spearheaded by Congressman James A. Garfield, had been passed to allow him to appoint trained census enumerators free from political influence. Notably, the 1880 Census's results suggested population throughout the Southern states had increased improbably over Walker's 1870 census but an investigation revealed that the latter had been inaccurately enumerated. Walker publicized the discrepancy even as it effectively discredited the accuracy his 1870 work. The tenth Census resulted in the publication of twenty-two volumes, was popularly regarded as the best census of any up to that time, and definitively established Walker's reputation as the preeminent statistician in the nation. The Census was again delayed as a result of its size and was the subject of praise and criticism on its comprehensiveness and relevance. Walker also used the position as a bully pulpit to advocate for the creation of a permanent Census Bureau to not only ensure that professional statisticians could be trained and retained but that the information could be better popularized and disseminated. Following Garfield's 1880 election, there was wide speculation that he would name Walker to be Secretary of the Interior, but Walker had accepted the offer to become President of MIT in the spring of 1881 instead. Social Darwinism Walker was a strong believer in social Darwinism. In 1896, he wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled "Restriction of Immigration," in which he said immigrants from Austria, Italy, Hungary, and Russia were nothing more than "vast masses of peasantry, degraded below our utmost conceptions . . . beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence." According to historian Mae Ngai, Walker believed the United States "possessed a natural character and teleology, to which immigration was external and unnatural. [His] assumption resonated with conventional views about America's providential mission and the general march of progress. Yet, it was rooted in a profoundly conservative viewpoint that the composition of the American nation should never change." Walker's theories and writing were foundational for the American nativist movement. Academic career As his Census obligations diminished in 1872, Walker reconsidered becoming an editorialist and even briefly entertained the idea of becoming a shoe manufacturer with his brother-in-law back in North Brookfield. However, in October 1872, he was unanimously offered to fill Daniel Coit Gilman's vacated post at Yale's recently established Sheffield Scientific School led by the mineralogist George Jarvis Brush. While at Yale, Walker served