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THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
tte
Published Weekly by the
University of North Caro
lina Press for the Univer
sity Extension Division.
born in north CAROLINA
Tt is not possible to look at the kempt
Kingdom of Denmark without
having North Carolina m the tail of
one’s eye, or not it you are a native of
the Old North State. Comparisons
may be odious, but intelligence begins
in a sense of difference, and not to
know ‘a hawk from a hernshaw is
Shakespeare’s phrase for hopeless stu
pidity. But also, intelligence ends in
a perception of likenesses-of unities
amid diversities, is the way Horace
Williams puts it, I think. Shakespeare
and Horace Williams are prime author
ities. Anyway they pair well in a pre-
face.
Commercialized Fishing
And my preface ought also to say
that there’s nothing rotten in Den-
- mark, or nothing that I have yet dis
covered, not even the fish, which the
Danish housewife buys alive in the
market tanks and cooks with the flesh
still quivering. A fish served in this
way is a dainty dish to set before
king. No fish of any size has any
chance to go stale in Denmark. The
small fry, even the midget eels, are
pickled or smoke-cured or preserved in
oil sardine fashion for smorrebrod uses.
The surplus catch of large fish is salt-
cured, sun-dried, or canned for an ex
port trade that amounts to $10,000,000
a year. The fine arts of curing sea
foods of every sort and size are details
of commercialized fishing that Eastern
North Carolina needs to learn. For
lack of such arts as the Danes practice,
our fishermen are wasting millions year
by year. And meantime they are im
porting boneless fish cured and packed
in Gloucester, Massachusetts. I found
-stacks of boxes of such fish on the boat
to Manteo—to Manteo of all places on
earth! Increasing production in our
fish'and oyster areas, passing restric
tive laws, and pestering fishermen with
fines are one end of this Tidewater
problem, but teaching them the arts of
preserving their catches without waste
and packaging their products attrac
tively for trade in a wide territory, is
another. It is a field worth exploring
by the State Fish Commission, and
Denmark is the best country I know in
which to spy out the details of sea foods
reduced to a commercial basis. It is
worth, in my opinion, $10,000,000 a year
to our fishermen and to the state
worth not less to North Carolina than
it is to Denmark.
XVI—DENMAKH AND TARHEELIA
not even yet been destroyed by two
centuries of savage cutting.
Both offer obstacles to a flourishing
civilization—in Denmark, nattirally poor
soils, coastal sand bars on the west and
north quite like the eastern shore of
North Carolina, sand dunes and sand
wastes, marshes, peatbogs, moorlands,
and heaths that reach far into the heart
of the mainland, a lack of merchant
able timber everywhere, for Denmark
was stripped bare of original forest
growths many centuries ago, and as if
to doom Denmark to agricultural levels
forever, nature gave her no basic min
eral deposits; in Tidewater Carolina
sandbars and sand-filled inlets, swamps,
malaria, cattle-tick fever and sparse
population that found life made
easy by rich soils and waters teeming
with fish and oysters.
VIRTUES OF COOPERATION
The virtues of cooperation are the
virtues of an enduring democracy.
And more, they are spiritual virtues,
every one of them, for without them
there can be no membership-in-one-
body, which was Saint Paul’s ideal.
-E. C. B.^
Conquering Difficulties
DenmarR and the Tidewater
It is entirely proper to ask what in
general are the conditions in Denmark,
how they differ from the conditions we
have at borne and what this little
country has that we might also have in
North Carolina—in our own fashion, to
be sure, for North Carolina has a way
of her own, and properly enough she
will have nothing in any other way.
Denmark is a little country. The
Danes are a little people. The little
landers, that is the small home-owning
farmers, hold Denmark in the jj^ow
of their hands, are the expres9!l«r I
hear oftener than any others from the
natives who explain their homeland to
me. And they are an unirroidable fore
word to any sensible thing said about
Denmark.
In number the Danes and the Tar
Heels are almost exactly the same, or
were before the Great War gave back
to Denmark 280,000 of the people she
lost to Germany in 1864. At present
they outnumber us by a few hundred
thousands. The advantage is quite
temporary, for North Carolina leads
the world in cradles and baby carri
ages.
