Rugged Individualism

Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier Thesis

At a meeting of the World Congress of Historians held in Chicago in the summer of 1893, a young professor from the University Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." In it, he developed two general propositions. The first was that the frontier--defined as an ever-receding border "between savagery and civilization," beyond which lay a vast expanse of "free land"--had been the primary determinant shaping the American character. The other was that, as of 1890, the frontier was closed, only isolated pockets of free land remaining, and "with its going has closed the first period of American history."

Turner's frontier hypothesis was a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of the age. For quite some time the prevailing view, at least among intellectuals, had been that the essential qualities of Americanness (most notably the Americans' spirit of enterprise and their capacity for self-government) were legacies from the Old World, specifically from their English forebears and, before that, from the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Turner challenged this "germ theory"--so called because it postulated that American institutions were the product of European seeds planted in New World soil--both as to the origins and as to the content of what was truly American. As for origins, Turner asserted that, except along parts of the Atlantic seaboard, people of English extraction had not been in a majority even during colonial times. More importantly, he insisted that Americans of whatever ethnic background -English, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Irish, German--had been forced to shed their European cultural baggage once they took up the life of pioneers and to develop into an entirely different breed of men. As for American traits and values, Turner declared that the most general of these were individualism, democracy, nationalism, equality of opportunity, spatial and vertical mobility, and--yes--idealism.

The immediate reaction to this daring "frontier thesis" was minimal. A reporter who covered the meeting for the literary magazine The Dial did not regard it as being worthy of mention in his story. Only one local newspaper found space, on an inside page, for even a brief reference to it. Of those people to whom Turner sent copies of the paper, only one responded with anything warmer than politeness.

In little more than a decade, however, the frontier thesis became a new orthodoxy. Turner himself helped popularize it by writing articles in such influential magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and also by training a host of graduate students who fanned out across the country and spread his gospel. The West and the frontier, as one scholar put it, rapidly took over space in the textbooks that had formerly been devoted to the Constitution. A number of popular writers parroted the thesis, novelists echoed its themes, politicians incorporated its message into their campaign oratory; it became common currency of the realm. In 1910 even stately and stodgy Harvard University added its imprimatur, luring Turner to grace its history faculty.

Acceptance of Turner's Thesis

There are many reasons why the frontier thesis so rapidly captured the popular imagination. The timing was propitious in several ways. The theory of evolution and its counterpart Social Darwinism were much in vogue, and Turner's was an evolutionary theory of American development. The political debacle resulting from the Populist Movement dramatized the importance of east-west tensions in America, heightened a national nostalgia for a simpler past, and lent credence to turner's assertion that slavery and the Civil War had been only "incidents" that obscured the march westward. Then, too, the nation was feeling its oats at the turn of the century, what with its growing industrial might, the tonic of a quick and triumphant war with Spain, and then the ebullient presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. Thus a national explanation of America's uniqueness was warmly welcome. And on the negative side, the country was undergoing a new immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the difficulties being experienced in assimilating those newcomers seemed to be explained by Turner's dictum that the safety valve long afforded by the frontier was no more.

But the most compelling reasons for the ready acceptance of the thesis arose from the self-same American character that Turner attempted to describe in his essay. Whatever may be the content of national character--and it is admittedly an elusive concept--one sure clue is what a people prefers to believe about itself. When Turner told Americans they were a rugged, self-made race of men, forged in adversity through the pioneering experience, reborn and purified into a breed unique on earth, and when he threw into the bargain a broad hint that everything good that had developed in Europe was imitative or derivative from the American example, he was telling them something they powerfully craved to feel was true. Moreover, the message was close enough to being true that no extraordinary credulity was necessary to swallow it whole.

The other American peculiarity that made them receptive to Turner's thesis was, ironically, that Americans are and have been the most a historical of Western nations: We do not know or wish to know what has gone before. This is no modern aberration, no product of a bankrupt educational system. When George Bush snarls contemptuously, "That's history," as a way of dismissing as irrelevant something that happened only a year or two ago, or even a week or tow ago, he is expressing a quintessential attitude deeply rooted in the past that has made Americans what they are.

