House and Annex
HOUSE AND ANNEX '"pHE Census Bureau has declared that 122,698,190 ¦*• persons now reside in the United States, which means a gain of slightly more than 16 percent during ten years. These figures...
...That agriculture has steadily lost in attractiveness is at present definitely proved...
...The local community could not live on the profits of rural trade, and steady deterioration set in...
...Farm land values had increased, acreage was at a premium owing to war-time needs, banks had loaned every available cent on attractive mortgages, the chain stores had not driven local merchants out but were operating, for the most part, as simple addenda to the commercial routine...
...The effect is rendered almost startingly graphic by the census reports...
...As an entity the small town was momentarily doomed...
...The list runs from the movie to the bathing beach, from baseball and football and golf to tossing jackknives, from radio programs to lecture courses...
...The most important and prosperous of these last is California, which has grown faster than any other state...
...But when the boom conditions disappeared and over-production ensued, it became apparent that the farmer's plant would not pay interest on the capital invested...
...And of course the census will reveal to future observers any number of things regarding the phenomenal growth of the amusement business in the United States...
...For the moment the average worker's disposition to mortgage his earnings via the instalment plan does not appear to have led to anything like financial catastrophe...
...Here wealth retires to enjoy the tranquillity and palm trees of Pasadena, riots in a dozen mountain-skirted valleys, wears out the roadbed between Los Angeles and Tia Juana...
...Curiously enough, the census arrives at the precise moment when a readjustment of values, the end of which cannot be foreseen, is in progress...
...Though only one farming state—Montana—is now host to fewer citizens than ten years ago, all the chiefly rural commonwealths have grown only in so far as their large cities have expanded...
...The two decades since 1910 have been notable primarily for industrial development...
...What the result was in terms of population statistics may be most easily visualized by pointing to the development of such centres as Detroit, South Bend and Cleveland...
...but since the first was disrupted by abnormal war conditions, it is the second which tells us most about the drift from the farm to the city, the new groupments of factory workers and the leisure results of prosperity...
...At all events, the new census may mark the close of an era of change more fascinating, more lurid and more dangerous than any in our previous history...
...But it is not so impressive as is the quality of that which he has been led to construe as pleasure...
...These figures are probably not strictly accurate, but they are as near to the truth as it is possible to arrive...
...That the industrialized citizen is a glutton for pleasure is an important sociological fact...
...On the other hand, we may be finding the recipe for equilibrium...
...That means a population steadily drifting from terms of ownership to a condition of indebtedness...
...The home has begun to be lost in the shuffle, unemployment means decapitalization in a sense never previously understood in America, the zest for amusement and pleasure has necessitated a new understanding of the nomadic life...
...But California is primarily the palace which America has erected to its leisure hours...
...To what extent the industrial community, in its turn, has been over-capitalized is a query now earnestly demanding an answer...
...Then there are dozens of economic and cultural by-products—road building on a scale undreamed of before, steel production, copper mining, the garage and dealer systems, new buildings which were sometimes headquarters and sometimes advertisements for great magnates of the motor, catering to tourists, and above all the conjuring up of vast new national playgrounds...
...Meanwhile the post-war boom had spread to industry...
...Possibly it is really the decline of the small town which affords the best clue to the dwindling farmer...
...Viewed as a whole they indicate the effect upon population growth of restricted immigration, falling birth and death rates conspiring to keep the ratio of natural increase about what it has always been...
...Even religion has now and then tried to be amusing—and sometimes it has paid...
...When the report is scrutinized for what it can tell us regarding recent striking changes in economic and political life, it becomes half an index and half an incentive to speculation...
...It demanded oil, for instance, and this appeared as if by magic in Texas, California, Oklahoma and other places—fields employing tens of thousands of men, making possible the formation of billion-dollar corporations, giving birth to mushroom towns over night...
...The use of tractors and other machines was spreading almost without the usual "technological disturbances" because hired help seemed quite impossible to find...
...But the automobile did incalculably more...
...Primarily, however, the cinema is enthroned in California, attracting by its regal glitter thousands who seek fame and many more thousands whom the lure of a climate it exploits has drawn to the flame...
...How many forms of play and pastime have been capitalized into gigantic, dividend-paying corporations it would be impossible to say...
...We may be headed for some fresh social destination...
...Ten years ago, these communities were often in the pink of condition...
...First came the automobile, to manufacture which huge enterprises—virtually new cities—were erected...
...As a result the mortgages lost their gilt edges, merchants and bankers could not recoup loans, acreage was as plentiful as sunshine...
...But eventual study of the census figures will probably tell us vastly more of the same kind of history narrated by the fragment of research in Ford employee's lives commented upon recently in this place...
...To some extent, of course, it is a commonwealth productive of oil, fruit, walnuts and abalone salad...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 18
