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 Press for the Univer
sity Extension Division.
NOVEMBER 21,1923
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
VOL. X, NO. 3
UJiorlsl (S tactlt B, J. S. U. Sobba, -Ir., L. K. Wilaon, E, W. Kaijf.Tl. t). U. Carroll, J. B.Bullitt. H. W.
Entered aa second-class matter November 14, 1914, at thePoatofficeat Chapel Hill, N. C.. under the act of August 24, ISH
DIVORCES IN THE UNITED STATES
XIX-HAMLET’S TOWN AND CASTLE
Elsinore, as everybody knows, is
Hamlet’s town and castle. It is only a
train-hour away from Copenhagen and
only twenty ferry boat-minutes away
from Helsingborg in Sweden. For many
hundred years, the castle guns- com
manded this bottle-neck of the Baltic
and compelled every passing ship to
anchor and pay toll into the private
treasury of the Danish kings, a high
wayman practice that Holland and the
United States combined to end in the
eighteen-fifties. It was mainly these
tolls that built the royal castles and
laid out the castle parks and gardens
the traveler finds today in every part
of Denmark. Most of the earlier cas
tles are now faintly outlined ruins, but
many others remain in almost perfect
preservation as priceless treasures of
beauty. Kronborg Castle for instance.
It sits within its walls and moats un
touched by time. It looks exactly as
it looked when Shakespeare mined the
rude chronicles of Saxo Grammaticus
for literary material four hundred
years ago. I ate my picnic luncheon
in the grass of the ramparts that the
ghost of Hamlet’s father haunted.
Even the rampart cannon remain in
their ancient places and, but for the
crumbling gun carriages, they look to
day exactly as they must have looked
to Hamlet’s strolling players and their
audience in the castle yard below. I
stumbled through the two-story dun
geons by the dim light of tallow can
dies, and I am certain that the air and
the odors date from Hamlet’s day.
I am not sure that a university school
of literature ought ever to forgive me
for confessing that Hamlet’s town stirs
my interest far more than Hamlet’s
castle—not the ancient village that
crouched and cowered in the shadow of
the castle walls, but the twentieth cen
tury city that leads all Denmark in
municipal social enterprise. Elsinore
is stiii Hamlet’s town. It illustrates
the world that Hamlet lamented, in
which “men must work while women
weep.’’ It is a brisk little industrial
city of 16,000 inhabitants, and as in
every other such city its women must
work as well as weep—work and weep
not less but more and more as modern
civilization develops its strange com
pounds of good and evil, magnificence
and misery.
A Sure Help in Trouble
But Elsinore has a keener ear for
weeping than most towns have. And I
know Elsinore fairly intimately, for I
bave been so fascinated by it that I
have made three trips to it to make
sure of the details of its civic-social
enterprises. As elsewhere in Denmark,
the city government collaborates with
the social-work agencies and institu
tions of the state on the one hand, and
on the other with the local, private or
ganizations busy with this or that
phase of human distress or necessity—
the infant asylum, the creche where
mothers check-in their babies during
working hours, the support and educa
tion of children removed from vicious
homes, the care and guardianship of
foundlings and the nameless children
of illegitimate fathers, the placing of
orphan children in good homes and the
supervision of such homes, hot lunch
eons for poor children in the public
schools during the winter months, pen
sions for Widowed mothers, old-age
pensions for people over sixty, medical
attention, nurses and midwives for
poverty-stricken homes, hospital care
of poor people temporarily or chroni-
. cally ill, the burial of the poor in de
cency and never in a potter's field, the
support and education of the deaf,
blind, and feebleminded children' of
Elsinore in the state or private insti
tutions of Denmark, unemployment
support,’ and counsel for working peo
ple, hospital care of the tuberculous,
medical attention for the socially dis
eased and legal supervision of these of
fenders against decency, and so on
down the long list of human frailties
and divine dispensations. As in other
cities everywhere, private grtnips of
social servants are struggling at their
own expense with many or most of
these human ills, but in Elsinore the
city stands by to help as a declared
municipal policy, and to help with the
money of the city taxpayers, not mea
gerly and grudgingly but readily to the
full extent of its income possibilities,
The city hall maintains no official ma
chinery for most of this social work,, it
recognizes the efficiency of first one
and then another of its private social
agencies, makes them semi-civic bodies,
and turns over to them the special
work that they can do better than
changing city officials could ever hope
to do it.
