Calvin L. Beale

Population, Labor and Income Branch

Rural Economy Division

Calvin L. Beale is Senior Demographer at the Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, DC. His research has focused on rural population trends, regional studies, and ethnic minorities.

Peter Morrison of the RAND Corporation provides the following portrait of Calvin Beale in "A Taste of Country: A Collection of Calvin Beale's Writings" (pp. 2-11).

A native of the District of Columbia, Calvin Beale studied geography at Wilson Teachers College and history at the University of Maryland. He then took a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin, pursuing interests in demography. He was a statistician at the Bureau of the Census from 1946 to 1953, when he joined the Department of Agriculture. In 1961 he became head of the Population Section of the USDA's Economic Research Service, where he built up its capability for documenting and reporting on the conditions of rural areas and their inhabitants. He is now Senior Demographer in that agency.
Beale has devoted his professional career, and also much of his spare time, to studying rural areas and their inhabitants. He has been poking about in places that many urban Americans have never seen and do not know: the Mississippi Delta, the Ozark Ouachita Uplands, Appalachia, the Corn Belt, the Cotton Belt and the Tobacco and Peanut Belt. "You can't know what's going on in the country from behind a desk in Washington," he asserts. Combining his firsthand observations with penetrating analyses of statistical data, Beale was the first to detect in some regions that more people were leaving metropolitan areas than were moving in - this in the late 1960s, when the government was contemplating the construction of new cities to handle urban spillover. Small wonder that his discovery met with widespread skepticism until massive new evidence bore him out.
Behind Beale's dignified, somewhat reserved manner, lies an encyclopedic knowledge of, and an endless fascination with, regions and places and peoples and how they are intertwined. Building on his wide-ranging observations, he refined and fostered the use of two analytic schemes for studying the developments under way in nonmetropolitan areas. One is an analytic typology for gauging the susceptibility of nonmetropolitan areas to urban influence. The other is a system of geographic subregions, dividing the nation into twenty-six economically and culturally distinct groupings of counties.
To the general reader, the most captivating aspect of Beale's writings is likely to be his sensitivity to the people of rural America. He was continually fascinated by clusters of people possessing (although not necessarily conscious of) a distinctive common identity. Such an identity might derive from ancestry or shared economic plight. Beale devised procedures to detect these identities, noting common surnames and colloquialisms, for example, where they were submerged beneath present-day consciousness. A common theme is how such identities have translated into distinct spatial patterns (paralleling, for example, Utah's concentration of Mormons) and how those patterns persist or gradually dissolve.

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