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Turner and the Western Revolt

The reign of aristocracy is passing; that of humanity begins. Democracy is waiting for its poet.

—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1883 (aet. 21)

All the associations called up by the spoken word, the West, were fabulous, mythic, hopeful.

—Hamlin Garland

I

WHEN WE THINK of the American West in the 1890’s, we think first of its manifest excitements—the revolt of Populism, the climax of the silver issue in the Bryan campaign of 1896. There was also a parallel cultural revolt of similar emotional origins yet gentler, subtler, and considerably more enduring. For a long time the East had condescended to Western culture, and Westerners were tired of being patronized. Mature enough now in their wealth and their cultural powers, they were at last ready to stage a demonstration of their coming of age, to write manifestos proclaiming their cultural independence and promising their future predominance. When Congress authorized a national exposition to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, it was none of the great Eastern cities—not Boston, the passing cultural capital, not New York, the emerging one; not Washington, the political capital, nor Philadelphia, which had appropriately been host to the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in 1876—but two upstart Western rivals, St. Louis and Chicago, that bid hardest to have the fair, and it was Chicago that won. There the American Historical Association gathered in July, 1893, and there Frederick Jackson Turner, then not quite thirty-two, read a paper on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” “which was destined,” as Charles A. Beard later wrote, “to have a more profound influence on thought about American history than any other essay or volume ever written on the subject.”¹

The political revolt of the West could be heard anywhere in the rhetoric of the nineties. The cultural revolt, carried on for the most part sotto voce and scattered in a variety of fugitive sources, is harder to record. But Turner’s address was one of two documents symptomatic of the spirit of the new West. While Turner in effect claimed for the West America’s historic past, Hamlin Garland’s literary manifesto, Crumbling Idols, claimed America’s cultural future. Garland’s little book, published in 1894 by the enterprising new Chicago firm of Stone and Kimball, was almost a counterpart in criticism of Turner’s historical essay. Garland, a year older than Turner, was also a native of Wisconsin. Like Turner, he had played the role of the young man from the provinces, although where Turner had gone to the East’s most vital academic center at Baltimore, Garland had gone to its old literary center at Boston. With Garland the experience led to a similar reassertion of Western pride, to a rejection of Eastern literary models and standards of judgment. The history of American literature, he argued, is the history “of the slow development of a distinctive utterance.” Its greatest impediment was a continuing imitation of English literary models. American literature had been almost wholly provincial down to the Civil War, but at its close, “from the interior of America, men and women rose almost at once to make American literature take on vitality and character.” Now the Eastern cities had taken the position once occupied by London, that of an academic center, and the many school-bred Westerners, who were still content to defer to the judgments of the East, wrote imitative works, taking their stand against “the indigenous and the democratic.” Against this worship of crumbling idols the Western artist must steel himself. The problem for an American art was not to produce something greater than the past but something different. “Our task is not to imitate but to create.”

In short bold strokes Garland tried to anticipate the new democratic realism (he used the unfortunate term “veritism”) that would rise out of the West. The Western writer must learn to see “the wealth of material which lies at his hand in the mixture of races going on with inconceivable celerity everywhere in America, but with especial picturesqueness in the West.” For forty years an “infinite drama” had been going on in the wide spaces of the West, as rich a drama as any ever seen on earth. Themes were crying out for their writers—the history, for example, of the lumbering district of the Northern lakes, the subtle changes of thought and life that had come with emergent cities like St. Paul or Minneapolis, the life of the sawmills and shingle mills, the river life of the upper Mississippi, the mixtures of races, the building of the railroads with their trickery and exploitation, the rise of millionaires. “The mighty West, with its swarming millions, remains undelineated in the novel, the drama, and the poem.” The coming generation would remedy this: but it must not imitate, it must write of the things it knows, must embrace local color—“Every great moving literature today is full of local color”; look at the Norwegians and the Russians. As Turner argued that local history must be set in the context of universal history, Garland saw that the parochial, once it has been raised to the highest level of expression, has universal merits.

