Invasive or Illuminating?

BRIAN: Hoover wasn’t the only one with a penchant for filing in the 19-teens. Our next story looks at another bureaucrat who was, in some ways, a kindred spirit.

Walter Plecker was a Virginia doctor who became head of the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics in 1912. Right away, he set about creating a bureaucracy worthy of the 20th century.

HELEN ROUNTREE: He insisted on better sanitation for midwives to use. He set up a system of birth certificates so that everybody could get registered.

BRIAN: This is Helen Rountree, a cultural anthropologist who studies Virginia Indian tribes. She says that Plecker’s leadership modernized the Bureau, making it more efficient and more organized. But his reformist zeal had a dark side.

HELEN ROUNTREE: He was also a racial purity nut. And he was determined, as the cliche, goes to keep the White race White.

BRIAN: Plecker’s big project was to ensure that mixed race Virginians would not enjoy the privileges reserved for Whites under Jim Crow. And the vital statistics bureau was a great place from which to run that kind of campaign.

At Vital Statistics, he had access to all sorts of data that he could use to supposedly prove somebody had African or Indian ancestry.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Now, he got the names of living people who might be, shall we say, suspicious in a number of ways. A fair number of the county court clerks were actually in sympathy with White supremacy and pure White race and all of that.

And anybody they thought was suspicious trying to register as White and not looking correct, the court was liable to turn them over to Plecker.

BRIAN: I see. So he did get tips from people on the ground.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Oh, yes. He got a lot of tips from people on the ground, and some of them were county officials. In 1943, he actually tried to expand that network. He sent out a circular listing, county by county, the surnames of people who he suspected were going to try to pass as white.

BRIAN: Let me get this straight. As late as 1943, in the midst of a war fighting Nazi Germany, Walter Plecker is sending out circulars talking about racial purity?

HELEN ROUNTREE: Yes. This was going on, parallel.

BRIAN: Boy.

HELEN ROUNTREE: In addition, Plecker welcomed tips, anonymous or otherwise, from interested citizens out in the counties. And he got a lot of these things by correspondence, and quite a few of them were just malicious.

BRIAN: Clearly the information that Plecker was operating on was suspect, to say the least.

HELEN ROUNTREE: All of it was suspect.

BRIAN: So how did he actually work? What were his techniques? They didn’t have computers in those days, and I gather that listing one’s race was rather haphazard before the 1920s?

HELEN ROUNTREE: Plecker relied on two major sets of records. One set of records were the US Census population schedules. The other set of records was to be found in the county courthouses.

In 1853, Virginia issued registers to all the county courthouses. And by that, I made great big books that were called registers– birth registers, marriage registers, death registers.

Those registers usually had racial designations in them. So of course when Plecker decided to begin having research done, he sent his people out to get all the information he could from those registers.

BRIAN: Were there other forms of data that he used?

HELEN ROUNTREE: In the county courthouses, there was another kind of record made, and that was the register of free Negroes. He had to get a certificate stating that they were of free birth, otherwise they could be kidnapped and sold into slavery.

The law about that went in in 1806. Plecker was able to get copies of those registers– every county had one. And then if he got a tip later and he could have his people trace geologically back to a free negro register, he had that present-day person as a person of African ancestry.

BRIAN: Let me get this straight, Helen. You’re saying that data that was used to ensure the liberty of free blacks in the early 1800s was turned against African Americans 100 years later.

HELEN ROUNTREE: Yes.

BRIAN: Do you have any examples of how Plecker’s interventions affected the lives of individuals?

HELEN ROUNTREE: There was an Eastern Chickahominy family living in Hampton. The father of it was the ticket agent at the railroad station. His children were in the White schools.

But Plecker intervened in the late 1920s, and he had the school board remove all of this family’s children from the White public schools.

BRIAN: Wow.

HELEN ROUNTREE: It was done on a school day. The kids were simply hoicked out of the classroom. It was all humiliating. The reason for it was made plain either then or immediately afterwards, and the kids were sent to the colored school.

And at that time, the county, Elizabeth City County, spent nine times as much per pupil on White students as on Black students.

BRIAN: What became of Walter Plecker? When did he retire?

HELEN ROUNTREE: He retired in 1946, and within a very few months, he was hit by a truck crossing the street.

BRIAN: Dare I ask the race of the person driving the truck?

HELEN ROUNTREE: I’ve never been able to find out, but I know a lot of people who wish they were behind the wheel.

BRIAN: Helen ROUNTREE is Professor Emerita of Cultural Anthropology at Old Dominion University. She wrote about Walter Plecker in her book Pocahontas’s People.

