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Between the Great War and the Great Depression: preliminary observations on the ‘missing link’ in the history of human stature in Poland
Economics and Human Biology 34 (2019) 162–168
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Between the Great War and the Great Depression: preliminary observations on the ‘missing link’ in the history of human stature in Poland ski Michał Kopczyn Institute of History, University of Warsaw, ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie, 00-927, Warszawa, Poland
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 25 July 2018 Received in revised form 3 January 2019 Accepted 3 January 2019 Available online 7 January 2019
The paper traces the secular trend in stature in Poland in the interwar period. On the basis of individual measuring cards created by military authorities for Krosno and Sarny districts, the author states that the secular trend in stature that started in the mid-1860s continued between the two world wars with the velocity of at least 0.7 cm per decade, i.e. at a similar rate as in the second half of the 19th century. Although regional differences inside the Second Polish Republic were clearly visible, cohorts born during the Great War were able to make up the lost ground in their teens despite the hardships caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
JEL classification: N34 Keywords: Stature Anthropometric history Poland Secular trend
1. Introduction It is well established both in physical anthropology and economic history that the evolution of human height can serve as a proxy of public health and material well-being (Tanner, 1982; Fogel et al., 1983; Komlos and Baten, 2004; Deaton and Arora, 2009). At the onset of historical auxology economic historians proved that stature is correlated with monetary measures of well-being such as real wages and the GDP/PC (Floud,1994; Steckel,1995; Baten and Blum, 2012a). However, later research revealed important exceptions to the rule. They manifested themselves especially at the initial stages of rapid modernization and urbanization. As a result, changes in height followed the opposite direction of GDP/PC. Such a phenomenon was documented in the United Kingdom and the United States (Floud et al., 1990; Komlos, 1985, 1989, Komlos, 1998, Zehetmeyer, 2011). The positive correlation between height and monetary measures was disturbed by the joint effects of changes in relative prices of foodstuffs, rising income inequality and alterations of consumer preferences that maximize short term gains at the expense of longterm perspectives in biological well-being (Komlos, 1998; Steckel, 1995). As a result, the tall height of inhabitants of isolated territories can stagnate or even diminish after the advent of a market economy (Komlos, 1989). Baten and Fertig (2009) showed that the lowering of
ski). E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Kopczyn https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.001 1570-677X/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
transaction costs caused the rise in inequality of statures in northwestern Germany in the late 19th. But the equilibrium could also be unsettled by internal causes without the interference of market forces. In the classical Malthusian model the growth of population leads to persistent malnutrition, stunting and finally to famine. In countries composed of regions strongly different in terms of economic development the evolution of stature seems to be a good proxy of biological well-being and regional differentiation. The Polish Second Republic (1918–1939) is such a case. The country reborn in 1918, after 123 years of trifurcation between Russia, Germany and Austria, included both Upper Silesia, a highly industrialized and urbanized region with a dense network of railways, and Polesie, a remote province situated and the eastern part of the country, with underdeveloped semi-subsistence agriculture and a sparse network of dirt roads periodically turning into impassable quagmires of mud (Tomaszewski, 1963)1. Final height is influenced by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, such as nutritionand disease environment. As a result, frequency, duration and timing of environmental stresses may hamper or even reverse the secular trend. According to the predominant opinion, the secular trend is restricted to the first 2 years after delivery, so nutritional stress in this age most likely reduces the final height (Cole, 2003; Behrman, 2016; Portarait et al., 2017). But
1
The capital of Polesie voivodship was Brzes c n/Bugiem, see Fig. 1.
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Fig. 1. The Second Polish Republic. Administrative division as on August 31st, 1939. Source: GUS, 1990: 131.
on the other hand, there were examples pointing to the relative importance of early school age (Kozłov and Samsonova, 2005; Ogórek, 2018) and the erasure of former nutritional deficiencies thanks to changes in diet in the pubertal age, as in the case of Afro-American slaves in the cotton belt of the United States (Steckel, 1986). For Central- and Eastern European populations the Great War of 1914–1918 meant a long-lasting nutritional crisis. Its results are clearly visible in data collected in clio-infra database, which indicates that Eastern European heights stagnated in cohorts born in the 1900s and the 1910s and started to rise only in the 1920s (Baten and Blum 2012b)2 . In contradistinction, the scars of war are indiscernible in Western European heights (Hatton, Bray, 2010).
2 Stagnation in the 1920s birth cohort documented in Table 7.2 of Baten and Blum 2012a is the result of the Russian experience. In other countries of the region height started to rise in the 1920s.
The aim of the present contribution is to assess the evolution of stature in the Second Polish Republic through the comparison of the height of soldiers born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and entering their growth spurt during the Great War with the stature of draftees born during the Great War and growing up in the Second Republic. The objects of our investigation were born in two predominantly agricultural districts. The district of Krosno lies in the south-eastern part of nowadays Poland. In the interwar period the district was part of the Lviv voivodship. As elsewhere in the former Galicia, peasants predominated in the occupational structure of the population. But since the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the discovery of oil deposits, inhabitants of the overpopulated district obtained a possibility to earn additional income from work in mines and transportation (Fleig Frank, 2005). In contradistinction, the district of Sarny (nowadays part of Ukrainian province of Volhynia) situated in Polesie voivodship near the border with the
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Soviet Union, was purely agricultural3 . The only industrial employers in the district were quarries and a brick factory in Klesów (Me˛drzecki, 1988).
height of population which is predetermined in the first two years of life, one should expect stunting for the generation born during the Great War.