Garland saw the future of American literature coming out of the prairies and forests, from which Turner traced the democracy of the past. “The prairies lead to general conceptions. The winds give strength and penetration and alertness. The mighty stretches of woods lead to breadth and generosity of intellectual conception. The West and South are coming to be something more than big, coming to the expression of a new world, coming to take their places in the world of literature, as in the world of action, and no sneer from gloomy prophets of the dying past can check or chill them.” Hence the center of national literary life could no longer be in the East. Literary supremacy would pass from New York to Chicago, as it once had from Boston to New York; and beyond Chicago there lay yet more new centers of literary culture. In the future, American culture would no doubt be more diffuse, but if it would have any center, it would surely not be New York, which, like Boston, “is too near London.” “From [the] interior spaces of the South and West the most vivid and fearless and original utterance of the coming American democracy will come.… The genuine American literature … must come from the soil and the open air, and be likewise freed from tradition.”

Turner’s single address had more durable fare to offer than the dozen essays that made up Garland’s book. Not only did Turner set forth a view of the American character so conceived that the very essence of American nationality was recaptured from the Eastern historians and turned over to the substantial majority of Americans who lived beyond the Appalachians, but he also offered an “explanation,” to use his term, of all American history that was distinctly different from previous explanations. His famous paper opens on a strategic note: citing a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census, Turner pointed out that the unsettled area of the United States was now so broken up by the advance of settlers that there was no longer a frontier line. The frontier had disappeared, and this marked “the closing of a great historic movement.” Thus far American history had been in large degree the history of the colonization of the West. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”²

Turner went on to underscore the central importance of growth and adaptation in American history, with the special feature that the frontier brought a continually renewed reversion to “primitive conditions,” which is experienced over and over again. “This perennial rebirth,” he asserted, “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.” Even the slavery struggle “occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.”

Exclusive attention, Turner complained, had been given to the germ theory of political institutions—to the study of European germs maturing in the American environment—and too little to the demands of the environment itself, for it was the environment that provided the American elements. “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” It takes the colonist, a man in European dress with European habits of thought, strips off the garments of his civilized past, puts him almost on a par with the Indian, and disciplines and changes him during his long struggle to implant society in the wilderness. At first the wilderness masters the colonist; in the end it is mastered by him, as the apparatus of civilization little by little emerges; but the point is that the process changes him, and when it is over he is no longer a European but a new man, an accretion of the new things he has had to learn and do. “Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.”

Like most of the post-Darwinian thinkers of the nineteenth century, Turner was fascinated by the idea of laying out the development of civilization in a series of distinct evolutionary stages; and the beauty of American history, from this point of view, was the way the stages of social development appeared and repeated themselves in a clear pattern. In one of his best images Turner said: “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.” The stages are recorded like the strata in a geological sequence or the order of species on a phylogenetic scale: first the Indian and the hunter; then the trader, the pathfinder of civilization; then, successively, the pastoral stage of ranch life, settled farming communities, intensive cultivation, and finally the emergence of cities and manufactures. In a long central passage of the essay Turner spelled out some of the features of these various kinds of frontiers.

In assessing the effect of the frontier on the East and on Europe, Turner argued that the frontier was the primary agency through which the immigrant was Americanized, that it “promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” The important legislation that had developed the powers of the national government was also “conditioned on the frontier.” Such matters as the tariff, the disposition of public lands, and internal improvement had traditionally been treated by historians as subsidiary to the slavery question. “But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.” (Earlier he had said, with better proportion, “a most important incident.”)³ The demands of the West, the problems arising out of the conquest and settlement of the West, were of such importance that they shaped the slavery struggle itself. The West forged legislation, broke down the sectionalism of the coast, nationalized the federal government. Loose construction of the Constitution gained as the nation marched westward. “It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the nationalizing republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson.” But the “most important effect of the frontier” was in promoting democracy both in America and Europe. The frontier produced individualism, and “frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.” It was the West that had done most to develop a democratic suffrage.

Above all, the West had promoted mobility and opportunity. “So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” Turner saw that “the democracy born of free land” had its limitations too: it went too far in its selfishness and individualism, proved itself intolerant of administrative experience and education, pressed liberty beyond its proper bounds, showed laxity in regard to governmental affairs, looked indulgently upon speculation and wild-cat banking, and, as the current agitation of the Populists showed, entertained rather primitive notions of finance. In religion and intellectual life the frontier inheritance was also mixed, but invariably powerful. “From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance,” which can be read in the reports of frontier travelers—coarseness and strength, acuteness and inquisitiveness, a practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients and masterful in its grasp of material things, a “dominant individualism working both for good and evil,” an exuberance that comes with freedom, but also a deficiency in artistic sense.

