Urban and Rural in North American just before World War One.

The WWI history list has been having a fascinating discussion regarding urban and rural populations in North American just before World War One.  This started off as a discussion on the health of Dominion troops at the time of their enlistment. That's an interesting topic in and of itself, but what I have been finding really fascinating is the discussion of the percentage of the population that was "urban" or "rural" in North America.  

This came up in the context of malnourishment of British and Canadian enlistees in the armed forces in World War One. What I think was ultimately revealed is that a large number of Canadian volunteers hailed from the United Kingdom, and therefore made the statistics somewhat unreliable.  I'm not posting this here for that story, however, although it is interesting. Rather, I'm posting it because of what some of these threads reveal about the urban and rural makeup of North America in the first half of the 20th Century.

 Farm Service Administration poster, 1930s.

Some interesting items:

Independent subsistence farming is not always easy, even in the best of times. 

With a rapidly-growing, just-industrializing population it can be even worse, since lots of people are compelled to farm marginal land, as the best land is already long taken. Surpluses frequently can't be moved to areas of drought or failed crops because the transportation infrastructure is poorly developed, and the social welfare "safety net" systems are usually fragmented and localized. 

The newly industrializing sector receives the attention and financial support, while those "underachieving hillbilly grubbers" are somewhat contemptuously ignored. 

In the cities where industry is beginning to take off, the workers still have little collective clout to bargain for better working conditions and pay. Rumors of jobs bring in more people from the countryside than there is work to support them. And again, large scale welfare systems simply don't exist to take care of those without jobs.

As mechanized agriculture begins, the price of grain tends to fall, and areas at the edges of the transport infrastructure are no longer worth shipping from, so small farmers lose much of the little cash income they may have previously earned. That money was once the "cushion" that tided them over through tough times and failed crops; food preservation is relatively undeveloped, so that this years' surplus can't just be stored indefinitely against future need.

There are lots of reasons why people are malnourished in societies just transitioning between agricultural and industrial.

V/R

James

______________________________________________________________________________

• According to the 1911 Census, Canada's population was 54% rural and 46% urban, although the definition of urban was living in any size town or city. The equivalent 1901 census figures were 62% rural and 38% urban, indicating Canada was urbanizing.
• According to a survey of attestation papers by the Directorate of History, the average height of the Canadian soldier in the First World War was 5' 4" and the majority of serving soldiers were townsmen and not from the country.
• Canada’s net output per capita of manufactured goods was only exceeded by Belgium, the US, and the UK, so Canada was not only rapidly urbanizing it was also industrializing.

Looks like Canada and the U.S, were tracing very similar paths toward urbanization and industrialization, as one would expect.

I think it fairly intuitive that significantly more than half of recruits would come from urban areas, even though only half the population lived in such areas. This was a time of very rapid urbanization; people were flocking to the cities faster than jobs were being created for them (a theme common to all urbanizing/industrializing nations). Landless, jobless men with no immediate prospects are an ideal recruiting pool.

V/R

James

 Emblem Wyoming, late 1930s.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you (saves me from having to dig those up for Canada, for one thing).

54% rural is a pretty large number, particularly if we consider that “urban” does not mean “living in big city”, but any town.  If we take the population of agriculturally based towns, of which there were a great number before large scale mechanization of agriculture, that’s a very large percentage of the population that most people would regard as rural in the casual sense.

Very interesting discussion, by the way.

Cattle buyers, Denver stockyards, late 1930s.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Hi James, quite correct, I was too quick to use unsupported memory.  As Bill's stats indicate, Canada at least was only approaching parity in terms of rural / urban spit in 1914. 
However I stand by my main point that the majority (i'll eschew adjectives) of enlistment was from the urban population.  In support Bill has already indicated that his source supports this for Canada, and whilst the Stats for the AIF that I have seen don't provide an explicit urban / rural split, the breakdown by trades gives those classified as 'Country callings' as 17.36% of the total.

cheers

Pete

 Cattle buyers, Denver stockyards, late 1930s.

_________________________________________________________________________________

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, for Australia the proportion of urban dwellers (major cities and regional centres) for 1911 was 43.55%.  By 1921 it was 49.7% and by 1933 it was 53.73% (the latter was no doubt amplified by the Depression and lower than normal rainfull leading to full drought in the easter states that went from 1937 to 1947 (ending with the first post war Ashes Series in Australia!)  causing many to walk off the land).
 

________________________________________________________________________________

The break-even point between rural and urban populations was reached in the U.S only between 1910 and 1920. 

According to the Census Bureau, 45.6% of Americans were urban dwellers in 1910; by 1920 it was 51.2%.

It seems HIGHLY implausible that the "vast majority" of either Australia's or Canada's population was urban in 1914!

V/R

James

 ________________________________________________________________________________

 Farm Service Administration poster, 1930s.