2. Stature in Poland: a brief outline
3. Materials
In the paper devoted to regional convergence in the Habsburg Monarchy, John Komlos (2007) observed that in the mid-19th century Poles and Ukrainians inhabiting Galicia were the shortest in the Austrian Empire. Since the late 1860s, Polish and Ukrainian statures started to rise dynamically and in the generation born in the late 1880s attained 165.8 cm. As a result, the gap between the stature of inhabitants of Galicia and the core lands of the Monarchy diminished by half, from 3.3 to 1.5 cm A similar trajectory of heights was observed in other parts of trifurcated Poland in the second half of the 19th century. In central Poland ruled by Russia, the average height of 21-year old inductees rose from 163 cm in the birth cohort of 1861 to 165.3 in the generation born 30 years later ski, 2007). In Great Poland (Wielkopolska) and Pomer(Kopczyn ania, which were parts of the German Empire, the growth rate in stature was similar. Polish 20-years old draftees born in the 1860s measured 165.0 cm, but in the early 1890s, they reached 167.3 cm (Nowak, 2011)4 . The contemporary history of Polish heights is well-known thanks to periodical surveys of the 19-years-old draftees organized by anthropologists from Wrocław headed by Tadeusz Bielicki since 1965 (Bielicki et al., 2003; Kołodziej et al., 2015). The average stature of young men in 1946 birth cohort was 170.5 cm (SD = 5.9, N = 21 155). The relatively tall stature of 1946 cohort may be astonishing if we take into consideration that the cohort was born just after the end of the Second World War in a ruined country, and entered school age in the Stalinist era notorious for market shortages of consumables. The 4 cm difference between the stature of 19-year-olds born in 1946 and 21-years-olds born in the 1890s provokes a question as to whether the change was abrupt and reflects the socio-political transformation that took place in Poland after 1945, or was it a part of a longer trend that started in the second half of the 19th century and continued in the Second Polish Republic. The “missing link” in the history of Polish stature mentioned in the title of the present contribution refers to the interwar period. Estimates of GDP/PC for the Second Republic look like a roller coaster. After a dramatic decline from 1739 USD in 1913 to a mere 678 in 1920, the income reached its highest level in 1929 (2 117). In 1935 it dropped to 1597 USD as a consequence of the Great Depression, but rose to 2182 in 1938 (Maddison, 2003:100; Good and Ma, 1999: 111; GUS, 2014: 550, 553)5 . Although the scale of the destructions caused by the Great War and the following armed conflicts of 1919–1921 is difficult to calculate, it’s assumed that material losses equivalent one national income (Landau and Roszkowski, 1995; Handelsman, 1936)6 . The level of the pre-war agricultural production was regained only in the mid-1920s (Grabski et al., 1936). If it’s true that the GDP/PC proxies the
The neglect of the interwar period in Polish research is paradoxical because researchers have at their disposal huge archival fonds consisting of over 24 running meters of individual measuring cards pertaining to soldiers and draftees born between 1899 and 1921. The cards were collected by the Anthropological Office operating within the Ministry of Military Affairs headed by an anthropologist, Captain Jan Mydlarski. There were two main purposes of the activities of the office. The first was mundane, the data was necessary for tailors and shoemakers sewing uniforms for the army. The second purpose was scientific, aimed at the “determination of the racial differences of the population of Poland in order to draw practical military conclusions” (Mydlarski, 1925: 530). The original research plan was very ambitious. Mydlarski intended to collect the measurements of 1% of the male population in the conscription age that made up about 140,000 observations. He planned to augment the database with observations concerning draftees and reservists from various localities. The second set of measurements was done in 1926–1930 and concerned mainly draftees. In the 1930s, the third set of research took place. Mydlarski’s team measured selected groups of conscripts, like officer cadets or draftees originating from various districts in the eastern territories of Poland. The last measurements took place in the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The summary of all the above-mentioned research activities has never been published. According to Bielicki et al. (1987), Mydlarski sent a manuscript of his book to a publishing house but the outbreak of the Second World War prevented the edition. The original manuscript was lost during the Warsaw rising of 1944. The only remainder of the work in the form of summary maps of average height district by district got through the war thanks to Jan Czekanowski and was published in 1951 and 1959 (Mydlarski, 1951; Ste˛slicka and Wanke, 1959)7. Unfortunately, we do not know how the averages were calculated, do they reflect means for the whole interwar period, or are calculated for one separate time period. After the Second World War Mydlarski performed several important functions, among them he served as the chancellor of the University of Wrocław. He died in 1956 never returning to his former research. The source material in the form of individual measurement cards survived only partly. Under the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War, the collection was kept in the basements of the Church of the Holy Cross in the center of Warsaw. Part of the documentation was moved outside the city, but the rest – we do not know how many cards - felt prey to flames during the Warsaw rising when the church became an arena of fierce fighting. The surviving cards until recently were kept in the archive of the Chair of Anthropology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław. A few years ago the documents were moved to the Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice (Sobeczko, 2014). Mydlarski published two interim reports summarizing the activities of his office. The first report described the results of the medical check-ups of 48,000 soldiers measured between 1921 and
3
In 1930 the district of Sarny was incorporated into Volhynian voivodship. Calculations are based on all inductees examined, not only on conscripted soldiers; therefore the means are free from the potential distortion due to minimum height requirement. The conscription was obligatory. The rate of evasion in the part of Poland ruled by Russia rose since the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 reaching 18% before the outbreak of the Great War. The major part of deserters were Jews who left Russia illegally, Christians constituted about 40% of all deserters ski, 2012). (Kopczyn 5 One should remember that Maddison estimated Polish GDP/PC for the territory of contemporary Poland and as a result the estimates are biased upwards. 6 Good and Ma, 1999: 136 estimate drop in manufacturing production at 65% and in output of major crops at 55%. 4
7 The publication of the maps in two separate papers mirrors the influence of political censorship in the Stalinist era. In 1951 it was not right to remind about the former eastern territories of Poland incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944.
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(Krosno). All of them were measured in accordance with the Frankfurt plain standard. Because in the case of soldiers the minimum height requirement was 150 cm we calculated the means using the truncated regression model. We chose subjects of Christian confessions. We omitted Jews because of their shorter height and uneven share in the population of both districts ski, 2011; Kopczyn ski and Sobechowicz, 2017). Due to the (Kopczyn loss of the original reports concerning the conscription we do not know the exact number of draftees measured in Krosno and Sarny, but we can assume that we have documentation pertaining to at least half of all draftees, i.e. 846 persons in Sarny and 510 in Krosno. According to the population census of 1931, there were 1625 men born in 1914 in the Sarny district and 663 men born in 1918 in the district of Krosno (GUS, 1938a,1938b: table 14). The cards include both men suited to the military service and draftees excluded from it because of poor health, so it seems that the sample is random. 4. Results
Fig. 2. The distribution of heights of soldiers measured 1921–1923. (1900–1902 birth cohorts, N = 15,694). Source: Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice, W III-33, Jan Mydlarski’s bequest.
1923. Their average height varied between 164 and 167 cm depending on the province, with the tallest statures in the former Prussian territories, the lowest in the former Russian partition and Galicia in between. It seems that there was no significant difference in the mean height between soldiers measured in the early 1920s and the inductees checked-up just before the outbreak of the Great War, at least on the level of provinces. This may evidence that the secular trend in height was hampered in the generation born at the turn of the centuries whose growth spurt had come at the time of the Great War of 1914–1918. However, the conclusion must remain tentative because of the minimum height requirement applied by the Polish army after 1918 (150 cm) which overestimate the average height of soldiers as compared with the pre-war inductees (see footnote 4). The second factor that obscures the comparison relates to measuring techniques used by the Mydlarski’s team and the pre-Great War draft boards. Mydlarski and his collaborators applied the standard Frankfurt plain while the pre-war military physicians used to measure conscripts with lifted chins thus adding artificially some height (Mydlarski, 1936, 16). We cannot safely assume that both effects cancel each other out.8 The distribution of heights of a sample of 17,000 soldiers measured between 1921 and 1923 is shown in Fig. 2. The second report written by Mydlarski was published in 1936 and described the results of the medical check-up of 21-year old inductees born 1906–1909 and measured according to the pre-war technique (Mydlarski, 1936). The mean height irrespective of ethnicity of the 1906 birth cohort was 165.8 cm. Mydlarski noted a slight rise in height between the 1906 and 1909 birth cohorts, but the change was negligible. It seems that the stature of men born 1906–1909 shows scares of the Great War and the post-war military conflicts between Poland, Ukraine, and Bolshevik Russia which lasted up to 1921. In the following part of the present contribution, we will concentrate on the Krosno and Sarny districts. In order to assess the secular trend, we compare the heights of soldiers aged 20–22 measured between 1921 and 1923 with the stature of inductees in the same age brackets measured in 1935 (Sarny) and 1939
