frontier thesis imperialism

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

Resources: Discussions and Assignments

Module 4 assignment: frederick turner’s thesis and u.s. imperialism, introduction.

On July 12th, 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper “ The Significance of the Frontier in American History ” for the first time at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner’s thesis asserted that the “closing” of the American Frontier, as demonstrated by the 1890 Census data, was the end of the most important era of American history. The Frontier, both the physical land and the ideological idea of it, Turner said, had infused American society with a unique blend of European refinement and untamed coarseness. This combination in turn encouraged the development of individualism, inventiveness, and an “antipathy to control.” The constant push of settlers into the Frontier resulted in a sort of “perennial rebirth,” the Thesis argued, defining American society as existing “between savagery and civilization.”

“What would happen to American society now that the Frontier had effectively been settled?” Turner wondered. Was the influence of the Frontier so great that American society would begin to decline? Or would this new society find an equally daunting challenge to take on?

In the following assignment, you will first read two claims or arguments based on modern interpretations of Turner’s Thesis (Secondary Sources), then describe which you find more convincing and why. Second, you will read two primary source speeches given soon after the publication of the Turner Thesis and make an assessment of their arguments in relation to the two claims.

To complete this assignment, make a copy of this worksheet . Follow along and fill out your answers as you read through the documents.

Part One: Assessing the Frontier Thesis

Secondary sources.

Step 1 . Carefully read the two claims made by historians about Turner’s thesis. Then answer the corresponding questions within the worksheet.

Claim A  (Author: Andrew Fisher, William & Mary)

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Claim B  (Author: Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College)

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. . . at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.” By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the progenitor of the American practical and innovative character: “that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again.

Part Two: The New Imperial Frontier

Primary sources.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s concern when he wrote the Frontier Thesis in 1893 was that the settling of the West would cause tension and conflict in American society. With no more wilderness to be tamed, the Anglo-Saxon-American Americans who featured in the Thesis would have no mold to form them into rugged, democratic, individualists, Turner claimed. The early Populist movement and its conflict with corporate interests seemed to confirm Turner’s theory. However, with the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it seemed that the U.S. had found another “Frontier” on which to focus its energy: overseas territories.

The scope of American imperial interests soon included the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and then Alaska in 1912. The debate about what the United States would become without a Frontier seemed to have been decided. The question was how this new American society would transition into an Empire in the new century. There were many different opinions on America’s imperial activities, ranging from enthusiastic support to disgusted opposition and everything in between.

The following part of the assignment will demonstrate two of these opinions through speeches given in 1899, one by future-president Theodore Roosevelt and one by Massachusetts Senator George Hoar. These speeches illustrate contemporary opinions of American Imperialism and relate to Turner’s Frontier Thesis.

Step 2 : Read these two excerpts of speeches from America’s Age of Empire. First, answer a few questions about each speech in the space provided on the worksheet.

Excerpt 1 : New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, “Strenuous Life” speech (Chicago, Illinois, 1899), at a meeting of the Hamilton Club, a Republican social and civic club for men.

“In speaking to you. . . men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. . . that highest form of success which comes. . . to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. . . A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. . . We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. . .

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who. . . live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. . . for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. . . The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth. . .

Many [Filipinos] are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. . . I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. . .

The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by. . . then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”

Excerpt 2 : Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, “The Lust for Empire” speech before Congress (Record, 55 Cong., 3 Sess., pp. 493-503, 1899), in response to statements made earlier in the session by Connecticut Senator Orville Platt concerning the constitutionality of American activities in the Philippines.

“I am speaking today only of the theory of constitutional interpretation propounded by [Senator Platt]. [The Founding Fathers] did not disdain to study ancient history. They learned from [Greek history] the doctrine that while there is little else that a democracy can not accomplish it can not rule over vassal states or subject peoples without bringing in the elements of death into its own constitution. . .

