National Affairs: A NATION'S FACE IN NUMBERS

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In recording his joys and sorrows, his struggle for existence, his encounters, good and evil, man has used words, music, paint, stone, steel, film. The U.S. Bureau of the Census uses numbers. Last week it issued its 75th Anniversary edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, a volume which embraces the raw material of American drama. Some ore from this 1,056-page mine:

THE 3,909,000 Americans who are born each year-have a life expectancy of 68.4 years (17 years more than they would have had 40 years ago). Births in hospitals are the rule (90% of the total registered) rather than the privilege (36.9%) that they were 20 years ago. Americans (aged 5 to 34) enrolled in school number 32,796,000 (up more than 3,000,000 in three years), of whom 3,515,000 are six-year-olds (up one million in three years, reflecting the attainment of school age by the postwar bumper baby crop).

Life & Death. Americans celebrate 1,566,793 marriages and agonize over 388,000 divorces in a year. The typical groom is 23.8, the bride 21.4 (they are oldest in Connecticut—23.6; youngest in Idaho—20.9). The nation's 46,828,000 families are smaller (3.4 persons) than in 1940 (3.77) or in 1890 (4.93). The U.S. has 814,000 more married women than married men (due to reporting discrepancies and absences of husbands on overseas assignments), but Mormon Utah is one state with more (633) husbands than wives. The U.S. has 1,776,681 more women than men (the reverse was true 75 years ago), 50.7 people per sq. mi. (v. 16.9 then), and its population (median age: 30.2, ten years more than in 1879) is 59% urban (v. 72% rural then).

In the nation's employed labor force (62,242,000) there are only 6,970,000 farmers. The 17 million labor force of 75 years ago was divided almost equally between farm and nonfarm. Women workers (19,353,000) today are 31% of the labor force, compared to 25% in 1940. There are 1,273,000 fewer farm workers and 321,000 fewer domestic servants than in 1940, but 1,836,000 more commercial service workers. Of the nation's 2,678 female morticians and embalmers, 35 are unemployed.

A 65-year-old person today can expect to live another 14.1 years, but death strikes 1,519,000 times a year in the U.S. The biggest killers are heart disease (545,675) and cancer (215,525), both of them highest in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, lowest in New Mexico. Infant mortality (28.4 under a year old per 1,000 live births) is down from 47 in 1940, 99.9 in 1915. It is highest in New Mexico, lowest in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In a year 7,495 Americans are murdered (but the rate is lower than in any year since 1910) and 15,909 are suicides (less per capita than in any year since 1920).

Each day 1,309,377 Americans receive hospital treatment, 584,455 in mental hospitals (the load was 352,279 twenty years ago). Among major diseases, the biggest gainer is polio (57,879 cases v. 1947's low 10,827); the biggest loser is syphilis (165.853 cases v. 1946's peak 385,524).