the columns of age, hitherto confined to a few periods, should be extended, commencing from infancy, in intervals of ten years,

The Organization of Age

37

to the utmost boundaries of life.”15 Consequently, the census enumerations of 1830 and 1840 expanded the number of age categories into which free white males and females were organized from six to thirteen. It continued to privilege youth by requesting that children and youths be organized into five-year age groups (under 5, 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and 15 to 20) and adults into ten-year age groups after age 20. However, the 1830 census enumeration was the first to request explicit information on the numbers of aging white Americans in the population, arranging older persons into ten-year age groups alongside young and middleaged adults, until age 100; all persons 100 years of age or more were grouped together. These census enumerations continued to require less detail on the grouping of black Americans by age categories, although they expanded such categories from four to six, in order to capture the numbers aged 55 to 99 and 100 years or more. Once again, the 1830 and 1840 censuses asked the same age information of free and enslaved black Americans.16 By providing information on all adults at decadal intervals as well as all persons over 100, the 1830 and 1840 US censuses facilitated the study of longevity. By 1850 in the US and 1852 in Canada, the American and Canadian censuses began to follow the precedent set in Great Britain in 1841, asking questions individually of each person in the household. Information on age was no longer grouped but instead each individual was asked their age alongside a series of other questions. Since a greater burden of information collection now fell on the shoulders of census takers, the Canadian and US census officials alike dispensed instructions to their enumerators detailing the ways in which responses to all census questions were to be recorded. The North American censuses were a major undertaking, encompassing by 1901 over six million square miles of urban and rural territory in an attempt to capture on paper the characteristics of a mobile, partly literate population unused to filling in forms or responding to official questions about their personal lives. The censuses were one of the few ways in which the federal governments interacted with their citizens at an individual level. A series of intimate questions were posed by enumerators with varying levels of ability, many appointed as a patronage favour rather than on the basis of their qualifications. The questions required that certain interpretations be applied consistently. As a result, prior to the taking of the census, census officials issued instructions to guide enumerators as they worked at a distance from their supervisors.

38

The Shady Side of Fifty

enumerator instructions and the construction of age Nineteenth-century enumerator instructions form a rich source of information on the historical censuses, not only detailing desired census procedures but also shedding light on census officials’ knowledge priorities.17 Some questions, such as occupation, were accorded a great deal more attention than others. The level of detail in these instructions was also enhanced over time, as federal bureaucracies and the statistical profession evolved and as the Canadian and US census bureaus became more stable and able to build on previous work. These instructions tell us what kind of responses census officials anticipated, how they wished to structure those responses ahead of time and the extent to which census officials attempted to impose a particular logic on their populations. A systematic comparison of references to age in the 1850–1901 US and Canadian census enumerator instructions reveals that the US instructions were consistently more detailed than their Canadian counterparts. The enumerator instructions for the census of the Provinces of Canada in 1852 merely request “The age of each person, next birth day.”18 In contrast, the US enumerator instructions for 1850 devoted three sentences to the recording of age for adults.19 They noted that “the specific age of each person at his or her last birthday previous to the 1st of June” was to be recorded, that in the event that the exact age could not be ascertained, a number that was “the near approximation to it” was to be recorded instead. The instructions then repeated that an age, whether exact or estimated, was to be recorded for each individual. The centrality of age in ordering a population was here emphasized: an age had to be recorded at all costs, even if it was merely an estimate. The lack of detail in the 1852 Canadian census instructions for the recording of age was paralleled by terse explanations of other questions such as those about occupation and birthplace.20 Curtis’s analysis of the administration of the 1852 Canadian census suggests that institutional inexperience and inadequate preparation were responsible for the lack of specificity in the Canadian enumerator instructions. Curtis cites many examples of administrative disorganization at the highest level, such as delays in the announcement of commissioner appointments and the provision of inadequate numbers of blank census forms and instructions.21 Moreover, Secretary of Registration and Statistics Walter Crofton leaned heavily on the local knowledge of his census commissioners and their enumerators, presuming that the commissioners could

The Organization of Age

39

function autonomously and would be able to appoint “responsible and competent men with literary skills,” to whom the 1851 Census Act had accorded “broad powers of inquiry.”22 In her history of the United States census, Margo Anderson notes that Joseph Kennedy, secretary of the 1850 Census Board, was aided in the planning and preparation of census forms and schedules by Lemuel Shattuck of the American Statistical Association and Archibald Russell of the American Geographical and Statistical Society.23 Perhaps as a result of their expert assistance, the US Census Board produced more detailed census instructions. For the first time in the history of the US census, similar attention was devoted to the ages of slaves on the 1850 slave schedule. The US census of 1850 did not reflect the humanity of African-American slaves by recording their names and family relationships. However, the census had come to privilege age as an essential demographic indicator; as a result, the 1850 US census requested as much detail on the age of each slave as for free white persons. The 1860 US census repeated the same instructions for enumerating age. In striking contrast to the enumerator instructions for the 1860 US census, the 1861 Census of the Province of Canada stated that the age question, along with sex and marital status, “need no explanation.”24 Curtis discovered that this tendency often led to columns being left blank.25 Not only did the Canadian and US census administrations differ in the extent of detail they offered enumerators in recording age but, in both 1852 and 1861, the Canadian census requested age at the next birthday, whereas the US census asked for age as of the previous birthday. These variations in Canadian and American census age questions demonstrate that demographic study of age in the mid-nineteenth century had not yet crystallized. There were as yet no accepted standards determining which expression of age – past or next birthday – was most suitable for scientific study. Howard Chudacoff, who explored the evolution of age consciousness in the United States, stated that age distinctions in the United States were somewhat blurred until the late nineteenth century.26 This generality with respect to age probably delayed the development of age statement standards. Chudacoff cites qualitative evidence from New York diaries and autobiographies that suggest the insignificance of birthdays in general. “Diarists from the Nanticoke Valley discussed the passage of time and the transformation of their lives in terms of events such as the death of a parent, marriage of a child and birth of a grandchild, rather than in terms of birthdays or other personal reckonings.”27 Chudacoff also notes that vital records were not always sufficiently consistent or accu-

40

The Shady Side of Fifty

rate to enable individuals to know their exact birth date.28 Time, migration, and inadequate record-keeping habits meant some people had to rely on the recollections of others to ascertain their age. A small selection of Revolutionary War pension applications submitted to the Secretary of War department in 1832 noted that written records of applicants’ ages were sometimes lost owing to the loss of a Bible or similar documentation. The age of North Carolina resident William Bryan “was in a book kept by father who was a man of learning and education, but book either lost or destroyed or carried to distant parts; he was born 3 August 1760, as Nancy Hobby now an elderly woman in adjacent county of Cumberland and who lived near parents of affiant can testify.”29 Just as the celebration of birthdays did not become common until the close of the nineteenth century, the study of population age structures was embryonic. Yet by asking the individual ages of each Canadian and US resident, the 1850 and 1852 US and Canadian censuses would provide the raw material for in-depth studies of individuals at different stages in the life course. Despite the considerable progress of Joseph-Charles Taché, Deputy Minister of the Department of Agriculture and Statistics, toward the establishment of “consistent observational protocols” to guide the taking of the 1871 Canadian census, enumerator instructions that accompanied this census, as well as those of 1881, 1891, and 1901, were no more detailed than earlier.30 The US census enumerator instructions, on the other hand, grew even more detailed toward the turn of the century. Statisticians had long been aware of the phenomenon of age rounding: Antoine Deparcieux, for example, had noted as early as 1760 that burial certificates for persons over 15 or 20 tended to report their ages in numbers rounded off to the nearest ten or five.31 Nevertheless, Canadian census takers dealt with age ambiguities and errors in the postenumeration stage and confronted these problems in their published volumes rather than in the enumerator instructions themselves. The introduction to volume five of the 1871 Census of Canada commented on the uncertainty with which ages tended to be stated: “true ages” could only be ascertained after a series of adjustments were made, “distributing over the previous and subsequent ages the surcharges which have accumulated on certain ages, through the universal habit people have of giving a period for an exact date.” The introduction also touched on age rounding: “In the same way, in the information given for years of age, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 years are expressions which have no very precise meaning.”32 Perhaps the Canadian census officials had

