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school wear : United States walking to school -- demographics
U.S. School Activities: The Walk to School--Demographics
Figure 1.-- The photos were taken in at the beginning of the school year in Breathitt County, Kentucky (September 1940). We see children coming to school and on the way back home. The girls wear light dresses and the boys overalls. Everybody is barefoot, that was common thriugh out the Appalachian mountains. Only a boy wears short cut overalls. For some reason that was not common. Notice the background. The reason that there was so much poverty in Apallachia is that there was very little productive flat land that could be farmed.
Of course another major change was demographic. Industrialization was not only making America rich, it was changing the face of the country. After World War I, the America population crossed the rural/urban divide. For the first time, the majority of the population lived in urban areas. As rural populations declined, the small rural schools with only a handful of children became increasingly expensive to maintain, but closing them would mean increasung the distances rural children had to walk to school. And World War II accelerated this movement. Until World War II, very large numbers of Americans still lived in rural areas. And at the time the rural life style was very different. This began to change dramastically. Ford had already brought mobility to the countryside and made tractors available to modest family farms. President Roosevelt's New Deal included major programs to address the problems of rural America. Especially important
was the Rural Electrification Administration which began to bring electricity to rural areas. And World War II drew large number of people from rural areas to cities for war work. Huge numbers of rural men and women were drawn into urban areas to fill the jobs needed to build the war winning Arsenal of Democracy. Few were willing to return to rural areas where decent paying jobs simply did not exist. As a result of this and mass media, the detinctions between rural and urban life began to disappear. Before the War adults and children in rural asreas dressed differently than people in the cities. This difference rapidly diusappeared. The rural poor gravitated to the cities. Farmers with adequate acerage inceasingly mechanized operations and were able to enjoy prosperous lives.