The question is this: have we the right, as doubtless we have the physical power, to enter upon the government of ten or twelve million subject people without constitutional restraint? I affirm that every constitutional power. . . is limited to the one supreme and controlling purpose declared as that for which the Constitution itself was framed: ‘In order to form a more perfect union. . .’ But when [Senator Platt] undertakes to declare that we may do such things not for the perfect union. . . but for any fancied or real obligation to take care of distant peoples beyond our boundaries, not people of the United States, then I deny his proposition and tell him he can find nothing either in the text of the Constitution or the exposition of the fathers. . . to warrant or support his doctrine. . .

But the question with which we now have to deal is whether Congress may conquer and may govern, without their consent and against their will, a foreign nation, a separate, distinct, and numerous people, a territory not hereafter to be populated by Americans. . . whether [Congress] may conquer, control, and govern this people, not for the general welfare. . . but for some real or fancied benefit to be conferred against their desire upon the people so governed or in discharge of some fancied obligation to them. . . I declare not only that this is not among the express powers conferred upon the sovereignty [the Founders] created, that it is not among the powers. . . implied for the sake of carrying into effect the purposes of that instrument. . . [it is] a power that our fathers and their descendants have ever loathed and abhorred – and that they believed that no sovereign on earth could rightfully exercise it and that no people on earth could rightfully confer it. They not only did not mean to confer it but they would have cut off their right hands. . . sooner than set them to an instrument which should confer it. . . . the persons who favor the ratification of [the Treaty of Paris] differ among themselves certainly in their views, purposes, and opinions. . .

If you ask them what they want, you are answered with a shout: . . .‘The United States is strong enough to do what it likes. The Declaration of Independence and the counsel of Washington and the Constitution of the United States have grown rusty and musty. They are for little countries and not for great ones. There is no moral law for strong nations. America has outgrown Americanism.’”

Step 3 : Fill in the chart in the worksheet using the information you learned from both the primary source speeches and the secondary source claims.

Assignment Grading Rubric

• Module 4 Assignment: Frederick Turners Thesis and U.S. Imperialism. Authored by : Lillian Wills for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Was Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:nmz1YGZA@5/9-18-%F0%9F%92%AC-Was-Frederick-Jackson-Turner-s-Frontier-Thesis-Myth-or-Reality . Project : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]
• Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, u201cThe Lust for Empireu201d speech before Congress . Provided by : GovInfo. Located at : https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-CRECB-1899-pt1-v32/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• Teddy Roosevelt, u201cStrenuous Lifeu201d speech. Located at : https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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Frontier Thesis

Article by D.R. Owram

Published Online February 7, 2006

Last Edited December 16, 2013

The Frontier thesis was formulated 1893, when American historian Frederick Jackson Turner theorized that the availability of unsettled land throughout much of American history was the most important factor determining national development. Frontier experiences and new opportunities forced old traditions to change, institutions to adapt and society to become more democratic as class distinctions collapsed. The result was a unique American society, distinct from the European societies from which it originated. In Canada the frontier thesis was popular between the world wars with historians such as A.R.M. LOWER and Frank UNDERHILL and sociologist S.D. CLARK , partly because of a new sense of Canada's North American character.

Since WWII the frontier thesis has declined in popularity because of recognition of important social and cultural distinctions between Canada and the US. In its place a "metropolitan school" has developed, emphasizing Canada's much closer historical ties with Europe. Moreover, centres such as Montréal, Toronto and Ottawa had a profound influence on the settlement of the Canadian frontier. Whichever argument is emphasized, however, any realistic conclusion cannot deny that both the frontier and the ties to established centres were formative in Canada's development.

See also METROPOLITAN-HINTERLAND THESIS .

Recommended

Laurentian thesis, metropolitan-hinterland thesis.

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

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When the Frontier Becomes the Wall

By Francisco Cantú

On Election Day, 2018, residents of Nogales, Arizona, began to notice a single row of coiled razor wire growing across the top of the city’s border wall. The barrier has been a stark feature of the town’s urban landscape for more than twenty years, rolling up and over hilltops as it cleaves the American town from its larger, Mexican counterpart. But, in the weeks and months that followed, additional coils were gradually installed along the length of the fence by active-duty troops sent to the border by President Trump , giving residents the sense that they were living inside an occupied city. By February, concertina wire covered the wall from top to bottom, and the Nogales City Council passed a unanimous resolution calling for its removal. Such wire has only one purpose, the resolution declared—to harm or to kill. It is something “only found in a war, prison, or battle setting.”

