A boy enumerator for the Census Bureau carries his forms into a Kentucky blood feud, an illegal rifle factory, mill towns full of child labour, the Black Hand’s territory, hobo camps and the far north. The book is part adventure and part civics lesson on how the census was taken, and its nativist alarm about immigrant hordes and its dialect portraits of Black Americans are frankly those of 1911.
An odd, revealing period piece on the census, Progressive-era reform and the prejudices that came with them. Download the free EPUB.