Turner's "history" could appeal to such a people because it was couched in terms of a process rather than a continuum, a process that was repeated over time in every part of America with only trivial deviations. Participants in the process looked forward in time, confident as to how it would all turn out. And as for looking backward, as one of Turner's many illustrious students put it half a century later, in his model "you didn't have to study the history of a time and place to know what that history was."

Turner's description of the frontier process began with the Indian and the hunter, continued with "the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader," then the "pastoral stage," then the growing of crops in "sparsely settled farming communities," followed by "the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement," and finally concluded with the organization of manufacturing with the "city and the factory system." He suggested that this process was the norm everywhere except when a mining phase intervened or when environments were radically different. "Stand at Cumberland Gap," he wrote, "and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file--the buffalo, following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer--and the frontier has passed by." That would have been during the 1780s. Now, "Stand at south Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.

Characteristics That The Frontier Produced

He meant his essay to be suggestive rather than definitive, however, and as he explored the subject further he introduced some refinements. For one thing, he observed that as New England Yankees trekked westward, their path marked by towns named Salem from Massachusetts to Oregon, they tended to do so in groups rather than as individuals or single families. Whole communities migrated together, and thus they were able to skip the most primitive and barbarous stages of the frontier process and to retain many of the traits of their Puritan ancestors. For another thing, Turner observed that southerner, though experiencing the early phases as he had described them, only evolved as far as the intensive agricultural phase because of their system of plantation slavery. But for the rest of the country, form the Middle Atlantic states through the Middle West and across the Mississippi into Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska--which he characterized as the "typically American" region of the country--he stuck by his formula.

The formula was one of environmental determinism, and given the broad sweep of his generalizations, he was fairly specific in suggesting how it worked. Pioneers went to the frontier--"a gate of escape from the bondage of the past"--from the settled east or directly from Europe. Either way, when they faced the rigors of surviving in a primitive wilderness, most of their socially learned values and ways roved utterly useless to them. They may have cast them off reluctantly, but cast them off they must; and thus, whatever their differences in backgrounds, they necessarily were homogenized into something new, and as they moved up the scale of social evolution, they necessarily did so along similar lines.

Most of the characteristics that the frontier process red were in Turner's view desirable. He saw the frontier as breeding nationalism, for instance, not only because frontiersmen felt a need for services such as transportation and protection from the Indians but also because the frontier and frontiersmen were ever on the move, and "nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism." As for democracy, he saw it as "born of free lad," for "so long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competence exists, and economic power secures political power."

To be sure, Turner's frontiersmen were not saints. Their democracy, "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." He deplored in particular the frontiersman's "laxity in regard to governmental affairs" and "the lack of a highly developed civic spirit," which together led to political corruption and a disregard for honor in matters of business. He relegated the lawlessness and violence of the frontier to a footnote on the ground that they were "sufficiently known." Even lawlessness, however, had a positive side. The frontiersman "knew how to preserve order, even in the absence of legal authority." He was interested not in "finely drawn distinctions or scruples of method," but in "substantial justice, secured in the most direct way." To him, "a crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the land."

Perhaps the most elusive and yet most powerful characteristic Turner saw on the frontier--and in the larger nation that it shaped--was idealism, born of the equal and boundless opportunity for self improvement the frontier provided. Picking up on a theme suggested by Henry Adams, Turner waxed poetical on the subject.

While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his as had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of he wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the long hut and the sod house of the home of his children, where should dwell comfort and the higher things of life, though they might not be for him.

Seen from that perspective, materialistic America was the most idealistic land on earth, and its people "had the power of will to make their dreams come true."

Evaluating The Frontier Thesis

To appraise the frontier theses is a threefold undertaking: as an account of American history to the end of the nineteenth century, as description of American character, and as a prophesy of what was to come after "the pioneering era drew to a close. " as indicated, the thesis was for a long time reckoned almost as holy writ. One measure of Turner's impact is that, whereas the University of Wisconsin was virtually alone in offering courses on the history of the western United States in 1893, almost every college and university offered such courses between roughly 1910 and 1960, a large percentage of them taught by Turner's students. His prestige and the respect with which his ideas were viewed are indicated by the fact that he was awarded two posthumous Pulitzer Prizes in the 1930s for books that he had never finished writing.

