The news in this publi
cation is released for the
press on receipt.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
NEWS LETTER
Published Weekly by the
University of North Caro
lina for the University Ex
tension Division.
JULY 9,1924
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
THE UNIVERSITY OP NORTH CAROLINA PRESS
VOL. X, NO. 34
BdiloriiU aC.Braa.»n. 3. H. H.bb., h.. L. H. Wll,™. B. W. Kbirtt D. D. CarMlI. 1. B. BbiUtt, H. W. (
N.vm.b.t K 1914. .t tb.P.»t«ac.t Chai,.l Hill. N. C.. undar tb, act at Aa»n,t £
BIRTH AND INFANT DEATH RATES
iXX—DENMARK, A HOME-OWNING CIVILIZATION
T. ivBlz«tion of Denmark is based
on h .tfie and farm ownership, and the
o.viiership of homes and farms is prac
tically universal. But it has taken
more than a century to lay down these
foundations of an enduring cooperative
commonwealth. For Denmark is what
no other country of Europe is, indeed
what no other state in the world is,
namely a cooperative commonwealth in
every phase of statehood, economic,
social, and civic-
The Danes believe that home and
farm ownership tethers a man to law
and order better tfhan all the laws on
the statute books, that it promotes in
dustry, thrift, sobriety and integrity,
that it makes a man a stable, respon
sible citizen, that it breeds in him a
sense of proprietary interest in church
es, schools and roads, that it moves
him to safeguard his home and home
community against social contamina
tions, that it makes him a better’ hus
band, a better father, a better neigh
bor, and a better citizen. And they are
everlastingly right about it. Any com
munity, state, or country is in peril so
long as its mud-sills are laid down in
landlessness, homelessness, and roving,
irresponsible citizenship. The Danes
are so strongly established in this be
lief that they have literally moved
Heaven and earth in the last quarter
century to reduce town and country
tenancy to zero, or as nearly so as
humanly possible.
America has moved steadily in the'
opposite direction. More than one-half
of all the people in the United States
live in dwellings that they do not own,
more than one-half of all the Southern
farmers are renters and croppers, a
third of all our white farmers and two-
thirds of our negro farmers in North
Carolina are tenants, while in our larg
er cities from two-thirds to three-
fourths of the people spend their days
and nights like poor Dante going up
and down somebody else's stairs.
But in Denmark the farmers believe
in having their legs under their own
tables. There are a few more farmers
in Denmark ihan in North Carolina but
the Danish tenants and renters are
barely more than 5,000 or less than two
and a half percent of all the farmers.
That is to say, tenants and renters in
the American sense of these words.
The Danish peasants like the peasants
of Germany and France have a passion
for land ownership. The lust for land
that was the ruling passion of our
Anglo-Saxon forefathers in the long-
ago days died out in western civiliza
tion, but it lives in Denmark. Said a
Jutland Dane to me, “A farmer hasn’t
got any standing unless he owns some
land if it isn’t more than a hectare.
Hardly anybody respects him in Den
mark unless he is a landowner big or
little.” It brought to my mind the
ancient sayings of the early Saxons:
“The land’s the man, Noland, no man.
Who owns the land owns the man. Who
owns the land rules the realm.” A
self-respecting farmer in Denmark
owns a farm of some size if it isn’t
bigger than a pocket handerkerchief,
and the passion for home ownership is
Dearly as strong in the cities.
If communism moves westward out
of Russia as it may do in some distant
day, it will assuredly leave Denmark
untouched. Communism ^gathers vol
ume wherever there are groups of
landless, homeless people. It showed
its head in the cities and industrial
areas of Germany and France in the
last elections, and it is in a position in
both these countries to demand a hear
ing in legislative halls. And not only
this, it is in a position to demand a
place in the ministries of both coun
tries. Its strength is entirely in the
towns, cities and other industrial cen
ters where homeless wage and salary
earners are multiplying as rapidly as in
America. But the bulwark of defence
against communism in Denmark is uni
versal or nearly universal home and
farm ownership. Property owners
tend to be conservative in their ways
of thinking about life, business and
politics, for the very simple reason
that they have something to conserve.
The radicals are radical everywhere
because they own barely more than
the clothes on their bodies, the strength
of their backs, and the skill of their
fingers. They are radical because they
have little or no property at risk.
Property and Wage-Earners
Outside of Copenhagen the Dane
without land, goods, and chattels is
rare, so rare that he is almost un
known. Even the farm laborer is usu
ally a house-holder settled onj a little
lot of his very own, and he thinks of
himself as belonging to the Little
Lander class of home-owning farmers.
