The Left has been very effective at telling this lie. Sadly, many conservatives have fallen for it. All the stories we were taught in government school pointed to the need for government because the urbanization and industrialization of America where so dehumanizing and inhumane.
Then come the necessary evidences of long hours in the factory, urban living densities, children working and low pay. What the unobservant or historically ignorant don’t know is that all these people came to live and work in cities and their factories of their own free will and choice. What the ignoramuses don’t know is that farm life is 24/7, low return, high risk work.
Lose a body part in the urban jungle and you can be at a hospital in minutes. Lose one in the field and you’ll likely bleed out and die. Rural poverty is broadly dispersed versus its concentration in cities. Worse, our idealized nostalgia over the bucolic history of the United States warps our view of cities.
The people of the prairie were working for a better life. That was to be had in free land and hard work. As soon as cities sprung up, they willingly left the forests and fields and moved into cities. Nobody collected them by force. Why would people willingly move to cities and work in factories? Because it improved their lives. They know it. We’ve forgotten it.
We've absolutely forgotten it, which is why we see some incredibly absurd things written on this thread. My father grew up on a farm during the depression and he tells stories about every one of his siblings dreaming of leaving the farm for the city to work in a factory....or anywhere. The agrarian lifestyle that brain dead liberals wax nostalgic about was a hard and miserable life.
Each and every one of them (9 children in all) were successful and found a way to climb up from the factory floor and provide an exceptional living for their families.
I'm a fan of Ayn Rand, and it's in discussions like this that I recall one of many favorite quotes:
Compared to the centuries of precapitalist starvation, the living conditions of the poor in the early years of capitalism were the first chance the poor had ever had to survive. As proof – the enormous growth of the European population during the nineteenth century, a growth of over 300 percent, as compared to the previous growth of something like 3 percent per century.