Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America

Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America Americans have long been a restless, migratory people, a fact which has left a deep impression on our national folklore if not yet on the writing of American history. Though it had earlier antecedents, the faith in spatial mobility as the key to virtue and success came into full flower in the nineteenth century. With an open continent beckoning, it was natural that mobility and opportunity were linked in the popular mind with the West and the frontier. But the supply of virgin land, though vast, was not limitless. As early as 1852, brooding about the future, the Superintendent of the U.S. Census saw trouble ahead: