land nor seek his fortune in that wicked Paris.’’ There being in America
no more western frontier for surplus children to claim, he concluded, ‘‘the
challenge to agrarianism...is...apopulation policy.’’^47
Here was dangerous language, indeed, boldly and maybe recklessly an-
ticipating the zero population growth aspect of environmental politics dur-
ing the s. From the s until , dissemination of birth control
information and devices was prohibited by federal law and, in , re-
mained illegal in many states. Clearly Vance implied birth control. He actu-
ally specified ‘‘population policy,’’ that is, guidance and intervention into
the most private of human social activities by governmental authority,
whether directly, coercively, or by some indirect, persuasive means. Vance
did not specify here.
A decade later, however, Vance published (again in Chapel Hill) his huge
population study,All These People: The Nation’s Human Resources in the
South. The book was dedicated to Howard Odum and presented as a ‘‘com-
panion volume’’ toSouthern Regions.All These PeopleresemblesSouthern
Regionsin its uncharacteristically (for Vance) wooden prose and almost
smothering array of maps, tables, charts, and graphs. Toward the end,
though, Vance regained his usual felicitous expression in his recommenda-
tions about policy. The federal government, he observed, had already lim-
ited population growth through immigration restrictions adopted by Con-
gress in and . Now stabilization and improvement of families’
standard of living depended on a combination of private and indirect gov-
ernment initiatives. Both the private and governmental programs would be
‘‘democratic’’ instead of coercive. Middle- and upper-class couples had al-
ready decided on birth control. The poor (particularly the rural poor) were
beginning to understand the relationship between family size, standard of
living, and family farm security. The private Planned Parenthood Federa-
tion of America—founded by Margaret Sanger, a sometime correspondent
of Howard Odum—would assist such people with information and other
means of zero population growth, which might be achieved, Vance hoped,
between and . (It was.) State and federal public health agencies
should assist Planned Parenthood in such work, he suggested.^48
tAmong the other Regionalists, I think that Arthur F. Raper was, next to
Vance, the exemplary link to our own Age of Ecology. Raper’s time in Chapel
Hill was relatively brief. Seldom an academician, he was instead a great field
researcher in small places. Raper’s two classic southern books,Preface to
Peasantry() andTenants of the Almighty(), describe only two coun-