Bit by bit, however, historians have whittled away at the thesis until almost no part of it is still accepted. As early as 1921 another historian of the west, Clarence W. Alvord, had pointed out in a review of Turner's major work The Frontier in American History that the "frontier process" rarely if ever happened. What happened instead was that hunters, herders, farmers, entrepreneurs, traders, and manufacturers poured into the western country "practically simultaneously." Instead of describing the process of civilization as marching is single file, or in a succession of waves, Alvord suggested, the appropriate metaphor "should be a flood." Reviewing the same book, Charles A. Beard noted that the frontier could not explain slavery, urbanization, industrialization, and the growth of organized labor, all of which were much in evidence before the frontier allegedly closed in 1890.

Curiously, neither these early critics nor later ones took notice of the fact that there were other peoples on the North American continent who proved entirely immune to the frontier environment. Most obviously there were the Amerindians, whom Turner described as primitives and savages without explaining why the frontier had not worked its magic upon them. There were also Hispanics in the South-west from Texas to California, who settled into a leisurely pastoral life that was changed only when the aggressive Gringos began pouring in form the east.

Nonetheless, criticisms on other grounds were forthcoming in the 1930s. Benjamin f. Wright, a professor of government at Harvard, led the way with a series of articles attacking the thesis. Most tellingly, he found that the movement of democratic institutions and ideas had not been from west to east, as turner had asserted, but the other way around. Indeed, most state constitutions were patterned after those of states immediately to the east, as were local governments. Wright also showed that the pioneering phase in most places lasted such a short time that it rarely forced settlers to cast off their past and assume a new personality. Other scholars, including Louis B. Wright, George W. Pierson, and Earl Pomeroy, elaborated and expanded the points Benjamin Wright had made.

In the 1940s two major scholars lambasted the "safety-valve" aspect of the frontier thesis--Turner's belief that the presence of free land had attracted eastern workers and immigrants and thus prevented their being bottled up in cities. The first critic, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., was a specialist in urban history who pointed out that as early as 1820 migration to the cities was more rapid than movement to the frontier. Moreover, during the century from the 1790 census to that of 1890, urban population growth was 139-fold, whereas that of the country as a whole was but sixteen-fold. Schlesinger claimed that Turner himself had, in 1925, recognized that American history would have to be reinterpreted as an urbanizing rather than as a westernizing experience.

The other major attack on the safety-valve theory was that launched by Fred Shannon, distinguished historian of agricu7lture at the University of Illinois. Shannon's research showed that, throughout the nineteenth century, for every industrial worker who went into pioneering agriculture on the frontier there were twenty farmers who moved to urban areas. There were tangible reasons why this was so: Shannon calculated that even when western land was nominally free, as it was under the 1862 Homestead Act, the cost of transportation and capital goods made it inaccessible to eastern workers. But there was also a matter of preference. People who grew up on farms were ten times as likely to move to the city as adults as they were to move to a new farm. Shannon also noted that the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, when more "free land" was being taken up than ever before, should have seen the safety valve working most effectively, whereas in fact strikes, radicalism, and violence had been rampant during those years.

In short, the frontier process did not take place, frontiersmen borrowed their democracy from effete easterners, and the great migration was to the cities rather than to the wilderness. There remains the question whether immigrants cast off their traditional cultures as they arrived in the west. The evidence is overwhelming that they did not. Turner himself was aware of the Germans who settled on the Pennsylvania frontier during the eighteenth century and also peopled the back-country of Maryland, much of the Shenandoah Valley, and portions of the Carolina Piedmont--retaining their ethnic awareness all the way. Surely he must have known too of the Scandinavians in the upper Middle West, who also retained a distinctive culture. He wrote much of the Scotch--Irish but was apparently unaware that when he described their characteristics as frontiersmen he was describing traits (as Grady McWhiney has so brilliantly demonstrated) that they had manifested for centuries in Britain and Ireland.