Living in Tucson, barely an hour north of the border, I have become familiar with both sides of Nogales, crossing over the border to shop, attend meetings, take gifts or supplies to deported friends, or volunteer at a soup kitchen for migrants. In December, as I walked through the pedestrian crossing, I passed by uniformed soldiers transporting long ladders to one side of the port of entry, but I barely registered their significance. The militarization of the borderlands has become so commonplace that one often grows numb to its manifestations. It can seem distant until it reaches out to touch you. Only months later, as I watched images of the concertina wire proliferating on my social-media feeds, did I finally understand what those ladders had been for.

In “ The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America ” (Metropolitan), the historian Greg Grandin argues that America’s urge to wall off its borders marks the death of our most potent myth—the galvanizing vision of men and women seeking freedom along a vast frontier, a space for reinvention, unburdened by society, history, and one’s own past. Since the very inception of our country, he writes, the presence of a frontier has “allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence.” The ever-shifting and expanding frontier also acted as a physical barrier against invasion; as a national-security buffer against foreign enemies, Native Americans, and Mexicans; and as a tenuous escape valve for freed slaves, European migrants, and discontented laborers from crowded Eastern cities.

The frontier did not always have mythic connotations. In early America, the words “frontier,” “border,” and “boundary” held little emotional significance and were used interchangeably to describe the physical limits of the nation. America’s first dictionaries didn’t even include the word “frontier.” But as the U.S. government began to coördinate campaigns for the removal and the extermination of Native Americans, clearing the way for westward settlers, the meaning of “frontier” came to be pegged to the notion of civilizational struggle. By the dawn of the twentieth century, with Native Americans dwindling in number and largely relegated to reservations, the frontier had been fully transformed into something romantic and beckoning—an entire way of life. It became, Grandin writes, “a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration.” For the dominant white culture, the word meant freedom.

The frontier also provided a new way of understanding American identity, history, and politics. At the end of the nineteenth century, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced his “frontier thesis”—the idea that, in his words, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” American identity hinged upon its perpetual expansion. Our democracy, Turner wrote, “came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier.” Expansion was thus a fundamental good and an integral part of what set us apart from Europe—it was the very thing that made America great. But on the frontier, Grandin reminds us, settlers won greater freedom for themselves only by “putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.”

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“The End of the Myth” aims, in part, to reposition race-based violence to the center of the frontier narrative, exposing it as foundational to today’s “border brutalism.” In this respect, Grandin’s study of the frontier serves as a vital corrective to popular conceptions, in the lineage of work by scholars like Richard White, Patricia Limerick, and Richard Slotkin. In a chapter on the Mexican-American War, for example, Grandin unflinchingly describes the savagery of U.S. troops during the conquest of the country’s continental neighbor. In one incident, more than a hundred Arkansas soldiers descended upon a group of Mexican war refugees in a cave, raping and slaughtering victims as they pleaded for mercy. Many of these rabid Army volunteers, Grandin notes, were former bounty hunters with an unchecked thirst for scalping their victims.

In passages like this, “The End of the Myth” is effectively in conversation with Cormac McCarthy’s seminal novel “ Blood Meridian ,” which follows a band of scalp hunters as they wreak carnage across the borderlands. Indeed, Grandin quotes from the novel, borrows its title for one of his chapters, and even draws on the cover art of the original, 1985 edition for his own book jacket—a closeup of one of Salvador Dali’s “phantom carts,” in which a horse-drawn wagon and its occupants become, upon further examination, indistinguishable from the expansive landscape and architecture that surround them. “Blood Meridian” is propelled by grisly, deeply researched depictions of the violence perpetrated by remorseless white American men, unconcerned with the traumas they were unleashing into history. Long celebrated as a disabused, revisionist “anti-Western,” McCarthy’s novel can also be understood as fuelling the illusion of frontier masculinity. Grandin, to his credit, rejects the temptation to dismiss the violence as being somehow typical of a particular time or place. The atrocities accompanying expansion are shocking now, and were shocking then: even war-hardened men like General Winfield Scott, the commander of U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War, found them heinous enough to “make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country.”

