Family size determining wealth/poverty

Monello

Monello

Smarter than the average bear
PREMO Member
The quote is from a Life Magazine article published decades ago, December 1949 to be exact. Way before many of us on the forums were conceived. And speaking of conception, it seems like Kentucky is where it was happening right after the war ended. People, including magazine writers, didn't have the faintest idea of political correctness. They wrote about what they thought, felt or saw. Politeness filters be damned.

The article seems to equate being middle class to having 2 children. The author almost makes a social argument for small families, equating a large family with lower IQs as socially irresponsible.

14 child mountain family
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The great U.S. baby boom which reached its squalling crest in 1947 [wrote author T. S. Hyland] is now on the downgrade. It has started sliding back toward the neatly rationed, two-to-a-family level that seems a cherished feature of the American dream of middle-class respectability. Only in one area does the boom heedlessly persist: in Leslie County, deep in the Kentucky mountains.

There is always a baby boom in Leslie County. In fact, its mountaineers are probably, in this respect, the busiest people on earth, multiplying at a birth rate about double that of the U.S. as a whole and equal to that of the swarming hordes of China and India. [But] the most striking fact about Leslie County is not how many babies its people have but how much they enjoy having them. In the two-room cabins along Hell-for-Certain Creek, the gospel of planned parenthood has fallen on deaf ears. . . .

While the Kentucky mountaineer has, on occasion, been praised as a proud, intelligent, independent member of the “Old American” frontier stock, he has also been damned as a degenerate, inbred, shiftless congenital moron. His proliferation has been called a “disgusting perversion of evolution” and (with equal venom) “a biological joy ride to hell.”

Hyland’s contention that, in the eyes of some people, Kentuckian fecundity was hardly something to celebrate; instead, for many, it was a revealing emblem of the fact that the “wrong people” were procreating at an alarming rate, while the “right people”—bankers, lawyers and other ostensible paragons of probity—were having smaller and smaller families.

Read more: A Rural Baby Boom: LIFE With Kentucky’s ‘Fruitful Mountaineers,’ 1949 | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/culture/appala...entuckys-fruitful-mountaineers/#ixzz3Eup0hZJB
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I enjoy reading old articles to see just how prophetic the authors were. Amazing he mentions the runaway birth rates of China and India. Of course today they are the 2 most populated nations by far. Guess which nation is #3?

There is no way this type of article published today would not start some sort of social media firestorm.
 
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