Social Work Collaboration
It is the Danish way, frojn the capi
tal down to the smallest city hall. Thus
the Danish Heath Society began fifty-
seven years ago as a private organiza
tion financed by'membership fees. It
is still a private agency, but it devel
oped such efficiency in forestry, drain
age and land utilization in general that
the state made it*a semi-public agency,
subsidized it liberally and resigned to
it all state work in its particular field
of effort. The plan frees the State
Agricultural Department for concen
tration upon other problems- of agri
culture. In exactly the same way this
state department collaborates witji the
Royal Danish Agricultural Society.
Why should the state do at great ex
pense, say the Danes, what a private
agency of proved efficiency does better
for less money? It is quite .as though
the state of North Carolina had said to
the Masons years ago. Here is some
money for your orphan asylum at Ox
ford; please take over this whole big
job of caring for the orphans of the
state, and the state- treasury to the
last limit of possibility will supplement
the charities of your order. Or to the
Children’s Society at Greensboro, Here
is an annual state treasury check;
please take over this whole big prob
lem of placing bereft children in good
homes and the State Welfare Board
will concentrate its energies and in
come upon other pressing social prob
lems. I am not arguing a point, I am
merely illustrating a fundamental dif
ference between civic-social service in
Denmark and America. Such work
gets done in Denmark in vast volume
and bewildering variety, and done with
out bankrupting state and local treas
uries or destroying the sense of social
obligation in religious bodies, wealthy
individuals, or generous social orders.
As one impressive result, semi public
officials and titles in Denmark are more
than the leaves of Vallombrosa. For
a Dane to be named a guardian of the
poor or a director of the public library
or the local museum or any other public
agency is to be set in high honor above
his fellowsT^ And to be removed for in
difference or neglect of duty smudges
the family record of democratic titles.
I am told that such a thing does not
happen in Denmark. At any rate the
Danes have a delicate sense of social
obligation. It saturates their civiliza
tion from top to bottom. My deliber
ate conclusion is that they have less
piety and more religion than any, peo
ple I know.
The Town as Landlord
Elsinore is not essentially different
from other Danish cities, but it is con
spicuously in the lead in civic-social
enterprise. For instance, it owns six
ty-three substantial new dwellings -of
two-, three-, and four-room apartments
occupied by 128 workingmen families
paying rents varying from five to eight
dollars a month. It is Elsinore's way
of side-stepping slums and forestalling
tenement landlords who grind the faces
of the poor.
Cooperative Home-Owning
Another achievement is the^ subur
ban park property of sixty-eight co
operating home-owners. Two years
ago they pooled their savings aftd cred
it to secure $270,000 with which to
erect forty-eight single and double
dwellings of five rooms for each family.
The cooperative society owns’the prop
erty as a whole and the members own
their dwellings as perpetual leasehold-
■ers on the basis of an annual four per
cent payment. At present each family
is paying the society $112 'ta year or
less than ten dollars a month, and out
of the fund thus created the society
BOOKS FOR THE CHILDREN
If North Carolinians make a poor
record in a census of those who read
books, it is largely because North
Carolina boys and girls are not more
often turned loose in good libraries.
The libraries in home, school, or
town have either too few books of
any kind or too many that are not
attractive to children.
No one questions the fact that
good books scatter the seed of cul
ture, of high ambition; that they
nourish the seeds of genius. But
in fact, this influence of books is
very largely ignored, and that is
why this week is to be observed as
Children’s Book Week.
As the winter season comes on,
‘parents take care to provide for the
bodies of their children warm cloth
ing and nourishing food; but unfor
tunately in too many instances the
minds of the men and women of to
morrow are left to get what inspi
ration they may by accident. The
wise direction of one’s child’s read
ing may be worth more to the na
tion than all the products of mines,
fields, forests, and factories, through
out a century. Let parents not over
look that opportunity and responsi
bility.—Smithfield Herald.
pays interest on the loan, all taxes and
assessments on the property, and re
tires the debt in thirty-four years.
Each owner keeps his house in repair
and bis lot in order, and pays his own
heat, light, water, and telephone bills.
He enjoys every privilege that a free
holder has except that he cooperates in
ownership and cannot alienate his right
in a joint property without the consent
of his fellow cooperators. Of course
this property is not as extensive and
elegant as Myers Park in Charlotte,
but it is distinctly an ornament to Elsi
nore. And moreover, it is an impress
ive example of what a cooperating
colony can do when it learns the fine
and final art of working and living to
gether.