Indeed, it is difficult to understand how a view so contrary to common sense could have endured, for a moment's reflection should be enough to indicate what, above all else, the essentially uninhabited American frontier provided and the Old World could not: space where people were able, by choice, to live among like-minded people in isolation for others. The frontier experience worked its changes, to be sure, but these were in the direction of remolding the settlers as caricatures of their old selves. In the words of Robert D. Mitchell, in frontier conditions tradition

Is modified because of selective trait retention by the culture bearers as they negotiate and settle the new environments. The core culture undergoes trait reduction and simplification, while those traits which are retained are intensified and become the framework to which innovative or borrowed traits are added to form the configuration of a new society.

Evaluating Turner's description of the American character and of American values yields more mixed results. His dictum that Americans were individualistic for instance, had long been and continues to be a cliche of questionable validity. My own researches of the eighteenth century demonstrate that in most places the community policed the manners and morals of all its members and was extremely intolerant when individuals departed from the norms expected of persons of a given place in the social hierarchy. Social hierarchies became much more fluid in the nineteenth century, it is true; but one needs only to read Tocqueville or Dickens to understand that, while Americans were wont to boast rudely of their individualism and equality, they continued in fact to be conformists. The one exception was the South. Obsessed with honor, quick to take offense, and prone to violence, Southerners developed a veneer of politeness and a spirit of live and let live, which led to an extreme tolerance of eccentric behavior.

Interpreting American Culture

As for the democracy that turner regarded as characteristically American, one must distinguish between the politically the United States had provided for universal manhood suffrage on a course paralleling that of England. Going beyond manhood suffrage, however--giving the vote to women, blacks, and eighteen-year-olds and providing for popular instead of legislative election of senators--entailed democratic reforms adopted during the twentieth century, long after the closing of the frontier. Socially, the nation was democratic in the sense that no one, except for slaves, had hereditary status. But social equality did not extend to women and children and members of dependent classes. (It is easy to forget that domestic servants and farm laborers constituted a fifth of the total labor force in 1900 and an eighth of the total as late as 1940.) In other words, there was a sense of social equality among free, white, propertied adult males, or perhaps one person in seven--and even among them a hierarchy of deference prevailed.

Turning to nationalism, it is true that Americans traditionally have regarded themselves as a unique and superior people, unburdened by the history that plagues the Old World. Beyond that, however, it is difficult to see any serious breakdown of localism in eighteenth-or nineteenth-century America, wherein secession movements were endemic. Westerners threatened to secede repeatedly from the 1780s until the 1830s, New Englanders so threatened during the presidencies of Jefferson and Madison, and the South did secede in 1860-61. Nearly every war until World War II divided the nation bitterly, as did those that followed. Sectional loyalty marked most of the country until quite recently, and a sense of ethnic identity among "hyphenated Americans" has been ever present. And with nationalism as with democracy, the greatest advances took place many years after Turner said the frontier was no more.

Equality of opportunity and mobility, both spatial and vertical, were closely related concepts, and in dealing with them Turner was on the mark. Truly, the united States provided boundless opportunities for those who were willing to seize them, and as truly the American people were restless and on the move, especially after 1815. Three observations must be added, however. The first is that other countries in the New World, particularly in South America, were quite as richly blessed in natural wealth and free land as the United States, but somehow their peoples failed to exploit and develop them. The second is that vertical mobility worked both ways. Rag to riches was a common story, but as historian Burt Folsom has shown, riches to rates was as common: The failure rate among both farmers and businessmen has been staggering throughout our history. The third is that opportunity and mobility have all along increased with urbanization, and they have grown enormously with massive urbanization in the twentieth century.

Finally, we come to the idealism. The spirit that Turner so eloquently described was abundantly present in nineteenth-century America, but not among those to whom he attributed it. Southern planters had it built the cotton kingdom, albeit with the forced labor of others. Town fathers, boosters, and boomers had it: and so did canal-builders, railroad-builders, and captains of industry--city men all. And most of all inventors and entrepreneurs had it. (Thomas Edison once took his secretary, A.O. Tate, into a northern New Jersey wilderness and asked what he saw before him. When Tate replied, " A beautiful valley," Edison said, "Well, I'm going to make it a lot more beautiful. I'm going to make it a lot more beautiful. I'm going to fill it with factory smoke-stacks.")

