Urban-Rural Conflict Research Articles

Democracy delayed: congressional reapportionment and urban-rural conflict in the 1920s

Democracy delayed: congressional reapportionment and urban-rural conflict in the 1920s

Congressional Voting in the 1920s: A Test of Urban-Rural Conflict

In the 1950s, historians explained many phenomena of the 1920s as products of conflicts between urban and rural areas. The Ku Klux Klan, Fundamentalism, Prohibition, immigration restriction, and Al Smith's defeat in the presidential election of 1928 were understood as examples of urban-rural tensions. More recent scholars have found evidence to challenge the urban-rural thesis by examining election results, state legislative voting, Klan membership, and support for Prohibition and Fundamentalism.1 Before scholars reject the urban-rural interpretation, however, it can be tested in a new way: analysis of roll-call voting in the House of Representatives in the 1920s. Such an analysis assumes that the intrinsic and symbolic importance of certain issues to urban or rural legislators outweighs other factors (friendship, partisanship, and pressures from House leaders, the president, and special interests) in determining voting patterns. For a more precise refinement of the urban and rural classifications, congressional voting of representatives from metropolitan districts and extremely rural ones will be compared. The urban-rural (and metro-most rural) divisions cannot be perfect and complete, but differences in voting should be observable if the urban-rural thesis is valid. Not all issues of the 1920s can be examined through roll calls; many did not come before Congress for a vote. On two questions central to the urban-rural interpretation, howeverProhibition and immigration restriction Congress did act. Four votes on each will be considered. Two roll-call votes on immigration restriction involved voting first to approve an amendment to a bill to reduce the suspension of all immigration from two years to just fourteen months, and second, to pass the bill. Four years later the House accepted an amendment to another bill to limit the burden of proof required of aliens to stay in the country, and then it approved the bill itself that restricted immigration to 2 percent of the 1890 population. In both 1920 and 1924, opponents of immigration restriction would have supported

Book Review: Urban-Rural Migration, Change and Conflict in an Orkney Island Community: The Maltese Migration Cycle: Perspectives on Return: Return Migration: A Review of the Literature: Return Migration: A Sourcebook of Evaluative Abstracts

Book Review: Urban-Rural Migration, Change and Conflict in an Orkney Island Community: The Maltese Migration Cycle: Perspectives on Return: Return Migration: A Review of the Literature: Return Migration: A Sourcebook of Evaluative Abstracts

Water Supply and the Urban-Rural Conflict

Water Supply and the Urban-Rural Conflict

Urban-Rural Class Conflict in Oregon Land-Use Planning

Urban-Rural Class Conflict in Oregon Land-Use Planning

Urban-Rural Class Conflict in Oregon Land-Use Planning

Urban-Rural Class Conflict in Oregon Land-Use Planning

The Classical Revival and Urban-Rural Conflict in Nineteenth Century North America

One of the more perplexing problems we face in the historical geography of the nineteenth century in North America is the origin of the anti-urban sentiment that stood alongside other "fears" as the material of political warfare. When "twisting the Lion's tail," jeering native gentility, and decrying the "infection" of foreign culture failed to produce a rush to join a politician's legion, it was always possible to trot out the specter of the bloated, parasitic city feeding on the vital sap of America. Yet Carl Bridenbaugh showed us thirty-five years ago that the seeds of American urbanism were not "solely the product of nineteenth century industrialism, but rather . . . germinated with the earliest settlement on American soil." He concluded "Surviving evidence justifies the temerity of my conclusion that a full-fledged urban society existed well before the close of our first century of history." (Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness. Second Edition. New York, 1960, vii.) Any nativist argumentation would seem to require the inclusion of the city in our revered past, yet in the last century there was a strong belief that urban settlement was a late and non-vital growth on an older and more "basic" agricultural root-system.

Urban-Rural Conflict: The Politics of Change.

Urban-Rural Conflict: The Politics of Change.

Civic Responses to Riots: A Reappraisal of Kerner Commission Data

rash of riots in U. S. cities during nineteen-sixties has prompted at least two parallel and somewhat related questions. Initially many observers have been led to ask: Why do some incidents provoke outbreak of violence while others do not? An equally significant inquiry that has received less attention might be phrased as follows: Why do some municipal governments respond to riots by attempting to reduce grievances that may have spawned violence, while others take little or no ameliorative action? latter query will form primary focus of this research note. capacity of political structures to resolve local complaints may be both a contributing factor and a product of urban violence. In an analysis of underlying conditions of 76 American race riots between 1913 and i963, Lieberson and Silverman commented on the com, munity failure to see riot in terms of institutional malfunctioning or a racial difficulty which is not met-and perhaps cannot be-by existing social institutions.1 Subsequent research by Bloombaum, which attempted to employ multiple scalogram analysis to establish dimensions in their data, also yielded results that were generally consistent with theory of institutional breakdown held by Lieberson and Silverman.2 extent to which local governments are able to respond adequately to public dissatisfaction, therefore, may play a crucial role in eruption of racial violence. Riots also may have a major impact on performance of urban governments. Greenstone and Peterson, for example, found a direct correlation between dispersion of political power and use of federal anti-poverty funds in nation's four largest cities before outbreak of civil disorder. After Watts riot of 1965, however, Los Angeles, which previously had received least OEO grants per poverty-stricken family, suddenly soared to top of list in Der * Harlan Hahn is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Riverside, and author of forthcoming books on police and on Urban-Rural Conflict: Politics of Change. 1 Stanley Lieberson and Arnold R. Silverman, The Precipitants and Underlying Conditions of Race Riots, American Sociological Review, Vol. 31, 1965, p. 898. 2 Milton Bloombaum, The Conditions Underlying Race Riots as Portrayed by Multidimensional Scalogram Analysis: A Reanalysis of Lieberson and Silverman's Data, American Sociological Review, Vol. 33, 1968, p. 90.

The Urban-Rural Conflict Revisited

The Urban-Rural Conflict Revisited

The Urban-Rural Conflict Revisited

The Urban-Rural Conflict Revisited

The Urban-Rural Conflict as Evidenced in the Reapportionment Situation

The Urban-Rural Conflict as Evidenced in the Reapportionment Situation