The essay closed with a moving coda, which reverted to the theme of the Columbian Exposition: “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.” It would be rash, Turner thought, to say that this expansive quality was at an end: the habit of movement was there, and American energy would continue to demand “a wider field for its exercise.” But now it would work without the great gift of free land. “For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not [sic] 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.”

II

Garland’s ingenuous and ill-formed tract, though prophetic on minor points, was soon to be forgotten. As for Turner’s address, its immediate reception by the historians at Chicago gave no augury of its future fame, but the tide was running with him: he had struck off a view of American history which appealed both to the particular needs and interests of the rising historical profession and to the American imagination at large. Somehow he had caught in an essay of less than thirty pages what was to become the characteristic American view of the American past. If Turner’s paper did not immediately strike his listeners as sensational, it may be because many of them were already sympathetically aware of the Western cultural reaction and because they greeted Turner’s assertions as part of the growing concern for the historical study of the West. The idea that the Eastern point of view had failed to account for the development of the continent took on a certain poignancy, to be sure, from sectional resentments. Charles A. Beard later remembered, perhaps with a touch of exaggeration, being “in the bondage of iniquity and the gall of bitterness—at least in the Middle West where I lived at the time Turner read his address,” and being convinced that Easterners had been raised on literature assuming “that all of us beyond the Alleghenies, if not the Hudson, were almost, if not quite, uncouth savages.”⁴

Westerners were not wrong in thinking that they were often regarded with some disdain by Easterners of the old school. Interregional encounters could be bruising. “I do not like the western type of man,” E. L. Godkin had once announced to Charles Eliot Norton, and to another who had written him in praise of California he replied firmly: “No scenery or climate I had to share with western people would charm me.” One of Norton’s correspondents, the young George Edward Woodberry, who had taught for a time early in his career at the University of Nebraska, found that the faculty was sharply split between its Eastern and Western members. His own response suggests why. Nebraska society, he reported to Norton, was “characterized by blank Philistinism intellectually and barren selfishness morally.” The undergraduates were “necktieless, often collarless,” and sometimes appeared in “shirt fronts of outrageous unclean-ness.” “This life,” he complained in an anxious letter to Norton, “requires a hardihood of the senses and susceptibilities of which you have little conception, I fear.… I doubt very much whether the hardihood I gain will not be a deterioration into barbarism, not sinew for civilization.”⁵

Such feelings Turner knew, and had opposed with a touch of gentle humor. Years after his famous essay, trying to help a friend phrase a tactful letter that would appease Western sensibilities, Turner unwittingly accounted for much of his own impact. “I have merely tried,” he explained, “to put myself in the mental attitude of a sensitive Western man who is apt to be on his guard and looking for trouble when a New England resident explains things to him.” Yet, despite the polemical surge behind much of Turner’s work, not all Eastern historians were disposed to deny that more attention should be given to the West. At its second meeting in 1885 the American Historical Association called for more suitable measures to preserve materials on Western history. W. F. Poole, an adopted Midwesterner, complained in his presidential address three years later that Easterners had been writing American history without due regard for the importance of the West, and urged them to grow “tall enough to look over the Appalachian range and see what has happened on the other side.” At the same meeting Turner’s teacher at Wisconsin, William F. Allen, a medievalist who sometimes doubled in American history and whose precepts profoundly influenced the young scholar, thought it important to plead for “The Place of the North-West in General History,” and had forcefully asserted the central place of the Northwest both in the imperial struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the development of American liberty. A young Eastern historian with Western interests, Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1889 the first two volumes of The Winning of the West, which Turner praised in the Dial as a “vivid portraiture of the backwoodsman’s advance” written “in the light of the widest significance of the events which he describes.”⁶

