The US tolerates more inequality than Europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than Europe's, though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century. We extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10,000 nationally-representative British and US fathers and sons. The US was more mobile than Britain through 1900, so in the experience of those who created the US welfare state in the 1930s, the US had indeed been “exceptional.” The US mobility lead over Britain was erased by the 1950s, as US mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)

We respond to several criticisms by Avery Guest and Michael Hout (2013) and Yu Xie and Alexandra Killewald (2013) to Jason Long and Joseph Ferrie (2013). We do not dispute Guest and Hout's characterization of the importance of total mobility in addition to relative mobility. We find much in their additional analyses that supports our original findings. In response to Xie and Killewald, we discuss the limitations of our data and the conceptualization of mobility. (JEL J62, N31, N32, N33, N34)