adminA professor outside of my department asked me at a mixer last week what literacy rates were in the United States at the time of Harper’s Weekly. I responded quickly and with great confidence, “very high.” When he asked me what “very high” meant, I paused and realized I didn’t have a firm figure committed to memory.
Feeling inspired, I went home and turned to census data. I’ve read a lot of literacy rates in secondary sources, but I wanted to get to the heart of the data. There I found the Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, originally compiled in 1975. It was the third such historical census report (let me know if you find a more recent one!), published under Census Bureau Director Vincent P. Barabba and his Chief of Statistical Compendia Staff William Lerner. Chapter H (pp. 332-422), which focuses on Social Statistics, was where literacy rates were compiled.
There, I read that the census tracked those who are illiterate, a figure that counts anyone “who could not read and write either in English or some other language” (364). To get at the “number of illiterates”:
“In censuses of 1870-1930, two questions were asked, one on whether the person was able to read and one on whether he could write. Illiteracy was defined as inability to write “regardless of ability to read...No specific test of ability to read and write was used, but enumerators were instructed not to classify a person as literate simply because he was able to write his name”.
Bicentennial Edition: Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, Chapter H: Social Statistics, p. 365.
With the large methodological caveats of literacy as a binary yes/no without standardized benchmarks, the data are as follows:
Percentage of illiterates in the total population 10 years old and over: 1870.....20.0 percent | (White population 9.0 percent) 1880.....17.0 percent | (White population 9.4 percent) 1890.....13.3 percent | (White population 7.7 percent) 1900.....10.7 percent | (White population 6.2 percent) 1910......7.7 percent | (White population 5.0 percent)
I was disappointed that there weren’t data from before 1870 in the handy chart. Still, the bicentennial report explained that “[d]ata on illiteracy were also collected in the censuses of 1840, 1850, and 1860, but are not included here because they are not comparable with statistics for subsequent years, and because of limitations in the quality of data for those early years” (365). (There is much more information on what those quality concerns were in the report.) However, the imperfect data was included in the report’s body:
Percentage of illiterates in the total population 20 years old and over:
1840.....22.0 percent | (White population 9.0 percent)
1850.....22.6 percent | (White population 10.7 percent)
1860.....19.7 percent | (White population 8.9 percent)
It turns out that my initial gut memory of literacy rates in the US was right: literacy rates were quite high throughout the nineteenth century, especially for people who might have made up the target readership of Harper’s Weekly.
Of course, not all of these literate people would have been able to read Harper’s Weekly. Many were literate only in a language other than English. Many likely had literacy skills that were not on par with the content Harper’s Weekly published. And more still could not have actually accessed the text in Harper’s Weekly–either because they could not buy it themselves, could not borrow from someone who could buy it, or didn’t have time to read it even if they or someone they knew could buy it.
For further reading, you could also consult a 1993 report from the Center for Education Statistics (part of the U.S. Department of Education). Compiled by Tom Snyder, 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait. summarizes some of the earlier data on page 9.
