ABSTRACT
When the Census Bureau in 1920 declared that the United States had become an urban society, it was a statement about statistical categories and not novel social and cultural arrangements. Neither was it meant to forecast future trends. The number of people living in urban places—places of 2,500 people or more—had simply exceeded 50 percent of the national population. Almost four-fifths of the previous decade’s population growth had occurred in urban places and, though immigration had diminished sharply, the great internal migration from country to city had continued unabated.
