Weber, Adna

In his classic 1899 work, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics, Adna Ferrin Weber (1870–1968) showed that the rapid growth of American cities was not unique but part of the vast migration from countryside to city that was rapidly transforming the Western world. As an analysis of causes and effects of 19th-century urban growth, Weber's study remains an essential source.

Weber cautioned that, although the Industrial Revolution coincided with the spectacular growth of cities, steam power was not, as commonly believed, the root cause of urbanization. Long before industrialization, Rome, Constantinople, and other great cities of antiquity had flourished. He showed that it was ultimately trade and commerce (to which industrialization would later contribute greatly) that allowed cities, whether ancient or modern, to grow.

The most profound effects of industrialization, Weber pointed out, were to be seen not in cities but in the newly cultivated prairies of North and South America and Australia, where power machinery allowed a relatively small number of workers to feed millions. As a consequence, European farmers, who for generations had tilled small plots, were becoming superfluous; thousands migrated to booming American cities. This long-distance emigration, however, was much less important for understanding urban growth than were the relatively shorter migrations within individual countries, including the United States.

As poor country people crowded into urban slums, the fear arose that cities were becoming sinkholes of illness, crime, and corruption. But Weber argued that rural poverty and immorality had largely been ignored or underreported and that cities were leading the way toward social progress. He showed that, although the countryside had always been healthier than the city, implementation of public health measures had allowed such a city as Vienna to become healthier than its hinterland, and other cities were moving in that direction. As long as they continued to attract the wealthy, the talented, and the ambitious, cities would remain the best hope for progressive change.

In studying United States cities, Weber concluded

• that the rapid growth of American cities began not in the Gilded Age but in the 1820s;
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• that during the 19th century, American cities could already be distinguished by their disproportionately high immigrant populations, relatively low population densities, and—along with Australian cities—high rates of suburbanization;
• that cities in the American West (and Australia) often grew faster than did their agricultural hinterlands; and
• that health and social problems related to overcrowding (as on New York's Lower East Side) could be effectively alleviated through development of population-dispersing rapid transit (subways) rather than through construction of model tenements.

Almost 40 years after Weber's book was first published, Lewis Mumford noted appreciatively that this monumental volume still—and wisely—had not been emulated. When the book was reprinted in 1963, historians Richard C. Wade (University of Chicago) and Bayrd Still (New York University) found it of critical importance in establishing an economic and demographic basis for a new field: American urban history.