The Organization of Age

41

decided it was hopeless to enjoin their own enumerators in the crusade for accurate age statistics and instead chose to undertake a top-down manipulation of ages. In contrast, the US census officials attempted to recruit their enumerators to the effort of recording accurate ages. The US enumerator instructions for the 1870 and 1880 censuses condensed the instructions stated in the 1850 and 1860 censuses but conveyed the same principles for recording age. In the 1870 and 1880 US census, the age question printed on the Schedule 1 form was extended slightly from merely demanding “age” to demanding “age at last birthday” and “age at last birthday prior to June 1, 1880.” Slight variations occurred from year to year. In the 1870 instructions, a note was added that “where the age is a matter of considerable doubt, the assistant marshal may make a note to that effect.” This proviso was removed from the 1880 instructions. The US enumerator instructions for the 1890 census requested “age at nearest birthday,” on the census form, and then returned to “age at last birthday” on the 1900 schedule. Chudacoff explains this change briefly, stating that “the revision proved too confusing.”33 In fact, variations in these instructions suggest that, in the United States, instructions pertaining to age were carefully considered and revised each year. Changes in the wording of birthday cards from the 1870s to the turn of the century offer clues why age at last birthday eventually became the norm for the US census bureau. The earliest birthday cards featured messages that wished the recipient a happy future; “many happy returns” was a common expression. By the turn of the century, birthday cards focused on celebrating the current age.34 This shift was emblematic of the standardization of age measurement in terms of age at last birthday. In 1890 and 1900, advice on the recording of age became more explicit than ever: “Write the age in figures at nearest birthday in whole years … for each person of one year of age or over,” noted the US instructions for 1890. The instructions seemed to draw the enumerator into the tabulation process, explaining the effects on aggregation of age heaping: “In any event, do not accept the answer ‘Don’t know,’ but ascertain as nearly as possible the approximate age of each person. The general tendency of persons in giving their ages is to use the round numbers, as 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, etc. If the age is given as ‘about 25,’ determine, if possible, whether the age should be entered as 24, 25, or 26. Particular attention should be paid to this, otherwise it will be found when the results are aggregated in this office that a much more than normal number of persons have been reported as 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 etc. years of age, and a much less than normal at 19, 21, 24, 26, 29, 31, etc.”

42

The Shady Side of Fifty

The 1900 US enumerator instructions on age were again revised, and this time a question on date of birth was added as a check on age. The professional statistical community had long been calling for this addition: “The date of birth inquiry was recommended by the International Statistical Congress in 1872, and no subsequent international statistical gathering has reversed or modified the recommendation.”35 In his 1894 paper to the Royal Statistical Society, Reginald Hooker stated, “There is a decided tendency for the ages to congregate about the round numbers. This is of course due to a person’s ignorance of what his age really is; a man perhaps knows only that he is ‘about 30,’ and he consequently records himself as 30 ... this ignorance would appear to be more widespread than is usually imagined.”36 The US enumerator instructions for 1900 again enjoined enumerator vigilance in accurate age reporting by explaining the reasons for and consequences of age inaccuracies. They described the date-of-birth question as an aid “in getting the exact age in years of each person enumerated. Many a person who can tell the month and year of his birth will be careless or forgetful in stating the years of his age, and so an error will creep into the census ... where this is impossible get as nearly as possible the exact years of age. An answer given in round numbers, such as ‘about 30,’ ‘about 45,’ is likely to be wrong. In such cases endeavor to get the exact age.” In contrast to the US instructions, the Canadian enumerator instructions pertaining to age were consistently nonchalant; in 1871 and 1901, the instructions refer to the age question as they had in 1861: “The filling of this column needs no explanation.”37 In 1881 and 1891, the relevant paragraph was modified only slightly: “The filling of this column needs explanation, only in the case of infants under one year.”38 Canadian officials’ concern for the accuracy of age reporting probably surpassed the level of detail they felt was worth inscribing in the enumerator instructions. On the one hand, the Canadian census staff added to the 1901 enumeration a date-of-birth question alongside age, demonstrating their awareness that collecting Canadians’ year of birth would reduce the incidence of age rounding. However, again in contrast to the US instructions, the Canadian instructions in 1901 merely noted that the date-of-birth question “require[s] no explanation.” It is difficult to unpack nineteenth-century concepts of age if one relies on the formulation of census questions and enumerator instructions alone. The messages about age articulated within these sources were subtle, diffuse, and contradictory. Despite geographic proximity

The Organization of Age

43

and certain social and economic similarities between the two countries, the Canadian and US census bureaus invested their enumerator instructions on age with different levels of detail. Moreover, the US censuses tended to use age as a criterion for other questions far more than the Canadian enumerations did. For example, the Canadian instructions allowed enumerators to record the occupations of working children, whereas the 1900 US census stated explicitly that the occupation question “applies to every person 10 years of age and over who is at work.” Age can be made to serve intellectual purposes by acting as an arbiter, restricting the denominator of a given statistical measure to those persons most likely to engage in the particular behaviour being measured, such as bearing children or attending school. Prescribing age limits for particular questions entails the recognition that the national population is indeed divided into different age groups, and that posing certain questions to the whole population necessitates needless labour on the part of enumerators. It seems likely that the US census bureau designed more explicit instructions with respect to age because it had undergone greater institutional development over the course of the late nineteenth century. The census bureaus in both countries were not rendered permanent until shortly after the turn of the century; however, important differences existed in the size of their respective staffs and access to expertise.39 Taché’s recommendations to reorganize the Canadian census office boiled down to hiring two permanent first-class statistical clerks who would be permanently attached to the statistical branch of the Department of Agriculture, as well as statistician Cyprien Tanguay as an external departmental “attaché.”40 By the summer of 1870, Taché’s staff included thirteen to twenty men, most of whom were experienced administrators.41 In contrast, US census superintendent Francis Walker “tripled the size of the Washington office staff between 1860 and 1870 and then tripled it again in 1880 (to 1,495).”42 By 1900 the Washington census office employed over 3,500 people, including five chief statisticians, whose responsibilities encompassed census technicalities.43 In The American Census: A Social History (1988), Margo Anderson traces the way members of the new social statistics profession encouraged census superintendents and Congress to ask a larger number of questions about the US public in general.44 Most of the enlargements to the US census concern questions that better enabled analysts to understand changes in the US economy. However, refinements in US census questions about age are probably also associated with the influence of “self-defined professional statisticians” who began to adminis-