In land area the advantage Is all ours,
for North Carolina is more than three
times the size of Denmark, if her col
onial possessions be left out of the
count. Put down on our map, Den
mark would just about cover Tidewater
Carolina. To the eye they are very
much alike. Both are low-lying areas,
the one being alluvial and the other a
region of glacial drift with irregular,
softly rounded hills and valleys. But
nowhere does Denmark have the na
tural advantages of our tidewater coun
try—the rich soils, the long growing
seasons, the abundant rainfall equably
distributed throughout the year, and
the extensive forest areas that have
But for fifty years Denmark has been
conquering her difficulties. In Tide
water Carolina we have barely begun
to move forward during the last quar
ter century, and what the Washington
authorities call the Great Winter Gar
den of the South is still largely unde
veloped. The state over, only twenty-
seven of every hundred acres are in
use for agricultural purposes.- In the
Tidewater the ratio runs around ten
acres, and even less in the Pamlico and
Lower Cape Fear country. In Denmark
seventy-six of every one hundred acres
are improved farm land. |
Governor Morrison has blue-printed
the development of the Tidewater and
doubtless we shall some day begin to
realize its rich possibilities. But there
ought to be no great delay, for it takes
a half century or more to work such a
miracle ao West DanTTiark has wrOUght
-and millions of money as well. Fifty-
seven years ago, some 6,000 home-own
ing farmers hungry for land orjganized
the Danish Heath Society and began
upon their own initiative and at their
own expense to reclaim their almost
worthless possessions. During this in
terval they have converted more than
one and a quarter million acres of waste
land into meadows, grain fields and
forests. The economicurge was strong,
because dairy farming had come to be
profitable and they needed more land
on which to make more money on dairy
cows, beef cattle, and pigs. Gradually
the state came to their aid with direct
appropriations, railway lines, cheap
freights, and a harbor at Esberg. The
point is that these heath farmers lifted
themselves well over the fence by tug
ging at their own boot straps, and I
dare say that the Tidewater land own
ers will have to solve their problems in
something like the same way.
Some Incentives We Each
And there is thiS further thing to
say. Population presses on land in
this little country; not so in North Ca
rolina and least of all in the Tidewater
country. In Denmark land is scarce
and high, in North Carolina it is abun
dant and cheap—cheaper than land of
its quality and value anywhere else in
the United States. Pack the popula
tion of North Carolina into one-third,
the space they now occupy and sheer
necessity would mother many self-help
ing enterprises that we know little a-
bout at present either in the Tidewater
or the Lost Colonies.
Moreover economic and social neces
sity provokes constructive reaction in
the owners of farms and homes, and al
most never in landless, homeless peo
ple. Was it not the landed estate of
the realm that wrung the Magna Char-
ta out of King John at Runnymede?
Denmark is a capital illustration of
Adam Smith’s saying, that given own
ership a people can be trusted to turn
a barren waste into a paradise. At
any rate it ought to be fairly clear that
land ownership by the few and land-or
phanage for the many is no safe basis
on which to build commonwealth pro
gress and prosperity. Denmark has
built her civilization on well-nigh uni-
versal home ownership, and during the
last seventy-five years it has become
mote and more certain that she has
builded wiser than she knew. One
million three hundred and forty thous
and people, town and country, are
landless in North Carolina. They are
more than half of our entire popula
tion. Their number steadily increases,
and it bodes ill for the state in the
years ahead.
More Home-Owners Essential
Size and population figured together,
Denmark averages 200 people to the
square mile, against fifty-two in North
Carolina—against fewer than twenty-
five per square mile in eleven of the
Tidewater counties, both races includ
ed. There are too few people in these
counties to support good schools and
good churches and to pay taxes for
good roads and other necessary agen
cies of common well-being. The bur
den falls too heavily on a small number
of property-owning, tax-paying citi
zens. What the state needs is a larger
population of home-owners, fewer ten
ants—town and country, and more
country community life, as a basis for
cooperative farm enterprises. The
contrast between Denmark and North j
Carolina in these particulars has liter
of slavery. We long delayed doing
something for Walter Page’s forgotten
man, for instance, because we were a-
fraid of doing something for our broth-
er-in-black, as Bishop Haygood called
him. And even today, prison reform
set against the same dark back
ground of massmindedness in every
Southern state. If slavery were a sin,
God knows the South has paid and is
still paying heavy penalties for it.
RocK Bases for Democracy
To say it in a word, economic and
social reforms make rapid headway in
Denmark (1) because the Danes are a
uenmarK ki; oecause .lie i..- — . i,
homogeneous people with no alien race 1167,Si96 people born m other
Carolina, a net gain in our favor of 12,-
283. Our net loss to Virginia was the
largest amounting to 75,918 people. In
1920 North Carolina was the adopted
home of 37,233 people of Virginia birth,
while Virginia had 113,161 inhabitants
born in this state.
