It is the railroad and the steamship that determine where a new business shall be developed, quite as often as the government policy. The grant of special rates and privileges to shippers is nowadays the most efficient kind of protection.
It is this quickening and cheapening of transportation that has given such stimulus in the present day to the growth of large cities. It enables them to draw cheap food from a far larger territory and it causes business to locate where the widest business connection is to be had, rather than where the goods or raw materials are most easily produced. And the perfection of the means of communication, the post-office and the telegraph, intensifies the same result.[[43]]
The entire net increase of the population of 1870 to 1890 in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota was in cities and towns possessing competitive rates, while those having non-competitive rates decreased in population, and in Iowa it is the general belief that the absence of large cities is due to the earlier policy of the railways giving Chicago discriminating rates.[[44]]
The advent of the trolley line and more recently of the automobile has produced still further disturbing elements in the growth of human communities. Their effect has been chiefly to modify the life of the small town or village, causing the decline of some and the sudden growth of others. The introduction of these two forms of transportation, more particularly of the automobile, has been the most potent force in our recent American history in affecting redistribution of our population and in the disorganization of our rural and small-town institutions which grew up on the basis of a horse-and-vehicle type of mobility.[[45]]
The evolution of new types of industry is another feature that becomes a determining factor in the redistribution of the country’s population. As we review our census reports we see the emergence each decade of one or more important industries; first, the textile industry causing concentrations of population in the eastern states, then the development of the iron and steel industry with its center of operations gradually shifting farther and farther west, and more recently the advent of the automobile and oil industries making for enormous concentration of population in certain states of the Union, also the motion picture industry with its concentrated center in southern California. The emergence of a new industry has a far-reaching effect in disturbing the status quo of communal life. Competition soon forces the new industry to concentrate its productive enterprises in one or two communities; these communities then serve as great magnets drawing to themselves the appropriate population elements from communities far and near.
IV. THE EFFECT OF ECOLOGICAL CHANGES ON THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF COMMUNITY
Population migrations resulting from such sudden pulls as are the outcomes of unusual forms of release in community growth may cause an expansion in the community’s development far beyond the natural culmination point of its cyclic development, resulting in a crisis situation, a sudden relapse, disorganization, or even panic. So-called “boom towns” are towns that have experienced herd movements of population beyond the natural point of culmination.
On the other hand, a community which has reached the point of culmination and which has experienced no form of release is likely to settle into a condition of stagnation. Its natural surplus of population is forced to emigrate. This type of emigration tends to occasion folk-depletion in the parent community. The younger and more enterprising population elements respond most sensitively to the absence of opportunities in their home town. This is particularly true when the community has but a single economic base, such as agriculture, lumbering, mining. Reformers try in vain to induce the young people to remain on the farms or in their native villages, little realizing that they are working in opposition to the general principles of the ecological order.
Again, when a community starts to decline in population due to a weakening of the economic base, disorganization and social unrest follow.[[46]] Competition becomes keener within the community, and the weaker elements either are forced into a lower economic level or are compelled to withdraw from the community entirely. There are, of course, periodic and temporary fluctuations in the economic balance, due either to circumstances which affect the entire economic order or to the vicissitudes of the particular industry from which the community draws its sustenance. These temporary fluctuations, however, while important from the standpoint of social well-being, do not comprise the basic determinants of community development.
The introduction of an innovating element into the adjustment of a community may be designated as the initial stage of an invasion which may make for a complete change in the structure and organization of the community. The introduction of a new mode of transportation, for instance, may transform the economic organization of a community and make for a change in population type.