The property-owning passion of the
small wage and salary earning classes
of Copenhagen leads them to build and
furnish little shacks of their own on
small garden spots on the vacant lots
and open fields fringing the city. They
look like colonies of doll houses. Some
of them are artistic, many are mere
shanties—a mere trifle, a poor thing
but their own, they say. On Sundays
the proprietors swarm into these col
onies with their wives and children, fly
their Danebrogs gkily, smoke, gossip,
eat, and work their little garden spa
ces, and revel in the open air enjoyment
of life. Copenhagen and every other
Danish city are rimmed ^around with
holiday scenes of thisjsort. They are
as spectacular as the traveling fairs of
Germany or the street carnivals of
France and America, but they are es
sentially different, because their origin
lies in the lust for property ownetship,
I may say that these tinyj garden lots
are sometimes owned by the occupants,
who actually live in the midget dwell
ings until they can move up into larger
land ownership, but.ijusually they are
merely renters or leaseholders. Fre
quently the owners of these vacant lots
are merchants or manufacturers who
grant rent-free privileges of this sort
to their employees. The vacant lot
gardening of the UnitedJStates is one
thing, but in Denmark it is quite an
other thing. It is more>r less a fad
in the United States, it isja racial pas
sion in Denmark—a passion for grow
ing things and for something they can
call their own.
Promoting Home Ownership
The cities of Denmark are busy get
ting wage and salary earners into homes
of their own. There^ are signs of it
everywhere you turn. The outskirts of
Copenhagen in a dozen points of the
compass show colonies of people living
in modest homes built with money bor
rowed straight out;;of the state and
municipal treasuries, or built by the
municipalities and sold to citizens
of good character at cost upon long
term payments at low rates of interest.
Frederickshaven, for instance, bought a
tract of land, erected some seventy
brick or brick-veneer buildings, each
one different from all the rest, and the
city is now offering these dwellings to
picked people among its wage and sal
ary earners at the exact cost, including
to be sure the expenses of street
building, water, sewer and light instal
lations. Any reputable citizen of small
income can buy the dwelling of his
choice and have from sixty-five to
ninety-eight years in which^'to pay for
it in regular monthly payments upon
principal and interest. What he pays
is always less than the rent he would
otherwise surrender to grasping
landlords. I found the same purpose
embodied in a different plan in Elsi
nore. Taking the city dwellers of Den
mark as a whole,: nearly* three-fourths
of them own the houses they live in. In
North Carolina nearly three-fourths of
the city dwellers in towns of 10,000 or
more inhabitants are renters, and rent
in every one of these cities has now
come to be a nightmare.
State-Aid to Farm Ownership
Any reputable farmer over twenty-
five and under fifty years of age can own
a farm in Denmark. The state for
twenty-five years has beenjdeliberately
helping men to rise out of tenancy into
farm-ownership. State-aid to farmers
began in 1899 and up to date 96 million
kroner has been appropriated by the
Danish Parliament for this purpose.
Reckoned in the normal exchange value
of the krone the total is right around
thirty million dollars. Forty percent
of this amount was taken out . of the
PLUNKETT’S FORMULA
Every man working to help the
' farmer must look at rural life as an
industry, a business, and a life. They
must organize for better farming,
better business, and better living.
We soon discovered that better
business was the basic thing in rural
organization. The farmer would not
listen to plans for better farming
and better living until organization
got him money for his stuff. Coop
erative organization proved to be
the foundation for the whole uplift
movement. If it is profitable for
farmers to come together they will
stay together. They will use their
business organization for social and
intellectual purposes. No organiza
tion can neglect any one of the
threefold purposes of combination
and live. The organization must
have people working on all three
sides of the problem.
In successful farm organization
there must be no building from the
top down. The local community
group must feel its part in the big
organization, must understand it,
and must have its say in the forma
tion of policies.—Sir Horace Plun
kett.
ordinary revenues of the state and the
rest or most of it.Vas furnished by the
fourteen land credit societies. These
credit societies are regional societies.
They are private coporations composed
of members who have investment capi
tal at their disposal, that is to say trust
moneys that they are willing to let in
this way at low rates of interest be
cause of the safety of ithe security.