44

The Shady Side of Fifty

ter the census. As Anderson explains, such men “saw themselves as creating new and more sophisticated interpretations of the numbers.”45 Whereas the secretary of the US census board, William Kennedy, made foreign visits to consult with prominent statisticians such as Adolphe Quetelet and the International Statistical Congress, his Canadian counterpart, William Hutton, was not permitted to attend the International Statistical Congress when it occurred in 1860.46 Differences in the use of age criteria in the Canadian and US censuses relate to distinct issues of national concern. In both countries, age criteria were drawn into the business of nation making. In 1870 and 1900 the US instructions specified age limits when describing questions concerning the right to vote, immigration, and naturalization The 1901 Canadian census, in contrast, used age as a criterion in asking questions on school attendance and language. The US political and social establishment actively maintained boundaries that prescribed who could be considered an American. Asking questions about voting, immigration, and naturalization would provide US political and social elites with the information necessary to track the changing nature of the American citizenry. At the same time, French and English Canadians contested their cultural identities, and census questions on language and schooling provided key insights for these debates.47 Integrating age criteria into census questions on immigration, naturalization, language, and schooling allowed the Canadian and US census bureaus to focus important national questions on those particular age groups – adults or youths – who were actively participating in the shaping of US and Canadian society. In this way, age itself became a tool in Canadian and US national political projects.

the use of age statistics in published census volumes The treatment of age in nineteenth-century US enumerator instructions demonstrates an increasing awareness on the part of American census officials that age statements constitute an essential demographic measurement tool. Once the US census office turned to nominal enumerations, the importance of collecting age data surpassed the need to control the level of available information on the black population. With each successive decade, American census officials gave increasingly detailed instructions on the collection of age to their enumerators. In contrast, the Canadian census officials, as we have seen, apparently saw little point in drawing Canadian enumerators into the process of col-

The Organization of Age

45

lecting accurate age information, publishing terse instructions and performing corrections after the fact. Can similar distinctions be observed in Canadian and American census officials’ treatment of age information once the census returns were handed in? Statistical reports generated by governments in the past provide a valuable window on public perceptions of social groups and concepts. By the nineteenth century, scientists and government officials increasingly used numbers to describe social phenomena. Literary critic Mary Poovey asserts that the very separation of numbers in tables, meant to represent value-free facts, from text, meant to embody interpretation, is the result of an epistemological evolution between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in which philosophers and social theorists increasingly constructed numbers as impartial descriptors.48 This increased reliance upon statistics was manifested in the census reports themselves. The choice of tabulations, however, was far from impartial. Since the production of published census volumes was costly, space was at a premium. For example, the introduction to the Canadian census of 1871 noted that the editors had combined both English and French languages in the same volume because “by this expedient the cost of the printing is very materially reduced … The edition will consist of five volumes, in which is compressed a mass of information more than three times as much as was contained in the reports of the Censuses of 1861 for the same four Provinces.” As a result, census tabulators had to make choices when tabulating census information, and these choices shed light on census officials’ intellectual priorities. An ocean and a continent away, similar choices were made by Russian census officials. In a recent study of Russian minority nationalities, Andrejs Plakans examined the published results of the 1881 census of the three Baltic provinces in order to understand census tabulators’ definitions of and the primacy accorded to minority and majority populations.49 Comparing the crosstabulated characteristics to all characteristics available on the census schedules, Plakans discovered that although information on language and nationality had been collected, census preparers chose to tabulate only religion with important demographic variables such as age and marital status. Plakans concluded that the concept of nationality had not yet become “a significant variable in the minds of contemporary statisticians.”50 In a similar vein, we can determine the extent to which census officials considered and rendered age a privileged social indicator by examining the extent to which age was included in census tabulations.

46

The Shady Side of Fifty

In addition to the tables, commentaries within the published census volumes can shed light on why the census bureaus chose to focus on certain results. As Catherine Hakim notes, “census commentaries ... testify to the historical character of the census. They shed light on issues and policy concerns that were current at each census. They set out the reasons for including certain topics in the census, for selecting certain definitions or classifying the results in a particular way. If the census is a snapshot of the nation at a particular point in time, the commentaries reveal how and why the camera was angled, how and why the picture was framed in a certain way.”51 Curtis explains that the earlier Canadian censuses constituted “an inventory of wealth and a statement of colonial population growth” and as such “served as indices of colonial progress and improvement.”52 Like the agricultural fairs of the same period, the Canadian and US censuses manifested on paper what census officials wished to highlight about the two countries. Analysis of published census statistics sheds light on the markers used by officials to distinguish people, illustrating definitions of personal identity and allowing us to trace the timing of and process through which new social designators emerged. The frequency and manner with which age appeared in the Canadian and US published census reports indicates the importance these governments attached to age for classifying their populations. Jean-Pierre Beaud and Jean-Guy Prévost demonstrate that the treatment of age within census enumerations sheds light on the state’s use of official statistics as “political-cognitive devices which, by providing a standard to measure things, allow for an agreement regarding their objective existence and, therefore, the possibility to act upon them.”53 Examining the frequency with which age was crosstabulated in the published census volumes as well as the categories into which age was aggregated helps us understand the place of age in the census imaginary. Minute changes in these aggregations may also signal transitions in the way census officials as social commentators and knowledge makers conceived of age and the elderly. Although nineteenth-century censuses played an important role in establishing the intellectual importance of age-based measurements, age was not the main interest of most Canadian and American historical census volumes. Instead, these volumes chronicled the geographic distribution of the populations, their racial or ethnoreligious make-up, and their occupational profile.54 Nineteenth-century census officials supplied statistics to governments, scientists, and a public interested in the growth and spread of the two countries, the political apportionment

The Organization of Age

47

Table 2.1 Historical published census volumes, 1870/71 and 1900/01, United States and Canada

total number of volumes total # of tables total # of tables including age total # of table with age as threshold % tables cross-tabulating age variables cross-tabulated with age: province/state district/county, sub-district/ divisions city sex marital status race blind deaf and dumb unsound mind/insane literacy and language spoken school attendance immigrants nativity nationality deaths causes of death occupations industrial hands employed manufactures salaries and wages working time birthplace of parents voting age militia age home ownership household headship No. variables

1870 US

1871 Canada

1900 US

1901 Canada

3 84 29 3 35

5 95 22 17 23

10 414 + 434 52

4 126 10 4 8

x x

x x

x x

x x

x

x x

x x x x

x x x x

x (threshold) x x x x x

x x x x x x

x x x

x

x x x (threshold) x x

x

(threshold) (threshold)

11

10

x (threshold) (threshold) x x 19

(threshold) (threshold) (threshold)

13

of state and provincial representatives, and the balance of white and black or English- and French-speaking citizens. As a result, most census volume tables focused not on age but rather on the number of dwellings and families, and the number of persons according to marital status, race, religion, origin, birthplace, nationalities, and geographic location. Attention to age in the earliest published Canadian census volumes suffered from the relative brevity of these statistical volumes. For example, the published reports for the 1852 Census of Canada were accommo-

