The Next 100 Years

t h i rd c yc l e : f ro m s m a l l tow n s
to i n d u s t r i a l c i t i e s
Just as Daniel Boone was celebrated long after his day was done, so were the 
virtues of small- town American life. Millions of immigrant workers had 
been imported to work in mines and factories, settling mainly in the big 
cities. They were mostly Irish, Italian, and Eastern European. These immi­
grants were completely different from anyone seen in the United States be­
fore. Think about it: a nation that was essentially white and Protestant with 
a black underclass was suddenly teeming with immigrants who looked, 
spoke, and acted very differently. Hence, they were regarded with suspicion 
and hostility by small- town America. Big cities, where these new immi­
grants settled to work in factories, came to be viewed as the center of an 
alien and corrupt culture. 
However, small- town values now started to work against America. The 
financial system had run on tight money since the late 1870s. This encour­
aged savings and investment but limited consumption and credit. As the 
population living in cities exploded—both from high birthrates and immi­
gration—low wages made life difficult for new immigrants. As investment 
grew, the ability of the workers to buy the products they produced became 
severely constrained. The result was the Great Depression, in which con­
sumers had no money to buy the products they needed, so factories making 
these products laid workers off, in a seemingly endless cycle. Hard work and 
frugality, the ethics of small- town America, were hardly sufficient against 
such powerful macroeconomic forces. 
In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt succeeded the failed presidency of Her­
bert Hoover. Roosevelt proceeded to reverse the policies of the preceding 
political generation by looking for ways to increase consumption through 
transfers of wealth from investors to consumers. He championed the in­
dustrial, urban workers at the expense of the declining small towns and 
their values. 
Ultimately, though, the New Deal didn’t end the Depression—World 
War II did it, by allowing the government to spend vast amounts of money 
to build factories and hire workers. The aftermath of World War II was even 

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a m e r i c a n p o w e r a n d t h e c r i s i s o f 2 0 3 0
more decisive in ending the Depression. After the war ended, a series of laws 
was created that allowed returning soldiers to buy homes on credit, easily fi­
nance a college education, and become white- collar professionals. The fed­
eral government built an interstate highway system, opening up the areas 
around cities for residential construction. These measures constituted a vast 
transfer of wealth, spurring growth in factory and office work and main­
taining wartime economic gains. The American middle class was born. 
Roosevelt’s reforms—dictated by World War II—were aimed at supporting 
the urban working class. They turned the ethnic working classes’ children 
into middle- class suburbanites.