8 The research on the measurement cards from Jan Mydlarski’s archival bequest is still pending.
In order to glimpse the secular trend in interwar Poland, we begin our analysis from the data collected by the Anthropometric Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1955–1957 for the ski et al., 1975: 173-4). The purposes of industrial design (Wolan samples consisted of 100–200 persons for each birth year and were not standardized according to the province of birth of men measured. The samples cannot be treated as representative of the entire Second Polish Republic; nevertheless, they mirror the general trend of the intergenerational changes in height. The results are shown in Table 1. Although the representativeness of the data may be doubted, the trend seems clear. The height increment between the 1900s and 1910s birth cohorts exceeded 2 cm while in the following generations born in the Second Polish Republic the secular trend in stature slowed down, which may mirror difficult living conditions during the Great Depression and the Second World War. The course of the Polish secular trend differs from the other East European ones by its early rise and the slowdown for cohorts born in the 1920s, i.e. in the period of economic reconstruction and the growth of the GDP/PC. In order to check up the conclusions drawn from the above presented general data and in search of regional differences in the tempo of the secular trend, we compare the height of soldiers and draftees from Krosno and Sarny districts (Table 2). In the case of Sarny, the height increment was 0.7 cm, i.e. 0.5 cm/per decade. In the district of Krosno, the height increment was 1.2 cm, which corresponds to a 0.7 cm change per decade. The data from Table 2 confirms the hypothesis that the positive secular trend in height started in the generation born during the Great War and growing up in the 1920s. It seems that deficiencies in nutrition typical to war years were compensated in the later years of growth in a relatively advantageous decade of the 1920s. Draftees from Krosno born in 1918 enjoyed economic growth before their teens but entered their pubertal growth spurt during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, their growth was more dynamic than their counterparts in the district of Sarny.
Table 1 Stature of Polish adult males, rural born, birth cohorts.1900–1938. Birth cohort
Mean
1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929 1930-1938
165.0 167.3 167.7 167.9
Source: Anthropometric Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences 1955–1957, ski et al., 1975: 173-4. Wolan
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Table 2 Height of soldiers and inductees in Sarny and Krosno districts aged 20–22, birth cohorts 1900–1902 and 1913–1919, truncated regression model, lower limit 150 cm. District
soldiers, birth cohort 1900-1902
all inductees, birth cohort 1913-1919
inductees fit for service, birth cohort 1913-1919
Mean
SD
N
Mean
SD
N
Mean
SD
N
Sarny Krosno
166.9a 167.0b
5.07 5.59
382 314
167.6a 168.2b
5.76 6.49
845 452
168.1c 168.8c
5.43 5.98
598 431
a a b-b c-c
,
,
denotes results of t-tests p < 0.05.
5. Discussion The difference between men born in the two districts compared above can be explained either by their situation in the first years of life or by differences in the standards of living in both regions. It may be that the process of growth of draftees from Sarny region born in 1914 was hampered by the adverse war conditions in the first thousand days of their life. The district was divided by the front line in 1915 and the positional war lasted until the end of the hostilities. In the following years, Bolshevik and Polish armies crossed the territory of the district several times. The extraordinary high share of men orphaned by their fathers in the sample of soldiers (22% vs. 6% in Krosno) may support that conclusion. Nonetheless, there are more explicit differences between Sarny and Krosno samples that decided about the different pace of the secular trend in stature. In the early 1920s, the share of peasants among soldiers from the Sarny district was 96%, while in Krosno we found 70% of peasants, 13% of craftsmen and 15% of laborers who earned their living outside of agriculture. The differences in the occupational structures increased in the 1930s. In the Sarny region 86% of draftees in 1935 declared agriculture as their primary profession, the share of craftsmen was 5.4% while laborers constituted 7% of the sample. At the same time, the district of Krosno looked very different. Only 44% of draftees defined themselves as peasants, 34% lived from craft and 12% were laborers. It does not mean that the district of Krosno modernized rapidly in the interwar period. It was still largely agricultural with the 42% share of farms under 2 ha (vs. 20% in Sarny), but the agriculture could no longer maintain the growing population. As a result, the younger generation was forced to move to towns (13% town residents in the district of Krosno vs. 9% in Sarny) and look for jobs outside agriculture. Similar processes were observed in other parts of central Poland (Landau, 1938: 107–110). In the Krosno district the process was facilitated by the higher level of alphabetization than in Sarny (86% of the male population could read and write in Krosno while in Sarny only 53%, GUS, 1938a, 1938b: table 17). Although average farms were bigger in Sarny region than in Krosno, the agriculture was more intensive in the former Galicia. The average yields of the main staples, i.e. rye and potatoes in the Polesie province were lower by 13–17%% than the Polish average. In consequence, crop failures caused by adverse weather conditions resulted in food shortages and malnutrition (Tomaszewski, 1963; Me˛drzecki, 2018). It is visible in our samples of draftees. The mean BMI of inductees in Krosno – 21.66 - differs in a statistically significant way from the BMI of draftees in Sarny (21.08). The share of malnourished draftees in Sarny was 3.5% vs. 2.5% in Krosno. It is not surprising that both regions differed in child mortality. The infant mortality rate is misleading because of underregistration of infant deaths in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, but the mortality of children aged 1–4 shows the difference. Its level in Krosno was 0.97 per 1000 population, while in Sarny it reached 2.54 in 1931 (Szturm de Sztrem, 1939). The differences enumerated above were mirrored in the evaluation of fitness for military service. Beginning from 1925 conscription authorities rated draftees according to fitness into 5
Table 3 Draftees from Sarny and Krosno districts according to fitness category. Birth cohorts 1914-1919. Category
Krosno
Share in %
Sarny
Share in %
A B C D E Sent for medical expertise Unknown Total
382 3 32 7 8 0 20 452
84.5 0.7 7.1 1.5 1.8 – 4.4 100.0
590 33 161 26 16 15 4 845
69.8 3.9 19.1 3.1 1.9 1.8 0.5 100.0
Source: Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice, W III-33, Jan Mydlarski’s bequest.
categories. Category A signified fit for service, B – temporarily unable to military service because of delayed maturation or curable illnesses, C – fit for service in the reserve, D –fit for service in the reserve but without a weapons, and finally, E was granted to draftees permanently unable for military service. The distribution of draftees examined in the 1930s according to fitness for military service is shown in Table 3. Draftees from Krosno were definitely fitter for the military service than their counterparts in Sarny. Although in the early 1920s draftees were not rated according to categories, we can safely assume that men conscripted would meet conditions of the A rank. If we compare 1921–1923 soldiers with inductees of the 1930s rated as A the rise of the mean height is even more significant. In the case of Krosno the height increment is 1.9 cm (1.1 cm per decade) and in Sarny 1.2 cm (0.9 per decade). 6. Conclusion In a pending discussion among Polish historians, the economic balance sheet of the interwar period is still a controversial topic. For the elder generation of researchers, the twenty years period between two world wars allowed only to rebuild the economic potential of Polish lands to the level reached previously in 1913. Revisionists tend to shorten the time horizon and compare the levels of economic development between 1918 and 1938 thus stressing the unquestionable achievements of the Second Polish Republic, like Władysław Grabski’s monetary reform of 1924, stateled investments in Gdynia or in the central industrial region in the late 1930s (Roszkowski, 1986)9 . Nonetheless, both sides of the controversy recognize the ruinous consequences of the Great Depression (Landau and Roszkowski, 1995). The dark picture of living conditions in Poland during the Great Depression is
9 Both views can be true but the discussion had also a political underbelly. In the post-1945 Poland the Second Polish Republic was presented as an economically underdeveloped state with pervasive poverty, lack of worth noting economic achievements and perspectives for development. The argument that in 1938 Poland reached the development level of 1913 served as confirmation of this bleak picture. Against such a background the post-war communist modernization looked like a great leap forward. The shortening of the perspective by the revisionists undermines the negative assessment of the Second Polish Republic. 10 The minimum need for an adult male was set at 2,400 calories.