They lend to a farmer 80 percent of the
value of the farm and farm equipments
on very much the plan of our building
and loan associations in America. They
hand out tax-free debenture bonds to
the borrowers and they are bonds un
derwritten by both the state authorities
and the credit societies. The farmers
cash these bonds at the banks or sell
them to private buyers. The borrowers
make stated monthly payments that in
98 years dismiss the debt. These pay
ments are calculated at four percent,
three and one-half percent being inter
est and one-half percent;*being pay
ments on the principal. In twenty-five
years the losses of the fourteen credit
societies have been less than one-third of
one percent. The foreclosing of mort
gages is rare in Denmark. If anybody
loses finally the loss falls upon the
state that guarantees these land mort
gage bonds, but the state is willing to
bear the loss if any in order to build a
stable and enduring commonwealth
upon the substantial basis of home
ownership and the citizenship that own
ership breeds. The rule is for a farmer
of experience to evidence his character
by offering one-tenth of the purchase
money as a first payment. If he does
not have the power of . hardy
self-denial sufficient to have saved
at least that much, the conclu-!
sion is that he is not a good credit j
risk. The would-be farm owner, upon !
satisfactory evidence of character, can I
borrow as much as $4,000 on first and
second mortgages, the first mortgage
maturing in 66 years and the second in
98 years. The interest rate is 4 per
cent, which includes regular payments
on the principal. The short-term loans
he needs for productive uses or emer
gency purposes he gets from his co
operative credit union, where again
his collateral is his character, re-en-
forced by the combined character of
his cooperative credit group. There is
no better collateral at the bank count
ers of the country.
An Extreme State Policy
But five years ago Denmark went a
step further. The state seized
the glebe lands of the Lutheran
churches and in this way secured 100
thousand acres to be sold to small-scale
farmers. It was already state property,
of course, and what the state did was
to make it available for settlement by
little farmers and farm laborers. But
also parliament broke down the ancient
laws of entail and seized one-fourth of
the land of the large estates and one-
fifth of their accrued capital wealth.
In this way it secured 126,000 acres
more and opened them up to settlement
by the Little Landers of character upon
the usual terms of interest and pay
ment. The details of which need not
be given here. Indeed this whole story
of state-aid to farm ownership in Den
mark will be found in brief in Howe’s
Denmark, A Cooperative Common
wealth, Mead’s Helping Men Own
Farms, and Faber’s Cooperation in
Danish Agriculture.
But the pertinent point I make is
this, namely, that for twenty-five years
Denmark has had a settled plan of get
ting farmers and city dwellers settled
down safely under their own roof-trees,
that it is a business plan figured upon
the basis of solvency. The business of
promoting farm ownership in Denmark
is a growing concern far removed from
bankruptcy. It is in no sense a charity
but in every sense an opportunity that
the state gives to worthy people to ac
quire farms and homes of their very
own. The details of management are
business details and men charged with
these business details are trained busi
ness men. So far the state has suffered
no losses, and the losses of the credit
societies have been so small as to make
scarcely a dent in the twenty million
dollar reserve fund of these corpora
tions.
All this, to make 18,000 farm owners
out of so many farm tenants and farm
laborers! The number looks small when
set against twenty-five years of intri
cate tedious work, but these 18,000
owners of new homes and farms swell
the volume of national wealth, increase
the tax resources of the state, multi
ply business profits and bank dividends,
re-enforce the army of stable, respon
sible citizens devoted to Denmark be
cause they have a stake in the land.
The Danes are firmly convinced that
their home ownership policies are worth
vastly more than the risk, the trouble,
and the loan capital of ninety-five mil
lion kroner.
Manifestly the farmers of Denmark
are loaded down with debt—around a
hundred millions of state debt, another
hundred millions of municipal debt,
and another hundred millions of land
mortgage debt. Their children and
their children’s children will be bur
dened with debt for generations to
come. But it is debt willingly assumed
in order to transform renters of trifling
significance into owners and citizens of
value and consequence. The Danes are
not afraid of mortgage debt or bonded
debt. To be in big business of any
sort, private, municipal or state, is to
be in debt—inescapably so. But they
are sturdy in body and brain, and they
look forward into a hopeful future.
They are moving upward inch by inch,
day by day, into untrammeled owner
ship, ownership of themselves, their
homes, their farms, their businesses,
and their commonwealth. All told, the
most cheerful and the most alert farm
civilization that I have ever looked
upon is the civilization of the debt
laden people of Denmark. —E. C. Bran
son, Copenhagen.
BIRTH AND DEATH RATES
For many years North Carolina has
ranked first among the states of the
registration area in the number of
births per 1,000 inhabitants. The fig
ures for 1923 which have just been re
leased by the Bureau of the Census
show that North Carolina again ranks
first in birth rates with 30 births per
1,000 inhabitants in the state. Utah
ranks second, while Virginia, Ken
tucky, and South Carolina, adjoining
states, follow in the order named. The
table which appears elsewhere shows
the rank of the states of the reeistra-
tion area in birth rates, while the ac
companying column shows the number
of infant deaths, deaths under one
year of age exclusive of still-births,
per 1,000 births.
