"Restless in the midst of their prosperity": New evidence on the internal migration of Americans, 1850-2000

Journal of American History

Volumn 91, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 829-845

  Hall, Patricia Kelly ^a   Ruggles, Steven ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41049111915     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3662857     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Frederick Jackson Turner, speech before the American Historical Association, July 12, 1893, in Proceedings of the Forty-first Annual Meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (Madison, 1894), 79-112.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II (New York, 1994), esp. 136;
3. Joseph Kennedy, Report of the Superintendent of the Census for December 1, 1852 (Washington, 1853), 15
4. quoted by Everett S. Lee, "Migration in Relation to Education, Intellect, and Social Structure," Population Index, 36 (Oct.-Dec. 1970), 437-44, esp. 437.
5. Turner, speech before the American Historical Association, 112. Central to Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis was the contrast of the socially fluid frontier with the closed social structure of the industrial East. Much of the early critique of Turner's thesis focused on his conception of the western frontier as the locus of the democratization and individual mobility that defined the character of Americans. See Charles A. Beard, "The Frontier in American History," New Republic, Feb. 16, 1921, pp. 349-50.
6. On Turner's early critics, see Allan G. Bogue, "Frederick Jackson Turner Reconsidered," History Teacher, 27 (Feb. 1994), 195-221.
7. For the argument that Turner was right about the central role of migration but wrong in assigning the defining power to the destination-the frontier-rather than to migration itself, see Everett S. Lee, "The Turner Thesis Reexamined," American Quarterly, 13 (Spring 1961), 77-83.
8. One of the first works to document the massive movement of Americans into cities was Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century; A Study in Statistics (New York, 1899).
9. On cities as magnets for surplus farm labor, see Fred A. Shannon, "A Post-mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory," Agricultural History, 19 (Jan. 1945), 31-37.
10. C. Warren Thornthwaite, Internal Migration in the United States (Philadelphia, 1934), 1-4, 32;
11. Conrad Taeuber and Irene B. Taeuber, The Changing Population of the United States (New York, 1958), 106-11.
12. In 1964 more sophisticated migration estimates broken down by age were published. Like the raw Census Bureau estimates, they showed little long-term trend in net displacement for the white population and gave no hint that migration was especially high in the nineteenth century. Those estimates have limitations: Because they measure net displacement, in-migration and out-migration cancel one another out. The measures are also highly sensitive to errors in mortality estimates and changes in the completeness of census enumerations. Our estimates of both mortality and census underenumeration have since been substantively revised. See Hope T. Eldridge and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Demographic Analyses and Interrelations, vol. Ill of Population Redistribution and Economic Growth: United States, 1870-1950, ed. Simon Smith Kuznets and Dorothy Swaine Thomas (Philadelphia, 1964).
13. On revised estimates of mortality and underenumeration, see, for example, James David Hacker, "The Human Cost of War: White Population in the United States, 1850-1880" (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1999);
14. and Michael R. Haines, "Estimated Life Tables for the United States, 1850-1910," Historical Methods, 31 (Fall 1998), 149-69.
15. James C. Malin, "The Turnover of Farm Population in Kansas," Kansas Historical Quarterly, 4 (Nov. 1935), 339-72;
16. Merle E. Curti, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier Community (Stanford, 1959);
17. Mildred Throne, "A Population Study of an Iowa County in 1850," Iowa Journal of History, 57 (Oct. 1959), 305-30;
18. Peter J. Coleman, "Restless Grant County: Americans on the Move," Wisconsin Magazine of History, 46 (Autumn 1962), 16-20;
19. Richard Steckel, "Household Migration and Rural Settlement in the United States, 1850-1860," Explorations in Economic History, 26 (April 1989), 190-218;
20. David W. Galenson and Clayne L. Pope, "Economic and Geographic Mobility on the Farming Frontier: Evidence from Appanoose County, Iowa, 1850-1870," Journal of Economic History, 49 (Sept. 1989), 635-56.
21. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), esp. 31;
22. Stuart Blumin, "Mobility and Change in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia," in Nineteenth-Century Cities, ed. Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett (New Haven, 1969), 165-208;
23. Peter R. Knights, The plain People of Boston, 1830-1860: A Study in City Growth (New York, 1971);
24. John Modell, "Peopling of a Working-Class Ward: Reading, Pennsylvania, 1850," Journal of Social History, 5 (Fall 1971), 71-96;
25. Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973);
26. Howard M. Gitelman, Workingmen of Waltham: Mobility in American Urban Industrial Development, 1850-1890 (Baltimore, 1974);
27. Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, "Migration and the Social Order in Erie County, New York, 1855," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (Spring 1978), 669-701;
28. Laurence Glasco, "Migration and Adjustment in the Nineteenth-Century City: Occupation, Property, and Household Structure of Native-Born Whites, Buffalo, New York, 1855," in Family and Population in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Tamara Haraven and Maris Vinovskis (Princeton, 1978), 154-78;
29. Clyde Griffin and Sally Griffin, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth Century Poughkeepsie (Cambridge, Mass., 1978);
30. Thomas Dublin, "Rural-Urban Migrants in Industrial New England: The Case of Lynn, Massachusetts, in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Journal of American History, 73 (Dec. 1986), 623-44.