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corroborated by the report published under the auspices of the Committee for Nutrition of the League of Nations. The authors of the report concluded the existence of ‘large-scale malnutrition’ and estimated the average daily caloric intake at 2200 calories among the lowest income blue-collar workers and 3140 among the higher income groups (League of Nations, 1936)10 . In a recent review of the standards of living in interwar Poland, Cecylia ska concluded that ‘slow economic progress was unable Leszczyn to make a marked improvement in the standard of living, particularly due to the high rate of natural increase’ that magnified ska, 2016: 116). the already huge rural overpopulation (Leszczyn ska stresses the difference between urban and rural areas Leszczyn in favor of the cities and regional disparities disfavoring the eastern parts of the country (where both Krosno and Sarny districts were located). The present contribution shows that differences persisted even inside the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic. The Krosno district in the former Galicia stepped on the way towards modernization, while the district of Sarny together with other less developed regions still remained in the shadow of the Malthusian trap. Although the documentation used in the present essay is scarce, we can hypothesize that the secular trend towards taller stature that started in Poland in the mid—1860s continued in the interwar period on a similar pace as before the Great War. It seems also that the start towards the positive trend in stature occurred in Poland earlier than in other Central- and East European countries, i.e. in the cohort born during the Great War. At the same time, the tempo of the trend differed between regions. The problem is worth further studies especially in relation to more developed regions, like Upper Silesia and the big cities like Warsaw and Łód z. As far as the problem of timing of nutritional stresses and their consequences for the final height is concerned, the data used in the present contribution points to the significance of biological adaptive mechanisms that enable the erasure of the consequences of nutritional stresses in the early childhood during the later periods of growth in better environmental conditions. Acknowledgments The paper is a part of the research project financed by The National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2016/21/B/HS3/00028. I would like to thank Joerg Baten, Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki, Bartosz Ogórek, Agnieszka and Paul Siewierski and anonymous reviewers for useful comments. References Baten, J., Blum, M., 2012a. Human Heights since 1820. In: van Zanden et alia, J.L. (Ed.), How Was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820. OECD Publishing, Paris. Baten, J., Blum, M., 2012b. Growing tall but unequal: new findings and new background evidence on anthropometric welfare in 156 countries, 1810-1989. Econ. Hist. Dev. Reg. 27 (sup1), 66–85. Baten, J., Fertig, G., 2009. Did the railway increase inequality? A micro-regional analysis of heights in the hinterland of the booming ruhr area during the late nineteenth century. J. Eur. Econ. Hist. 38 (2) . Behrman, J., 2016. growth faltering in the first thousand days after conception and catch-up growth. In: Komlos, J., Kelly, I.R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Economics and Human Biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ski, T., Strzałko, J., 1987. Historia antropologii w polsce. Przegla˛d Bielicki, T., Krupin Antropologiczny 53 (1-2), 3–28. Bielicki, T., Szklarska, A., Kozieł, S., Welon, Z., 2003. Transformacja ustrojowa w 19-letnich me˛zczyzn, _ Polsce w swietle antropologicznych badan 23. Monografie Zakładu Antropologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Wrocław. Cole, T.J., 2003. The secular trend in human physical growth: a biological view. Econ. Hum. Biol. 1 (2), 161–168. Deaton, A., Arora, R., 2009. Life at the top: the benefits of height. Econ. Hum. Biol. 7 (2), 133–136.
10
The minimum need for an adult male was set at 2,400 calories.
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Fleig Frank, A., 2005. Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. Floud, R., 1994. The Heights of europeans since 1750: a New source for Europeans economic history. In: Komlos, J. (Ed.), Stature, Living Standards and Economic Development: Essays in Anthropometric History. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 9–24. Floud, R., Wachter, K., Gregory, A., 1990. Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Fogel, R.W., et al., 1983. Secular changes in American and British stature and nutrition. J. Interdiscip. Hist. 14 (2), 445–481. Good, D., Ma, T., 1999. The economic growth of central and Eastern Europe in comparative perspective, 1870-1989. Eur. Rev. Econ. Hist. 3 (2), 103–137. _ Grabski, W., Stojanowski, J., Ware˛zak, J.,1936. Rolnictwo Polski 1914-1920. In: Historia ekonomiczna, Handelsman, M. (Eds.), Polska W czasie Wielkiej Wojny, vol. 3. Mie˛dzynarodowych, Warszawa, pp. 225–489. Towarzystwo Badania Zagadnien GUS, 1938a. Drugi powszechny spis ludnosci z dnia 9.XII.1931, województwo lwowskie bez miasta Lwowa. Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny. GUS, 1938b. Drugi powszechny spis ludnosci z dnia 9.XII.1931, województwo skie. Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny. wołyn GUS, 1990. Historia Polski w liczbach. In: Kubiczek, F. (Ed.), Terytorium, Ludnos c, vol. 1. Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny, Warszawa. ska, C. (Eds.), Historia Polski w GUS, 2014. In: Kuklo, C., Łukasiewicz, J., Leszczyn liczbach, vol. 3. Polska w Europie, Główny Urza˛d Statystyczny, Warszawa. Handelsman, M., 1936. In: Historia ekonomiczna, Handelsman, M. (Eds.), Polska w czasie Wielkiej Wojny, vol. 3. Towarzystwo Badania Zagadnien Mie˛dzynarodowych, Warszawa. Hatton, T.J., Bray, B.E., 2010. Long run trends in the heights of European men, 19th20th centuries. Econ. Hum. Biol. 8 (3), 405–413. ska, M., Lipowicz, A., Szklarska, A., Bielicki, T., 2015. Secular Kołodziej, H., Łopuszan trends in body height and body mass in 19-Year-Old polish men based on six national surveys from 1965 to 2010. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 27 (5), 704–709. Komlos, J., 1985. Stature and nutrition in the Habsburg Monarchy: the standard of living and economic development in the eighteen century. Am. Hist. Rev. 90 (5), 1149–1161. Komlos, J., 1989. Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg Monarchy: An Anthropometric History. Princeton University Press, Princeton. Komlos, J., 1998. Shrinking in a growing economy? The mystery of physical stature during the industrial revolution. J. Econ. Hist. 56 (3), 779–801. Komlos, J., 2007. Anthropometric evidence on economic growth, biological wellbeing and regional convergence in the Habsburg Monarchy, c. 1850-1910. Cliometrica 1 (3), 211–237. Komlos, J., Baten, J., 2004. Looking backward and looking forward. Anthropometric research and the development of social science history. Soc. Sci. Hist. 28 (2), 191–210. ski, M., 2007. Agrarian reforms, agrarian crisis and the biological standard Kopczyn of living in Poland, 1844-1892. Econ. Hum. Biol. 5 (3), 458–470. ski, M., 2011. The physical stature of Jewish men in the second half of the Kopczyn 19th century. Econ. Hum. Biol. 9 (2), 203–210. ski, M., 2012. Loyal subjects of the Tsar? Conscription to the Russian army in Kopczyn the Kingdom of Poland, 1832-1913. In: Katajisto, K. (Ed.), On the Edge of Empire. Poland and Finland at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries, , pp. 68–80 Tampere 2012. ski, M., Sobechowicz, Ł., 2017. The impact of urbanization on Stature and Kopczyn BMI in Poland. J. Interdiscip. Hist. 47 (3), 359–379. Kozłov, I., Samsonova, A., 2005. The impact of the siege on the physical development of children. In: Barber, J., Dzeniskevich, A. (Eds.), Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941-1944. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, pp. 174–196. Landau, L., 1938. Młodziez_ sie˛ga po prace˛. Instytut Spraw Społecznych, Warszawa. Landau, J., Roszkowski, W., 1995. Polityka gospodarcza II RP i PRL. Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, Warszawa. League of Nations, 1936. The Problem of Nutrition. League of Nations Publications Department, Geneva. ska, C., 2016. Level of living of Polish citizens in the interwar period, and its Leszczyn diversification. Roczniki Dziejów Społecznych i Gospodarczych 76, 93–120. Maddison, A., 2003. The World Economy. Historical Statistics, OECD Publications, Paris. skie 1921-1939. Elementy przemian Me˛drzecki, W., 1988. Województwo wołyn cywilizacyjnych, społecznych i politycznych, Ossolineum, Wrocław. Me˛drzecki, W., 2018. Kresowy kalejdoskop. We˛drówki przez ziemie wschodnie Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej 1918-1939. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków. Mydlarski, J., 1925. Sprawozdanie z wojskowego zdje˛cia antropologicznego Polski. Kosmos 50 (2-3), 530–583. _ me˛skiej roczników 1906 do 1909 w Mydlarski, J., 1936. Budowa fizyczna młodziezy swietle materiałów komisy poborowych. Lekarz Wojskowy 22 (1-4) 14-27, 7786, 116-126, 195-199. Mydlarski, J., 1951. Mapy antropometryczne polski. Przegla˛d Antropologiczny 17 (1951), 189–194. _ Nowak, O., 2011. Wysokos c i masa ciała młodych me˛zczyzn w okresie przemian historycznych i społeczno-gospodarczych drugiej połowy XIX i pocza˛tku XX . wieku na ziemiach polskich. Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM, Poznan Ogórek, B., 2018. Niezatarte pie˛tno? Wpływ I wojny swiatowej na ludnos c miasta Krakowa. Universitas, Kraków. Portarait, F.R.M., van Wingerden, T.F., Deeg, D.J.H., 2017. Early life undernutrition and adult height: the Dutch famine of 1944-45. Econ. Hum. Biol. 27 (1), 339–348.
