There were two technological innovations that profoundly changed daily life in the 19th century. They were both “motive powers”: steam and electricity. According to some, the development and application of steam engines and electricity to various tasks such as transportation and the telegraph, affected human life by increasing and multiplying the mechanical power of human or animal strength or the power of simple tools.

Those who lived through these technological changes, felt them to be much more than technological innovations. To them, these technologies seemed to erase the primeval boundaries of human experience, and to usher in a kind of Millennial era, a New Age, in which humankind had definitively broken its chains and was able, as it became proverbial to say, to “annihilate time and space.” Even the most important inventions of the 19th century that were not simply applications of steam or electrical power, such as the recording technologies of the photograph and the phonograph, contributed to this because they made the past available to the present and the present to the future.
The 1850 song, “Uncle Sam’s Farm,” written by Jesse Hutchinson, Jr., of the Hutchinson Family Singers, captured this sense that a unique historical rupture had occurred as a result of scientific and social progress:

Our fathers gave us liberty, but little did they dream
The grand results that pour along this mighty age of steam;
For our mountains, lakes and rivers are all a blaze of fire,
And we send our news by lightning on the telegraphic wires.

Apart from the technological inventions themselves, daily life in the 19th century was profoundly changed by the innovation of reorganizing work as a mechanical process, with humans as part of that process. This meant, in part, dividing up the work involved in manufacturing so that each single workman performed only one stage in the manufacturing process, which was previously broken into sequential parts. Before, individual workers typically guided the entire process of manufacturing from start to finish.

This change in work was the division or specialization of labor, and this “rationalization” (as it was conceived to be) of the manufacturing process occurred in many industries before and even quite apart from the introduction of new and more powerful machines into the process. This was an essential element of the industrialization that advanced throughout the 19th century. It made possible the mass production of goods, but it also required the tight reorganization of workers into a “workforce” that could be orchestrated in various ways in order to increase manufacturing efficiency. Individuals experienced this reorganization as conflict: From the viewpoint of individual workers, it was felt as bringing good and bad changes to their daily lives.

On the one hand, it threatened the integrity of the family because people were drawn away from home to work in factories and in dense urban areas. It threatened their individual autonomy because they were no longer masters of the work of their hands, but rather more like cogs in a large machine performing a limited set of functions, and not responsible for the whole.

On the other hand, it made it possible for more and more people to enjoy goods that only the wealthy would have been able to afford in earlier times or goods that had never been available to anyone no matter how wealthy. The rationalization of the manufacturing process broadened their experiences through varied work, travel, and education that would have been impossible before.

Welsh-born cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth drew the famous cartoon of John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arm wrestling while sitting on hydrogen bombs. It appeared in the October 29, 1962 edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Born in 1902, Illingworth started drawing cartoons for the famous British news magazine Punch in 1927. The Daily Mail hired him as well in 1937 and he continued to provide cartoons for both publications for the rest of his career. He gained a measure of national fame for the effective cartoons he drew during England's dogged stand against Nazi Germany.

Illingworth was not an overtly political cartoonist and this is evident in this arm wrestling cartoon. One notices the characteristic Illingworth preference for detail rather than commentary on who is right or wrong. The intensity of the struggle is captured both by the energy that radiates out of Kennedy and Khrushchev's gripped hands, but also by the fact that each is sweating profusely. Each man still has his finger on the button that will detonate the bombs.

Illingworth's drawings contrast sharply with those of Edmund Valtman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and fiercely anti-communist cartoonist for The Hartford Times. On October 30, after the crisis had seemingly passed, his paper published a Valtman cartoon of Khrushchev yanking missile-shaped teeth out of a hideous-looking Castro's mouth. The caption above the illustration reads, “This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You” and the cartoon clearly represents a moment of American gloating over the communists.

That the Illingworth cartoon was published in a British newspaper bears witness to the fact that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis affected the fate of populations beyond those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed the whole world was watching. The publication date of October 29 is also significant since on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles out of Cuba and the crisis seemingly had passed. Illingworth's cartoon reminded readers that the superpower struggle would continue and that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remained.

Good question and one that is often answered a bit too narrowly. The key issue is whether trade routes promoted resource extraction and/or economic development, and if the latter, what sort of development. Of course, the most famous route, with the greatest impact on New World colonies, was the Triangular Trade, which had some variants. In addition, though, there were several versions of a simpler two-way transatlantic trade, from the UK to the northern colonies, from France to Quebec, and from Spain/Portugal to Latin American places. Last, and less known, a transpacific trade took shape in the 17th century, connecting the Philippines with Mexico through the west coast port of Acapulco. So here we have at least half dozen routes to assess in terms of impacts.

The core of the triangular trade, ca. 1600-1800, was the exchange of slaves for materials and goods – African captives brought to eastern Atlantic ports, exchanged for gold or British manufactured products, then transshipped brutally to colonial depots – Charleston, New Orleans, the Caribbean islands, and in smaller numbers, New York, for example. There, captives were again sold, for cash or goods (sugar, tobacco, timber) which returned to a UK starting point (often Liverpool). Yet this sequence was not the only one, particularly in New England, where merchants sent rum and other North American goods to Africa, secured slaves for auction to sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and brought liquid sugar (molasses) to American shores for distillation into more rum. Though this sounds tidy, actually, rarely was either triangle completed by one ship in one voyage; each triangle stands more as a mythical model than a description of standard practice. Nonetheless these ventures, plus those made by Spanish and Portuguese slavers extracted over nine million Africans from their home terrains across the 16th through the 19th centuries. That’s quite an impact, creating slave economies from Virginia to Trinidad to Brazil. Another three-sided trade involved slavery indirectly, as when Yankees sent colonial goods to the sugar islands, shipped to Russia to exchange sugar for iron, which returned to New England.

Bilateral trade is simpler to grasp, and yet may depart from our current notions of exchange. The Kingdom of Spain extracted precious metals from Latin America, sending back goods for colonizers, especially through Veracruz, which became Mexico’s principal east coast harbor. By contrast, French trade with Quebec was a constant drain on the monarchy’s funds; often goods sent to sustain some 50,000 settlers cost more than double the value of furs gathered and sold. However, Virginia tobacco sold to Britain at times created high profits, but this single-crop economy proved vulnerable to commodity price fluctuations (Cotton’s southern surge came after the American Revolution.). Clearly trade did not automatically translate into sustained development, though port cities did prosper, not least because they became anchors for coastal shipping within and among colonies. At times, expanding trade could irritate the colonizing state, as when Mexican merchants created a long-distance 16th-18th century trans-Pacific route from Acapulco, trading an estimated 100 tons of silver annually for Chinese silks, cottons, spices, and pottery – resources the Crown thought should be sent to Madrid instead. Overall, my sense is that colonial trade routes deepened exploitation of people and nature appreciably more than they fostered investment and economic development.

The charter of the Second Bank of the United States, granted in 1816, expired in 1836 (President Jackson vetoed Congress' effort to recharter the bank), after which banking and the issuing of bank notes was not done by a central bank, but devolved upon thousands of state-chartered banks with minimal federal regulation. State laws were often so lax that almost anyone could issue bank notes.

Nevertheless, the state of Pennsylvania did renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, with Nicholas Biddle as its president, which issued bank notes under the name of the institution, but which was then only a state-chartered bank, even though the old bank's stock holders (except the U.S. government) voted to transfer the assets and liabilities of the old bank to the new one. The directors of the new bank decided not only to reissue the old bank notes, but also not to close the books of the old bank, but to continue them into the life of the new bank (it continued until 1841), which made it quite difficult later to disentangle the affairs of the defunct bank from those of the new one. One of the consequences was that the new Pennsylvania bank honored the notes issued by the old Bank of the United States. Because of that, other banks and individuals could also honor the old notes because the new bank would redeem them.

Reproductions of 1840 bank notes of the Second Bank of the United States, issued in Philadelphia by the state-chartered bank—the "Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania"—have lately been printed as "souvenirs" but are essentially worthless to numismatic collectors.

The original 1816 charter of the Second Bank of the United States limited the circulation of notes by the bank to $35 million, and required that no notes be issued in denominations less than $5. In practice, the bank never had more than $25 million in notes circulating, and most of the time much less, averaging for one period about $15 million.

