Mobility

Mobility. The concept of mobility includes both geographic and social components.Geographical mobility refers to any change of residence, including migration, defined in the United States as movement across county lines. Social mobility entails changes in social position, usually focusing on upward (or, less frequently, downward) movement in social class. Much work on geographical mobility posits a relationship between these two processes. The labor‐mobility model, dominant in migration research, suggests that people flow from areas of few economic opportunities to areas with surplus opportunities. Thus, the model suggests, geographical movement typically produces social mobility, as people move to new locations with better jobs.

American society has historically valued both types of mobility. The nation's founders had moved, or had ancestors who had moved, from the “Old World,” setting the tone for a restless, highly mobile society. Americans continued moving, searching for better conditions. Some estimates suggest that as much as half the population moved during each decade of the nineteenth century. While these estimates may be high, census data show that about one‐fourth of the mid‐nineteenth‐century population lived outside its state of birth. Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America wrote eloquently of Americans’ love for pulling up stakes and moving on.

The Era of Western Migration.

First settling along the Atlantic coast, the European newcomers quickly looked westward. Even before the Revolutionary War, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia experienced net out‐migration of native‐born men of militia service age. The British Proclamation of 1763 restricted settlements to the east of the Appalachian Mountains; hence, colonists from the Middle Atlantic states moved down the mountains’ eastern side as far as Georgia. Northern colonists moved into upper New England and upstate New York. Following independence, Americans, including those from southern states, spread westward. The 1790 census reported about half a million people living west of the original thirteen states. By 1860, after a decade during which the population center moved a greater distance west than during any other decade between 1790 and 1930, over half the population, about sixteen million people, lived west of the Appalachians.

Considering it their “Manifest Destiny” to settle the continent, Americans followed Horace Greeley's advice, “Go west, young man,” and sought opportunities in the vast interior, which Frederick Jackson Turner described in The Frontier in American History (1920). As explorers, trappers, and traders blazed trails, more permanent settlers followed. Daniel Boone forged a trail through the Cumberland Gap in 1775, and settlers followed him to Kentucky, Tennessee, and beyond. The Lewis and Clark Expedition mapped a route for fur traders and, by the 1840s, settlers bound for Oregon and California. Discovery of gold and silver stimulated further mobility, most notably the 1849 California gold rush. Although prospectors moved first, support and service personnel followed rapidly. While some boom towns became ghost towns when the ore was exhausted, others evolved into stable communities, attracting even more settlers. About the same time (1847), Mormons seeking freedom from religious persecution arrived in Utah, ending a trek that originated in New York with brief stays in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois.

Farther south, by 1824, more than two thousand settlers had moved into Texas despite the Mexican government's restrictions on immigration. The Mexican authorities did allow movement along what would become the Santa Fe Trail, demonstrating that heavy wagons could make the journey across the plains and the mountains, and helping refute the view of the West as an inhospitable Great American Desert. Back East, the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, provided a northern route for movement of goods and people into the Middle West.

Land availability figured prominently in attracting settlers. The 1862 Homestead Act provided a land parcel to any citizen who paid a small fee and agreed to cultivate the land for five years. In 1866, another Homestead Act provided land in the Southwest for freed slaves. While some African Americans took advantage of this opportunity, neither act stimulated a land rush comparable to the 1899 opening of the Oklahoma territory. Not all agreed on opening these lands. Industrialists opposed the idea because they felt it would decrease their factories’ labor supply. Additionally, railroads gained control of substantial land in an attempt to control western development.

Westward settlers faced many hardships from the social and physical environment. Whites fought frequent wars and skirmishes through the later nineteenth century as they pushed into Native Americans’ lands. Treaties forced Indians to move westward into small reservations with poor environments and few opportunities, reversing the typical pattern of migration producing upward mobility. Mastery of the physical environment also proved problematic. In the 1880s, settlers on the Great Plains faced devastating drought. As recently as the 1930s, drought conditions (worsened by destructive agricultural practices) drove many Dust Bowl farmers from their lands. For women, as diaries and letters reveal, the quest for economic mobility through westward migration often meant hardship on the trail, unremitting labor on the new farm, and a gnawing sense of isolation.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, settlers, including lower‐class laborers, moved to fill the Great Plains. The agricultural communities had high mobility rates as settlers continually sought better conditions on other farms or in the towns developing along the railroads and other transportation routes. Millions of farmers moved to Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana between 1870 and 1890, leading the director of the census at the century's end to note the closing of the frontier.