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Roszkowski, W., 1986. Poland’s economic performance between the two world wars. East Eur. Q. (20), 285–297. Sobeczko, M., 2014. Nabytki Polskiej Akademii Nauk Archiwum w Warszawie oddziału w Katowicach w 2014 r. Biuletyn Archiwum Polskiej Akademii Nauk 55, 215–220. Steckel, R.H., 1986. A peculiar population: the nutrition, health, and mortality of american slaves from childhood to maturity. J. Econ. Hist. 46 (3), 721–741. Steckel, R.H., 1995. Stature and the standard of living. J. Econ. Lit. 33 (4), 1903–1940. Ste˛slicka, W., Wanke, A., 1959. Dalsze mapy antropometryczne Jana Mydlarskiego wg stanu z 1934 r. Przegla˛d Antropologiczny 25 (1), 171–185.
stwa, urodzenia i zgony 1931, 1932. Główny _ n Szturm de Sztrem, E., 1939. Małze Urza˛d Statystyczny, Warszawa. Tanner, J.M., 1982. The potential of auxological data for monitoring economic and social well-being. Soc. Sci. Hist. 6 (4), 571–581. Tomaszewski, J., 1963. Z dziejów Polesia 1921-1939. Zarys stosunków społecznoekonomicznych, PWN, Warszawa. ski, N., Niemiec, S., Pyzuk, _ _ Wolan M., 1975. Antropometria inzynieryjna. Kształt i _ wymiary ciała ludzkiego a wzornictwo przemysłowe, Ksia˛zka i Wiedza, Warszawa. Zehetmeyer, M., 2011. The continuation of the antebellum puzzle: stature in the US, 1847-1894. Eur. Rev. Econ. Hist. 15 (2), 313–327.
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Between the Great War and the Great Depression: preliminary observations on the ‘missing link’ in the history of human stature in Poland ski Michał Kopczyn Institute of History, University of Warsaw, ul. Krakowskie Przedmiescie, 00-927, Warszawa, Poland
A R T I C L E I N F O
A B S T R A C T
Article history: Received 25 July 2018 Received in revised form 3 January 2019 Accepted 3 January 2019 Available online 7 January 2019
The paper traces the secular trend in stature in Poland in the interwar period. On the basis of individual measuring cards created by military authorities for Krosno and Sarny districts, the author states that the secular trend in stature that started in the mid-1860s continued between the two world wars with the velocity of at least 0.7 cm per decade, i.e. at a similar rate as in the second half of the 19th century. Although regional differences inside the Second Polish Republic were clearly visible, cohorts born during the Great War were able to make up the lost ground in their teens despite the hardships caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
JEL classification: N34 Keywords: Stature Anthropometric history Poland Secular trend
1. Introduction It is well established both in physical anthropology and economic history that the evolution of human height can serve as a proxy of public health and material well-being (Tanner, 1982; Fogel et al., 1983; Komlos and Baten, 2004; Deaton and Arora, 2009). At the onset of historical auxology economic historians proved that stature is correlated with monetary measures of well-being such as real wages and the GDP/PC (Floud,1994; Steckel,1995; Baten and Blum, 2012a). However, later research revealed important exceptions to the rule. They manifested themselves especially at the initial stages of rapid modernization and urbanization. As a result, changes in height followed the opposite direction of GDP/PC. Such a phenomenon was documented in the United Kingdom and the United States (Floud et al., 1990; Komlos, 1985, 1989, Komlos, 1998, Zehetmeyer, 2011). The positive correlation between height and monetary measures was disturbed by the joint effects of changes in relative prices of foodstuffs, rising income inequality and alterations of consumer preferences that maximize short term gains at the expense of longterm perspectives in biological well-being (Komlos, 1998; Steckel, 1995). As a result, the tall height of inhabitants of isolated territories can stagnate or even diminish after the advent of a market economy (Komlos, 1989). Baten and Fertig (2009) showed that the lowering of
ski). E-mail address: [email protected] (M. Kopczyn https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.001 1570-677X/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
transaction costs caused the rise in inequality of statures in northwestern Germany in the late 19th. But the equilibrium could also be unsettled by internal causes without the interference of market forces. In the classical Malthusian model the growth of population leads to persistent malnutrition, stunting and finally to famine. In countries composed of regions strongly different in terms of economic development the evolution of stature seems to be a good proxy of biological well-being and regional differentiation. The Polish Second Republic (1918–1939) is such a case. The country reborn in 1918, after 123 years of trifurcation between Russia, Germany and Austria, included both Upper Silesia, a highly industrialized and urbanized region with a dense network of railways, and Polesie, a remote province situated and the eastern part of the country, with underdeveloped semi-subsistence agriculture and a sparse network of dirt roads periodically turning into impassable quagmires of mud (Tomaszewski, 1963)1. Final height is influenced by a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, such as nutritionand disease environment. As a result, frequency, duration and timing of environmental stresses may hamper or even reverse the secular trend. According to the predominant opinion, the secular trend is restricted to the first 2 years after delivery, so nutritional stress in this age most likely reduces the final height (Cole, 2003; Behrman, 2016; Portarait et al., 2017). But
1
The capital of Polesie voivodship was Brzes c n/Bugiem, see Fig. 1.
