It’s 1920, Republicans feel their government trifecta melting away. They’ve decided forcing a constitutional crisis is the only way to maintain that stronghold.
Rural states have identified foreign immigration into urban, Democratic population centers as a top concern. The decennial Census, taken every 10 years since 1790, has tracked the expanding U.S. population, which, at the time, had swollen evermore because of the influx of people from other countries coming to this one with eyes toward gainful employment and the propagandized American Dream.
“Those States which would have their representation reduced — not all of them, but most — managed to put a spike in the wheels of legislation,” reports the New York Times on a 1928 House bill to reapportion Congress.
As a result, the congressional map drawn after the 1910 Census will stay in place until a few years down the line, when President Herbert Hoover signs the Reapportionment Act of 1929 into law.
After the 1920 Census recorded sharp population shifts and major boosts in the number of people living in urban centers, rural Republicans who controlled the House, Senate and presidency at the time violated the Constitution by refusing to enact congressional reapportionment based on the new population figures.
“What was the Constitution to a man who might lose his job through the proposed reduction?” the Times queried in the 1928 article.
While this episode in American history was problematic, historical precedent like this keeps Census historian Margo Anderson calm as she watches President Donald Trump’s relentless attempts to reorder how political representation works in America by contorting the Census Bureau.
“One of the caveats I always have on this is that, as a historian, we’ve been there before,” Anderson, a history and urban studies professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, told TPM. “In other words, what my role is is to say, you know, we go through this every decade, so everybody, calm down.”
The administration’s most recent attempts at contorting population data — revealed through an internal memo obtained and published by TPM — show its intention to try and exclude certain immigrants from the count. The administration’s efforts echo Republican anxieties from 100 years ago. Like today, congressional Census manipulation worked in tandem with xenophobic attacks and legislative restrictions on immigration. While Republicans were successful in the 1920s in using their Republican trifecta to manipulate population data and therefore congressional representation numbers, today’s governmental plans are still unofficial.
Still, the administration’s plans to manipulate the Census for political gain are both unoriginal and unsettling.
“The right proposed constitutional amendments in the 20s and 30s to exclude foreigners and immigrants from the count,” Anderson said. “The same stuff that you’re talking about now. It’s exactly the same.”
Trump officials recalled the Three-Fifths Compromise, wherein enslaved Black people did not count as whole persons before the Civil War, to support a widely rejected legal argument that the use of the word “persons” in the constitutional enumeration clauses actually refer to “citizens.” Beyond diminishing their personhood, enslaved Black people were further objectified because individuals’ names weren’t recorded in any Census before 1860, Aderson François, civil rights attorney, law professor, and director of the Georgetown Law Civil Rights Clinic, told TPM. Trying to exclude certain noncitizens from the population count is one more way a country founded on a racial caste system, said François, is trying to dehumanize a targeted group of people.
“[W]e found a way in the Census to mark them as nonpeople simply because they didn’t have a name,” François said of enslaved Black people. “It seems to me what we’re trying to do is the same thing, with respect to undocumented people. No matter what we do these people will still be here, they exist. But it’s yet another way to dehumanize them. To say they don’t quite count as much as everybody else.”
Perhaps unprecedented is how the administration has attacked data in a way that works to eliminate underrepresented groups’ ability to prove discrimination or disparate impact.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in June ended its enforcement of disparate impact claims based on protected characteristics including race. In July, Republican members of the three-person EEOC board voted to end collecting race and gender data about U.S. workers. Last year, a public database detailing federal employee demographics deleted race and gender data before DOGE decimated the federal workforce last year in mass layoffs that disproportionately impacted Black women.
Whereas white supremacists of olde relied on race data to create illegitimate science designed to support racial hierarchy, experts told TPM this administration’s colorblind approach to data collection will still work to uphold racial inequity for both federal resource allocation and civic engagement.
“I think it all works together,” Jeanine Abrams McLean, president of Fair Count, a civic engagement organization focused on the U.S. South, told TPM.
A recent Fair Count study of 2020 Census data showed a shift in demographics within South Georgia communities, those predominantly Black places lacked equitable political representation.
“There are folks that are trying to consolidate power and using the Census as a tool to do that,” Abrams McLean said. “But I do think there are genuine anti-immigrants sentiments. There are genuine racist sentiments that some of these people hold and are infusing into the work that they do.”
In the 1920s, Congress was the body which abdicated its responsibility to enact fair representation for the then-U.S. population of roughly more than 105 million people.
During Reconstruction, it was the courts that worked against what François described as a brief post-slavery period where Congress genuinely tried to legislate racial equality. Today’s Supreme Court — led by Chief Justice John Roberts and his colorblind ideology which has supported law enforcement stops based on race while rejecting decades old civil rights protections based on the same — poses a danger to the “whole persons” population count required in the Fourteenth Amendment, François said.
“If you look at the history of the Court from the start,” François said, “the Court has always been…at best indifferent to the cause of human rights, and at worst hostile to the cause of human rights.”
François is not hopeful the more sophisticated Trump II Census attack will leave the population count unscathed. Instead, François envisions a plan which would begin as a talking point among radical fringe groups before moving into mainstream right-wing circles and which concocts a sort of compromise: Undocumented people can be counted in the population, but shouldn’t have the same weight as citizens when it comes to political representation.
Already, Trump II’s plan to eliminate race from the Census echoes ideology pushed by the far-right Heritage Foundation in 2018. More recently, the conservative Free Press published a piece that supported the end of sorting “Americans into bogus racial categories.” From Stephen Miller, to Pete Hegseth, to Russell Vought, members of the far-right who support these efforts don’t just have the president’s ear. They run his Cabinet.
“And the bigger irony,” said François, “is that we are slowly, in some ways, backing our way into a neo-version of the Three-Fifths Compromise.”
