One hundred fifty years ago, when the American Sta tistical Association (ASA) was founded, statistics had yet to be recognized as an organized discipline, the descriptive information about the state of the world was incomplete and relatively unscientific, the country had no unified com prehensive data base, and the federal statistical system as we know it today did not exist. The four population cen suses that had been carried out were the responsibility of U.S. marshals who added the enumeration chore to their law-enforcement activities. Some states sponsored survey work on income and production, but the methods used were primitive and the data were incomplete. From its beginning, the purpose of our association and, for that matter, of the field of statistics in this country at that time-was to develop and disseminate facts about society. It was not until much later that the organization's attention expanded to include theory and methods in volving statistical inference, variability, error structure, and methods of data analysis.
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Janet L. Norwood (1990) studied this question.