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Fig. 1. The Second Polish Republic. Administrative division as on August 31st, 1939. Source: GUS, 1990: 131.
on the other hand, there were examples pointing to the relative importance of early school age (Kozłov and Samsonova, 2005; Ogórek, 2018) and the erasure of former nutritional deficiencies thanks to changes in diet in the pubertal age, as in the case of Afro-American slaves in the cotton belt of the United States (Steckel, 1986). For Central- and Eastern European populations the Great War of 1914–1918 meant a long-lasting nutritional crisis. Its results are clearly visible in data collected in clio-infra database, which indicates that Eastern European heights stagnated in cohorts born in the 1900s and the 1910s and started to rise only in the 1920s (Baten and Blum 2012b)2 . In contradistinction, the scars of war are indiscernible in Western European heights (Hatton, Bray, 2010).
2 Stagnation in the 1920s birth cohort documented in Table 7.2 of Baten and Blum 2012a is the result of the Russian experience. In other countries of the region height started to rise in the 1920s.
The aim of the present contribution is to assess the evolution of stature in the Second Polish Republic through the comparison of the height of soldiers born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and entering their growth spurt during the Great War with the stature of draftees born during the Great War and growing up in the Second Republic. The objects of our investigation were born in two predominantly agricultural districts. The district of Krosno lies in the south-eastern part of nowadays Poland. In the interwar period the district was part of the Lviv voivodship. As elsewhere in the former Galicia, peasants predominated in the occupational structure of the population. But since the second half of the 19th century, thanks to the discovery of oil deposits, inhabitants of the overpopulated district obtained a possibility to earn additional income from work in mines and transportation (Fleig Frank, 2005). In contradistinction, the district of Sarny (nowadays part of Ukrainian province of Volhynia) situated in Polesie voivodship near the border with the
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Soviet Union, was purely agricultural3 . The only industrial employers in the district were quarries and a brick factory in Klesów (Me˛drzecki, 1988).
height of population which is predetermined in the first two years of life, one should expect stunting for the generation born during the Great War.
2. Stature in Poland: a brief outline
3. Materials
In the paper devoted to regional convergence in the Habsburg Monarchy, John Komlos (2007) observed that in the mid-19th century Poles and Ukrainians inhabiting Galicia were the shortest in the Austrian Empire. Since the late 1860s, Polish and Ukrainian statures started to rise dynamically and in the generation born in the late 1880s attained 165.8 cm. As a result, the gap between the stature of inhabitants of Galicia and the core lands of the Monarchy diminished by half, from 3.3 to 1.5 cm A similar trajectory of heights was observed in other parts of trifurcated Poland in the second half of the 19th century. In central Poland ruled by Russia, the average height of 21-year old inductees rose from 163 cm in the birth cohort of 1861 to 165.3 in the generation born 30 years later ski, 2007). In Great Poland (Wielkopolska) and Pomer(Kopczyn ania, which were parts of the German Empire, the growth rate in stature was similar. Polish 20-years old draftees born in the 1860s measured 165.0 cm, but in the early 1890s, they reached 167.3 cm (Nowak, 2011)4 . The contemporary history of Polish heights is well-known thanks to periodical surveys of the 19-years-old draftees organized by anthropologists from Wrocław headed by Tadeusz Bielicki since 1965 (Bielicki et al., 2003; Kołodziej et al., 2015). The average stature of young men in 1946 birth cohort was 170.5 cm (SD = 5.9, N = 21 155). The relatively tall stature of 1946 cohort may be astonishing if we take into consideration that the cohort was born just after the end of the Second World War in a ruined country, and entered school age in the Stalinist era notorious for market shortages of consumables. The 4 cm difference between the stature of 19-year-olds born in 1946 and 21-years-olds born in the 1890s provokes a question as to whether the change was abrupt and reflects the socio-political transformation that took place in Poland after 1945, or was it a part of a longer trend that started in the second half of the 19th century and continued in the Second Polish Republic. The “missing link” in the history of Polish stature mentioned in the title of the present contribution refers to the interwar period. Estimates of GDP/PC for the Second Republic look like a roller coaster. After a dramatic decline from 1739 USD in 1913 to a mere 678 in 1920, the income reached its highest level in 1929 (2 117). In 1935 it dropped to 1597 USD as a consequence of the Great Depression, but rose to 2182 in 1938 (Maddison, 2003:100; Good and Ma, 1999: 111; GUS, 2014: 550, 553)5 . Although the scale of the destructions caused by the Great War and the following armed conflicts of 1919–1921 is difficult to calculate, it’s assumed that material losses equivalent one national income (Landau and Roszkowski, 1995; Handelsman, 1936)6 . The level of the pre-war agricultural production was regained only in the mid-1920s (Grabski et al., 1936). If it’s true that the GDP/PC proxies the
The neglect of the interwar period in Polish research is paradoxical because researchers have at their disposal huge archival fonds consisting of over 24 running meters of individual measuring cards pertaining to soldiers and draftees born between 1899 and 1921. The cards were collected by the Anthropological Office operating within the Ministry of Military Affairs headed by an anthropologist, Captain Jan Mydlarski. There were two main purposes of the activities of the office. The first was mundane, the data was necessary for tailors and shoemakers sewing uniforms for the army. The second purpose was scientific, aimed at the “determination of the racial differences of the population of Poland in order to draw practical military conclusions” (Mydlarski, 1925: 530). The original research plan was very ambitious. Mydlarski intended to collect the measurements of 1% of the male population in the conscription age that made up about 140,000 observations. He planned to augment the database with observations concerning draftees and reservists from various localities. The second set of measurements was done in 1926–1930 and concerned mainly draftees. In the 1930s, the third set of research took place. Mydlarski’s team measured selected groups of conscripts, like officer cadets or draftees originating from various districts in the eastern territories of Poland. The last measurements took place in the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The summary of all the above-mentioned research activities has never been published. According to Bielicki et al. (1987), Mydlarski sent a manuscript of his book to a publishing house but the outbreak of the Second World War prevented the edition. The original manuscript was lost during the Warsaw rising of 1944. The only remainder of the work in the form of summary maps of average height district by district got through the war thanks to Jan Czekanowski and was published in 1951 and 1959 (Mydlarski, 1951; Ste˛slicka and Wanke, 1959)7. Unfortunately, we do not know how the averages were calculated, do they reflect means for the whole interwar period, or are calculated for one separate time period. After the Second World War Mydlarski performed several important functions, among them he served as the chancellor of the University of Wrocław. He died in 1956 never returning to his former research. The source material in the form of individual measurement cards survived only partly. Under the German occupation of Poland during the Second World War, the collection was kept in the basements of the Church of the Holy Cross in the center of Warsaw. Part of the documentation was moved outside the city, but the rest – we do not know how many cards - felt prey to flames during the Warsaw rising when the church became an arena of fierce fighting. The surviving cards until recently were kept in the archive of the Chair of Anthropology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław. A few years ago the documents were moved to the Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice (Sobeczko, 2014). Mydlarski published two interim reports summarizing the activities of his office. The first report described the results of the medical check-ups of 48,000 soldiers measured between 1921 and
3
In 1930 the district of Sarny was incorporated into Volhynian voivodship. Calculations are based on all inductees examined, not only on conscripted soldiers; therefore the means are free from the potential distortion due to minimum height requirement. The conscription was obligatory. The rate of evasion in the part of Poland ruled by Russia rose since the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 reaching 18% before the outbreak of the Great War. The major part of deserters were Jews who left Russia illegally, Christians constituted about 40% of all deserters ski, 2012). (Kopczyn 5 One should remember that Maddison estimated Polish GDP/PC for the territory of contemporary Poland and as a result the estimates are biased upwards. 6 Good and Ma, 1999: 136 estimate drop in manufacturing production at 65% and in output of major crops at 55%. 4
7 The publication of the maps in two separate papers mirrors the influence of political censorship in the Stalinist era. In 1951 it was not right to remind about the former eastern territories of Poland incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1944.