Frontiersmen and ordinary farmers dreamed a different dream. It needs be recognized that except for plantation masters few Americans ever became wealthy from farming, whether as pioneers or as settled agriculturists. But there lay open to them one prospective quick route to wealth, and that was in land speculation, fever for speculating in land was pandemic in America from colonial days to the twentieth century, infecting rich and poor, men of high birth and low. Repeatedly, whenever farm prices began to rise, farmers took out mortgages and invested in land every dollar they could raise, expecting to sell to newcomers at whopping profits. Their own buying, not that of new settlers, pushed land prices sharply upward, and on paper they were temporarily men of wealth. Inevitably, however--in the panics of 1819, 1837, 1857,1873, and 1893--the bubble burst, and the farmer-speculators went down with their dreams.

Turner's Vision of America Endures

Enough has been said the indicate that Turner's frontier thesis proved in the long run to be no more accurate at foretelling the future than at describing the past. But it was not his misinterpretations or the work of scholars that brought the ultimate rejection of his ideas. Rather, the demise of the frontier thesis is explicable in terms of turner's own philosophy of history. He always insisted that study of the past had no value unless it shed light on present concerns. History was, he said, the " self-consciousness of the living age, acquired by understanding its development from the past." In other words, history was meaningful only as long as it was relevant. Without commenting on this formulation as a philosophical proposition, we may conclude that Turner's version of the American past became defunct because it became irrelevant.

A reasonably accurate barometer to the fluctuations in its relevance is to be found in the traditional movie westerns. The westerns of the 1930s--featuring Tom Mix, Buck Jones, ken Maynard, bob Steele, and perhaps two dozen other stars--captured the frontier myth in celluloid. Common ranchers and farmers, struggling against nature, find their hopes and dreams frustrated by (choose one) (1) outlaws, (2) a crooked sheriff, (3) wealthy land- and water-engrossers, (4) railroaders, (5) eastern exploiters, or (6) all of the above. In comes a stranger on a white horse who rallies the plain fold, wipes out the bad guys, and rides the Marines in the South Pacific by drawling, "Saddle up, boys"--but as soon as the war was won, they returned in full vigor. When television came along, and throughout the 1950s, westerns were the most popular shows among children and adults alike, and their message was always some variant of the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy was able to strike responsive chords by calling his program the New Frontier; but frontier imagery was soon to be discredited and them obliterated from memory by the onward rush of events. The discrediting came from a perversion of frontier vigilantism in the form of assassinations, first of Jack Kennedy and then of his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King, Jr. The obliteration came from the civil rights movement, urban race riots, Vietnam, Watergate, the emergence of the New Left, the hippie counterculture--in sum an orgy of national self-flagellation. In the wake of all that, American history was rewritten to feature the rape of a continent, ravaging of Indians, exploitation of blacks, and oppression of women--in short, something to be thoroughly ashamed of. There was no place left for a romanticized, heroic westward movement as the central theme of the American experience.

And yet, if one can see beyond the pages of the history books and the nightly newscasts and the Establishment press and the mouthing of liberal politicos, it is obvious that the Turnerian vision lives on in the collective consciousness of America. Consider the popularity of the antihero; who is he but Daniel Boone, the quintessential rebel against civilization, in disguise? Consider the Naderites; who are they but 1890s-style populists? Consider such disparate groups as environmentalists, organic food freaks, and the National Rifle Association; what are they expressing if not a nostalgia for a simper, frontier America? Consider the flap over Willie Horton, or the demand for a crackdown on urban crime; what are those if not cries for a return to frontier justice? Consider the presidential campaign of George "Read Mt Lips" Bush; what was that, if not an invocation of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood?

What I am getting around to is this. Frederick Jackson Turner was wrong in almost every detail--in his description of the American past, in his analysis of the American character, in his forecast of America's future--but in some broader, more fundamental, almost Jungian, way, he captured the truth. Our frontier past, real or imagined, is indelibly imprinted upon our soul as a nation.