As settlement supplanted America’s physical frontier, a new project arose to extend Manifest Destiny beyond its former geographic limits. American imperialism provided the opportunity for “a new revolution,” Woodrow Wilson declared in 1901, a little more than a decade before ascending to the Presidency. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 and ensuing military campaigns in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua, Americans had, in Wilson’s view, “made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas.” This form of expansion allowed a nation still recovering from the Civil War and Reconstruction to channel its aggression outward once more. Former Confederate soldiers were able to don the uniform of a newly unified country and earn patriotic recognition while still fighting to exert racial superiority over people of color. Letters sent home by soldiers enlisted in these campaigns, Grandin tells us, “are notably similar, lightheartedly narrating to family and friends how they would shoot ‘niggers,’ lynch ‘niggers,’ release ‘niggers’ into the swamp to die. . . .” Like those who had collected Native American scalps first as mercenaries and then as soldiers, these men learned that America’s new frontier was a place that could legitimatize a racist thirst for violence.

For America’s leaders, the new age of imperialism also reaffirmed old lessons: expanding the country’s borders beyond the domestic sphere could provide a space to divert anger, resentment, and extremism. Frederick Jackson Turner had recognized that the frontier “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” He also recognized that, at the end of the nineteenth century, America was closing in upon itself. But he hoped that the experience of having constructed civilization on a vast frontier would lead to the building of a stable inward society, one rooted in lessons of coöperation, progress, and equality. He failed to imagine that the seductiveness and the convenience of the frontier would, instead, propel America through a new century of global expansion.

As America thrust itself into the wider world, it simultaneously began a process of shoring up its domestic borders. With its entrance into the First World War, the country started to implement race-based quota systems and other immigration controls, culminating in the passage of the National Origins Act of 1924, which excluded all Asian immigrants and sought to insure that ninety-six per cent of America’s immigration slots were reserved for Europeans. Business interests shielded Mexican migrants from such immigration quotas. But the 1924 act provided for the formation of the U.S. Border Patrol: the previously irregular and ad-hoc policing of the boundary was replaced by a new paramilitary police force that would come to wield extraordinary power along the Mexican border. White supremacists and members of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan saw the nascent Border Patrol as a venue for unchecked brutality, Grandin writes, and they quickly joined its ranks, turning it into “a vanguard of race vigilantism.” The new agency became the bastion of a Wild West mentality in which patrollers easily imagined themselves as guardians of “frontier forts in hostile territory, holding off barbarians.”

The patrol’s authority grew in time. Through the nineteen-twenties, Mexicans entering the United States had been required to present themselves at official ports of entry, where they were often doused with kerosene by immigration agents and stripped from head to toe to be shaved of their hair in accordance with delousing procedures. To avoid what Grandin aptly describes as a “ritual of abuse,” many migrants simply circumvented border controls by crossing along unmonitored stretches, as they had done for decades before. But, in 1929, Congress passed a law—introduced by Senator Coleman Blease, an unabashed racist who defended the lynching of black men during his tenure as the governor of South Carolina—that made it a crime for migrants to enter the United States outside official ports of entry, with the newly established Border Patrol providing the muscle for its enforcement.

It wasn’t long before the Border Patrol began to establish the first significant physical barriers along the Mexican boundary. At the close of the Second World War, 5.8 miles of chain-link fencing was erected through Calexico, California, in order to push migrants away from the town’s population center and into the rugged and remote desert that surrounded it. This fencing, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes, in “ Migra! ,” her indispensable history of the U.S. Border Patrol, came from Japanese internment camps that had recently been ordered closed by the Supreme Court. This pattern of repurposing wartime matériel, described as “imperial recycling” by the political scientist Victoria Hattam, was repeated again at the end of the Vietnam War, when surplus helicopter landing mats were used in the construction of walls along the border in San Diego, Yuma, Nogales, and elsewhere.