31. Two studies have attempted national-level record linkage: Avery M. Guest, "Notes from the National Panel Study: Linkage and Migration in the Late Nineteenth Century," Historical Methods, 20 (Spring 1987), 63-77;
32. and Joseph P. Ferrie, Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States, 1840-1860 (New York, 1999).
33. See David P. Davenport, "Tracing Rural New York's Out-Migrants, 1855-1860," Historical Methods, 17 (Spring 1984), 59-67;
34. and David P. Davenport, "Duration of Residence in the Census of New York State," ibid., 18 (Winter 1985), 5-12.
35. On census underenumeration and other problems with historical migration data, see John W. Adams and Alice Bee Kasakoff, "Estimates of Census Underenumeration Based on Genealogies," Social Science History, 15 (Winter 1991), 527-43;
36. Peter R. Knights, "Potholes in the Road of Improvement? Estimating Census Underenumeration by Longitudinal Tracing: U.S. Censuses, 1850-1880," ibid., 517-26;
37. Stephan Thern-strom and Peter R. Knights, "Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (Autumn 1970), 7-35;
38. and Donald H. Par-kerson, "How Mobile Were Nineteenth-Century Americans?," Historical Methods, 15 (Summer 1982), 99-110.
39. Steven Ruggles et al., Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0, 2004 http://ipums.org (July 12, 2004). Samuel Preston of the University of Pennsylvania created the original sample for 1910, and Halliman Winsborough of the University of Wisconsin oversaw creation of the samples for 1940 and 1950. No microdata are available for 1890 because the original enumeration sheets were lost in a fire before they could be microfilmed. The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) project has nearly completed a sample for 1930.
40. On the underestimation problems associated with a methodology that takes account only of state of birth and state of residence, see Everett S. Lee et al., Methodological Considerations and Reference Tables, vol. I of Popula-tion Redistribution and Economic Growth, ed. Kuznets and Thomas (Philadelphia, 1957), 58-60.
41. Taeuber and Taeuber, Changing Population of the United States, 109.
42. s is the proportion of the standard population born in states of size s. The standard distribution of state sizes is the average of the size distribution of birthplaces for the native-born across all census years.
43. The concentration of young adults among those migrating is well known; see Donald J. Bogue, Principles of Demography (New York, 1969), 762-64;
44. and P. Neal Ritchey, "Explanations of Migration," Annual Review of Sociology, 2 (1976), 363-404. From 1940 onward, the census provides information on residence five years ago, and those data confirm that migration is most common among those in their twenties and thirties. For example, our analysis of IPUMS data shows that 60.6% of persons who migrated across state lines between 1935 and 1940 were aged 20-39. The more limited statistics available for nineteenth-century migration also show the twenties and thirties to be the ages with the highest proportion of migrants.
45. See, for example, Curti, Making of an American Community; Katz, Doucet, and Stern, "Migration and the Social Order in Erie County," 669-701; Dublin, "Rural-Urban Migrants in Industrial New England"; and Steckel, "Household Migration and Rural Settlement."
46. According to the theory, as the occupational choices open to women changed with industrialization and modernization, the migration differentials between men and women decreased. See Henry S. Shiyock Jr. and Hope Tisdale Eldridge, "Internal Migration in Peace and War," American Sociological Review, 12 (Feb. 1947), 27-39;
47. Larry A. Sjaastad, "The Costs and Returns of Human Migration," Journal of Political Economy, 70 (Oct. 1962), 80-93;
48. Everett S. Lee, "A Theory of Migration," Demography, 3 (no. 1, 1966), 47-57;
49. Ritchey, "Explanations of Migration"; Steven H. Sandell, "Women and the Economics of Family Migration," Review of Economics and Statistics, 59 (Nov. 1977), 406-14;
50. Jacob Mincer, "Family Migration Decisions," Journal of Political Economy, 86 (Oct. 1978), 749-73;
51. Dov Friedlander and Eliahu Ben Moshe, "Occupation, Migration, Sex Ratios, and Nuptiality in Nineteenth Century English Communities: A Model of Relationships," Demography, 23 (Feb. 1986), 1-12;
52. and Franklin D. Wilson, "Aspects of Migration in an Advanced Industrial Society," American Sociological Review, 53 (Feb. 1988), 113-26.