48

The Shady Side of Fifty

dated within two volumes, which between them included only one table with information on age. In this table, age information on people over twenty was condensed into ten-year age groups in order to liberate space to present information separately for each census district (Table 2.1). In the United States, on the other hand, it is difficult to attribute relative inattention to age to a lack of resources. Margo Anderson describes the increasing activity by the Washington census staff after the Civil War. The number of published census volumes increased from five in 1860 to thirty-two in 1890, while the census staff tripled from 1860 to 1870 and tripled again from 1870 to 1880.55 Instead, it appears that neither Canadian nor American census statisticians had as yet developed an intellectual framework for the analysis of age and age groups. Not until the close of the nineteenth century did a small number of scientists such as Sir Francis Galton and G. Stanley Hall begin to publish works on age-related development.56 In contrast to today, when public discourse and sociological and gerontological research connect aging to poverty, national productivity, property ownership, and retirement, most nineteenth-century census volumes failed to connect age to issues of economic status by crosstabulating age with economic variables such as occupation and property. Furthermore, nineteenth-century census officials did not depict age in relation to family; with the exception of dwelling and household sizes, family characteristics were not tabulated at all within these census volumes. “Except for the mean size of households,” state Steven Ruggles and Susan Brower, “the Census Bureau produced no published statistics on family and household composition until 1940, and official published statistics remained scanty until the 1960s.”57 Margo Anderson’s reflections on the evolution of the US census bureau depict an increasingly professionalized staff preoccupied with questions of urbanization, nonagricultural work, immigration, and vital statistics. The treatment of age by nineteenth-century census officials in the earlier published census volumes reveals their basic concern about population growth in Canada and the United States. The earliest modern Canadian census reports, those for the 1852 Census of Canada East and Canada West, depict pride in the growth of the young Canadian population. Improved agricultural conditions in Canada and economic distress in Britain had resulted in high rates of immigration to Canada. At the same time, the Canadian population reproduced at a healthy rate.58 Census officials’ concern for reproduction and geography was reflected in the types of variables they chose to crosstabulate with age: chiefly,

The Organization of Age

49

other personal demographic characteristics and geography. Tables that included age tended to interrelate age with sex and marital status, breaking the results down by county or subdistrict. Crosstabulations of age with sex permitted census officials to understand the sex ratios of different communities from east to west, while the relationship between age and marital status could provide clues to how quickly the population was marrying and reproducing, and to what extent widowhood impeded such reproduction. To reflect and provide further opportunities to investigate population growth, the report writers of volume one of the 1852 Census of Canada devoted greater space to the ages of children, observing the number of children up to five years old in singleyear age groups, then the number of children and youths up to age 20 in five-year age groups. This table did, however, present a fair amount of detail within the adult ten-year age groups by distinguishing men from women and dividing each sex by marital status.59 The introduction to volume 2 of the published report of the 1851–52 Census of Canada devoted three pages to tables and brief notes about the age structure of the Canadian population, drawing comparisons with Great Britain and the United States. The writer, William Hutton, noted that “the youthfulness of the population of Canada bears a striking contrast to that of England.” Hutton’s crude comparisons of birthrates in the two countries used slightly different age groups in the denominator and did not account for mortality. Hutton also failed to consider the effects of the de facto enumeration practices in England versus the mixed de facto/de jure practice in Canada. Nevertheless, Hutton rooted the transatlantic age structure differences in greater population increase in Canada, the tendency of children to stay home longer in Canada, and the general exclusion of old people from the waves of immigrants arriving in Canada. Hutton made other observations about the age structure of Canada and the United States, including the ratio of females to males in various age groups and the tendency of widows to outnumber widowers in all age groups, without engaging in further discussion of these phenomena.60 The introductions to subsequent Canadian census volumes reveal a particular concern with what was viewed as a particularly slow rate of population growth. Discussions focused on the reasons for this slow growth which ranged from criticisms of inflated population counts in previous censuses to acknowledgement of the greater attraction of foreign immigrants to the United States and the great extent of Canadian outmigration south of the border. The Canadian census officials

50

The Shady Side of Fifty

labelled this demographic problem “stagnation.” Their concern for population “stagnation” can be related to today’s concerns about the aging of the population. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, doctors viewed infirmity as an inevitable consequence of old age and recommended the isolation of the elderly.61 Such views fostered negative public attitudes toward old age, which was increasingly “viewed as a stage of life synonymous with poverty, disease, uselessness, and dependency.”62 Old men were defined as useless in the workplace; negative attitudes toward elderly men were manifested in a movement for mandatory retirement, which would result, it was believed, in a younger and more efficient workforce.63 In contrast, elderly women were defined as useless because their mission to bear children was over. Medical texts and popular manuals discussed menopause as a shock to a woman’s system, resulting in a loss of sexual passion and femininity.64 Dismal nineteenth-century medical views of aging notwithstanding, nineteenth-century census officials did not clearly articulate population stagnation as a problem rooted in an overabundance of old people. Today, substantial attention is focused on the growing proportion of elderly persons, the outcome of shrinking birthrates. Conversely, the nineteenth-century census volumes themselves focus concerns about population “stagnation” on children and youths. Of course, the causes of slowed population growth differed in the past and the present, the mid-nineteenth-century volumes concerning themselves chiefly with the effects of outmigration and to a lesser extent with the effects of falling fertility, then just newly apparent. Analyzing Age in Relation to Demographic and Social Characteristics: 1870 US and 1871 Canada Compared In-depth comparisons of the 1870/71 and 1900/01 published census volumes for the United States and Canada reveal the extent to which age-related patterns were considered of prime interest by census tabulators in the two countries. In 1870 and 1871 Canada and the US published similar quantities of census material. The US census officials produced three volumes of statistics covering population measures, vital statistics, and statistics on wealth and industry (Table 2.1). In comparison, the Canadian census bureau published 5 volumes, of which the first three covered basic population and industrial statistics collected that year. The 1870 US census volumes featured 84 tables compared to 95 tables in the 1871 Canadian volumes.

The Organization of Age

51

The 1871 census marked the apogee of Canadian census officials’ interest in age. The 1871 census tabulations were the outcome of a new level of intellectual energy at the census bureau, spearheaded by JosephCharles Taché, the deputy minister of Agriculture, who, according to Bruce Curtis, achieved for the first time “an internally coherent image of social relations.”65 In 1865 Taché determined that Canada’s published census reports must be reorganized and expanded to include older census material, and recommended that experienced statistical clerks be hired and “men of science” consulted in the preparation of statistics.66 Thus, the last two volumes published by the Canadian census bureau provided more extensive analysis of the census returns, comparing the 1871 results to those in 1852 and 1861 and reproducing an extensive list of statistics drawn from seventeenth-, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Canadian population counts. In both countries, age was crosstabulated with geographic and demographic variables. However, the Canadian and US census officials made different choices about which characteristics needed to be understood in relation to age, asking a slightly different range of questions. The 1871 Canadian census had asked a question about marital status, while the 1870 American census had asked a question about race (see Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Consequently, the Canadian census tabulators were able to explore, however indirectly, the ages by which most people generally married and the relative proportion of widowers and never-married persons in the population. The US tabulators, in contrast, were able to compare the age distribution of the white and black populations, observing the proportion of children in the two populations and the relative longevity of black and white persons. Both countries were interested in the association of age and health-related effects, breaking down the number of blind and insane persons by age. However, in general, the American census tabulators included age in a wider variety of analyses. For example, they explored the age profile of foreign-born persons residing in the US in 1870, influenced no doubt by the much higher influx of immigrants into the US. The American census tabulators also explored the association of age with variables indicating social and economic status, namely, school attendance and occupation. Evidently, US census officials were using the wealth of information generated by the 1870 US census to better understand the rapid changes taking place in their country: the ages of immigrants, the entry of children into the labour force, the extent to which older men remained in the labour force, as well as the rise of schooling. The Canadian census