Grandin’s chapters on the Border Patrol make evident the origins of many of today’s most egregious border-enforcement practices. When I read of the Mexicans who were routinely jeered at by federal agents in the nineteen-twenties as they crossed the bridge from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso, I thought of the agents who mocked a roomful of crying migrant children last summer after they had been separated from their parents. “ Aqui tenemos una orquesta ,” one agent joked—“We’ve got an orchestra here.” When I read of the workplace police raids that were conducted in the early nineteen-thirties, with the sanction of the Hoover Administration, as a “psychological gesture” to scare deportable migrants, I thought of the “show me your papers” law, passed in Arizona in 2010 and then adopted by other states, with the explicit hope of driving migrants toward self-deportation. When I read of the Border Patrol agents who admitted to reporters in the nineteen-seventies that, when pursuing migrant families, they would often try to apprehend the youngest member first, so that the rest would surrender in order to avoid being separated, I thought, inevitably, of the enactment last year of “zero tolerance,” which turned family separation into a national policy.

Because I served as a Border Patrol agent, from 2008 to 2012, Grandin’s account brought up more personal memories for me as well. Despite its white-supremacist roots, the Border Patrol has evolved into an agency where more than half of its members are of Latinx descent. Just as the military has long promised social mobility to immigrants and minority populations, the Border Patrol provides rare access to financial security and the privileges of full citizenship, especially for those living in rural border communities. In America, even at the individual level, citizenship politics often wins out over identity politics.

As a member of the patrol, I never witnessed anything as straightforwardly depraved as the beatings, torture, rape, and murder Grandin describes. But I often heard romanticized stories of “the old patrol,” a lament for the days when agents had free rein across the borderlands, lighting abandoned cars on fire and “tuning up” smugglers and migrants at will. As young trainees, my colleagues and I were taken to storied places in the desert—a remote pass where earlier generations of agents were rumored to have pushed migrants from clifftops and hidden their corpses, a stretch of road where an agent had run over a Native American lying drunk and asleep on the road, an isolated patch of scrubland where agents had force-fed smugglers fistfuls of marijuana and turned them loose to walk through the wilderness barefoot and stripped to their underwear.

The forms of violence that I observed and was complicit in were subtler—the destruction of food and water caches, a pervasive attitude of dismissal and neglect, a persistent use of dehumanizing slurs. Grandin’s description of a McAllen, Texas, police force that came together in the nineteen-eighties to gleefully watch highlights of brutal interrogation sessions of migrants called to my mind a day when a senior officer burst into the computer room where I was gathered with a group of junior agents. He interrupted our work to project onto a screen at the front of the room photographs of a body he had just encountered in the desert. In the images, he was squatting, with two thumbs up and a broad smile, beside a dead man whose flesh had rotted from his bones after months under the unforgiving sun. It was meant to be, as Grandin observes about the videos of the McAllen interrogation sessions, “a bonding ritual used to initiate new recruits.”

Part of Grandin’s achievement in “The End of the Myth” is to situate today’s calls to fortify our borders in relation to the centuries of racial animus that preceded them. Donald Trump can be distinguished from his predecessors, Grandin argues, because of his willingness to meet conservative and nativist demands at their logical end point—by closing off instead of moving out. By contrast, his predecessors over the past four decades each found ways of channelling aggression outward by identifying new frontiers and promising boundlessness in a shrinking world. Reagan pursued anti-Communist wars in Central America by declaring it “our southern frontier”; George H. W. Bush saw the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and imagined “new markets for American products,” proclaiming that “in the frontiers ahead, there are no borders”; Clinton declared, as he signed NAFTA , that “this new global economy is our new frontier”; and George W. Bush launched a global war on terror with the promise to “extend the frontiers of freedom.” After America’s military failure in Iraq and its economic failure in the Great Recession, the nation’s first African-American President arrived in office at the precise moment when hatred was coming home from the fringes.

