#52 Frederick Jackson Turner – The Significant of the Frontier in American History

I’ve long been of the opinion that American history is too much fun to be left to the historians. There’s something especially grand about its grand narratives. Its political struggles seem to be projected at twice their natural size, its people seem to be faced with challenges peculiarly theirs. And, most of all, the whole story is told with a sense of abiding hope.

That, according to Frederick Jackson Turner, is not a coincidence. In his eyes, it is all to do with the role of the frontier in America’s history.

“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 the American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.”

Historically, the frontier was the name given to the edge of America’s settlement – a line that swept inwards from one coast, then another, from the seventeenth century onwards. By the time of American independence, the line of settlement rested at the Appalachians. Within forty years, the nation had been filled in to the Mississippi, and California would soon be added in the far west. The frontier was pushed ever-more towards the middle of the country until, in 1890, the census bureau said that the ‘frontier’ had ceased to exist as a meaningful entity.

Turner, however, argues that the role of the frontier goes well beyond simple questions of geography or demography. Its presence runs through the whole of American culture and politics and defines what it means to be an American.

Every homestead and township in America has been cut out of nature, founded in the wilderness. America did not exist, like some ancient European nation: it had to be made, and the people who built it were shaped accordingly. Also, these places were built on land that was essentially free.* The people who built the West had come to make their fortune, and to do so through their own labour.

“The fundamental traits of the man of the interior were due to the free lands of the West. These turned his attention to the great task of subduing them to the purposes of civilisation, and to the task of advancing his social status in the new democracy he was helping to create.”

These settlers were used to the unavoidable equality of frontier life, equally suspicious of government and social elites. The frontier gave a rough, populist character to American political life and customs, which in turn is reflected in the development of key stages of American history. The establishment of universal male suffrage and the rise of Jacksonian democracy;** the stirring of the civil war; the rise of the US into an industrial powerhouse – all of these were driven, Turner says, by the consequences of the frontier.

As with all historians, there is an agenda behind Turner’s arguments. By showing America to be formed by its frontier experience, he implicitly argues that America is different from the nations of Europe. That’s a particularly important point when Turner is writing, at the turn of the twentieth century, when America is first emerging as a world power. For a new-born nation, created as an outgrowth of other nations, foundation myths are doubly important for establishing a separate identity.

“This new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the [old] ideals of statesmanship came from no theorist’s dreams of the German forest. It came, stark and strong, from the American forest.”

But that notwithstanding, geography plays a vital role in forming our ideas of who we are. Just as America has been dominated by the logic of the frontier and the topology of its river basins, other nations have had their characters decided by their coastlines or their politics set by their accidental neighbours.

In the case of America, the role of the frontier has stretched beyond institutions or politics, to cover cultural and psychological factors as well. The stories of the Wild West still stir the heart today. America’s ideas of self-reliance and virtue come in no small part from the homesteads of the prairie. Also, from this sense of having built a nation, there comes an inescapable hopefulness:

“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 often been forced upon them.”

This fits beautifully with a certain view of American history, and this theory has been tremendously influential in setting the way America sees its own history. It’s therefore interesting to note that Turner, in his original essay, was writing about the end of an era of American history. With the end of the frontier, he thought that the country was destined to change, away from all this individualism towards something more modern and cooperative. That never really happened.

Some might argue that the frontier was only ever part of the story. But, for me, I wonder if America will never run out of frontiers to tame.

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*No onward chain, as General Custer would have said.

**One piece of American history that often gets forgotten is that even among the white, male population, one-man-one-vote wasn’t universal until the 1840s – seventy years after the overthrow of British rule.