DOCUMENT
Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis
In 1893, the World’s Colombian Exposition opened in Chicago. The fair, called by one critic “a creation . . . nearly allied in beauty to festal and imperial Rome,” entertained throngs of visitors with the extraordinary and exciting: the best of architecture, technology, and city planning; a seventy-five-foot-high statue from France called “the Republic”; the miracle of public illumination by electricity; and the Darling of the Nile, the belly dancer Little Egypt.
Onto this stage stepped a young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, to present to the American Historical Association his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Historian Henry Nash Smith later called it “the most influential piece of writing about the West produced during the nineteenth century.” The essay’s thesis was startlingly simple: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. . . . The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” This thesis directly countered the views of two then-dominant schools of historians, those interpreting U. S. history in terms of the slavery controversy and those explaining U. S. institutions as products of English -- or Teutonic --”germs” planted in the New World.
Although the essay initially may have been overshadowed by the excitement of the exposition, it soon propelled Turner into a select group of historians of the ensuing century whose generalization are sweepingly concrete, whose prose frequently borders on poetry, and whose ideas have the brilliant originality and elegant simplicity that compel the reader to utter with admiration and envy, “Why didn’t I think of that?’
The essay also propelled Turner into a maelstrom of debate that has lasted through most of this century. Henry Nash Smith admired Turner’s thesis: “In the frontier Americans had a safety valve for social danger, a bank account on which they might continually draw to meet losses. This was the vast unoccupied domain that stretched from the borders of the settled areas to the Pacific Ocean.... No grave social problem could exist while the wilderness edge of civilizations opened wide its portals to all who were oppressed, to all who with strong arms and stout heart desired to hew out a home and a career for themselves. Here was an opportunity for social development continually to begin over again, wherever society gave signs of breaking into classes. Here was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.
But Turner had his critics as well. The very fact that he spent much of his career reworking and amplifying this thesis was for some the basis for criticism. For others, it was the substance of his ideas that posed problems. Howard Lamar in 1968, for instance, objected to the implications that a “discontinuity existed between America’s rural past and its urban-industrial present.” This, Lamar argued, made the thesis “useless as a guide for the present and future.” In short, he believed that Turner’s emphasis on pre-industrial America made his ideas irrelevant to modern, urban America.
Whatever the debate about the modern viability of Turner’s thesis, its function as a catalyst for subsequent thought on the nature of American society has been invaluable. Decade by decade over the past century, Turner’s ideas - - and those of his critics and advocates -- have led to new insights. This, as much as his original thesis, is the value of Turner’s writing. For, as he proposed in 1891:
“Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.... The aim of history, then, is to know the elements of the present by understanding what came into the present from the past. For the present is simply the developing past, the past the undeveloped present.... The antiquarian strives to bring back the past for the sake of the past; the historian strives to show the present to itself by revealing its origin from the past. The goal of the antiquarian is the dead past; the goal of the historian is the living present.”
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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.
.....The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is in the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.
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.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier - - a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile.
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, 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. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a study growth of independence on American lines. And to study the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.
From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred.... By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the regions that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.....
But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.... frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy....
So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit....
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.... Movement has been its dormant 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 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.
[from The American Frontier, Opposing Viewpoints, edited by Mary Ellen Jones. San Diego, California, Greenhaven Press, 1994.]