52

The Shady Side of Fifty

volumes instead confined analysis of age-related effects largely to personal demographic or health characteristics, including marital status, sex, blindness, being of unsound mind, and causes of death. Thus, agerelated changes were related to the most personal events and characteristics, those that took place and that were witnessed at home: marriage and dying, being male or being female, and experiencing disability. For Canadian census officials in 1871, age was a limited aspect of the social imaginary, restrained to intellectual inquiry on reproduction and health. US census-making practices, on the other hand, worked to compartmentalize American producers and citizens by age. Thus, for US census officials, age had emerged as an important dimension of socioeconomic change. Age Groupings in the 1870 and 1871 Census Volumes: The Priority Placed on Children Examination of the types of characteristics subjected to age-based analyses reveals the priority census officials assigned to age and the types of phenomena that they thought needed to be understood in relation to different life stages. At the same time, analysis of the ways in which census tabulators grouped persons of different age groups sheds light on the importance census officials accorded to children, youths, persons at midlife and the elderly.67 Such analysis also helps us to understand the ways in which census officials constructed old age, by indicating the extent to which census officials subdivided the elderly in smaller groups. Generally, neither the American nor the Canadian census editors were able to present tables that offered information on people in single-year ages. The US and Canadian census volumes alike prioritized separate listings for each state or province, county or district, and subdistrict or division. As a result, the US and Canadian published censuses could not accommodate tables that broke down frequencies by single ages. In addition, the well-known problem of age heaping could be eased by grouping ages in 5- or 10-year intervals. Finally, the science of census tabulating was in its infancy. For example, despite Taché’s ambitions for precision, the age groups denoted in volume two of the 1871 census were not mutually exclusive. Since these categories were labelled “31 to 41,” “41 to 51,” “51 to 61,” and so on, it is unclear where the 41, 51-year-olds etc. would have been placed. This error was rectified in subsequent published statistics. Nevertheless, the treatment of age within

The Organization of Age

53

the published census tables is suggestive of census officials’ age consciousness and attention to the elderly. The Canadian and US census volumes produced a variety of age groupings. The 84 tables in the 1870 US census volumes that included age either as a crosstabulated characteristic or as a threshold defining the population being measured featured ten different arrangements of age groups. Different age thresholds were established for different purposes: ages 5 to 18 to encompass the school-going population, 18 to 45 to indicate those of age for military service and 20+ years to describe men eligible to vote (Table 2.2). By producing statistics on the male population of military and voting age, the 1870 US census continued to fulfill its mission to evaluate the strength of the state: in this case, by counting the number of fighting arms and voting hands available to support the nation in its battles, political and otherwise. The Canadian census officials did not publish tables that specifically addressed the size of the population eligible to attend school, fight, or vote. Nevertheless the introduction to volume 2 of the 1871 Canadian census discussed the fact that the age columns in its general tables had been arranged to divide at age 21, “the age of majority (21) to stop at that important stage of life, and the following period to begin with that age, thereby giving, for both sexes, the total proportion of those who have not reached, and of those who have attained the age of majority.”68 The report assumed that the significance of the age of majority would be understood by readers. When the Canadian census tabulators used age as a threshold to demarcate the population under examination in an entire table, it was in relation to literacy, disability, or labour in particular industries. In the first case, the threshold of 20 years was used, whether in recognition that not all teenagers might yet have acquired literacy skills or in an attempt to boost as much as possible the numbers who could testify to literacy. In the second case, a younger threshold of 16 years was applied to the whole table in view of the participation of young people in the industrial labour force. The ways in which ages were grouped varied from table to table in the 1870 US and 1871 Canadian published census volumes. Sometimes 5-year and sometimes 10-year intervals were used; at times 5-year intervals were used up to a certain age, after which 10-year intervals were used. One consistent trend in both countries was to devote greater attention to age-related phenomena among children and youths than among adults. For example, volume 1 of the 1870 US census presented the occu-

54

The Shady Side of Fifty

pations and nationalities of youths aged 10 to 15 years, then lumped all adults age 16 to 59 years together. Volume 2 of the 1870 US census presented information on disability for youths in 5-year intervals up to age 20; thereafter, information on this characteristic was presented in 10-year intervals. The 1871 Canadian census tabulators followed a similar approach; for example, in volume 2, the Canadian tabulators presented a basic age distribution of Canadians in 5-year intervals up to age 21, and in 10-year intervals thereafter (Table 2.3). The ages of the Canadian dead in 1871 and the causes of their deaths were presented in 5-year intervals up to age 11, and in 10- or 20-year intervals for adults. In volume 5, married and widowed persons were separated out if they were aged 15 to 20 or 16 to 21, but adult married or widowed persons were grouped in 10-year intervals. Since census officials in both countries were particularly concerned with the rate and dimensions of population growth, the most specific age-related information was presented for babies and young children. For example, the 1870 US census presented deaths by sex, race, and state for babies aged less than 1 year, then for children at individual ages from 1 to 5. Canada followed suit in volume 2, presenting the ages of the dead in single years up to age 5. The introduction to this volume devoted a couple of paragraphs to the manner in which information was grouped by age, noting that a separate column had been devoted to babies between 0 and 1 year of age. Old Age and Census Age Statistics: Death, Longevity, and Labour Finally, the ways in which old age was accounted for in the US and Canadian published census volumes for 1870 and 1871 varied a fair amount. In the case of death and disability statistics, the 1870 and 1871 US and Canadian census volumes accorded the same space to middleaged and older persons, permitting equally detailed studies of death as people grew older and older. While the 1870 US census grouped together all workers aged 16 to 59, it subdivided workers over 60, perhaps in an attempt to ascertain early trends toward retirement or to understand the potential for poverty in its older population. When presenting nativity and race characteristics by age, the 1870 US census volumes featured 5-year age groups for adults up to age to age 74, and 10-year age groups for those 75 years or more. The US census officials were apparently less interested in detailed age breakdowns for very old immigrants or nonwhite populations. The 1871 Canadian census volumes did not manipulate the classification of older ages to the same

The Organization of Age

55

extent as the 1870 US census. Since the 1871 Canadian census included age in a smaller number of tables, it usually accorded the elderly the same space, and therefore attention, as middle-aged persons. The caps placed on the oldest age category, in other words, the ages at which remaining elderly persons were grouped together, also varied from table to table: alternately, persons aged 90 and over, 95 and over, 100 and over, or 101 and over were grouped together in the last column of a table that featured age. Whether census officials in Canada and the United States were preoccupied with population stagnation or population growth, children and youth secured the larger share of census tabulators’ attention. By producing more refined counts of the number of babies, children at very young ages, and teenagers, census officials deliberately highlighted the results of population reproduction. Published census statistics not only provided a snapshot of the demographic progress of the country but also demonstrated pride in the youthfulness of the two nations. Nevertheless, Americans were constituted in the US census imaginary on the basis of their age in a wider variety of ways, as fighters and voters and workers. In Canada, the elderly were afforded less space as subjects of intellectual inquiry, the general exceptions centring on longevity and death, while the US census in 1870 showed fledgling interest in the economic status of aged persons. Censuses at the Turn of the Century By the turn of the century, the US output of published census volumes more than tripled, from 3 to 10, while Canada published a comparatively modest four volumes (Table 2.1). The US census bureau had developed into a major federal institution, with the resources to conduct extensive analyses of its census returns.69 Worton emphasizes that the 1901 Census of Canada was an outstanding enumeration: “The census of 1901 was perhaps the most remarkable statistical undertaking before or since that time, in that its content ballooned from 9 schedules and 216 questions in 1891 to 11 schedules and 561 questions.”70 An interest in changing immigration and economic patterns fuelled this expansion, and the attention of census analysts to profiling these changes in the published reports seems to have come at the expense of age.71 The energy with which Canadian census taking was expanded in 1901 was not subsequently manifested in an expansion of the Canadian census volumes themselves. The US published census of 1900 featured

