Focusing on white U.S. men aged 25-34, this paper compares the patterns of intergenerational occupational mobility in a late 19th century sample to those found in the well-known 1962 and 1973 surveys of Occupational Change in a Generation (OCGI and OCGII). While the overall pattern of mobility indicates less upward mobility and greater occupational inheritance among the 19th century men, the differences are small when comparisons are restricted to the nonfarm sector. Results from association models indicate a stronger relationship between origins and destinations in 1962 than in the late 1800s. In contrast, the 1973 OCGII data shows a virtually identical relationship between origins and destinations to that found in our 19th century sample. This paper sheds new light on the historical pattern of U.S. social mobility by examining father to son occupational mobility for a national sample of white men who were 25 to 34 years old in 1900. We study the relationship between the occupations of these men as reported in the 1900 census manuscripts and the occupations of their fathers (or, in a few cases, the household head), as reported in the 1880 census manuscripts. The -mobility of this sample will be compared with analogous men in two well-known post-World War II surveys of U.S. stratification pat*Revised version of a paper presented at the 1986 meetings of the Population Association of America. This research has been supported by grants from NICHD, A National Panel Study and Cohort Changes in Personal Attributes, 1880-1900. We are grateful to Thomas W. Pullum and Charles D. Rice for their technical help, and to Michael Hout, R. S. Oropesa, and Ross M. Stolzenberg for their helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Direct correspondence to Avery M. Guest, Department of Sociology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195. i The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, December 1989, 68(2):351-378