In October 1836 (the Second Bank of the United States closed its doors in March of that year), its records showed that about $12 million notes were still in circulation, down from $24 million one year earlier (Cattrell, pps. 427, 512), with the average circulation for 1836 reckoned to have been about $21 million. The mixture of bill denominations in this total was not recorded, so it seems impossible to be certain of how many bills this represented.

In colonial America, there were not really any “teenagers” as we know them. Of course, children passed through the decade that we know as the “teens,” but that stage of their lives was not the carefree, exploratory period that today’s youth experience. Children grew into adulthood more quickly than they do today, and by the time a child entered their teen years, they were already on a path toward their life’s occupation. Although a youth’s path to adulthood depended on their family’s socio-economic status, regardless of wealth, young men usually learned their trade through some form of apprenticeship.

Children from poor families were often bound out to servitude at a young age, earning their keep while learning a trade. In the seventeenth century, 80% of the Chesapeake’s immigrants were indentured servants. Many of these servants were over the age of 20, but a significant number were young men and women still in their teens. In return for their passage to the Chesapeake, these servants agreed to work for a period of time, usually between four and seven years, without pay. During their service, masters provided food, clothing and shelter, and at the end of their term, servants received “freedom dues,” usually three barrels of corn and a suit of clothes. Many of these youths were orphans, but some were from indigent families who could not care for their children, and therefore sent them off to find their own fortunes. But a young person did not have to travel across the Atlantic to enter into servitude. At the age of 12, Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed to his brother, James, a Philadelphia printer. In his autobiography, Franklin recalled that his brother was “passionate” and often beat him. “Thinking my apprenticeship very tedious,” Franklin stated, he “was continually wishing for some opportunity of shortening it.” At the age of 17, Franklin ran away from his brother’s household.

Children of wealthier families also took on considerable responsibility at a young age. Children from families of middling means often learned how to read and write, especially if they lived in urban areas. By the time they were in their mid-teens, sons were at work in the family farm or business, learning the trade that they would probably practice the rest of their lives. In the wealthiest families adolescent boys were often sent to boarding school, and then when they were around 15 years of age, they entered institutions such as Harvard, William and Mary, or Yale. After finishing their formal education, many took apprenticeships as clerks in merchant offices or law offices, or they returned home to follow their fathers’ profession.

Only young men were allowed to pursue higher education. Although there were a few opportunities for girls to receive a more extensive formal education in the colonial period, most families kept their daughters at home to learn how to run a household and to be a dutiful mate for her future husband. There were rare exceptions to this convention, however. In 1738, when Eliza Lucas was 15, her father moved her and her mother from Antigua, West Indies, to a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Her father’s travels with the army and her mother’s ill health forced Eliza to manage the family business. In a letter to a woman friend, Eliza Lucas described her duties: “I have the business of 3 plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine.” But, she assured her friend that “I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father, and by rising very early I find I can go through much business.” Lucas assumed an unusual burden as a young woman, but eventually she followed a somewhat conventional path – she married a planter and had children, yet she continued to hold considerable responsibility in the management of her husband’s plantations.

Sears Roebuck, like its competitor Montgomery Ward, built its business as a mail-order company. Consequently, many of its customers were farmers or at least lived far away from big cities. The majority of Sears Roebuck customers also ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

In the early 1920s, many of Sears Roebuck's rural mail-order customers wrote to the company asking them to set up a way for trappers to sell their furs. Beginning in late 1925, Sears Roebuck & Company, through the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services, began buying furs from independent, rural trappers. Trappers would mail packages of their prepared muskrat, mink, otter, raccoon, fox, badger, beaver, weasel, skunk, and opossum pelts to a Sears depot. At first there was only one in Chicago, but the company soon increased the number of depots around the country, including ones in Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Sears would grade the pelts and either promptly send the trappers a check or give them credit toward purchases from its general merchandise catalog. If the trapper was unsatisfied with the value Sears gave him, he could return the check and the company would return the furs. The vast Sears catalog carried a line of Victor, Oneida, and Gibbs traps, scents, and pelt stretchers, as well as firearms, ammunition, decoys, and a wide selection of farm equipment and supplies.