56

The Shady Side of Fifty

more than 400 hundred tables that crosstabulated age with other social, demographic, and economic characteristics. In addition, the 1900 US census volumes included a special report on age authored by Allyn Young, mentioned earlier, a report that will be discussed further in the next chapter.72 Chudacoff notes that Young’s report “reflected the heightened significance of age in national life and policy.”73 In contrast, Canadian census tabulators manifested decreased interest in age-related patterns, crosstabulating age with other characteristics in only 10 of their 126 tables. By the turn of the century, Canadian outmigration had slowed and census officials’ interest had turned away from population stagnation and toward the rapid economic changes that were overtaking the country. Perhaps for these reasons, attention to age in the published Canadian census reports actually decreased between 1871 and 1901. In 1900 and 1901, both countries crosstabulated age with the usual personal demographic characteristics, geography, and causes of death. This time, however, Canada joined the US in examining age-based patterns of immigrants and school attendance. Expanding its interest in age-related analysis, the US for its part built upon themes introduced in the 1870 published census volumes: to school attendance it added an analysis of age and literacy and language spoken, while to its study of age and nativity it added an analysis of age and parental birthplaces. In contrast, the Canadian census volumes continued to confine age-related analysis to traditional subjects. On the other hand, the 1901 Canadian census volumes did introduce some age thresholds to its analysis of manufactures, salaries and wages, and working time. By the turn of the century, not only had the US published census output grown enormously but the number of ways in which census preparers grouped age into varieties of categories also increased. Whereas in 1870, US census tabulators had found 10 different ways to group individuals on the basis of their age, the 1900 published census volumes displayed no fewer than 76 different age-based groupings, dependent on the particular needs posed by the characteristic under analysis (Table 2.4). In contrast, the 4 published volumes of the 1901 Canadian census confined themselves to seven different ways of grouping individuals by age (Table 2.5). Growing attention to age in the US published volumes was manifested in various other ways. For example, in volumes 2 and 3, 14 tables crosstabulated age by single years, providing extremely detailed age-based information on sex, nativity, and race, as well as the average age at death, the month and season of death, and the cause of death.

The Organization of Age

57

The 1901 Canadian census preparers, in contrast, did not find the space to offer information on age by single years in any table. In general, US census tabulators did not make use of single-year breakdowns as often as they relied upon simple age thresholds, which sufficed to identify populations that were likely to engage in certain behaviours. In over 100 tables, US census tabulators used thresholds such as 21+ to analyze nativity and literacy, 5–20 to study schooling, 18–44 to identify men of militia age, 20+ to study married persons, 10+ to study illiteracy, 10+ to study occupations, 21+ to study men of voting age, and under and over 16 to study persons working in manufacturing. Like their US counterparts, the Canadian census volumes used the threshold of under and over 16 to distinguish between children and adults working in manufacturing. At the same time, they used a lower threshold of 5+ years to study literacy and language spoken. However, the Canadian census tabulators, when they did control for age, relied less often upon simple age thresholds and more often embedded age within the table as a crosstabulating variable. In 1901 the way Canadian census tabulators grouped information on age reduced the amount of available detail on very old persons. For example, in volume 4, a single table, one that provided a basic age and sex distribution by district and subdistrict, offered equal information on middle-aged, old, and very old persons, providing information at 5-year intervals from age 5 to 94. In other tables on disabilities, the Canadian census tabulators offered information in 20-year intervals up to age 79, and thereafter placed people aged 80 years or more in one group. When detailing the causes of death, the Canadian census preparers presented information in 10-year age groups up to age 74 and then grouped persons aged 75 years or more. In contrast, the US census tabulations offered 58 tables with 5-year age intervals and only 14 tables with 10-year age intervals. Thus, the US published census volumes provided relatively detailed information on much older persons. The US census tabulators offered a wider variety of tables on causes of death; those included in volume four provided equal information on middleaged, old, and very old persons, providing information in 5-year intervals up to age 94. However, as in the case of the Canadian published volumes, the US census tabulators made choices in their tables, often grouping older individuals together. Whereas information on nativity, sex, and race was provided in 5-year intervals right up to age 99 in tables 23 to 26 and 29 to 31 in volume 2, information on marital status, sex, nativity and race was tabulated in 5-year intervals up to age 64

58

The Shady Side of Fifty

only, with persons aged 65 years or more grouped together at the end of the table. Information on illiteracy was also capped at age 64, with persons 65 years and over lumped together. Evidently, the elderly commanded most attention in the US census imaginary with respect to longevity and death, or in relation to some of the basic organizing principles of US society: gender, birthplace, and colour. However, even the US census tabulators were forced to make analytic trade-offs, and detailed information on the elderly was at times sacrificed in favour of fuller information on other characteristics. As was true of the 1870 and 1871 published census volumes, children and youth captured the greater share of census tabulators’ attention, often commanding tabulations in months up to age 1 and in single years up to age 5. Given the space restrictions of the 1901 Canadian census volumes, census tabulators found the space in their tables on disabilities to separate children under 5, aged 5 to 9, and aged 10 to 19 separately, grouping adults into 20-year intervals thereafter (Table 2.5). As two demographically young and expanding countries, Canada and the US made the study of youth one of their highest intellectual priorities. Longevity, Centenarians, and Veterans In contrast to late-nineteenth-century social welfare discourse and measures, census officials in both Canada and the US showed no interest in the economic status or family position of the elderly. The elderly were often socially identified as “the deserving poor.”74 By the turn of the century, governments and charities in Canada and the United States began to constitute the elderly as a special category of needy persons by constructing institutions designated specifically for elderly women and men.75 At the same time, families were expected to provide the first source of support for needy aged persons.76 The US census began asking relationship to the head of the household in 1880 and Canada began to do so in 1891. In both countries, enumerators were expected to list heads and spouses first, followed by children in order of age, followed by kin such as coresident elderly parents. These expectations suggest that the Canadian and American census officials understood normative positions for the elderly within the family, based on their family and household relationships. On the other hand, responses to the relationshipto-head-of-household questions were never tabulated. Census takers were more interested in old age as it related to longevity and death, marital status, sex, and race, occasionally in relation to occupation and