53. The overall chronological pattern of migration is slightly different in figures 5 through 8 than in figures 2 and 3, since the statistics on migration flows have not been standardized to control for changes in the size distribution of states; see note 13.
54. The definitions of each type of destination vary slightly across censuses; see the IPUMS variable descriptions (for farm, urban, and metro for a full discussion of the changes: Ruggles et al., integrated Public Use Microdata Series. In data from 1940 onward, not all destination types are available in all census years. Where information was not available, the destination of migrants was estimated through interpolation. As a result, the estimates for 1940-2000 should be regarded as approximations. In 1870 and 1880, more black migrants are classified in rural non-farm places than on farms, but the great majority were employed as agricultural laborers. Most of those people probably resided on plantations-often in the quarters they had occupied before abolition-but the census does not provide sufficient information to classify their places of residence as farms.
55. William H. Frey, "Black In-Migration, White Flight, and the Changing Economic Base of the Central City," American Journal of Sociology, 85 (May 1980), 1396-1417.
56. Publications using IPUMS data to analyze migration out of the South include James N. Gregory, "The Southern Diaspora and the Urban Dispossessed: Demonstrating the Census Public Use Microdata Samples," Journal of American History, 82 (June 1995), 111-34;
57. Stewart E. Tolnay, "Migration Experience and Family Patterns in the 'Promised Land,'" Journal of Family History, 23 (Jan-1998), 68-89;
58. Thomas N. Maloney, "Migration and Economic Opportunity in the 1910s: New Evidence on African-American Occupational Mobility in the North," Explorations in Economic History, 38 Jan. 2001), 147-65;
59. Trent Alexander, "Great Migrations: Race and Community in the Southern Exodus, 1920-70" (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2001);
60. and Jason Digman, "Which Way to the Promised Land? Changing Patterns in Southern Migration, 1865 to 1920" (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Chicago, 2001).
61. White-collar workers are those in occupations classified as professional, technical, managerial, clerical, and sales in the 1950 U.S. Census Bureau classification, except for hucksters, peddlers, and newsboys, who are classified as unskilled. The occupations of craftsmen, artisans, and operatives are designated as skilled, and those of service workers and laborers as unskilled. U.S. Census Bureau, Alphabetic Index of Occupations and Industries: 1950 (Washington, 1950).
62. Murray Kane, "Some Considerations on the Safety Valve Doctrine," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 23 (Sept. 1936), 169-88;
63. Clarence H. Danhof, "Economic Validity of the Safety-Valve Doctrine," Journal of Economic History, 1 (Dec. 1941), 96-106.
64. Larry H. Long, "Migration Differentials by Education and Occupation: Trends and Variations," Demography, 10 (May 1973), 243-58;
65. Bogue, Principles of Demography, 769-70;
66. Stanley Lieberson, "Selective Migration from the South: A Historical View," in The Demography of Racial and Ethnic Groups, ed. Frank D. Bean and W. Parker Frisbie (New York, 1978), 119-41;
67. Stewart E. Tolnay, "Educational Selection in the Migration of Southern Blacks, 1880-1990," Social Forces, 77 (Dec. 1998), 487-514;
68. Stewart E. Tolnay, "The Great Migration Gets Underway: A Comparison of Black Southern Migrants and Nonmigrants in the North, 1920," Social Science Quarterly, 82 (June 2001), 235-52.
69. Joseph P. Ferrie, "Migration to the Frontier in Mid-Nineteenth Century America: A Reexamination of Turner's 'Safety Valve,'" paper delivered at the World Congress of Cliometrics, Munich, Germany, July 1997 http://www.faculry.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/ferrie/papers/munich.pdf (July 12, 2004);
70. Joseph P. Ferrie, "Longitudinal Data for the Analysis of Mobility in the U.S., 1850-1930," paper delivered at the conference "Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Historical Data: Intersections and Opportunities," sponsored by the International Microdata Access Group, Montreal, Nov. 10-11, 2003 http://www.nappdata.org/imagpapers/ferrie.pdf (July 12, 2004). Building on Ferrie's work, Steven Ruggles is developing a series of large-scale representative samples of linked nineteenth-century censuses, which will provide a tool for investigating such issues; see Steven Ruggles, "Linking Historical Censuses: A New Approach," paper delivered at the conference "Longitudinal and Cross-Sectional Historical Data," ibid.
71. Steven Ruggles, "Sample Designs and Sampling Errors," Historical Methods, 28 (Winter 1995), 40-46.