In this way, Sears Roebuck became one of the largest fur buying companies in the country. The trappers generally found the company's fur grading to be accurate and the prices paid to be fair, especially for good, large skins. The company had found a way to help their rural customers by giving them a market for their furs that was as close as their mailboxes. Farmers trapped for sport and recreation, but also to control the wildlife population that threatened their crops.

Sears Roebuck mailed more than 7 million copies of an annual publication, Tips to Trappers, a magazine of about 30 pages in length, written and edited by "Johnny Muskrat" (a trapper, as well as a Sears spokesman) "and his trapper friends."

Tips to Trappers had articles and photographs showing the best ways to find and trap animals and prepare their pelts, as well as letters from readers, techniques from renowned trappers, information on state trapping seasons and limits, news on the fur market, and instructions on how to prepare and mail pelts to Sears. Included in each issue were shipping tags for mailing packages to a Sears raw fur depot.

Sears Roebuck also ran the National Fur Show in different cities around the country each year from 1929 to 1958. Pelts that had been submitted to Sears depots during the year were judged at the shows and cash awards (and even new cars) were given for the "best prepared" pelts, regardless of their ultimate value. This helped promote and teach the company's suppliers and clients about the best ways to handle pelts.

Johnny Muskrat also had a regular radio show during the 1920s and 1930s on Sears' own Chicago-based radio station WLS ("World's Largest Store"), and then elsewhere in the country through station affiliates. He and his occasional trapper guest would talk about how to set traps, dry pelts, and other techniques. Muskrat also discussed fur market conditions, tips on camping and hunting, and pioneer life in general, as well as reading letters from his listeners.

Radio station WLS was the voice of the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, which Sears began in 1924 as a means to increase its outreach to American farmers. The programming on WLS was a mix of music and entertainment (such as its annual sponsorship and broadcast of the "National Barn Dance") designed to appeal to a rural audience, as well as regular shows for farm listeners that were devoted to growing, harvesting, and selling crops.

The Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation offered advice and instruction by mail to farmers and their wives who wrote to the company. The Foundation also supported rural agricultural agents, farmers' markets, cooperative associations, 4-H and FFV chapters, agricultural demonstration projects, and scholarships to agricultural colleges.

Sears Roebuck and Company's second president, during the 1920s and 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, was a true philanthropist who viewed the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation not just as a way to capture customers for Sears, but as a means to improve the lives of Americans living in rural communities. He was, for example, responsible for Sears' extensive support for Historically Black Colleges, especially in the South, and for the establishment of almost 5,000 schools for African American children in the region.

After 34 years in the fur buying business, Sears Roebuck decided in 1958 to focus on urban customers and retail stores, and so discontinued, among other things, the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services and the publication of Tips to Trappers.

All of the major economic events of the Jacksonian Era can be linked to Andrew Jackson's determination to pay off the national debt. Not only did he enforce the steady shrinking of the debt by paying it off and being strictly frugal with federal funds, but he also established policies to ensure that the government would not incur new debt. As a result, the U.S. actually did become debt free, for the first and only time, at the beginning of 1835 and stayed that way until 1837. It remains the only time that a major country was without debt.

Jackson and his followers believed that freedom from debt was the linchpin in establishing a free republic. It freed the country and its citizens from burdens and bondage to creditors. It freed the majority from dependence on a minority.

As Jefferson had thought of it, debt involved dependence on one's creditors, whoever they might be, domestic or foreign, and, as he famously wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, "Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition." If the government involved itself in the creation and sustaining of credit and debt, it would naturally encourage "public and private profligacy," as Jackson put it in his first inaugural address, which meant that the government would overextend itself into the liberty of its citizens.

The government, then, should insert itself into the lives of its citizens as little as possible, and the government should strive for its own freedom from dependence on creditors. In some respects, this was simply a reading of indebtedness as enslavement and as incompatible with the status of liberty. The determination to abolish America's debt was also of one piece with the other "reform" movements of the early 19th century, the temperance movement, for example.