Ed, Peter, there’s so much to talk about in that interview. But what strikes me as particularly relevant right now given the controversy over the way the NSA is collecting and using data is the unintended consequences of collecting data in the first place– the way data is collected for one reason back in 1806 and then, a century later, put to completely different uses by a completely different set of people interested in completely different things.

PETER: Right. Well, we’ve always been a data generating people. We need to record every transaction from birth to death to property transactions.

So you have all those data points out there, and they may seem pointless to us, but then they can be assembled and are assembled. And, you know, it’s not always for maligned purposes.

So I’ll give you a case in point. You think about freedom suits in early Virginia, and you think about people with Indian ancestry who were enslaved are establishing their ancestry beginning with a free Native American woman– an Indian woman.

And that’s a legitimate grounds to sue for your freedom. And what’s amazing to us– we think of Virginia slave society as this totalistic and unjust system, and, of course, it is, but there’s room to wiggle. There’s room to move if you can establish the documents. If you’ve got the data.

BRIAN: If you’ve got the data.

PETER: And you can be freed. And it seems, in some ways, to be just a complete flip from what you’re describing where the taint, the faint suggestion of one drop of Black blood makes you–

BRIAN: But the data are the same.

PETER: It’s the same data.

BRIAN: They don’t change– that’s the history and the interpretation.

PETER: That’s right. They’re neutral.

ED: You know, Peter you talk about the neutrality of this evidence and how it turns out to be this force for great evil, really– the 20th century and using this to disrupt these people’s lives.

But as you know, I’m always trying to look on the bright side.

BRIAN: Make lemonade out of this one. Go ahead.

ED: Well, it’s interesting to think about these very records that Peter’s talking about all the way back in the 17th century that are first beginning to separate out who might be Negro and White and doing all that.

And our very own tribe of historians has come back and used those records with remarkable skill to bring to life people who are otherwise completely forgotten.

PETER: Yeah. It’s a process of what historians call records stripping, when you have a variety of data points that just seem random and they don’t add up to anything. And you have to pull them together. Then they add up to something. Then you might even reconstruct the life of an individual. It’s quite amazing.

ED: But ironically, the method is that of Plecker.

BRIAN: Yeah, that’s it.

PETER: That’s record stripping, yeah.

ED: And triangulating all of these different kinds of evidence, of connecting things that would not have been connected at the moment of creation to recreate somebody in the past–

BRIAN: Which sounds to me like exactly what the NSA is doing today.

ED: Well, it’s funny you’d say that, Brian, because there’s a hilarious blog post that’s come out recently that actually imagines what if the people at the time of the American Revolution had had the techniques of the NSA today and they could uncover the conspiracy that was roiling the North American continent.

BRIAN: Yeah. This was posted by a sociologist named Karen Healy, and it’s about the run up to the Revolution in Boston. That was a conspiracy against legitimate authority.

Now remember, this is from a British point of view. And what we do in order to find out who is behind all this, who is the terrorist that we need to capture– because that’s what the British are interested in. They want to hang the people who are responsible for this, because they’re traitors.

So you do this metadata analysis. You get all the groups that have revolutionary leanings– Tea Party types, the Long Room Club, Saint Andrew’s Club, the Loyal Nine. A whole bunch of them.

ED: That sounds very threatening.

BRIAN: Yeah. OK, so you find out who has membership in what group, how they overlap, how they could be connected through groups or as individuals. You don’t look at any communications. You can’t tap the wires, you can’t–

ED: No purloining necessary.

PETER: No, nothing. All you know is who is connected with whom by some close association. You put it in motion, mix and stir, and what you end up with is– and this is the punchline, so hold onto your tri-cornered hats– who is the chief terrorist?

BRIAN: Sam Adams.

PETER: Close, but no cigar.

BRIAN: Or beer.

PETER: It’s Paul Revere, OK? It’s nothing he said. They don’t have him on tape. You don’t have him saying, I am a terrorist. But you could identify him from the outside in using this metadata.

BRIAN: It sounds like guilt by association to me, guys.

PETER: It is all about association. It’s called social network analysis.

ED: And that’s kind of a new frontier, guys, in the social history of coming back in, of finding the networks among abolitionists or among authors in the Antebellum Period.

PETER: And there you go again, Ed. You’re taking this nasty thing, all this metadata analysis we’re also upset about now, and you saying, hooray, this is going to be an historian’s tool.

BRIAN: He thinks like that, Peter.

ED: I’ve never metadata I didn’t like!

BRIAN: I’ve met a lot of dates who didn’t like me, Ed.

PETER: [LAUGHING]