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(Krosno). All of them were measured in accordance with the Frankfurt plain standard. Because in the case of soldiers the minimum height requirement was 150 cm we calculated the means using the truncated regression model. We chose subjects of Christian confessions. We omitted Jews because of their shorter height and uneven share in the population of both districts ski, 2011; Kopczyn ski and Sobechowicz, 2017). Due to the (Kopczyn loss of the original reports concerning the conscription we do not know the exact number of draftees measured in Krosno and Sarny, but we can assume that we have documentation pertaining to at least half of all draftees, i.e. 846 persons in Sarny and 510 in Krosno. According to the population census of 1931, there were 1625 men born in 1914 in the Sarny district and 663 men born in 1918 in the district of Krosno (GUS, 1938a,1938b: table 14). The cards include both men suited to the military service and draftees excluded from it because of poor health, so it seems that the sample is random. 4. Results
Fig. 2. The distribution of heights of soldiers measured 1921–1923. (1900–1902 birth cohorts, N = 15,694). Source: Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice, W III-33, Jan Mydlarski’s bequest.
1923. Their average height varied between 164 and 167 cm depending on the province, with the tallest statures in the former Prussian territories, the lowest in the former Russian partition and Galicia in between. It seems that there was no significant difference in the mean height between soldiers measured in the early 1920s and the inductees checked-up just before the outbreak of the Great War, at least on the level of provinces. This may evidence that the secular trend in height was hampered in the generation born at the turn of the centuries whose growth spurt had come at the time of the Great War of 1914–1918. However, the conclusion must remain tentative because of the minimum height requirement applied by the Polish army after 1918 (150 cm) which overestimate the average height of soldiers as compared with the pre-war inductees (see footnote 4). The second factor that obscures the comparison relates to measuring techniques used by the Mydlarski’s team and the pre-Great War draft boards. Mydlarski and his collaborators applied the standard Frankfurt plain while the pre-war military physicians used to measure conscripts with lifted chins thus adding artificially some height (Mydlarski, 1936, 16). We cannot safely assume that both effects cancel each other out.8 The distribution of heights of a sample of 17,000 soldiers measured between 1921 and 1923 is shown in Fig. 2. The second report written by Mydlarski was published in 1936 and described the results of the medical check-up of 21-year old inductees born 1906–1909 and measured according to the pre-war technique (Mydlarski, 1936). The mean height irrespective of ethnicity of the 1906 birth cohort was 165.8 cm. Mydlarski noted a slight rise in height between the 1906 and 1909 birth cohorts, but the change was negligible. It seems that the stature of men born 1906–1909 shows scares of the Great War and the post-war military conflicts between Poland, Ukraine, and Bolshevik Russia which lasted up to 1921. In the following part of the present contribution, we will concentrate on the Krosno and Sarny districts. In order to assess the secular trend, we compare the heights of soldiers aged 20–22 measured between 1921 and 1923 with the stature of inductees in the same age brackets measured in 1935 (Sarny) and 1939
8 The research on the measurement cards from Jan Mydlarski’s archival bequest is still pending.
In order to glimpse the secular trend in interwar Poland, we begin our analysis from the data collected by the Anthropometric Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1955–1957 for the ski et al., 1975: 173-4). The purposes of industrial design (Wolan samples consisted of 100–200 persons for each birth year and were not standardized according to the province of birth of men measured. The samples cannot be treated as representative of the entire Second Polish Republic; nevertheless, they mirror the general trend of the intergenerational changes in height. The results are shown in Table 1. Although the representativeness of the data may be doubted, the trend seems clear. The height increment between the 1900s and 1910s birth cohorts exceeded 2 cm while in the following generations born in the Second Polish Republic the secular trend in stature slowed down, which may mirror difficult living conditions during the Great Depression and the Second World War. The course of the Polish secular trend differs from the other East European ones by its early rise and the slowdown for cohorts born in the 1920s, i.e. in the period of economic reconstruction and the growth of the GDP/PC. In order to check up the conclusions drawn from the above presented general data and in search of regional differences in the tempo of the secular trend, we compare the height of soldiers and draftees from Krosno and Sarny districts (Table 2). In the case of Sarny, the height increment was 0.7 cm, i.e. 0.5 cm/per decade. In the district of Krosno, the height increment was 1.2 cm, which corresponds to a 0.7 cm change per decade. The data from Table 2 confirms the hypothesis that the positive secular trend in height started in the generation born during the Great War and growing up in the 1920s. It seems that deficiencies in nutrition typical to war years were compensated in the later years of growth in a relatively advantageous decade of the 1920s. Draftees from Krosno born in 1918 enjoyed economic growth before their teens but entered their pubertal growth spurt during the Great Depression. Nevertheless, their growth was more dynamic than their counterparts in the district of Sarny.
Table 1 Stature of Polish adult males, rural born, birth cohorts.1900–1938. Birth cohort
Mean
1900-1909 1910-1919 1920-1929 1930-1938
165.0 167.3 167.7 167.9
Source: Anthropometric Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences 1955–1957, ski et al., 1975: 173-4. Wolan
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Table 2 Height of soldiers and inductees in Sarny and Krosno districts aged 20–22, birth cohorts 1900–1902 and 1913–1919, truncated regression model, lower limit 150 cm. District
soldiers, birth cohort 1900-1902
all inductees, birth cohort 1913-1919
inductees fit for service, birth cohort 1913-1919
Mean
SD
N
Mean
SD
N
Mean
SD
N
Sarny Krosno
166.9a 167.0b
5.07 5.59
382 314
167.6a 168.2b
5.76 6.49
845 452
168.1c 168.8c
5.43 5.98
598 431
a a b-b c-c
,
,
denotes results of t-tests p < 0.05.
