Excluding those whose land was stolen and redistributed by government.
> not community sacrifice
Excluding government-funded infrastructure projects like canals that enabled growth. And support that immigrants received from ethnic communities.
> Meanwhile, during the 1800s, scores of millions of people moved up from poverty
Yes, fifteen tons, we know that song.
1. The immigrants came by the boatload from Europe to the US. Not the other way around. The Titanic was built for that purpose.
2. The immigrants were the poor of Europe, not the wealthy.
3. The US middle class and upper middle class and the wealthy came from those poor people. I can't think of any American wealthy families that came from the wealthy of Europe.
4. The height of Americans increased dramatically from 1800 to 1900. This is only possible by plenty of food being available. Visit Fort Henry and look at the uniforms of the 1700s. They look kid sized.
5. The uniforms of Civil War soldiers look teen sized. You can see them for yourself in the Gettysburg museum.
6. In WW1 when the US Army arrived on the scene, the Germans were shocked at their height and high quality plentiful food, and then knew they had lost the war.
7. The US supplied all the Allies in WW2 (including the USSR), provided the shipping fleet to do it, floated two navies, one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific, and simply buried the Axis under the weight of all the hardware it made.
8. The Wehrmacht relied on horses.
9. The European middle class did not have cars until after WW2. The pre-war US filled the country with Model T's for everybody.
10. My grandfather started out shoveling coal in a steamer (a dirty, rotten job). By the turn of the century, he had his own middle class home, and later a vacation home and a couple cars.
America truly is exceptional.
What society mass-moved individuals from menial work to better work?
Many societies have made generational improvements: children raised with more opportunity, but I'm not aware (hey, I'm ignorant of a lot) of any that moved significant numbers of menial laborers themselves up significantly in standard of living besides the USA post-WWII or new technology (electricity, plumbing).
Parents usually sacrificed so their children have better lives, not themselves. The USA is currently an interesting example of the opposite.
I haven't heard of mass movements of farmers into professional work late in life. The immigrant story of America is the parents sacrificed for their children to do better. Why would existing citizens want to bring in large number of unskilled people and give them better jobs than themselves? I'm not aware of such generous circumstances working out.
Not when compared with the rest of the world.
Life in pre-Colonial America was pretty hard. Building a civilization by hand from wilderness is a tall order, and life was short. But after 1800, life improved by leaps and bounds. You can see this in statistics of average height.
As for the Soviet Union, I recall newspaper accounts from the 70s and 80s that if you were traveling there, be sure to load up your luggage with blue jeans. Blue jeans were in high demand and would fetch a nice profit. And how many Soviet consumer items do you have in your home?
The government did not engage in welfare until FDR.
