After reviewing such figures, Stephan Thernstrom and Peter
Knights wonder:

If American city-dwellers were as restless and footloose as our
evidence suggests, how was any cultural continuity--or even the
appearance of it maintained? . . . American society in the
period under consideration here was more like a procession (with
people flowing rapidly through it) than a stable social order.
How did this social order cohere at all?

Howard Chudacoff in his study of Omaha writes that he believes
mobility was so high as to preclude creation of social attachment.
Thernstrom and Knights even raise the possibility of a class of
unattached floaters or permanent transients. ³

The larger meaning of widespread geographic mobility remains to
be seen, but the initial impression is one of extraordinary flux: a
society composed of restless individuals whose frequent moves cut
them off from communal ties and freed them from such traditional
restraints as gossip, family, and neighborhood.

Geographic mobility has often been viewed as disruptive of pri-
mary human ties--as a negative, alienating influence which destroys
community and stimulates impersonal social arrangements. Most re-
cent historians have avoided such an interpretation without neces-
sarily disavowing it, but Rowland Berthoff has suggested that
mobility was so "excessive" as to destroy social cohesion and usher in
an age of disorder. According to Berthoff, nineteenth-century America
is best understood as embodying a struggle to maintain stability in
the face of overpowering forces of instability. Here is flux in the
extreme, a society coming apart at the seams. And here too is the first
set of crucial issues to be examined in this book: How much geo-
graphic mobility took place? Did mobility increase between 1800 and
1860? Who moved and who stayed? Why did they move? Was
mobility "excessive" enough to overwhelm the social order and usher
in an age of relative chaos? ⁴

In his study of the Discovery of the Asylum in America, David
Rothman suggests that Jacksonians were very much aware of dis-
order in their midst. Jacksonians, he argues, lived with a sense of peril
that mobility, urbanization, and a breakdown of hierarchical social
arrangements threatened to plunge the Republic into chaos. Fluidity
and grandiose ambition destroyed family cohesion and communal
solidarity and left criminals, paupers, and lunatics in their wake. ⁵

Lest society really break apart, some Jacksonians set about creating
institutions--prisons, insane asylums, and poorhouses--where disci-

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