Sunday, November 20, 2005
(10:19 AM) | John Emerson:
Darwin in American Life
The resident troll routinely accuses the Weblog crew of being a bunch of hicks from Kalamazoo, but Kalamazoo is a cosmopolitan paradise compared to the Lake Wobegonian farm town (only one step above 9-man football) where I presently reside.As it happens, the most excitable boy this town has produced in recent memory had the given name of "Darwin", and I recently ran into another old guy from around here with that same name -- a farmer. And quite by chance, one of my cousins (who was visiting from an equally small town in a neighboring state) mentioned a distant relative of ours (another farmer) who also was named "Darwin". (Both these twons are very churchy).
I know the mother of one of the local Darwins, but I can't ask her how he got the name because she's a devout church lady and a friend of my mom's -- and beyond that, her son's pranks, though admired for miles around, are an embarassment to her.
However, I was at least able to find the statistics on the use of this name. If I'm reading this graph correctly, between 1910 and 1960 "Darwin" ranked between about #380 and about #500 among male given names. In 1970 the name plummeted to about #800, and then even lower, before recovering recently. For the year 2003 the name ranked #800; for males of all ages, in the 2000 census the name ranked #583.
I'm pretty sure that the given name "Darwin" was rare before Charles Darwin became prominent, so the name can be taken as a marker for free-thinking. Furthermore, since "Darwin" seems like a country-ish sort of name, it might even be a marker of hillbilly freethinking.
This is a bit anecdotal at the moment, but three anecdotes makes a trend. Further research might be necessary, but it won't be by me -- I'm an anecdotalist by trade. Based on what I've been told about my father's childhood (born 1914) I think that my guess is accurate. The fundamentalist domination of the countryside might be worse now than it was 90 years ago.