As is commonly the case with such basic ideas, Turner’s frontier interpretation did not spring into being all at once out of a single mind. It no more detracts from Turner’s originality to point to his predecessors than it does—to risk a comparison with a much grander intellectual construction—to point out that Marx’s system was pieced together out of English political economy, German philosophy, and French utopian speculation. The presence of the unsettled West had always had a powerful effect upon the minds both of American and foreign observers, and it is no surprise that Turner’s theories were a striking consummation of an old interest rather than a new departure. Many leading writers, beginning with Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton, had argued that free lands would act as a kind of relief for unemployed or discontented labor and as a source of high wages, and this idea became very widespread in the United States. This, to be sure, was only a portion of Turner’s interpretation; but his central emphasis on westward expansion and open land as forces in American democracy and the American character had also been anticipated by others at home and abroad. Hegel, in his Philosophy of History, had considered that the Mississippi lands relieved the chief source of discontent in America and thus guaranteed its existing civil condition.⁷ Emerson, in 1844, had observed in his lecture, “The Young American,” that the Atlantic States had been oriented toward Europe and commercial culture but that now “the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.” Macaulay in an often quoted letter of 1857 to an early biographer of Jefferson, attributed the stability of American politics to “a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land.” Yankee prophets of the early nineteenth century like Timothy Dwight and Lyman Beecher had clearly seen the pivotal place of the West in the future culture of America and were intent to claim it for the right brand of Protestantism. Such men did not always think well of the Westerners, but their sense of the process involved was much like Turner’s. “In mercy … to the sober, industrious, and well-disposed inhabitants,” Dwight wrote in 1821, “Providence has opened in the vast Western wilderness a retreat, sufficiently alluring to draw them away from the land of their nativity. We have many troubles even now; but we should have many more, if this body of foresters had remained at home.”

A commentator like Tocqueville could hardly fail to see the phenomenon, particularly in its bearing on the American imagination. “The American people,” he wrote, “views its own march across these wilds, draining swamps, turning the course of rivers, peopling solitudes, and subduing nature. This magnificent image of themselves does not meet the gaze of the Americans at intervals only; it may be said to haunt every one of them in his least as well as in his most important actions and to be always flitting before his mind.” E. L. Godkin had argued in a brilliant essay of 1865 that the phenomena of frontier life were more an effect than a cause of democracy, but that “it has been to their agency more than to aught else, that the democratic tide in America has owed most of its force and violence.” To the westward movement Godkin attributed the “prodigious contempt for experience and for theory” that Americans had developed, and he charged it with accentuating their materialism, their anti-intellectual and anticultural feelings and their distrust of history. (Turner was amused when his attention was called to this piece in 1896. “Godkin,” he said, “has stolen my thunder.”) The ingratiating Southern statesman, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, adumbrated some aspects of the frontier thesis in a memorial speech on Calhoun delivered in 1887. Lord Bryce sounded rather like Turner two years later when he wrote in his great commentary that “the West is the most American part of America; that is to say, the part where those features which distinguish America from Europe come out in the strongest relief.” He also observed that nearly all the best arable land was already occupied, and predicted on this count that the future “will be a time of trial for democratic institutions.”

Three years before Turner’s address Hubert Howe Bancroft, another historian of the West, had noted that “the tide of intelligence” had always moved from East to West, and had attributed the static character of late medieval Europe to the “lack of free land.” He thought that the Anglo-Saxons of America in their westward advance across the continent had “a marked advantage over other nationalities for migration and colonization by virtue of the century-training in backwoods life, and expansion of frontier settlement by constant accessions from the seaboard states. Herein they had developed the practical adaptability and self-reliance inherited from the mother race, so much so as to surpass even that so far pre-eminent colonist element.” William Graham Sumner often wrote of American democracy as the product of a particularly favorable “man-land ratio,” and forecast that its course would be less smooth as the ratio changed with the exhaustion of the available lands.

Henry George’s concern with land use brought him strikingly close to the ideas identified with Turner. In Progress and Poverty (1879) he wrote: “This public domain—the vast extent of land yet to be reduced to private possession, the enormous common to which the faces of the energetic were always turned, has been the great fact that, since the days when the first settlements began to fringe the Atlantic Coast, has formed our national character and colored our national thought.… The general intelligence, the general comfort, the active invention, the power of adaptation and assimilation, the free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people, are not causes, but results—they have sprung from unfenced land. This public domain has been the transmuting force which has turned the thriftless, unambitious European peasant into the self-reliant Western farmer; it has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it. The child of the people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the best seats at the banquet of life marked ‘taken,’ and must struggle with his fellows for the crumbs that fall, without one chance in a thousand of forcing or sneaking his way to a seat. In America, whatever his condition, there has always been the consciousness that the public domain lay behind him; and the knowledge of this fact, acting and reacting, has penetrated our whole national life, giving to it generosity and independence, elasticity and ambition. All that we are proud of in the American character; all that makes our conditions and institutions better than those of older countries, we may trace to the fact that land has been cheap in the United States, because new soil has been open to the emigrant.”