The Organization of Age

59

nativity, and finally, as an exception, represented by extremely long lived persons. Since the eighteenth century, on both sides of the Atlantic, philosophers, writers, doctors, and government officials had been fascinated by centenarianism, while ordinary individuals claimed this status with regularity.77 Peter Laslett describes the eighteenth century as “an era of virtually uncontrolled fantasy in the history of centenarianism.”78 By the mid-nineteenth century, the fledgling statistical profession had focused on accurate measurement of centenarians. This interest in exceptional old age was signalled by the tendency in Canada and the US to lay aside a category for all those aged 100 years or more. Enumerators who recorded the 1860 US census were requested to write down the names of all slaves whose age reached or exceeded 100 years. While the Canadian and American census officials’ interest in the elderly remained limited throughout the late nineteenth century, census volumes from the two countries consistently provided tables that showed the number of persons living to an extreme old age. Proportionately few Canadians and Americans during this period lived into their 80s and 90s, yet the census tables from both countries regularly made space to display the number of men and women of different marital statuses and in different districts and counties who achieved extreme old age. For example, the age table in volume one of the 1852 Canadian census provided a separate column for those aged 100 years or more. The age table in the census of the two Canadas, 1860–61, volume 1, followed the same pattern.79 In the 1871 report, information on people aged 100 or 101 years or more appeared in statistics on age, marital status, and disability (Table 2.3). The American census tabulators followed suit: several tables in volume 2, on vital statistics, of the 1870 census provided the number of black, white, native-born, and foreign-born persons aged 100 years or more (Table 2.2). Volume 2 of the 1900 US published census, on population, provided the same information for persons aged 100 years or more in 8 tables (Table 2.4). The published volumes of the 1901 Canadian census, on the other hand, manifested reduced interest in extreme old age, at the most grouping all persons aged 95 years and over (Table 2.5). These crosstabulations were a natural extension of census officials’ interest in age as a demographic parameter and as a way to capture the growth or stagnation of a population. A population that included relatively large numbers of 80- and 90-year-olds and even centenarians could boast of the health of its population. The introduction to the lengthy age table presented in volume 5 of the 1871 Canadian census

60

The Shady Side of Fifty

makes clear that false centenarianism was understood by census officials as a lie and a statistical problem. The introduction noted that all persons aged 91 years or more had been grouped together because “the reports of extreme ages, and especially those represented to be centenarians, do not afford a degree of exactitude sufficient to be made use of. These statements of extreme old age, recorded by the proceedings of a census, cannot be interpreted as being of any further importance than as giving the number of so many people of advanced years.”80 In two instances, the Canadian census initiated investigations of false centenarianism. The 1851–52 census published the names, occupations, residences, ages, and marital status of all individuals who reported themselves as being 100 years or more. The rationale for doing so was clear: “It has been thought right to give the names and residence of those, 100 years of age and over, in order to prove the authenticity of the return or otherwise, persons residing in the neighbourhood would most probably be able to judge of their correctness from personal knowledge, and there are so many returned at very advanced ages that doubts might be entertained of their existence unless the names and residences were given.”81 Census takers viewed the falsification of extreme old age as an offence necessitating community discovery and censure. The 1871 Canadian census was similarly interested in centenarianism but went a step further than the 1851–52 census: this time, census officials tracked down the true birth date of the 421 dead persons listed in the 1871 return whose age had been reported as 100 years or more and published a lengthy report in volume 5 discussing the results of this investigation. They then published the names of the “winners,” the individuals who had told the truth. The rationale behind this investigation was to facilitate comparisons of Canadian longevity with that of other nations: “The question of the human longevity of our times is one of the highest importance in biological investigations, and the furnishing of a considerable number of well-established facts, and contributing to clear it of the confusion produced by the gratuitous assertions by which it is surrounded, appears to be a service to science.”82 There may have been an underlying motive, however, a broader sense that to lie about being a centenarian was to take advantage of the community. The rest of this census commentary is worth quoting at length: Oftentimes ... these assertions of extreme ages are deceits, which are looked upon as being of no importance; being prompted by a vanity

The Organization of Age

61

which leads some persons to underrate their age till the limits of old age are reached, and which leads to exaggerating one’s age when the evidence of time can no longer be concealed. Sometimes also, these statements are positive impostures. A recent case is well known in Canada of an old man still alive, who, like many of his predecessor macrobites, was deriving revenue, dinners and feasting from his profession of centenarianism. He was armed with the authentic copy of registration of his birth, but in which the two last figures of the date had been altered. The parish priest who had certified the copy, having seen reproduced in the newspapers that copy of registration thus falsified, protested against such a use of his signature, and the so-called centenarian, whose stomach was the stronger that it had not lasted one hundred years by a good many, had to desist from a trade which he was prosecuting by deceit practised on his customers and victims.83 Census officials felt no qualms about publishing the names of purported or actual centenarians, even though they had sworn to protect the privacy of Canadians in the census. Similarly, the US census bureau viewed the names of pensioned or potentially pensioned veterans as public information. In 1840 the US census asked the names and ages of “Pensioners for Revolutionary or military services.” The results of the census were printed in 3 volumes, the third of which contained “the names, ages, and places of residence of pensioners for Revolutionary or military services, and the names of the heads of families with whom they resided June 1, 1840.”84 This disclosure contradicted the instructions for the 1840 census, whereby enumerators were to assure respondents that their names would not be published: “On the statistical tables no name is inserted – the figures stand opposite no man’s name; and therefore the objection can not apply.”85 The 1890 census enumeration returned to the question of war veterans, asking whether an individual was “a soldier, sailor or marine during the civil war (United States or Confederate), or widow of such person.” The special inquiry connected with the same enumeration asked for military service information and current place of residence of surviving Union veterans or their widows.86 Carroll Wright states that the census office devoted much time toward correcting and classifying these veterans, yet Congress did not provide funds to publish “this huge directory of surviving veterans of the late war, which, if published, would occupy 8 large quarto volumes of 1,000 pages each, and the schedules were subsequently turned over…to the Bureau of Pensions.”87

62

The Shady Side of Fifty

The Census Bureau’s interest in Union army veterans and their widows makes sense in the light of the Union army pensions being paid to such persons. On 27 June 1890, not quite a month after the 1890 census was taken, Congress enacted a pension act that greatly broadened eligibility for the Union army pension, granting a maximum rate to those aged 75 or more and the minimum rate to those 65 and more. Payouts for this pension proved considerable; by 1893 Union army pensions constituted 43% of all federal spending.88 Dora Costa explains how Union army pensions became a common subject of political contention: “Grover Cleveland, who as president had vetoed a pension bill that would have given pensions to disabled, needy veterans, lost in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison, who promptly signed the 1890 act providing pensions to all disabled soldiers.”89 The pension system also provided Democrats and Republicans with opportunities to reward political patronage and to encourage votes. When framing a veterans’ pension policy in the aftermath of wwi, the Canadian government sought primarily to avoid the example set by the United States: “In any list of democractic excesses, the ‘pension evil’ would rank with Tammany Hall and elected judges.”90 The advent of federal spending on Union army pensions and the importance of the pension as a political tool explains the interest of the US census bureau in establishing the number of surviving Union army veterans and their widows. What is more noteworthy is the fact that the census bureau was prepared to publish veterans’ names if funds could be procured, despite the instruction to enumerators for the 1890 census that “the names and residence will not be used in the printed reports, nor will any statements be made concerning the business or operations of individual establishments.”91 Perhaps the veterans’ status as former soldiers defined them as public servants rather than private citizens, and this distinction may have influenced the census bureau’s willingness to publish their names. A parallel example from Great Britain and the British colonies suggests that military veterans were viewed as perpetual soldiers. Colonial Secretary Earl Grey established a pensioner project in 1846 to settle British veterans on land next to Canadian towns in lieu of paying their pension. The arrangement that veterans would be “rapidly assembled in civil or military emergencies” if the need arose demonstrates that the British government perceived its relationship with its former soldiers with a sense of continuity.92 On the other hand, the privacy of Canadian veterans and their families more than a half century later was contested. “The state was obliged to support depend-

