granting any actual settler 160 acres (320 for married couples) at a nominal fee of $18 provided they lived on the land for five years. Eventually, about 270 million acres of land were distributed to 1.6 million people under this law.47 Distribution was not immediate, however: homestead claims did not peak until 1910, and actual title transfers peaked in 1913.
Between 1862 and 1900, only 80 million acres of land were granted under the Homestead Act. At 160 acres per claim, they were enough for 500,000 people. But since many claims were filed by married couples, far fewer families were probably represented. Rural populations grew by 20 million people during that period, which (at the then-average family size of 5.5 people) represent about 3.6 million families. The Homestead Act provided land for just 7 to 14 percent of those families.
During the 19th century, the United States acquired vast amounts of land, including the Louisiana Purchase, more than half of Mexico, the Oregon Territory, and Alaska. Yet most of that land remained unavailable or unaffordable to many settlers until the 1862 Homestead Act. Even the Homestead Act was insufficient since the 320 acres of land that could be granted to a married couple was too little to make a living in the arid West, where most of that land was located.
Through the combined effects of the Homestead Act, the Donation Land Claims Act, and other laws, Congress eventually managed to get several hundred million acres of once-federal lands into the hands of settlers with secure titles. Economist de Soto argues that “the result was an integrated property market that fueled the United States’ explosive economic growth thereafter.”48 That’s probably a stretch. Although those laws gave nearly two out of three farmers secure title to their land by 1890, urban home- and landownership rates remained low through the end of the 19th century. Yet most of the nation’s economic growth after 1840 took place in cities, not in agricultural areas. What can be stated with greater certainty is that secure title to farms contributed to agricultural productivity in the late 19th century, while increased urban homeownership contributed to small-business growth in the latter half of the 20th century.
In sum, it appears likely that homeownership and farm-ownership rates were something less than 40 percent in 1800, or no more than the rate recorded by the 1890 census. From there, historians agree that rates declined for at least the first half of the 19th century.49 That decline occurred both because of the difficulty farmers had in obtaining title to lands acquired by the federal government and because the nation’s growing cities increasingly housed low-paid working-class employees who could not initially afford to own their own homes.
Though a majority of Americans continued to live in rural areas until around World War I, American cities began rapidly growing after 1840. From 1790 to 1840, the urban share of the American population had barely doubled, from slightly less than 5 percent to slightly more than 10 percent. In 1840, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston—still the nation’s three largest urban areas when “suburbs” such as North Liberties and Charlestown are included— housed just 4 percent of the population, and only 20 cities had more than 20,000 people. Still, the 1840 census was the first to find more than 100 communities of more than 2,500 people each—there were just 90 in 1830.
After 1840, the urban share of the nation’s population began growing by about 5 percent per decade, so that it nearly doubled to 20 percent by 1860, doubled again to 40 percent by 1900, and doubled again to nearly 80 percent by 2000 (see Figure 3.1). This growth increasingly made urban homeownership rates the heart of our story.
New transportation technologies—the steamboat after 1810, the canal after 1820, and most importantly the railroad after 1830— stimulated the explosive growth of the cities. By greatly reducing the costs of moving raw materials to factories and finished goods to consumers, these new forms of transportation increased industrial production and the demand for workers in urban areas.
If transport and industry provided the jobs, immigration provided many of the employees and their families who made up the growing populations of the nation’s larger cities. Immigration grew from under 10,000 people per year before 1825 to more than 100,000 people per year in 1842. From 1840 through 1900, immigrants made up 30 percent of the population growth of the United States, and many of those immigrants settled in industrial cities, such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh.
The Middle-Class/Working-Class Split
The advent of large corporations, such as railroads, textile manufacturers, and steelmakers, created a demand for two types of employees: managers and laborers. Management required special skills and, often, personality traits, so good managers were paid a premium. Laborers were viewed as interchangeable and were generally paid much less. Although management jobs tended to go to native-born Americans with better educations, immigrants mainly took the laborer jobs. The managers became the middle class, while laborers became the working class.
These distinctions were largely unknown before the 19th century. The first recorded use of the term “working class” was in an 1813 book titled A New View of Society, which divided people into “poor,” “working class without property,” “working class with property,” and higher classes that employed the working classes.1 The term “middle class” is older, its earlier meaning referring to traders and merchants who were between the aristocracy and peasants. Its modern usage of referring to professionals and managers has been traced to an English statistician named T. H. C. Stevenson, who worked for the Registrar-General—roughly the British equivalent of the Census Bureau—in his analysis of Britain’s 1911 census.2
Cultural differences between the middle and working classes go well beyond differences in income, which greatly narrowed in the second half of the 20th century. Qualifying for a management job generally requires more education, and that advanced education helps shape people’s tastes in food, recreation, entertainment, and lifestyles in general.
These cultural differences go back many decades. An analysis of 19th-century literature, for example, found that working-class fiction, reflecting the realities of working-class lives, tended to be more violent and more overtly sexual than middle-class fiction.3 Cultural differences in the 19th century were particularly exacerbated by the high percentage of immigrants—often immigrants from countries culturally much different from the Anglo-Americans who made up most of the native-born population. Irish immigration peaked in the 1840s and 1850s; German immigration came in waves that successively peaked in the early 1850s, early 1870s, and early 1880s; Italian and eastern European immigration became significant in the 1890s and peaked in the 1900s–1910s.4 These waves of immigration brought in people who were increasingly alien to the Anglo culture that dominated the United States.
Imagine a Sunday summer afternoon in late 19th-century Chicago or Pittsburgh where a working-class family lives next door to a middle-class family. On the front porch, the working-class father plays a banjo and the family sings songs from their native land in their native language, accompanied by clucking chickens and barking dogs. Meanwhile, the middle-class family gathers around the piano indoors. The working-class mother is cooking a meal liberally laced with garlic, strong cheeses, and other odiferous ingredients. The middle-class family eats food that is even blander than English food is noted for today. Boarders come and go in the working-class house along with customers of the in-home sewing business; the only visitors to the middle-class house are as prim as its residents. The potential for conflicts is obvious.
The Immigrant Dream
One of the cultural differences between 19th-century working- and middle-class families was in how they viewed their homes. While middle-class
