ABSTRACT
Americans were unaccustomed to urbanization, collectively ill prepared, and many were philosophically opposed to cities. Cities confined people physically while being morally stretched. In the countryside, they were free to action and movement and thought. At least 90 percent of the country’s five million Euro American population lived on farms in the year Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency. By the 1910s, or about 120 years later, the figure was 30 percent, in the 1990s, less than 2 percent. In the absence of social stability, common decency, and legal controls after the Civil War, municipal and commercial corruption became entrenched, political indiscretion de rigueur well before the 1890s, rampant by that decade. That was when Wright launched his independent professional career.