With Trump—the first President since the dawn of American imperialism to renounce the Turnerian call for rejuvenation through expansion—“America finds itself at the end of its myth,” Grandin asserts, and is finally being forced to confront “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.” The idea of the border wall has thus replaced the myth of American limitlessness, Grandin concludes, serving as “a monument to the final closing of the frontier.” For all that, Trump’s pledge to erect a “big, beautiful wall,” from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, serves many of the same purposes as the earlier expansionist rhetoric—the border remains abstract in the minds of most Americans, yet it represents a problem and a promise distinct enough to distract from more immediate and enduring social ills. A completed border wall, and the victory it would represent to many, is thus conveniently unattainable, allowing for the same fleeing forward that has always tugged at American history. After all, as Grandin shrewdly observes, “the point isn’t to actually build ‘the wall’ but to constantly announce the building of the wall.”

If there is something missing from Grandin’s study of the frontier, it is that the vast scope of his history leaves little room for readers to encounter stories on an individual human scale, to grapple with the more intimate effects of decades of militarism on the border. The rhetoric of the frontier has always had life-altering consequences for those whose lives are thrust against its edge. But the fact that we rarely hear their voices in “The End of the Myth” is perhaps less Grandin’s failure than it is the failure of the historical record to capture the voices, bodies, and places that have always had the least access to documentation. Much like McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” corrective histories reveal the gruesome truths we have long been made to look away from, but they rarely show how violence is internalized by its victims or is lodged inside the collective memory of entire cultures, societies, and landscapes. To do so, the Mexican intellectual Sayak Valencia writes, “it is crucial to speak of the body, of the violence enacted upon it and suffered within it.”

In the 2017 novel “ In the Distance ,” Hernán Diaz, who grew up in Argentina and Sweden, reverses the action of “Blood Meridian.” Set in the same historical period, the novel depicts a young immigrant who has become separated from his brother on the docks in Europe. He accidentally boards a ship to San Francisco, while his brother, it is presumed, arrives in New York. And so our stoic protagonist sets out eastward across frontier America, crossing the country in reverse, against an advancing tide of settlers, explorers, and outlaws. As expected, he is engulfed by hardship, drama, and violence, but, when he finds himself in the middle of a McCarthyesque slaughter of Native Americans, he is unable to soldier on like the hardened men of so many Westerns. Instead, he retreats into the wilderness, where he hopes no human will ever find him, and burrows deep into the ground. But, even in his attempt to escape the violence of which he has become a part, the men he has killed stare at him in his dreams, and the rare utterances of his own voice sound monstrous.

What makes the wall terrifying to so many who live along the border is, in part, the way it serves as an inescapable reminder of the brutalities and injustices that have long been unleashed upon the frontier. The very presence of a barrier represents a profound psychological, political, ecological, cultural, and spatial reordering. In Arizona, west of Nogales, the border wall bifurcates the lands of the Tohono O’odham people, who live on the second-largest reservation in the United States. In an interview with the writer Marcello Di Cintio, a Tohono O’odham elder named Ofelia Rivas speaks of how post-9/11 enforcement shut down the cross-border pilgrimage routes of her people and led to the erection of border fencing and steel-bollard vehicle barriers across their sacred lands. The year the barriers went up, Rivas says, “we lost eleven elders. One after another, they passed away. It just seemed they couldn’t comprehend what was happening.” It was as if they had been poisoned, as if America had found a new way to take their land. At this point, Rivas begins to speak of her body, her hair. For Rivas, as for many native people, hair is intimately tied to heritage and identity. For the O’odham, the poet Ofelia Zepeda writes, “Our hair is our dress. It is our adornment.” When the walls went up, Rivas remembers, she had long hair. Each time an elder died, however, she would cut a length of it as an act of homage. “By the end of the year,” she recalls, “my hair was gone.” ♦

