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There is no comparison of dimensions of what the US went through and what Europe was going through. In the US you had the ability to turn to farming yourself an

There is no comparison of dimensions of what the US went through and what Europe was going through. In the US you had the ability to turn to farming yourself and survive, whereas you couldn't in Europe. And also you have to take into account the extreme levels of poverty that were standard at the time. Just having your farm with your family and kids would mean that the smallest health issue starved the entire family to death. The process was gruesome to todays standards, and it is reprehensible to what we do and can do today but it turned a world with 90%+ extreme povery into a 40% extreme poverty in a century, unlike anything before in history.

lovich 8y ago
You are conflating "less opressed" with "not opressed", and disregarding all of the actual opression that was happening to labor from both business owners and the government. Also it was the industrial revolution when people were flocking to the cities to work in factories in part because working a farm was no longer enough to survive for most people. Other than a few periods of time when the government gave out land grants, a penniless immigrant couldn't just show up and get land.