300 Million

So anyway, I’m more or less back from being wherever I was, and getting caught up on things slowly. I have a few slightly out-of-date matters to deal with here.

For instance: Last week I read this little article in USA Today, “Little fanfare to mark population milestone.” In fact this turned out to be the first of many things I heard or read about the U.S. population hitting 300 million. Even so, the article notes that 200 million was marked by “500 spectators jamm[ing] the lobby of the Commerce Department and President Lyndon Johnson stood in front of the ‘census clock’ as it counted the 200 millionth American,” in November 1967. These days, the piece says, population growth fueled by immigration makes the whole subject too politically frought for such an event.

Could be.* In any case, my interests in the milestone are a little different. It seems at least a little amazing to me that the population has grown by 50 percent in about 40 years. In 1965, the story notes:

Johnson signed a law that reopened the borders after four decades of shutting out immigrants. ‘Immigrants were a much smaller share of the population (then), probably smallest in our history,’ says Jeffrey Passel, demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Passel’s calculations show that immigrants and their U.S.-born offspring accounted for 55% of the increase in population since the last milestone.

This gets at an aspect of the contemporary, super-niche-y, non-monolithic America I’ve wondered about. Generally discussions of that subject are all about technology that’s set us free from the three-network oppression of mass culture blah blah blah. But perhaps another relevant factor is that the country is a) simply more diverse than it was in the mid 1960s, which makes a certain amount of cultural fracturing inevitable, and b) much bigger, making possible the multiple-mass scenario that I earlier called “the four or five Americas.” I’m not saying technology doesn’t matter, but these more mundane facts seem to me to play more of a role than most discussions of the subject suggest.

* Update: While politicians may or may not want to make much of the 300 million thing, marketers are not afraid. The NYT today noted that Gerber has some kind of sweepstakes website tied to the population milestone; Johnson & Johnson had some related promotions; and Papa John’s, somewhat absurdly, offered free pizzas to the father of American No. 300 million.