At the time of Turner’s address America’s awareness of its landed heritage stood at a new juncture. Many thoughtful Americans of the 1890’s were undergoing a crisis of nerve about the present and future of their country. Even before the beginning of the general depression of 1893, an agrarian depression had set in, followed by the emergence of Populism and the cry for free silver. The possibilities of greater industrial violence too were sounded in the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894. Renewed agitation over monopoly had stimulated the passage of the Sherman Act in 1890. But the exhaustion of the public lands (then imagined to be much closer than it actually was), the end of the frontier line, seen in conjuncture with the agrarian crisis and labor conflict, posed certain dark questions about the future.⁸ What would be the character of American development without the resource of free land, which was believed to have provided a fund of new opportunities and an escape from poverty and unemployment? The eminent American economist, Francis Amasa Walker (who exercised considerable influence on Turner), wrote in 1892 that since public land worth claiming had almost run out, “reluctant as we may be to recognize it, a labor problem is at last upon us. No longer can a continent of free virgin lands avert from us the social struggle which the old world has known so long and so painfully.” Leading advocates of immigration restriction, among whom Walker was prominent, were beginning to point to the supposed exhaustion of land as a reason for closing the national gates. Even before the panic of 1893 precipitated the gloom, there was a widespread anxious feeling that the country was nearing a major turning in its history, and that the future might be far more difficult and less endurable than the past—a feeling echoed in Turner’s assertion at the end of his address that the first epoch of American history had come to a close. But this anxiety was also a spur to thought, and it prepared the way for new speculation about the meaning of American history.

Turner’s friend and contemporary, Woodrow Wilson, was one of those who saw the significance of his ideas. In an essay of 1893, Wilson observed that everything in American development had been modified “when the great westward migration began.” A new nation sprang up beyond the mountains, a continental life radically different from that of the first seaboard settlements. “The formative period of American history … did not end in colonial times or on the Atlantic coast … nor will it end until we cease to have frontier communities and a young political life just accommodating itself to fixed institutions. That part of our history, therefore, which is most truly national is the history of the West.” “The fact that we kept always, for close upon three hundred years … a frontier people always in our van,” Wilson wrote two years later, “is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history. ‘East’ and ‘West,’ an ever-changing line, but an unvarying experience and a constant leaven of change working always within the body of our folk. Our political, our economic, our social life has felt this potent influence from the wild border all our history through. The ‘West’ is the great word of our history. The ‘Westerner’ has been the type and master of our American life. Now at length … we have lost our frontier: our front lies almost unbroken along the great coast line of the western sea. The Westerner, in some day soon to come, will pass out of our life, as he so long ago passed out of the life of the Old World. Then a new epoch will open for us. Perhaps it has opened already. Slowly we shall grow old, compact our people, study the delicate adjustments of an intricate society, and ponder the niceties, as we have hitherto pondered the bulks and structural framework of government.”⁹

“Slowly we shall grow old.…” The line underscores an important quality of the frontier myth, which, as we shall see, pervades its history: it is adaptable not only to the American’s celebration of himself but also, curiously, to his misgivings about America. If the frontier was the making of America, what could ever replace it? The latent pessimism of the frontier view, in sharp contrast to the ebullient optimism attributed to frontier communities, had repercussions in Turner’s own intellectual development.

III

Turner’s life was like a personal re-enactment of the dialogue that was beginning in his day between the Eastern and Western historians, for he was reared in the frontier country and came eastward for graduate study to one of the primary centers of the historical ideas he eventually overthrew. He was born in 1861 in Portage, Wisconsin, a little town recently planted in the wilderness and not far from the frontier, which still had fewer than 4,500 inhabitants in the early 1880’s when Turner left to attend the University of Wisconsin. Of his family background Turner later wrote: “My people on both sides moved at least every generation, and built new communities.… My father was named Andrew Jackson Turner at his birth in 1832 by my Democratic grandfather, and I still rise and go to bed to the striking of the old clock that was brought into the house the day he was born, at the edge of the Adirondack forest. My mother’s ancestors were preachers. Is it strange that I preached on the frontier?”¹

