On a Discipline in Search of Application.

The article presents information on a presidential address given by Harold R. Capener at the annual meeting of the Rural Sociological Society, San Francisco, California, in August 1975. The author said "Calvin Beale, one of our foremost demographers, in a recent article made a pronouncement of great significance to the discipline of rural sociology: The huge rural-to-urban trend, the common pattern to U.S. population migration since World War II, has been reversed. In the eyes of many Americans, the appeal of major urban areas has dimished and the attractiveness of rural and small town communities has increased, economically and otherwise. The result is a new trend that is already having an impact. One that modifies much we have taken for granted about population distribution. Beale's statement is interesting. He says, in effect, all these years we have been living and adjusting our social, economic, and political policies around the opposite phenomenon-rural-to-urban migration."