Saturday, June 1, 2013

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

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  • 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.
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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.

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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.


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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).
 
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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
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 Farm Service Administration poster, 1930s.

Friday, May 31, 2013

CPSC - Fred Meyer Recalls “Chicken Dance” Easter Chicks Due to Hearing Damage Hazard

CPSC - Fred Meyer Recalls “Chicken Dance” Easter Chicks Due to Hearing Damage Hazard

Okay, this isn't even vaguely related to the main topic of this blog, but nonetheless, I can't help but note that some new stories are  almost too weird to be true, such as this one.

Wardewll Field. Casper's second airport.


Photograph courtesy of Wyoming State Archives.

Neat photograph of the big hanger at Wardwell Field, Casper's second airport (many believe it was the first, but a field in what is now Evansville was actually the first).  Today, the hanger is used by a boat vendor, and the runways are streets for Bar Nunn.

Interesting to see it actually in use, with some fairly substantial aircraft.  This airfield continued to serve Casper until either the late 1940s or the early 1950s, at which time the government granted the airfield built during World War Two to the county, which is now the Natrona County International Airport.  The area depicted above still has an airfield in the vicinity, however, that being Hartford Field, which is a small private airfield just across the  highway.

Today In Wyoming's History: President Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 Horseback Travel Route Field Trip | WyoHistory.org

Today In Wyoming's History: President Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 Horseback Travel Route Field Trip | WyoHistory.org

This route would actually be fairly doable today.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Terrorism. Always with us.


September 16, 1920. Wall Street.  A horse drawn wagon laden with explosives blew up blew up at noon, killing 38 and injuring 143. Believed to be the work of Italian anarchists, it has never been officially solved.  It was the biggest such attack in the country's history. But even at that, it was only ten years following another such act.

Cartoon depicting bombers and organized labor in teh "flareback" of the Los Angeles Times bombing.

That act was the 1910 bombing of the Los Angeles Times by members of an iron workers union.  They were caught and convicted.  The bombs were timed to go off when nobody would have been in the building, but a faulty primer and a late addition of the paper sent the bomb off early, killing 21 and wounding 100.


Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Trailing Posts and Epilogs

Some may note that there are some posts that seem to revive and get re-posted from time to time. Why is that?


Well, for the most part, they fit into two categories, trailing post and posts with epilogs.


Trailing posts are posts that were designed to be updated as additional information comes in. For example, there's the They Had Been Lawyers post.  That tread will be updated as additional people are discovered to belong in the list.  Indeed, that's why it was updated just today.  The Working With Animals post is also in this category, and it's been re-posted several times as a result.


Working With Animals also has an epilog, meaning nothing more than that there was something topical added to it after it was posted.  Originally, I just did new posts when that occured, but this seemed a better route, as the old content often was just as relevant and added to what otherwise would have been the epilog.  Sometimes, the epilog wasn't noteworthy enough to justify a new posts, but did otherwise add to the original post.  The Novelty of the Normal is another example of this.  So is the Peculiarized Violence thread, and quite a few others.


I will not, of course, being doing this to every thread, so people do not need to fear that.  Even at that, however, a few old posts just get re-posted for one reason or another.  I know that this isn't the blog norm, but oh well.  Author's prerogative.


As I update entries, from here on out, I will post a date on the updated item, so that anyone following the posts doesn't have to re-read the entire thing, which I am sure would preclude them from doing it.