5. Discussion The difference between men born in the two districts compared above can be explained either by their situation in the first years of life or by differences in the standards of living in both regions. It may be that the process of growth of draftees from Sarny region born in 1914 was hampered by the adverse war conditions in the first thousand days of their life. The district was divided by the front line in 1915 and the positional war lasted until the end of the hostilities. In the following years, Bolshevik and Polish armies crossed the territory of the district several times. The extraordinary high share of men orphaned by their fathers in the sample of soldiers (22% vs. 6% in Krosno) may support that conclusion. Nonetheless, there are more explicit differences between Sarny and Krosno samples that decided about the different pace of the secular trend in stature. In the early 1920s, the share of peasants among soldiers from the Sarny district was 96%, while in Krosno we found 70% of peasants, 13% of craftsmen and 15% of laborers who earned their living outside of agriculture. The differences in the occupational structures increased in the 1930s. In the Sarny region 86% of draftees in 1935 declared agriculture as their primary profession, the share of craftsmen was 5.4% while laborers constituted 7% of the sample. At the same time, the district of Krosno looked very different. Only 44% of draftees defined themselves as peasants, 34% lived from craft and 12% were laborers. It does not mean that the district of Krosno modernized rapidly in the interwar period. It was still largely agricultural with the 42% share of farms under 2 ha (vs. 20% in Sarny), but the agriculture could no longer maintain the growing population. As a result, the younger generation was forced to move to towns (13% town residents in the district of Krosno vs. 9% in Sarny) and look for jobs outside agriculture. Similar processes were observed in other parts of central Poland (Landau, 1938: 107–110). In the Krosno district the process was facilitated by the higher level of alphabetization than in Sarny (86% of the male population could read and write in Krosno while in Sarny only 53%, GUS, 1938a, 1938b: table 17). Although average farms were bigger in Sarny region than in Krosno, the agriculture was more intensive in the former Galicia. The average yields of the main staples, i.e. rye and potatoes in the Polesie province were lower by 13–17%% than the Polish average. In consequence, crop failures caused by adverse weather conditions resulted in food shortages and malnutrition (Tomaszewski, 1963; Me˛drzecki, 2018). It is visible in our samples of draftees. The mean BMI of inductees in Krosno – 21.66 - differs in a statistically significant way from the BMI of draftees in Sarny (21.08). The share of malnourished draftees in Sarny was 3.5% vs. 2.5% in Krosno. It is not surprising that both regions differed in child mortality. The infant mortality rate is misleading because of underregistration of infant deaths in the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, but the mortality of children aged 1–4 shows the difference. Its level in Krosno was 0.97 per 1000 population, while in Sarny it reached 2.54 in 1931 (Szturm de Sztrem, 1939). The differences enumerated above were mirrored in the evaluation of fitness for military service. Beginning from 1925 conscription authorities rated draftees according to fitness into 5
Table 3 Draftees from Sarny and Krosno districts according to fitness category. Birth cohorts 1914-1919. Category
Krosno
Share in %
Sarny
Share in %
A B C D E Sent for medical expertise Unknown Total
382 3 32 7 8 0 20 452
84.5 0.7 7.1 1.5 1.8 – 4.4 100.0
590 33 161 26 16 15 4 845
69.8 3.9 19.1 3.1 1.9 1.8 0.5 100.0
Source: Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Katowice, W III-33, Jan Mydlarski’s bequest.
categories. Category A signified fit for service, B – temporarily unable to military service because of delayed maturation or curable illnesses, C – fit for service in the reserve, D –fit for service in the reserve but without a weapons, and finally, E was granted to draftees permanently unable for military service. The distribution of draftees examined in the 1930s according to fitness for military service is shown in Table 3. Draftees from Krosno were definitely fitter for the military service than their counterparts in Sarny. Although in the early 1920s draftees were not rated according to categories, we can safely assume that men conscripted would meet conditions of the A rank. If we compare 1921–1923 soldiers with inductees of the 1930s rated as A the rise of the mean height is even more significant. In the case of Krosno the height increment is 1.9 cm (1.1 cm per decade) and in Sarny 1.2 cm (0.9 per decade). 6. Conclusion In a pending discussion among Polish historians, the economic balance sheet of the interwar period is still a controversial topic. For the elder generation of researchers, the twenty years period between two world wars allowed only to rebuild the economic potential of Polish lands to the level reached previously in 1913. Revisionists tend to shorten the time horizon and compare the levels of economic development between 1918 and 1938 thus stressing the unquestionable achievements of the Second Polish Republic, like Władysław Grabski’s monetary reform of 1924, stateled investments in Gdynia or in the central industrial region in the late 1930s (Roszkowski, 1986)9 . Nonetheless, both sides of the controversy recognize the ruinous consequences of the Great Depression (Landau and Roszkowski, 1995). The dark picture of living conditions in Poland during the Great Depression is
9 Both views can be true but the discussion had also a political underbelly. In the post-1945 Poland the Second Polish Republic was presented as an economically underdeveloped state with pervasive poverty, lack of worth noting economic achievements and perspectives for development. The argument that in 1938 Poland reached the development level of 1913 served as confirmation of this bleak picture. Against such a background the post-war communist modernization looked like a great leap forward. The shortening of the perspective by the revisionists undermines the negative assessment of the Second Polish Republic. 10 The minimum need for an adult male was set at 2,400 calories.
ski / Economics and Human Biology 34 (2019) 162–168 M. Kopczyn
corroborated by the report published under the auspices of the Committee for Nutrition of the League of Nations. The authors of the report concluded the existence of ‘large-scale malnutrition’ and estimated the average daily caloric intake at 2200 calories among the lowest income blue-collar workers and 3140 among the higher income groups (League of Nations, 1936)10 . In a recent review of the standards of living in interwar Poland, Cecylia ska concluded that ‘slow economic progress was unable Leszczyn to make a marked improvement in the standard of living, particularly due to the high rate of natural increase’ that magnified ska, 2016: 116). the already huge rural overpopulation (Leszczyn ska stresses the difference between urban and rural areas Leszczyn in favor of the cities and regional disparities disfavoring the eastern parts of the country (where both Krosno and Sarny districts were located). The present contribution shows that differences persisted even inside the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic. The Krosno district in the former Galicia stepped on the way towards modernization, while the district of Sarny together with other less developed regions still remained in the shadow of the Malthusian trap. Although the documentation used in the present essay is scarce, we can hypothesize that the secular trend towards taller stature that started in Poland in the mid—1860s continued in the interwar period on a similar pace as before the Great War. It seems also that the start towards the positive trend in stature occurred in Poland earlier than in other Central- and East European countries, i.e. in the cohort born during the Great War. At the same time, the tempo of the trend differed between regions. The problem is worth further studies especially in relation to more developed regions, like Upper Silesia and the big cities like Warsaw and Łód z. As far as the problem of timing of nutritional stresses and their consequences for the final height is concerned, the data used in the present contribution points to the significance of biological adaptive mechanisms that enable the erasure of the consequences of nutritional stresses in the early childhood during the later periods of growth in better environmental conditions. Acknowledgments The paper is a part of the research project financed by The National Science Centre, Poland, grant no. 2016/21/B/HS3/00028. I would like to thank Joerg Baten, Włodzimierz Me˛drzecki, Bartosz Ogórek, Agnieszka and Paul Siewierski and anonymous reviewers for useful comments. References Baten, J., Blum, M., 2012a. Human Heights since 1820. In: van Zanden et alia, J.L. (Ed.), How Was Life? Global Well-Being Since 1820. OECD Publishing, Paris. Baten, J., Blum, M., 2012b. Growing tall but unequal: new findings and new background evidence on anthropometric welfare in 156 countries, 1810-1989. Econ. Hist. Dev. Reg. 27 (sup1), 66–85. Baten, J., Fertig, G., 2009. Did the railway increase inequality? A micro-regional analysis of heights in the hinterland of the booming ruhr area during the late nineteenth century. J. Eur. Econ. Hist. 38 (2) . Behrman, J., 2016. growth faltering in the first thousand days after conception and catch-up growth. In: Komlos, J., Kelly, I.R. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Economics and Human Biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ski, T., Strzałko, J., 1987. Historia antropologii w polsce. Przegla˛d Bielicki, T., Krupin Antropologiczny 53 (1-2), 3–28. Bielicki, T., Szklarska, A., Kozieł, S., Welon, Z., 2003. Transformacja ustrojowa w 19-letnich me˛zczyzn, _ Polsce w swietle antropologicznych badan 23. Monografie Zakładu Antropologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk, Wrocław. Cole, T.J., 2003. The secular trend in human physical growth: a biological view. Econ. Hum. Biol. 1 (2), 161–168. Deaton, A., Arora, R., 2009. Life at the top: the benefits of height. Econ. Hum. Biol. 7 (2), 133–136.
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