Tender Care for the Aged
But the thing that sets Hamlet’s
town above all the rest in Denmark
and, so far as I know, above all other
cities of the world, is its tender care of
its old and feeble folk. The week be
fore I visited its three old-age institu
tions with the mayor, one-hundred and
twenty people from ten different coun
tries of the world, among them the
United States and Canada, made a
similar trip through these establish
ments. Students come in a steady
stream from every country on the globe
to see these iiappy-faced old people in
their handsome homes.
If the old folk are widowed, alone
and lonely, they live two in a room and
dine together in the common hall of
the Asylum, as it is called. There are
thirty two of these old men and women.
On the same square or court are the
three buildings of the Old-Age Home.
Here the 107 alumni have each an a-
partraent of two or three rooms, The
old women who find their happiness in
bustling about and keeping busy wijh
light housekeeping have each a bed
room, a sitting-room, a kitchenette,
and a private toilet.
Life’s Honor Graduates
The reader must not miss the title
the Danes give to these old souls—they
are not paupers, ■ they are alumni or
honor graduates in life's hard school.
If they are sick and helpless, they go
into the infirmary where the doctors
and nurses care for them tenderly and
lay the!^ away gently when the end
comes. All the buildings have steam
heat, water, lights, telephones, social
rooms with papers, books, and writing
tables, and the outdoor spaces are
beautifully parked with trees, shrubs,
flowers, and seats in sunny places. All
without one cent of charge! I lived in a
little hotel alongside this establishment
for three days before it dawned on me
that it was what English-speaking
countries call u poor-house! No other
single word better characterizes the
heartlessness of our civilization. Old
age is not a nuisance and decent pov
erty is not a disgrace in Denmark, and
least of all in Elsinore.
The City’s Pensioners
But Hamlet’s town has another rare
institution—a block of concrete build
ings with 160 three-room apartments,
water, heat and light for the old-age
pensionnaires of the city. Persons six
ty or more years of age in Denmark
draw a state pension of ten kroner or
about two dollars a month, that is to-
say, if they have lived lives free from
the disgrace of crime or public charity.
Elsinore adds a little to this small pen
sion, builds a modern home for these
old people and beautifies the open
spaces of it with lawns, flowers, hedges,
and shade trees. The old married coup
les with slender earning capacity oc
cupy seventy-five of the apartments
rent-free. The other seventy-five a-
partments are occupied by old couples
in better circumstances and able to pay
ten kroner a month for their lodgings
in the Pensionnaire Home.
If there^s any lovelier municipal so
cial enterprise anywhere on earth than
Elsinore's care of honorable old age, I
think I would be willing to go half a-
round the world to see it.—E. C. Bran
son, Gedser, Denmark, Sept. 6, 1923.
XI-OUR CH EMICAL INDUSTRY
Carolina Rubber Tires
As you stand on the sidelines and
watch the automobiles roll by, or as
you sit in an auto and watch the scen
ery pass, have you ever stopped to con
sider that you may be riding over the
roads on a Carolina product? Not all
the crude rubber gathered by the Bra
zilian seringueiro, or rubber gatherer,
goes to Northern ports. The Old North
State is receiving daily at its ports
consignments of this Black Gold from
foreign shores to be made into thous
ands of automobile tires in our own
four big tire factories.
Preparing the Rubber
'To produce rubber tires is not a
simple process. When the crude rub
ber is received at the factory, it is
passed to the breakers which are pow
erful machines that crush the rubber
between large corrugated rolls. The
crepe is next sent to the washing ma
chines which are similar to the break
ers with the exception that a stream
of water plays on the rubber as it is
being worked between the rolls. The
latter process leaves the rubber clean
and rolled out into thin, porous sheets
containing a large percentage of mois
ture which must be removed, as water
has a deleterious effect on the com
pounding. Therefore, the sheets are
next passed through heated drying-
rolls, or rolls in which the friction of
the rubber produces enough heat to
drive out the water. When the rub
ber is dry it is worked up until it takes
on a soft, tacky consistency. Then the
necessary sulfur is added for vulcani
zation, together with other ingredients,
according to the product desired. Pure
rubber, merely vulcanized with sulfur,
would never do, so the chemist com
pounds and mixes certain chemicals to
toughen, to stiffen or make more pli
able the rubber according to the prod
uct. With nearly three hundred dif
ferent grades of crude rubber and a
similar number of compounding chemi
cals, the possibilities are infinite. After
proper compounding the various rubber
mixtures are ready to be used in tire
manufacture. One composition is ready
for tread making, another for side
walls, another for the bead, and still
another as frictioning material for the
fabric.
