Social Insecurities

Private Data and Public Culture in Modern America

Sarah E. Igo

How are Americans known by their state, and with what ramifications for individual privacy and political culture? Asked urgently today, the question surfaced as early as the first censuses of the population. But it captured broad public attention in the decades defined by the Depression and World War II, provoked by the U.S. government's new — or at least newly open — methods of tracking its people. Honed during the Philippine-American War at the turn of the century and refined through the Bureau of Investigation's domestic surveillance activities during World War I, such techniques were in this era extended to a much broader swath of the citizenry. From birth certificates to passports, administrative tracking was becoming part of the bureaucratic everyday. In the New Deal, it would come wrapped in the guise not of social order but of social benefit — indeed, social security.

What scholars have termed the administrative state entered citizens' lives in new ways and to novel ends in the 1930s. It ballooned further during World War II, when the scale of government activity came to dwarf the New Deal programs "that had seemed gargantuan only a few years earlier." The state had been a locus for fears about centralized authority since the first days of the American republic, of course. But the state understood as administrator or bureaucrat was a product of the twentieth century. As federal agencies loomed larger in Americans' lives, they also became a focal point for reflecting on individual privacy. How much knowledge about its own citizens ought a government possess? And what would an administered society mean for the people caught in its net?

These questions became less abstract with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. A landmark piece of legislation, still considered "the most expansive and important social welfare program in the United States," the act ushered in old-age and unemployment benefits for a large segment of the population. Less noticed, it also marked the U.S. government's first widespread use of personal information to identify and administer specific individuals, in the form of the Social Security number (SSN). The SSN was an essential mechanism of the ambitious new program, which as reformer and social scientist Sophonisba P. Breckinridge put it in 1935, "contemplates the participation in all of our lives of the federal, state, and local governments and puts, for the first time, a degree of validity into the expression 'American standard of life.'"

Standard here referred to a minimum threshold for subsistence, but it implied a kind of standardization common to large-scale administrative projects. Unprecedented though it was in scope, Social Security was in step with a set of identification and documentation practices well advanced by the early decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, its planners drew from other nations' experiments with administering citizens' identities, particularly those of France, Britain, and Brazil. "Seeing like a state," in James C. Scott's influential formulation, hinged on making citizens "legible" and thereby amenable to the designs of officials and planners. The expansion of "paper identities" was thus intertwined with a mode of governance able to register and recognize specific persons.

States were never the only authors of this documentary impulse. Life insurance outfits and credit agencies were two of the powerful private entities driving the creation of what we would now call "personally identifying information." Through the efforts of private as well as public agencies, modern Americans were becoming deeply enmeshed in webs of bureaucratic verification. A columnist for an Atlanta newspaper wryly testified in 1942 that "every law-abiding citizen today" had "his vest pockets ... crammed with credentials," including "a draft registration card, a social security card, a driver's license, a hospitalization card, an insurance card, a gasoline ration book, a sugar ration book, a finger-print identification card, a shopper's credit card," and so on. "Practically all of these items stress the fact that I am me and nobody else; without them, I would officially cease to exist," he quipped.

For this columnist, Social Security cards were just one piece of a "thoroughly classified, documented, and cross-indexed" modern existence. Yet these cards warrant special scrutiny for the fashion in which the numbers imprinted on them bound data to entitlements and individuals to the state — enlisting Americans in their own bureaucratic visibility by making manifest the benefits of identification. The federal government's numbering of individuals, and the potential tracking it permitted, did not escape public notice. Quite apart from discussions over Social Security's substantive merits, this feature of its operation engendered sharp questions from a strange set of bedfellows: the Republican opposition as well as African Americans, labor unions, working women, and religious groups. But we must not read backward from our anxious contemporary stance toward identity documents; nor should we assume that state surveillance loomed large for most citizens in the 1930s and 1940s. Concern about Social Security numbers in that era, while evident, competed with another view, in which the nine digits were broadcast, even cherished, as proof of membership in a newly...