In 1920 there were living in other
states but born in North Carolina near
ly a half million people, 443,844 .to be
exact. If all the people born in North
Carolina had remained at home we
would have had a population of slight
ly'more than three million, instead of
2,659,123 as reported by the census. At
that time there were living in this state
states.
astride their backs, (2) because they
are a home-owning people with the
smallest illiteracy ratio in the world,
and are therefore able to organize on
a common basis for the common good,
and (3) because they are keen enough
to see that the under-dog must always
be the man who lacks the cooperative
virtues of intelligence, faith in his
fellows, willing subordination to self-
chosen authority, a sense of moral ob
ligation, group loyalty, and unbreak
able courage. The virtues of cooper
ation are the virtues of an enduring
democracy. And more, they are spirit
ual virtues, every one of them, for
without them there can be no member
ship-in-one-body, which was Saint
Paul’s ideal.
“If ye cannot work together on earth
ally kept my brain in i
weeks.
LiKenesses and Contrasts
The farm populations also offer con
trasts. In North Carolina the farmers
and their families number 1,600,000
souls or fifty-eight percent of the total
population, and they cultivate a little
more than eight million acres. In Den
mark 1,200,000 farm people cultivate a
little more than eight million acres
aittio ..— I neither shall ye dwell together in Hea-
blaze these last! I xhe same being Timothy 10:16,
‘ or so said Spoopendyke.—E. C. Bran
son, Elsinore, Denmark, August 6,
1923.
BORN IN NORTH CAROLINA
North Carolina has always been a
population exporting state. ' You can
find a Tar Heel in almost any locality
in the United States. A native-of the
urue luoie ...... state traveling through other states is
The average is around twenty-seven I usually surprised at the number of
acres per family in both territories. In people he runs across who were born m
other words both the Hanes and the
Tar Heels are small-scale farmers. In
Denmark the explanation lies in the
scarcity of land; in North Carolina and
the South it lies in the scarcity of farm
capital, and the intensive cultivation
of cotton and tobacco fields with land
less, illiterate labor.
The Danes are food farmers, they
feed themselves and their farm ani
mals first, and then they produce a sur
plus of meat and milk products amount
ing to 260 million dollars a year in ex
port trade. They live in clover, no
matter whether they get high prices or
low for their products. The last two
years, market prices and exchange
rates have been against the Danish
farmers, but there are no signs of dis
tress in the farm homes and no politi
cal upheavals in the country regions.
LooHing Facts in the Face
In contrast, the Tar Heels are cotton
and tobacco farmers. They are food
farmers incidentally, even accidentally,
at least in our fifty-one cash crop coun
ties. As a result the state imports
right around two hundred million dol
lars’ worth of food and feed stuffs
every year. For many years our cot
ton and tobacco money has barely more 1
than paid the bill for imported food
supplies. We are near the top of the
column in farm wealth production, and
near the bottom in farm wealth reten
tion, If only we could produce cotton
and tobacco on a home-raised bread-
and-meat basis. North Carolina in ten
years would be the richest farm area
on earth. But we are never likely to
farm in this fashion as a common prac
tice until farm tenancy and country il
literacy come to an end. These twin-
born social ills are stubbornly in the
way of a self-feeding farm systerh as
every farm owner in the cotton-tobacco
belt knows full well. And moreover in
one way or another they imperil every
effort at cooperative farm enterprise,
as our farmers have doubtless learned
during the last twelve months. Danish
tenants are only ten in the hundred farm
ers and the illiterates are only two per
thousand. Our tenants are forty-five
in the hundred farmers and our country
illiterates ate one hundred and eighty
per thousand. The contrast is humili
ating but it is no part of wisdom to
blink anything of consequence in build-
ing s stat6.
Sad Sequences of Slavery
North Carolina, but who are now living
out of the state. One gets the idea
that we must have lost a considerable
number of natives to other states. And
so we have. The people bopn in North
Carolina but now living in other states
number 443,844, and they range all the
way from seventy-five in Vermont to
113,161 in Virginia. As far away as
California you will find 5,742 native Tar
Heels. In Washington there are 6,729,
in Arkansas 11,128, in Texas 14,966, ir
New York 17,803, in Pennsylvania 20,
877, in Missouri 6,476, in West Virginia
13,636, in Florida 17,368, in Tennessee
27,744, in South Carolina 60,040, and in
Virginia 113,161, or so in 1920.