Alexander Hamilton's 1791 financial plan for the U.S. had included the implicit acceptance of a national debt, along with the establishment of a central bank, and the federal government's assumption of the debts of the individual states. Hamilton saw it as the federal government's duty to promote economic development, including an expansion of the money supply and credit in order to finance investment in economic growth, and even direct government subsidies of businesses.

Jeffersonians were skeptical of this. For them, debt freedom would vindicate the U.S. as an exception among countries, and would demonstrate that the new country was the golden example for the rest of the world to follow. The implication of this was, for Jackson (following Jefferson), that government should stay out of the economy as far as possible.

When Jackson came into office, the government's economic activities were being conducted along the lines of Whig Senator Henry Clay's "American System," that had two main components—high protective trade tariffs and the funding of domestic "internal improvements," mostly in the form of roads and canal projects.

High protective tariffs protected and promoted the growth of U.S. manufacturing against cheap imports. They also provided most of the federal government's revenue. The South, however, saw protective tariffs as a system of sucking money out of the region (by penalizing them with higher prices, domestic and foreign, for manufactured goods and by encouraging reciprocal tariffs levied by other countries against American agricultural products, such as tobacco and cotton) and funneling it to the North and West, as well as into the pockets of northern manufacturers.

Provided with an extended rationale by Jackson's own vice president, John C. Calhoun, South Carolina passed an ordinance that "nullified" federal tariffs, based on the argument that the federal government did not have the power to levy them. Jackson responded by threatening South Carolina with force. Both sides eventually compromised, with the passage of a reduced tariff in 1833.

Jackson believed that the federal government did have the power to levy and enforce tariffs and he recognized a need for the revenues that they generated, but for two reasons. The first was to stimulate production of military supplies for national defense, and the second, to raise money to pay off the national debt, resulting primarily from the War of 1812. The debt surpassed $100 million after the war (including carryover from the Revolutionary War), but by the time Jackson entered office in 1829, it had been reduced to $58 million. Jackson did not agree with northern manufacturers that a tariff did much to promote industry and he did not agree with southern planters that it did much to penalize agriculture.

Another part of Clay's "American System" was funding transportation projects, mostly in the north and west. The rationale was to fund development that had a national effect, not a purely local one, and would bind together the different regions of the country. The legislative process for funding these projects, however, often devolved into corrupt "log rolling," with politicians swapping votes and investors gaming the system to advance special privileges through subsidies. In addition, using federal funds in this way meant that fewer funds were available for paying off the debt and so postponed the day when the U.S. would be debt free.

Jackson, therefore, began vetoing these bills, deliberately minimizing the government's involvement in the economy. He believed that the government should not be a vehicle for privileged interests and that it should remain small.

Out of this belief, Jackson came to oppose the Bank of the United States because it entangled the government, which capitalized it, into protecting the interests of private stockholders. He shocked the bank's president, Nicholas Biddle, as well as many other people, when he vetoed the rechartering bill in 1832. In his veto message to Congress, Jackson summed up his sense of the proper, limited role of government: "If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing."

Instead, the rechartering of the bank would have required heavy capitalization using public funds that would not simply keep the bank going, but make a profit. To Jackson, the bank's purpose had been only to establish a national currency and to meet interest and principal payments on the national debt. Because the debt was soon to be paid off, much of the bank's original purpose was about to disappear.

Jackson, in fact, believed that the bank was an "abominable institution—the monster, that has grown up out of circumstances, and has attempted to control the government." He had closely read accounts of the disastrous "South Sea Company Bubble" of 1720, which had implicated the English King and his ministers in a series of financial manipulations, aided by the government's executive power. When the speculative bubble burst, it caused widespread loss, debt, and poverty. The fear of such executive power had partially inspired mid- and late-18th century radicals to agitate for a more limited central government. It inspired American revolutionary thinking and informed the Founding Fathers' determination to set up a system of limited government wherein the executive's power would be checked.

From the time that Hamilton's plan was implemented at the very beginning of the republic, opponents—including Jefferson—feared that it would consolidate moneyed interests and threaten individual liberty. That fear came to be focused on the Bank of the United States. Biddle and the like-minded staff of the bank, however, believed that it was a good thing for the government to invest in private enterprises because it would promote industry and business, and would make a profit for the government.