How Tires are Made
There are two distinct types of tires,
fabric and cord. In the former a fab
ric of fine grade cotton forms the back
bone of the tire, the frictioning pro
duced by impregnation of the fabric
with a solution of the proper rubber
mixture. In this state only the cords
are made. Cord tires differ from fab
rics in that they are constructed of lay
ers of rubber-covered, rubber-impreg- ■
nated cable cords, each layer laid at
a long angle to the other, to eliminate
the internal friction present in fabrics,
instead of the woven fabric. The pliant
cord offers a minimum of resistance to
the road, yet makes a strong tire. The
tire proper is made by laying over an
iron core a coated strip of cords cut at
the proper angle. Layer upon layer
are added until the desired number are
built onto the form. Then the bead or
rubber covered metal hoop is placed
on the tire. After the bead is prop
erly worked on, the sole or tread of the
tire is applied; this is yielding or sin
ewy, literally clinging to the friction-
ated fabric. The side walls are then
adjusted and the tire is ready to be
vulcanized in a vat or drum by steam
under pressure. Since the friction so
lution, the tread, the sidewall and the
bead are of different thicknesses and
must serve different purposes ^nd yet
be integral parts of the tire, it is
necessary that the compounding be so
adjusted th?it the tire comes out prop
erly cured all over and ready to do the
service required.
Carolina Plants
Extraordinary testimonials of service
bespeak the quality of the high grade
of tires that are jent out from North
Carolina to serve the autoists in all
parts of our country.
The oldest rubber plant in the state
•is only five years old, two others are
two years old, and one Is not yet a
year old. Their age does not bespeak
their importance, for a capital invest
ment of $2,200,000 and plant valuation
of $2,000,000 have produced $4,600,000
worth of products in the last year. In
1922 this infant industry employed 525
men and expended $600,000 in wages.
The indications are that North Caro
lina will become an important producer
of automobile tires. Natural ad
vantages are in our favor. Cords and
fabrics are manufactured in abundance
at home. We have an abundance of
adaptable white labor that can be em
ployed at reasonably low wages. We
are nearer the crude rubber supply to
the south. Climate favors us. Our on
ly lack is experience, which we are
rapidly acimiring. —Frank C. Vilbrandt,
Associate JProfessor of Industrial Chem
istry, University of North Carolina.
RATIO OF DIVORCES TO MARRIAGES
Based on Department of Commerce figures for the year 1922.
United States average one divorce for^very 7.6 marriages in 1922.
North Carolina average one divorce for every 16.8 marriages, against one'
divorce for every thirty-two in 1916. There were 668 divorces granted in North
Carolina in 1916, and 1,317 in 1922, an increase of 100 percent in divorces, .while
total marriages increased only 8.6 percent. The divorce menace is growing at
a rapid pace in this state. Except for South Carolina, which grants no divorces,
we made the best showing of all states in 1916.
Department of Rural Social Economics, University of North Carolina
Rank
State
Number of
Rank
State
Number of
1
2
marriages to
pne divorce
26
\
marriages to
one divorce
District of Columbia 36.0
27
Florida
6.8
3
New York
22.6
27
Illinois
6.8
4
Georgia
19.4
29
Kentucky
6.7
5
North Carolina..
16.8
30
Arkansas
6.6
6
Maryland
16.1
31
Delaware
6.6
7
New Jersey
13.0
32
Iowa
6.0
8
Louisiana
12.0
33
Maine
5.8
9
Connecticut
11,7
33
Michigan
5.8
10
West Virginia...
11.6
35
Kansas
5.7
11
North Dakota ..,
11.4
36
Colorado
5.5
12
Mississippi
J0.9
37
Indiana
5.4
13
Massachusetts...
10.2
37
Nebraska
5.4
13
Pennsylvania....
10.2
39
Ohio
5.2
16
South Dakota....
9.8
40
California
5.1
16
Alabama
9.6
41
Idaho
4.9
17
Virginia
9.5
41
Texas
4.9
18
Minnesota
9.4
43
Oklahoma
4.8
19
New Mexico
8.7
44
Arizona
4.7
19
Utah
.../ 8.7
44
Missouri
4.7
21
Wisconsin
8.6
46
Montana
4.3
22
Tennessee
8.3
47
Wyoming
3.9
23
Vermont
8.2
48
Oregon
2.6
24
New Hampshire.
7.6
49
Nevada
0.9
24
Washington
7.6