Andrew Jackson Turner was one of those alert and mobile Americans whose lives figured in his son’s essays. Having come west from the Lake Champlain region of New York in 1855, he started in Wisconsin as a printer, later bought the newspaper that had employed him, and soon pursued a career in journalism as well as politics. He became a member of the state legislature (as a Republican, though he had been raised as a Democrat), of the state railroad commission, and mayor of Portage. He also achieved some note as a genealogist and local historian. In his father’s office young Turner learned the ways of American politics, and in the life around him he watched the ways of the frontier and developed an appetite for the outdoors that never left him. In his sixties he recalled: “I have poled down the Wisconsin [River] in a dugout with Indian guides … through virgin forests of balsam firs, seeing deer in the river,—antlered beauties who watched us come down with curious eyes and then broke for the tall timber,—hearing the squaws in their village on the high bank talk their low treble to the bass of our Indian polesman,—feeling that I belonged to it all. I have seen a lynched man hanging from a tree when I came home from school in Portage, have played around old Fort Winnebago at its outskirts, have seen the red shirted Irish raftsmen take the town when they tied up and came ashore, have plodded up the ‘pinery’ road that ran past our house to the pine woods of Northern Wisconsin, have seen Indians come in on their ponies to buy paint and ornaments and sell their furs; have stumbled on their camp on the Baraboo, where dried pumpkins were hung up, and cooking muskrats were in the kettle, and an Indian family were bathing in the river—the frontier in that sense, you see, was real to me, and when I studied history I did not keep my personal experience in a water tight compartment away from my studies.”²

His memories of the Wisconsin environment, invoked nostalgically in some of his later letters, were strong and formative during his years as a student in Madison. As a junior he wrote his first published work about the vicinity of his birthplace, a “History of the ‘Grignon Tract’ on the Portage of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers,” and his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation dealt with the early Wisconsin fur trade. “I am placed in a new society,” he wrote in 1887, “which is just beginning to realize that it has made a place for itself by mastering the wilderness and peopling the prairie, and is now ready to take its great course in universal history. It is something of a compensation to be among the advance guard of new social ideas and among a people whose destiny is all unknown. The west looks to the future, the east toward the past.”³

The West, the future, and democracy. As the son of middle-class Western culture, and of a politician named after Andrew Jackson, Turner assumed without questioning the ultimate validity and future supremacy of popular democracy. The language of a surviving oration on “The Poet of the Future” Turner delivered as an undergraduate in 1883 sounds to one who is familiar with the idiom of nineteenth-century America as though it might as well have been delivered fifty years before, in the Jacksonian era. “All over the world,” young Turner asserted, “we hear mankind proclaiming its existence, demanding its rights. Kings begin to be but names, and the sons of genius, springing from the people, grasp the real sceptres. The reign of aristocracy is passing; that of humanity begins. Democracy is waiting for its poet.” Historians, he wrote in his notebook, had traditionally concerned themselves with “noble warriors, & all the pomp and glory of the higher class—But of the other phase, of the common people, the lowly tillers of the soil, the great mass of humanity … history has hitherto said but little.” Even then Turner thought of what he called “peasant proprietorship”—by which he meant simply the small farmer owning his own land—as the key to the rise of democracy, and hence as the key to America; the nation would have been altogether different had its land fallen into the hands of capitalists, the owners of great estates. “In this simplicity of our land system lies one of the greatest factors in our progress.”⁴

At Madison Turner was singularly fortunate in one of his teachers, W. F. Allen, then in his early fifties, who held the professorship of Latin and history. A native of Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, Allen had undertaken graduate study in Germany. At Göttingen, he had been influenced by Bancroft’s old teacher, A. H. L. Heeren, who was particularly concerned with the history of colonial expansion, the unity of European and American peoples, and a developmental approach to institutions. Allen, who won Turner’s enduring affection along with his intellectual interest, taught American as well as ancient and medieval history, and though he was keenly aware of the importance of the West in American development, he taught it against the background of universal history, thus taking it out of the realm of local antiquarianism and putting it into a wide intellectual framework. From the very beginning, then, Turner was directed away from a purely parochial exploitation of his feeling for the West and toward a broad comparative view of history.⁵ When he later became Allen’s successor in history, his duties required him to duplicate some of his teacher’s versatility by offering a wide variety of historical subjects, including the dynastic and territorial history of the Middle Ages. He never ceased to believe that American history had a great deal in common with medieval history; and while this idea in itself may not strike us as a particular telling one, the essential fact remains that Turner had the imagination to look at the American frontier and American expansion against the background of other macro-historical changes.