Late 19th-century historian James Parton wrote that, "Financiers of the Biddle school, some of whom proclaimed the national debt a national blessing, regarded the solicitude of the President on this subject as primitive and puerile." As part of his battle against the Bank of the United States, Jackson had the government remove its deposits with the Bank and place them in a number of regional banks, chartered by the various states. Unfortunately for Jackson, however, this only stimulated financial speculation, rather than dampening it, because the state-chartered banks, as a rule, operated under looser lending procedures than the national bank did. The combined debt of individual states, through state-issued bonds meant to finance "internal improvements," had climbed to nearly twice the total of the national debt.

As a result, a speculative balloon grew, based on the relatively unconstrained lending by these newly rich banks to people who were speculating in the sales of the government's western lands. In fact, for the "mercantilists" like Henry Clay and Nicholas Biddle, it was to the government's advantage to keep land prices high in order to generate more government revenue from their sale.

To try to restrain the growth of this balloon, Jackson issued an executive order, known as the "Specie Circular," in 1836, requiring that payment for western lands be accepted only in the form of gold coin. He also attempted to replace as much paper money as he could with gold coins—eagles ($10), half-eagles ($5), and quarter-eagles ($2.50). In this, he was counseled and supported by his long-time associate, Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Benton gained the nickname "Old Bullion," for this, and the gold coins came to be called "Jackson Yellow Jackets," "Yellow Boys," or "Benton Mint Drops."

The requirement to use gold to buy federal lands suddenly deflated the speculative balloon, resulting in the Panic of 1837, just as Jackson was leaving office. The sudden contraction of credit that was a consequence of Jackson's "tight money" policies continued under his successor, Martin Van Buren, even though the panic made it necessary for the government to begin borrowing money again, and since that time, the United States has never again been without a national debt.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) makes available the census records from the decennial censuses (the latest to be opened for public inspection is the 1930 census). But administrative records of the Census Bureau are also kept at NARA. Generally, these are in Record Group 29. NARA's website contains a description of the items, including, for example, item 134, "Record of Enumerators, 1900," which is in 37 volumes. These volumes give the name and address of each enumerator (commonly called a "census taker") and agent, his or her daily rate of pay, and the number of his or her enumeration district and his or her supervisor's district.

In the 19th century, compensation rates for enumerators generally were set by the laws that authorized each specific census. Carroll D. Wright and William C. Hunt reprinted these laws in The History and Growth of the United States Census, published in 1900. This volume includes the pay rates for enumerators--and other staff--for each census from 1790 through 1890.

In it, we learn, for example, that the authorization law for the 1790 census specifies that the "marshals' assistants" (the enumerators) were to receive $1 for every 150 persons enumerated in rural areas and $1 for every 300 persons in cities, with some discretion allowed for marshals to supplement the pay of the enumerators working in rural areas, depending on the difficulties they encountered in locating people.

The amount and kind of information collected grew with each census. As a result, the basis on which enumerators were compensated reflected their increased labor. For the 1850 census, for example, enumerators were paid 2 cents per person enumerated (living or deceased), with a 2% supplement for collecting "social statistics," 10 cents per mile traveled, 10 cents per farm enumerated (where crop and livestock production figures had to be collected), and 15 cents per "establishment of productive industry."

The pay schedule for the 1880 census (the first in which women could serve as enumerators) was similar, except for replacing the provision for travel compensation with a provision enabling the Superintendent of the Census to adapt the rate of compensation to various regions, depending on the difficulties (mostly geographical) in collecting information there. A ceiling of $4 per day was set for enumerators in districts east of the 100th meridian and $6 per day west of that (enumerators were expected to work a 10-hour day).

Also included in Carroll's book are detailed listings of all the information that enumerators were expected to collect, as well as the printed instructions given to the marshals and their assistants, some of which are concerned with making exceptions to the standard pay rate for enumerators.

Enumerators have sometimes had to press claims for payment for "extra schedule work," such as, in 1880, arranging and copying long lists of occupants in alphabetical order or for required attendance at the local courthouse where they filed their forms.