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News | ONCE MORE INTO THE FRONTIER WITH FREDERICK…

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News | ONCE MORE INTO THE FRONTIER WITH FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER

Edited by John Mack Faragher

Holt, 255 pages, $30

Since its publication a century ago, Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” has exerted more influence on American historians than any other single piece of writing. Turner’s “frontier thesis,” taught in schools, written into political oratory and endlessly represented in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and motion pictures and dime novels, has also profoundly shaped the way Americans have seen themselves. Turner believed passionately that America’s westward expansion had shaped American democracy and the national character far more than slavery or any other single factor; for him, “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

Turner (1861-1932) was a product of the 19th Century, when thinkers like Marx, Darwin and Freud believed that the mysteries of human behavior could be understood and resolved in much the same way that many scientific and technological mysteries were then being overcome. For Turner, however, beneath this optimism lay the racism, elitism and imperialism of turn-of-the century America, expressed in these essays by condescending references to Native American “savages,” to “other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped” and to the poor, darker Southern Europeans then immigrating to the industrial Northeast. Through Turner’s ideas, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt were able to justify American expansion into the Philippines and the Hawaiian Islands; Turner saw American ventures in the Pacific as a natural outgrowth of westward movement.

Because of this subtext, and for many other reasons, 20th Century historians have found Turner’s analysis too simplistic. In an afterword suggesting additional reading, editor John Mack Faragher, author of an award-winning biography of Daniel Boone, recounts the efforts of American historians to refute Turner and reveal American development in less one-sided terms. In the 1920s, intellectuals including John Dewey and Charles Beard began picking Turner apart; in the 1930s, historian Herbert Eugene Bolton called for a multinational and multiethnic history of the West. Attacks on Turner continued, and today anti-Turnerian historians comprise the majority view. For the public, the Turnerian era surely ended with the Vietnam-era publication of Dee Brown’s widely read account of Euro-American destruction of Native American life, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

But Turner can’t really be reduced to a proponent of imperialism. He was a public intellectual whose academic career testified to an unshakable commitment to the public university, a lifelong historian whose passion for research continually left eager publishers waiting for completed, definitive manuscripts. And in this somewhat uneven collection of essays, many useful insights are to be found apart from the biased and outmoded concepts and the repetitions of key ideas.

Turner expounded the thoroughly modern notion that each age reinterprets history in light of its own experiences and concerns; in an important essay called “The Significance of the Section,” he crafted a very convincing case that geographical sections of the United States-the South, the Great West, New England and the Middle West-have played more significant political roles than the states themselves. And for all its problems, and the fact of its excessive influence, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” is still a stunning essay. “The power of the frontier thesis derived from its commitment to the study of what it has meant to be an American,” Faragher believes; in his useful biographical introduction he notes that Turner forces us to confront what another historian has called “empire as a way of life.”

For the reader coming across it for the first time, the frontier essay has the effect of something uncanny and almost instantly familiar. If read purely on the level of metaphor, its artistic merit simply cannot be dismissed, and its last lines have the force of poetry:

“Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

Turner had tapped into something fundamentally American; he himself said that the ideas in the essay would have been expressed in one form or another by someone else because they were part of America’s growing consciousness of itself. And despite Turner’s uncertainty about what lay past the official closing of the frontier, the need for Americans to leave the places where the dream has died for unspoiled territory in which to begin again did not end with the 19th Century. The phenomenon is at work today, for example, in the migration of Californians to previously pristine territories in the intermountain West.

With regret, Turner watched pioneer individualism disappear and saw the rise of concentrated monopoly capital that was its antithesis; he watched Western citizens turn to the federal government for protection against those economic forces. Eerily, at the close of another century, we too are witnessing immense recombinations of capital, this time on a global scale. Reread in 1995, the words of Frederick Jackson Turner serve to suggest that we too may be at the dawn of a new and unknown era.

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What was Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis”?

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Imperial America: U.S. Global Expansion, 1890-1915

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