The birth rate in North Carolina is
35 percent above the average birth rate
for the states of the registration area,
which contain about 86 percent of the
population of the United States. Every
year our birth rate averages about one-
third higher than the rate for all the
states. And our high rate is not due
to our negro population for as a rule
the white and negro rates are about
the same. Our high birth rate is due
largely to the fact that the bulk of our
people live on farms and in small
towns. Farm families are usually
larger than urban families. But also
the high rate is due in a large measure
to the virile stock of natives who in
habit the state, since out urban birth
rate is not far below the country rate.
The urban birth rate is higher in onlv
one state.
Twenty-one of the 27 states had low
er birth rates in 1923 than in 1922.
North Carolina was one of these, her
rate decreasing from 30.9 to 30. Our
rate in 1921 was 33.8, which was con
siderably above the rate for last year.
However, we still lead our nearest
competitor by a comfortable margin.
Infant Deaths
But when it comes to infant mortali
ty the picture is almost the reverse.
For every 1,000 babies born in North
Carolina in 1923 there were 82 deaths
of infants under one year of age ex
clusive of still-births. The infant death
rate was higher in only eight states,
mainly states with either large negro
ratios or a high percentage of foreign-
born inhabitants.
Infant mortality among negroes
helps to account for the high infant
death rate in this and other southern
states. Figures for 1923 are not avail
able as yet, but in 1921 the negro in
fant death rate in North Carolina was
95 per 1,000 births, while the white
rate was 66.
Although we still rank* low in infant
mortality we have made remarkable
progress during recent years, due
mainly to the great work of our state
and county health departments. For
instance the negro infant mortality
rate in 1917 was 133 deaths for 1 000
births. By 1921 the rate had been re
duced to 96. The white infant death
rate was reduced from 85 to 66 during ’
the same period. We do not have data
by races for 1923.
Ignorance is the one great cause of
infant deaths. North Carolina is mak
ing gratifying progress along educa
tional lines and this, together with the
excellent work of our public health of
ficers, IS bringing about a rapid reduc
tion in infant deaths. The rate is still
too high—far too high. We cannot af
ford to remain near the bottom in in
fant deaths. For every 1,000 births in
North Carolina 82 infants die during
the first twelve months. This is a use
less waste of human life, attributable
very largely to ignorance. With a
public health department in every coun
ty in the state the infant death rate
would gradually be reduced. Before'
many years we would lead not only in
births, but in the prevention of sick
ness, the conservation of health and
life, and especially in the saving of in
nocent infants from an untimely grave.
Ignorance and infant mortality are com
panion evils. The infant death rate is
a good yardstick with which to meas
ure the level of intelligence of a peo
ple. To lead in births is both praise
worthy and desirable, but to rank best
in infant mortality rates is immeasur
ably more desirable.
BIRTH AND INFANT DEATH RATES
In the Registration Area of the U. S in 1923
I table, based on U. S. Census report, the states which be-
,^^®5®SJstration area are ranked according to the birth rate excln«?ivp
of stilLbirths, per 1,000 population. The accompanying column shows the death
rate of infants under one year of age per 1,000 births. ueueaia
Average birth rate for the states in the registration area 22 2 ner 1 000
population. Average infant death rate 77 per 1,000 births ' ’
Average birth rate for North Carolina 30.0 per 1,000'inhabitants and we
continue to lead the states of the registration area. However our infant
tUs%Tpect^^ pooler ”n
S. H. Hobbs, Jr.
Department of Rural Social Economics, University of North Carolina
Rank State
Birth
rate
per
1,000
popu
lation
Infant
death
rate
per
1,000
births
Rank State
Birth
rate
per
1,000
popu
lation
1
North Carolina.,.
.... 30.0
82
16
Indiana
. . 5>1 7
2
Utah
.... 28.6
68
16
Kansas
91 7
3
Virginia
.... 26.7
84
18
Wisconsin ....
91 a
4
Kentucky
.... 26.4
72
19
New York
91 9
4
South Carolina. .
.... 25.4
96
20
Ohio
6
Pennsylvania ....
.... 23.9
90
21
California
... 90 Q
7
Mississippi
.... 23.8
68
22
Connecticut
-.. 20.8
8
Wyoming
.... 23.2
80
22
New Hampshire...
20 8
9
Rhode Island*.. .
.... 23.1
86
22
Vermont. .
90 8
10
Maryland
.... 23.0
96
26
Delaware
IQ 7
11
Minnesota
.... 22.6
62
26
Illinois
IQ 4
12
Maine
.... 22.4
89
27
Oregon
18 1
]3
New Jersey
.... 22.1
72
28
Washington....
17 K
13
Massachusetts*...
.... 22.1
81
29
Montana
. .. 17.1
16
Nebraska
* 1922
22.0
66
Infant
death
rate
per
1,000
births
71
63
71
72
75
73
77
93
76
104
82
67
57
71