For the last (2000) census, the Federal Register listed enumerators' wages as ranging from $8.25 to $18.50 per hour, depending on the locality. Typically, in recent censuses, regional supervisors have been given budgets and then decided how to recruit and pay the enumerators they have needed. Pay for mileage or travel has been more realistically set on a local basis, rather than a national one.

Census enumerators have often been motivated by other considerations than the mere pay--the feeling of patriotism, for example, or civic duty, or a taste for adventure, or even sheer curiosity. The people being enumerated have not always welcomed the questions of their government enumerators. In addition, the enumerator's job can be physically and emotionally demanding. For the 1890 census, for example, the regional agent in North Alaska tried to recruit men as enumerators and found that the wages he could offer them ($16 a day) were "absurdly low in the gold region." Most people he asked "simply laughed at him."

He then "appealed to the men's friendship, to their love of adventure, and to their love of country," and finally convinced 14 men to undertake the arduous task, which required traveling long stretches by dogsled and canoe and some wild encounters with some very wild men. The government paid them--in addition to their wages--50 cents a day per dog in their teams in order to feed them, and each enumerator also took along an Indian interpreter, who was paid $5 a day by the government.

The historian must also note that census-takers have sometimes been accused of being caught up in the "enthusiasm" of politics and the desire to maximize the local count, resulting in rumors of under-the-table remuneration. As an example, the U.S. marshal overseeing the 1870 census in the upper midwest lived in St. Louis, whose citizens, apparently, thought of the census as an opportunity for St. Louis to compete with Chicago. The census results showed a larger population in St. Louis than in Chicago, by a small amount, and the "citizens of St. Louis in grateful appreciation of the figures gave the marshal a banquet and presented him with a service of silver, as a reward for his victory over Chicago." The citizens of Chicago, however, were not at all amused.

Our resident historian suggests the following quotations. Here is a quote from Milton Friedman, from a column he wrote in Newsweek, dated July 14, 1975, on p. 71, entitled National Economic Planning:

The central planners want planning by them for us. They want the government—by which they really mean themselves—to decide "social priorities" (i.e. tell us what is good for us); "rationalize production" (i.e. tell us where and how we should work); assure "equitable distribution" (i.e. take from some of us to give to others of us). Of course, all this can be voluntary—if we are willing to turn our lives over to them. Otherwise, "antisocial behavior" must be restrained—who can gainsay that? The iron fist must be there—just in case.

Such planning, from the top down, is inefficient because it makes it impossible to use the detailed knowledge shared among millions of individuals. It undermines freedom because it requires people to obey orders rather than pursue their own interests.

Here is a longer quote from Herbert Hoover, "Individualism Speech," October 22, 1928. Landmark Document in American History. Box 91, Public Statements, Herbert Hoover Library, West Branch,1A. :

When the Federal Government undertakes a business, the state governments are at once deprived of control and taxation of that business; when the state government undertakes a business it at once deprived the municipalities of taxation and control of that business. Business requires centralization; self government requires decentralization. Our government to succeed in business must become in effect a despotism. There is thus at once an insidious destruction of self government.

Moreover there is a limit to human capacity in administration. Particularly is there a limit to the capacity of legislative bodies to supervise governmental activities. Every time the Federal Government goes into business 530 Senators and Congressmen become the Board of Directors of that business. Every time a state government goes into business 100 or 200 state senators and assemblymen become directors of that business. Even if they were supermen, no bodies of such numbers can competently direct that type of human activities which requires instant decision and action. No such body can deal adequately with all sections of the country. And yet if we would preserve government by the people we must preserve the authority of our legislators over the activities of our Government. We have trouble enough with log rolling in legislative bodies today. It originates naturally from desires of citizens to advance their particular section or to secure some necessary service. It would be multiplied a thousand-fold were the Federal and state governments in these businesses.

The effect upon our economic progress would be even worse. Business progressiveness is dependent on competition. New methods and new ideas are the outgrowth of the spirit of adventure of individual initiative and of individual enterprise. Without adventure there is no progress. No government administration can rightly speculate and take risks with taxpayers' money. But even more important than this—leadership in business must be through the sheer rise of ability and character. That rise can take place only in the free atmosphere of competition. Competition is closed by bureaucracy. Certainly political choice is a feeble basis for choice of leaders to conduct a business.