AHC: Keep the US as rural as possible

Spanish flu much much worse, isolated Amish communities thrive in the aftermath and recruit en masse
 
You would have to freeze certain elements of automation and industrialization. But even if you did that, a town of 40,000 in 1910 would grow to 100,000 by now and would still be a small city, not really rural.
 
During WW2, Germany already deployed an excellent method for A-bombing cities along the American East Coast: U-Boats.
Just lay the bomb on the bottom of the harbour and sail away.

Devestation would match that of the Halifax explosion.
 
I said "don't" invent it.
And that was what I was responding to. Without barbed wire, there's no practical way of dividing up the Great Plains for agriculture, so it's going to just be giant ranches with a few dozen people to keep track of the cows/sheep/goats/etc. You know, the way it was before the invention of barbed wire.
 
And that was what I was responding to. Without barbed wire, there's no practical way of dividing up the Great Plains for agriculture, so it's going to just be giant ranches with a few dozen people to keep track of the cows/sheep/goats/etc. You know, the way it was before the invention of barbed wire.

Or for another historical example the Eurasian Steppe which is pretty much what the Great Plains are.
 
And that was what I was responding to. Without barbed wire, there's no practical way of dividing up the Great Plains for agriculture, so it's going to just be giant ranches with a few dozen people to keep track of the cows/sheep/goats/etc. You know, the way it was before the invention of barbed wire.

As you say barbed wire allows you a practical way to break up the Great Plains, the Outback, the Steppe, whatever. With barbed wire, even if it is just a border fence, there is a hard limit on how far your stock can roam. Once you sub divide you can control that movement further. You can start rotating your paddocks (ones that can take a day to cross by horse) to maintain fodder and water levels. Importantly you don't need to send your staff out to muster across the entire property. You are covering a much smaller and controlled area at any one time. Thus you don't need as many staff. Save money.

Close in in more civilised places (more fertile soil and smaller properties) you are basically looking at eliminating shepards and their equivalents. You don't need a human to keep the flock together when a cheap fence will do it.

Fences were instrumental in the second Agrarian Revolution. Enclosing the land made it more productive meaning fewer farmers and more people leaving for the cities. Cheap fences like barbed wire just meant that you could apply it to wider spaces.
 
Fences were instrumental in the second Agrarian Revolution. Enclosing the land made it more productive meaning fewer farmers and more people leaving for the cities. Cheap fences like barbed wire just meant that you could apply it to wider spaces.
Enclosure only worked that way when there was already a substantial population living on the land, which was now surplus to needs, like in the Highlands. Since the Great Plains didn't have a substantial (citizen, anyway) population in many areas, exactly the opposite happened: enclosure allowed more profitable but labor-intensive practices (primarily farming instead of ranching) to take place, thereby resulting in a growth in population. In fact many of the Plains states saw some of their most significant population growth after the development of barbed wire: Montana and Wyoming both tripled in population between 1880 and 1890, just as barbed wire was being widely deployed, South Dakota increased three and a half and North Dakota over five times in population in the same time period, Nebraska and Colorado doubled, Kansas increased in population by half again, and Texas increased in population by more than a third.

If you continue moving forward, Texas has continued growing fairly rapidly up to the present day (although not mostly in rural areas, of course); Kansas stalled out from the 1900 census onwards, with much slower growth more reminiscent of other, more eastern states; Nebraska behaved similarly, with a dramatic slowdown in growth from the 1890 to 1900 census and continued slow growth thereafter; Colorado continued rapidly growing until 1920, then slowed into a more normal pattern of growth afterwards; North Dakota continued rapid growth until around the 1920 census, then shrank between every census after 1930 until 1980; South Dakota similarly stalled after 1920, then bounced around until 1990 when growth resumed; Wyoming and Montana similarly stopped growing rapidly after 1920, with Montana actually dropping in population over the 1920s before resuming fairly steady growth, and Wyoming merely slowing in growth. None of this is at all compatible with your hypothesis, which would suggest that the introduction of barbed wire in the 1880s would have driven population out of these plains states, when in fact they generally continued growing for another 40 years unless they were already heavily populated (like Kansas and Nebraska) where the ability to more cheaply enclose large areas of land might actually have driven some degree of displacement.

The pattern holds even more strongly if you drill down to the individual county level, historical population peaks in the Great Plains came largely between 1910 and 1930, with a few counties in primarily Kansas and Nebraska peaking in the 1900 census. Again, this is completely inconsistent with the idea that a technology developed forty to sixty years earlier was the cause of the displacement. This makes sense when you realize that the primary effect of barbed wire in the Great Plains wasn't to allow more efficient large ranches, it was to allow the subdivision of land into much smaller and more intensively operated farms owned by individual families, which results in a higher population density than small numbers of large ranches relying on extensive grazing practices and (single male) hired staff. If anything, the timing of the historical population peaks strongly suggests that the economic stagnation experienced by agriculture in the 1920s (probably for fundamental structural reasons) and the Dust Bowl and major drought of the 1930s are primarily responsible for depopulating most of the Great Plains. Neither of these, obviously, had all that much to do with barbed wire, except that it maybe enabled some of the bad farming practices that led to the latter.
 
somehow you see less concentration into New York, Chicago, Denver etc. Instead you have a bunch of smaller cities and focus on towns.
 

Marc

Donor
Massive urbanization is an ongoing global process that goes back, at least to the late 1700's. As others have noted, you would have to hand wave the industrial revolution. Possible, but really a 5 sigma event.
 
Have technology advance faster with renewables, and an environmentalist movement tries to get people moving out into planned green communities.
 
And that was what I was responding to. Without barbed wire, there's no practical way of dividing up the Great Plains for agriculture, so it's going to just be giant ranches with a few dozen people to keep track of the cows/sheep/goats/etc. You know, the way it was before the invention of barbed wire.

Barbed Wire first showed up in Iowa in 1859, invented by a Farmer named Alvin Morley, who didn't patent it.

How to stop barbed wire? Per Code of Iowa 1851, property with animals had to be fenced, that meant you had to have property with woods, or to buy from Wisconsin or Minnesota to get your material for split rail fences for your 40 acres.
Slower way was to grow hedges, mostly of Osage Orange. but that didn't satisfy the law, so the landowner was on the hook for whatever damages his stays would do. But was better than nothing, and cheaper than buying wood from out of state

Since Iowa at the time had few trees away from streams or riverbanks, there was good incentive for another product, and bulk iron wire was available for some time, but without the barbs, less effective
 
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