If demography is destiny, as some historians would argue, then
Calvin Beale, Senior Demographer at ERS, has had a strong hand in
tracking the destiny of late-20th-century rural America. During
a career spanning 56 years—most at USDA—Calvin has been
at the forefront in analyzing population patterns, migration flows,
and racial/ethnic composition of nonmetropolitan (rural) areas.
Calvin is widely acknowledged for pathbreaking research on the
farm population, notably for tracing and explaining its rapid decline
over several decades. He produced the first comprehensive report
on Black farmers, chronicling the circumstances that helped generate
a massive rural exodus by Blacks from 1920 to 1960.
A landmark contribution was Calvin’s discovery of the U.S.
nonmetro population turnaround in the early 1970s. His study was
first to report that the decades-long stream of rural-to-urban migration
had reversed.
Thirty years later, Calvin is mining recently released Census data
to uncover new patterns of change. He was among the first demographers
to note that an influx of Hispanic residents accounted for a quarter
of all nonmetro population change in 1990-2000. In 2001, he and
colleague Glenn Fuguitt documented the reversal of the longstanding
trend of Black migration from the South, linking the reversal to
economic development in the rural South. Over the past 2 years,
Calvin’s research on the disproportionate placement of prisons
in nonmetro areas has drawn national media attention.
Rural America is both vocation and avocation. Having once said,
“You can’t know what’s going on in the country from
behind a desk in Washington,” Calvin has visited most U.S.
counties. Along the way, he photographed over 2,000 county courthouses.
A sample of the photos, worthy of a coffee-table volume, can be
viewed at www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Rural/Photos.
His firsthand observations and conversations with local officials
and residents, combined with incisive analysis of data, have yielded
precise readings of the rural population pulse.
In 1990 the Rand Population Research Center published A Taste
of the Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale’s Writings.
Recognizing the book’s continued influence, Penn State University
Press reissued it in 2002. The year 2002 also saw him honored by
colleagues at an event sponsored by the Rural Sociological Society,
the Population Reference Bureau, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation,
for 50 years of contributions to research on population migration
and to the field of rural demography.