Mobility in Industrial and Post–Industrial America.

The western frontier's closing coincided with accelerated manufacturing growth and increased rural‐to‐urban migration. The appeal of industrial and, later, service jobs replaced land as migration's driving force. The textile industry, first in New England and later in the South, created opportunities for social mobility in early industrial cities. Textile factories attracted women as well as men, although women typically quit their jobs when they married. Agricultural mechanization, improved transportation systems, and the lure of bright lights and urban culture all contributed to the flow of Americans cityward. In 1790, about 5 percent of the population lived in urban places. By the Civil War, the total had risen to about 20 percent. By 1920, a majority was urbanized, including many African Americans who moved to cities in the North and South during World War I. (The 1920 census reported an increase of 695,000 southern‐born blacks in the North.) Black migration to cities continued through the 1920s and surged again during World War II. By the late 1990s, about three‐fourths of all Americans lived in urban areas.

As cities filled, often with immigrants, minorities, and the poor, many who could afford it moved to the surrounding suburbs. While suburbanization began earlier, it accelerated during the 1950s, accounting for approximately 80 percent of metropolitan growth during this decade. By 1970, more people lived in suburbs than in cities or rural areas. Suburbs offered affordable family housing during the post–World War II baby boom, yet with access to cities’ jobs and cultural opportunities. The thriving economy, expanding interstate highway system, lower tax rate, and home‐building standardization promoted suburban movement. Initially suburbanization was a mainly white phenomenon, with African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and other minorities excluded by either economic considerations or overt discrimination. As the twentieth century wore on, suburbs attracted many blacks and other minorities, but many suburban neighborhoods continued to be highly stratified along lines of race, ethnicity, and social class.

During the 1970s, countering the earlier rural‐to‐urban pattern, nonmetropolitan areas grew faster than metropolitan areas. Movement to nonmetropolitan areas occurred for many of the same reasons as the suburban migration. Improved transportation and communication made it possible to move farther away from the city and still take advantage of opportunities there. Additionally, many businesses and services relocated to nonmetropolitan areas. After dipping in the 1980s, the movement to nonmetropolitan areas resumed in the 1990s.

Following Peter Rossi's Why Families Move (1955, 1980), much research on mobility has suggested that families move as units after careful balancings of demographic, economic, and psychological calculations. Upon marriage, Rossi found, the wife was expected to give up her job and move with her husband. Recent research suggests changes in this view, however, particularly as more women have careers, limiting their desire to follow their husbands to new locations.

Mobility among regions has played an important role in U.S. development. The later twentieth century saw substantial population shifts to the so‐called Sunbelt. Older, industrial areas of the Northeast and Midwest lost population as the South attracted migrants, especially those of the educated middle class, because of its expanding economy, natural resources, favorable climate, lower taxes, and more leisure opportunities. Businesses were attracted by the lower cost of (nonunionized) labor. From the 1970s on, African Americans returned to the South in increasing numbers because of both economic opportunities and a perceived decline in racial discrimination. This migration southward also included retirees seeking a moderate climate, not necessarily social mobility. These recent trends exemplify the degree to which not simply a desire for better economic opportunity, but a combination of economic, cultural, and social factors, along with personal “lifestyle” choices, shaped patterns of geographic mobility at the close of the twentieth century.
See also Agriculture; Alger, Horatio; Census, Federal; Expansionism; Franklin, Benjamin; Gold Rushes; Immigrant Labor; Immigration; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian Wars; Labor Markets; Mormonism; Race and Ethnicity; Racism; Urbanization; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Simon S. Kuznets and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, eds., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870–1950, 3 vols. 1957–1964.
Stephen Thernstrom , Progress and Poverty: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth‐Century City, 1964.
Peter M. Blau and and Otis Dudley Duncan , The American Occupational Structure, 1967.
Jeanne C. Biggar , The Sunning of America: Migration to the Sunbelt, Population Bulletin 34, no. 1 (1979).
Daniel M. Johnson and and Rex R. Campbell , Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic History, 1981.
Larry Long , Migration and Residential Mobility in the United States, 1988.
David R. Gerhan and and Robert V. Wells , compilers, A Retrospective Bibliography of American Demographic History from Colonial Times to 1983, 1989.
William H. Frey , Metropolitan America: Beyond the Transition, Population Bulletin 45, no. 2 (1990).
Patricia Gober , Americans on the Move, Population Bulletin 48, no. 3 (1993).

Robert H. Freymeyer