Many Marriages

Cupid, who does just as good business in city parks as he does in a haymow, smiled all over his face last week. New York City reported that marriage licenses were going boom. In the first half of 1941 the city issued 38,918 permits to marry--10,015 more than in the first half of 1940. If the boom zooms, 1941 will be New York City's most nuptial year in history, bigger even than 1917, which turned in 76,149 legal weddings.

License officials said it was Cupid's soldier clothes. As in 1917, young men hurriedly mumbled their marriage vows before Selective Service caught them--not to avoid serving in the Army, but to sandwich in a brief honeymoon before they went off alone to camp. On the day after graduation day at West Point, chaplains were busy from 9:30 a.m. until dusk, married 26 second lieutenants with the ink barely dry on their commissions.

Babies, quite properly, were also having a banner year. After glooming for years over the falling U.S. birth rate, the U.S. Census Bureau sheepishly announced that 1941 will have the highest rate in a decade. In the first four months of 1941, about 20,000 more babies were born in the U.S. than in the first third of 1940. Dr. Halbert Dunn, chief vital statistician for the Census Bureau, began to talk of "an increase of about 7% in population per generation."

All these figures backed the common belief that births and marriages increase in time of war. The present U.S. birth rate--18.5 babies per 1,000 population--is only .3 of a baby less than the last reported (1937) rate in Germany.

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