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"Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity": New Evidence on the Internal Migration of Americans, 1850–2000
Patricia Kelly Hall and Steven Ruggles
| The quantity and character of internal migration in the American past is a contentious historiographical issue. Over a century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner pointed to westward migration as a safety valve that profoundly affected the nature of the Republic. With the closing of the frontier, Turner predicted, the population flow to the West would decline.1 Turner's twentieth-century critics argued that the greatest American population movement was not westward expansion, but rather urbanization, which accelerated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1960s, social historians using new quantitative approaches fleshed out the critique of Turner, arguing that high migration to and between urban areas in the nineteenth century did not result in improved economic opportunity. |
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This article uses new evidence to reevaluate internal migration in the American past. Our three major findings are consistent with Turner's interpretation. First, we identify a U-shaped pattern of change: the nineteenth century had the highest overall levels of migration, followed by a decline in the first half of the twentieth century and a resurgence after World War II. Thus, by the time Turner wrote about the closing of the frontier, a dramatic decline in geographic mobility was already under way. The highest mobility in American history occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century, and there was a steady decline in interstate mobility until well into the twentieth century. Second, we show that the high levels of nineteenth-century migration resulted from long-distance westward migration to farms, whereas the high migration of the late twentieth century can be ascribed to white suburbanization and black migration to northern cities. Finally, we look briefly at the relationship between geographic mobility and social mobility and find evidence suggesting that migration may have improved economic opportunity. |
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Migration and American History | |
| In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville devoted an entire chapter to explaining "why the Americans are so restless in the midst of their prosperity." The high mobility of nineteenth-century Americans was widely remarked upon, and it was usually explained by the plentiful availability of land. Joseph Kennedy, superintendent of the census of 1850, regarded high migration as an "unfavorable trait in our national character." But Kennedy predicted that the mobility would not last: once the Plains had been settled and the cheap land was gone, Americans would settle down and "the inhabitants of each state would become comparatively stationary."2 |
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Four decades later, Frederick Jackson Turner began his famous essay by quoting another superintendent of the census. Because of the settlement of the interior of the country, the 1890 census showed for the first time that the frontier line no longer existed. Turner argued that "movement has been [the] dominant fact" of the American past, but the era of westward expansion was ending: "the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Turner's frontier thesis included four specific hypotheses about migration: first, the nineteenth century was the greatest period of migration in American history; second, the magnet for migration was the economic opportunity offered by the availability of agricultural land on the ever-moving western frontier; third, those agricultural opportunities provided a hopeful alternative for the surplus labor supply crowding the urban centers of the East; and finally, with the closing of the frontier, American migration would lose its force.3 |
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