The Organization of Age

63

ents of its fallen heroes, but how far did the obligation extend? A soldier’s widow, whatever her means, now had a statutory right to a pension unless she remarried. What if she chose to live common-law? Should the Pension Board act as a moral watchdog?”93 The US government required personal information from each veteran applicant for the practical reason of verifying legitimate pension claims. As early as 1820, responding to allegations of pension abuse as well as increased appropriations to fund Revolutionary War pensions, the US government enacted legislation that required pensioners to submit a report including information on the names and ages of his dependents, his land, his personal property, and the ability of his family members to provide support.94 Practical concerns also dictated the British government’s request that veterans pay pensions through the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and inform their staff officers in advance of their intention to move to another district: the staff officers needed to make arrangements for payments to be made in the correct district.95 In each instance, state obligations to veterans and military pension expenditures were a primary concern of the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, and it is difficult to disentangle such concerns from state perceptions of veterans themselves. The Canadian Pension Board in fact undertook intensive medical examinations of each prospective pensioner to ensure that pensions compensated for disabilities, not old age.96 Nevertheless, the 1840, 1852, 1871, and 1890 US and Canadian published census volumes do not contain any other instances in which individual names were published from the census returns; neither is there evidence of Canadian or American plans to publish the individual names of any other particular group. Centenarians and pensioners alike were denied the census guarantee of anonymity. False centenarians threatened scientists’ ability to produce credible longevity statistics; according to the 1871 Canadian census report, they also impinged upon the resources of their own communities. Self-declared military veterans represented a potential expenditure by the state. Thus, census officials paid substantive attention to elderly persons in exceptional circumstances. At the same time, the identification of elderly persons with these special statuses was tricky and circular. Larry Logue’s investigation of the role of enumerators in identifying black Confederate veterans in the 1910 census reminds us of Bruce Curtis’s warning that “census making typically involves the construction of lengthy chains of observations of observations.”97 Logue discovered that enumerators were more likely to record the Confederate survivor status of Mississippi blacks if the respondent was elderly. The older the respon-

64

The Shady Side of Fifty

dent, concluded Logue, “the more likely the census taker was to connect him with the Civil War.”98 Veteran status, like reporting oneself to be 100 years old or more, justified particularized treatment on the pages of the census volumes. At the same time, according to Logue’s investigation, respondents may not have been identified as veterans unless their old age was perceived by the enumerator in the first instance. Why did some elderly people feel motivated to claim centenarian status falsely? We can draw upon perspectives from gerontology to understand “false” claims of centenarianism in more subtle ways. Contemporary gerontologists stress that there are indeed multiple processes of aging, and multiple ages for each person. Scholars of aging study “perceived youth”: the age seniors feel they are as opposed to their chronological age.99 We could view the assertion of centenarian status by persons whose chronological age was less than 100 not as a lie but rather as a strategy. Such persons may not have been chronologically 100 but felt socially or economically or emotionally deserving of such status and whatever perks may have come with it. In the absence of true knowledge of their chronological age, elderly persons who could no longer underreport their age felt that they might as well claim the status of centenarian. Elderly persons have used old age to access resources in other circumstances: John Budd and Timothy Guinnane argue that the institution of the old age pension in Ireland in 1908 motivated many older persons “to lie about their ages, and qualify for a pension before they reached the statutory age.”100 They also found instances of age exaggeration in earlier Irish censuses, before the pension was enacted. “The historiography of rural Ireland suggests that many people, particularly in the lower classes of society, took a fairly calculating attitude toward the government and might not care at all about making misrepresentations to it.”101 Canadian census historian David Worton had termed the 1871 investigation of centenarianism as “ruining a harmless cottage industry.”102 Yet the centenarian question highlights a conflict in the census process, a conflict located at the interface between respondents and officials, between officials’ attempts to constitute age as an abstract demographic category and elderly persons’ exercising of their own imagination and self-definition.

conclusion During the second half of the nineteenth century, age and the elderly captured the attention of census takers in uneven ways. Census officials

The Organization of Age

65

in both countries were well aware of the need for a basic understanding of the age structure of their populations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the censuses of Canada and the US alike had asked for the specific age of every Canadian and US resident. Concern about the precision of age statistics existed on both sides of the border, as demonstrated by the addition of a date-of-birth question to the census by the turn of the century. However, while the US census bureau drew census enumerators into the process of obtaining accurate age information, the Canadian census viewed age rounding as a problem to be resolved during the postenumeration tabulation phase. The priority assigned to age-based analyses in these countries moved in two different directions as the nineteenth century progressed and drew to a close; the US published census reports crosstabulated age with other variables to an increasing extent, while the opposite occurred in the Canadian census reports. The Canadian census bureau continued to depict age as a function of basic demographic processes, examining the age distribution of women and men and married and widowed persons, and longevity and mortality; in contrast, the US census bureau used the published census reports to explore age-based aspects of labour, citizenship, and immigration. The Canadian census reports acknowledged the fundamental role of age and aging in population reproduction, while the American census reports sought to understand persons of different age groups in broader terms, in relation to the occupational profile and shifting ethnic composition of the country. At no time did the censuses of either country constitute the elderly in their family context. The nineteenth century and turn-of-the-century censuses were not intended to render the family a subject of statistical inquiry. Yet as we shall see in chapters 4 through 6, the censuses themselves provided important data for studying Canadian and American elderly as family members. Before turning to census evidence on the lives of the Canadian and American elderly, we must first examine the construction of age and old age through the eyes of ordinary people, the census respondents themselves. This shift from a top-down to a bottom-up understanding of age and the census is prompted by census officials’ discussions of centenarians. Both American and Canadian census officials demonstrated interest in the elderly in terms of longevity and mortality, reserving space in certain tables to record the number of very old persons. False centenarianism particularly captured the attention of Canadian census takers as they sought to produce accurate measures of Canadian longevity and to police creative age reporting. The energy Canadian census takers

66

The Shady Side of Fifty

devoted to investigating false centenarians suggests that, during the nineteenth century, a distinction existed between popular and scientific views of old age. I now turn from scientific perspectives on old age to views expressed by ordinary Canadians and Americans, views articulated in the ways they represented their ages on the pages of the census manuscripts.

The Organization of Age

67

Table 2.2 Type of age categories used, 1870 United States volume 1: population Table 23: nativity, race & sex Table 24: sex, school, military & voting Table 25: sex, school, military & voting Table 28: occupations Table 29: occupations & nationalities Table 30: occupations & nationalities Table 31: occupations & nationalities Table 32: selected occupations volume 2: vital statistics Table 2: deaths by sex & state Table 3: deaths by sex & state Table 4: deaths by race & sex Table 7: blind by race & sex Table 14: deaf and dumb by race & sex Table 16: insane by race & sex Table 18: idiotic by race & sex Table 22: nativity & race Table 23: sex by states Table 24: ages, native-born Table 25: ages, foreign-born Table 26: ages, whites Table 27: ages, native, white Table 28: ages, foreign-born white Table 29: ages, black persons Table 30: ages, Chinese & Indian Table 31: ages 80+ by nativity, race, sex Table 32: ages 80+ by nativity, race, sex Table ii: life table

thresholds: school age=5–18 years; military & voting age=18–45; 20+ thresholds: school age=5–18 years; military & voting age=18–45; 20+ thresholds: school age=5–18 years; military & voting age=18–45; 20+ 10–15; 16–59; 60+ 10–15; 16–59; 60+ 10–15; 16–59; 60+ 10–15; 16–59; 60+ 10–15; 16–59; 60+