General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It's bothered me for years. Where did the ridiculous notion [View all]Pope George Ringo II
(1,896 posts)The original thirteen British colonies were basically small agrarian communities which existed to provide raw materials like food, timber, cotton, and tobacco to the mother country. The frank fact is that most of the population still lived a lot like that when the United States was born, and right into the Industrial Revolution. Then the economic opportunity of the industrial revolution gave us the migration to the cities, which we should admit actually was pretty nightmarish between the awful working conditions, slums, and poor sanitation. The fact that American farmers looking for work in the city were competing for jobs with foreign immigrants discovered there for the first time in their lives only added to the sense that things were alien in the big city but the comfortable old farm was truly American. Add to those facts that technology always came to the city first, and it gives the same thing: Cars were a big bit of new strangeness, as was electricity. And some people just like knowing the faces of everybody they're going to see all week, and find a city terrifyingly impersonal.
If something is new to either America or the world, it happens in a city first. Technology, an immigrant wave, acceptance of another demographic, whatever. People from the farm show up in the city only because money meant they had to, and see a bunch of stuff they've never seen before, and they don't know anybody there. The newness frightens half of them back to the farm, and they'll tell their kids about what weird things go on in the city. The kids grow up and do the same thing all over again. Rural life is generally the old way, and it doesn't stretch them out of their comfort zone.
I don't disagree with any of the comments talking about more recent stuff, but this pattern is pretty darn old. Of course it happens with minority city dwellers today. But it happened with Italians and Jews in the 19th Century. And the Irish looked normal enough, but like the Italians had the incredible poor taste to be catholic.