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In many places across North America, millions of formerly rural Europeans (and a large number of formerly rural black Americans making their own great migration) were repeating this classic approach to settlement. While Toronto had the most dramatic number of such shantytowns, they were also major features in the blue-collar outskirts of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and, later, Los Angeles, with unapproved, owner-built shack housing constituting as much as a third of new construction in those cities. They were a major part of Chicago’s periphery in the decades before the Depression, defining then-unincorporated neighborhoods, such as Stone Park, Oak Forest, Burnside, Robbins, large parts of Gary, Hegewisch, Garfield Ridge, and Blue Island, and pockets throughout the west and southwest.31

The outstanding feature of these settlements, aside from their spontaneous form and their haphazard appearance, was that virtually all of their residents owned the land their shacks stood on. Though the land had often been subdivided without approval by speculators who had bought plots of farmland or uncleared forest and sold slivers for perhaps $200 apiece, governments and banks usually recognized the title deeds. As we’ve seen throughout the developing world, land ownership offers a clear path to social stability and often to middle-class vitality, as long as governments are willing to help.

What made North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century so different from Europe—and so different from North America today—was the scale of home ownership among the newly arrived poor. Blue-collar workers, in both Canada and the United States (and very likely in Australia), had rates of home ownership that were far higher than those of any other social class. As the historian Elaine Lewinnek has shown, one-quarter of all Chicagoans owned their own homes between 1870 and 1920, a rate that rose to nearly 50 percent in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. The drive to save and scrounge earnings, however small, to buy a plot of land or put a down payment on a small home was almost a religion among the rural-immigrant working classes of the time. Similar rates of lower-income home ownership have been chronicled in Boston, Detroit, New Haven, and Toronto. And the numbers were also surprisingly high among blacks and women.32

The result was an extremely high rate of upward social mobility—a trend that ended only in the second half of the twentieth century, when cities became more zoned and regulated, barriers to home ownership and property financing became more difficult, and the pathways from lower- to middle-class status came to be defined by much-harder-to-obtain forms of higher education and loan capital.

FAREWELL TO ALL THAT

Back in Europe, the industrialization of farming continued to throw millions of people off the land, in numbers that reached their peak in the early twentieth century, and while the vast majority were absorbed more or less comfortably into the arrival cities of Europe and North America, there continued to be frequent arrival-city failures, especially in the more peripheral parts of the continent. The results were increasingly explosive.

Toward the end of this period, a young man was born in a Balkan farming village; as the second son of nine children, he did not inherit any land, and work near his home could not be found, so he made various failed attempts to enter urban life through the region’s disjointed arrival cities, eventually joining a floating population of casual laborers who lived on the edge of urban poverty. The humiliation of this experience, amid the riches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, radicalized this young man and his milieu. When Gavrilo Princip pulled the trigger that began three decades of war, he was giving violent expression not only to the tortured politics of central Europe but also to the dismal failure of many European governments to comprehend or manage the expansive new communities of former villagers forming within their cities. Like the revolution