Safety Valve Theory
Many people viewed the frontier as a "SAFETY VALVES ," meaning that when hard times came, the unemployed who cluttered the city pavements would merely move west, take up farming, and prosper. In truth, relatively few city dwellers, at least in the populous easter centers, migrated to the frontier during depressions. Most of them did no know how to farm; few of them could raise enough money to transport themselves west and then pay for livestock and expensive machinery. But the safety-valve theory does have some validity. Free acerage did lure to the West a host of immigrant farmers who otherwise might have remained in the eastern cities to clog the job markets and to crowd the festering adn already over-populated slums. And the very possiblility of westward migration might have induced urban empolyers to maintain wage rates high enough to discourage workers from leaving. But the real safety valve by the late nineteenth century was in western cities like Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco, where failed farmers, busted miners, and displaced easterners found ways to seek their fortunes. Indeed, after about 1880 the area from the Rocky Mountains to teh Pacific Coast was the most urbanized region in America, measured by the percentage of people living in cities.
More Products of Valves