To All But Five
North Carolina has suffered a net loss
of population to all the states of the
Union except five, and the net gain
from four of these is insignificant
South Carolina is the only state that
has suffered a large net loss to North
Carolina.' See the table carried else
where. In 1920 there were living m
South Carolina 60,040 people born in
North Carolina, while we had within
our borders 62,323 people born in South
Thus our net loss to other states was
286,848 people and only six stated have
sustained a greater net loss, four of
these being southern states. Our net
loss consisted of 172,291 native whites,
and 113,716 native negroes. We had a
slight net gain of other classes.. The
census shows that relatively the neg
roes are more migratory than the
whites.
We Are First
North Carolina leads the Union in
births and baby carriages. Otherwise
we could not increase in population
faster than the average for the United
States, and at the same time suffer a
net loss to all the states except five.
The birth rate of this state has held
attention for many years. In 1921 it
was 39 percent higher than the average
for the United States.
North Carolina ranks first in the
United States in the percent of her
white people who are of native birth.
Of her entire white population 93,4
percent were born within the state’s
borders and 99.3 percent were born in
the South. i
North Carolina ranks first in the per
cent of her people born in the United
States. Only 7,272 people in 1920 were
of foreign birth or four-tenths of one
percent of her total population. Of her
entire population 99.6 percent were
born in the United States.
The Tide Has Turned
The 1930 census will prove to us the
effect of good roads, schools, and the
like on retaining our present, and at
tracting new, population. Formerly
our roads were poor, and our schools
poorer. Our industry and agriculture
were far less developed than today.
For these and many other reasons, hun
dreds of thousands of people have left
the state through choice or necessity.
But those days are gone forever, we
hope Today North Carolina offers in
dustrial and agricultural advantages
and opportunities that cannot be
matched elsewhere in the South, or
surpassed in the United States. The
state is prosperous, and prospering, as
is shown by a recent announcement of
bank dividends for 1922, by the Feder
al income tax returns for the same
year, and by the purchase of 64,89b
new automobiles during the last twelve
”^The^ state is full of opportuni
ties for almost every calling. Unsur
passed opportunities of every sort to-
cether with our net work of splendid
highways, and the educational facilities
the state has set her hands to build and
maintain will not only retain our native
born people from now on, but will at
tract thousands of good people and mil
lions of investment capital from other
states. The tide has chanpd. The
sensitive mind notes it. We will no
longer be a population exporting, but
instead a population imposing -nd
wealth attracting state.-b. H. H.,
Jri
BORN IN NORTH CAROLINA
But Living in Other States in 1920
The following table based on the 1920^^^^^^^^^
born in North Carolina in sustained by North Carolina due to
“■'^SUTn'S^oSh Carolina but residing in other states 443,8« ^peepi.^^^Born
“£attnl 28i87“®Only”fivl states have sustained a net population loss
to North Carolina. Hnbhs Jr
Denartment of Rural Social' Economics’, University of North Carolina
Rank States
Born in N.C.
Living in
S. Carolina 50,040
"Vermont
Maine
N. Hampshire... 104
Wisconsin dbi
These fateful social ills in North Ca-, 22
rolina and the South are the sequences 23
Nevada
Rhode Island .... 6^
S. Dakota 3^
Minnesota 679
N. Dakota 464
Delaware pm
Nebraska l.lpB
Utah......
Wyoming “6
Arizona... 9™
New Mexico 99
Montana LBIB
Connecticut 3,03'
T/xvttq “tTtoZ
Oregon 2.383
Colp>:ado 2,618
Louisiana
Netloss
to N. C.
12,283
199
198
116
6
Net gain
from N.C.
123
169
234
400
402
403
621
622
546
873
963
1,460
1,693
1,743
1,943
2,308
2,331
2,394
Rank States Born in N.C. Net gain
24
26
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
46
46
47
48
Living in
Kansas |146
Michigan........ 3,313
Massachusetts... 6,oo£
Kentucky 6.686
Alabama 6.660
Illinois 5,463
Mississippi o.bdy
Missouri 6,476
Indiana 6,3(3
California 6,742
Washington 6,(39
Oklahoma J667
Dis. of Col 8,026
Maryland 10,262
Ohio 11.698
N. Jersey
Arkansas 11,138
W. Virginia 13,636
fTovftQ 14,9bb
New York 17»803
Florida 17,368
PeMsyl vaiiia*20,877
from N.C.
2,432
2,617
2,733
3,427
3,863
4,161
4,310
4.644
5,104
6,492
6.644
7,434
7,605
8,187
9,506
9,607
10,615
11,901
13,804
13.938
16,484
16,675
17,106
17,945
76,918