After Turner had taught for a few years at the University of Wisconsin, where he had taken an M.A. and written his thesis on the fur trade, he was prodded into getting a doctorate by its new president, Thomas C. Chamberlin, who hoped to build a more imposing university and wanted more PhDs on his staff. Several Wisconsin students had already gone to Johns Hopkins, then at the peak of its eminence as a center of graduate study, and Turner’s decision to follow them in 1888 was fortunate: the new university in Baltimore not only gave him keener intellectual stimulation than he could have had elsewhere in the United States but also gave him the shock of opposition that was needed to precipitate his ideas.

The primary seminar at Johns Hopkins was conducted by Herbert Baxter Adams, German-trained but also a disciple of the English historian E. A. Freeman. Adams adhered to Freeman’s notion that history is past politics and to the ideas of the Teutonic school of evolutionary institutional history. But for men like Adams, as for Freeman, “past politics” was generously interpreted: it included heavy doses of legal and constitutional developments, and indeed put a strong emphasis on local institutional history. Influenced by Bluntschli, as well as by such English writers as Freeman, Stubbs, and Maine, Adams shared their concern with establishing a kind of history that would illuminate the problematic nineteenth-century constitutional developments in their own countries. The interest, for example, of a Swiss-German liberal like Bluntschli in the convergence and federation of local political units had obvious points of contact with the problems of American federalism.

The method to be used in such studies was supposed to be rigorously scientific—a comparative method inspired in the first instance by Darwinism and intended to win for history some of the prestige of evolutionary science, but also drawn more immediately from the evolutionary anthropology of Spencer and Tylor and from the techniques of contemporary philology. With the evolutionary anthropologists, the institutional historians believed that human development takes place more or less according to a single, unilinear pattern, and that it is the business of the investigator to trace out the stages in the development of institutions. The Adams school believed firmly in long-range continuities, and in the genetic method. “The science of Biology no longer favors the theory of spontaneous generation,” Adams wrote in 1883. “Wherever organic life occurs, there must have been some seed for that life. History should not be content with describing effects when it can explain causes. It is just as improbable that free local institutions should spring up without a germ along American shores as that English wheat should have grown here without planting. Town institutions were propagated in New England by old English and Germanic ideas brought over by Pilgrims and Puritans.” If this emphasis on cultural continuity had brought the English historians to see their debt to German institutions, it suggested that Americans should stress their debt to England. “Thus, English historians, Green, Freeman, and Stubbs recognized their fatherland. The origin of the English Constitution, as Montesquieu long ago declared, is found in the forests of Germany.”⁶

But the germ theory of democracy, as it has been called, also suggested that democracy had always been present, like the homunculus in the ancient view of human generation, within the political plasm of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, that it would unfold more or less automatically, or organically, wherever the Anglo-Saxon “race” predominated. Actually, the Anglo-Saxon school did not remain formidable for very long. Frederick Seebohm had begun to puncture its notions in the early 1880’s, and in 1890 Charles McLean Andrews, one of Adams’s own pupils, pointed to the superficiality of the supposed resemblances of the German tun, the Anglo-Saxon village, and the New England town. It was not long before the study of early American history would be taken away from the Teutonists by what is known as the “imperial school” of colonial historiography. But what united both was the disposition to look at American history as an extension of English history, a kind of evolutionary conservatism, and an Anglophile bias, none of which was altogether congenial to the spirit of Portage and Madison.

Adams in himself, cordial though he was to Turner, provided a personal summation of the latent differences that were at work in this historical argument. Adams had come out of a solid New England background, and had been sent to Phillips Exeter and Amherst before going to Heidelberg to study under Bluntschli. Just after Turner went back to Wisconsin from Johns Hopkins, Adams too was given an opportunity to move westward, in the form of an invitation to an exceptionally well-paid post at the University of Chicago. Before deciding to stay put, Adams drew a balance sheet of the advantages and disadvantages of moving which sums up the tug of war over social and moral values that was going on between men like him and men like Turner. On Adams’s list of the qualities of the two situations there were the following:⁷

BALTIMORE	CHICAGO
Quiet	Rush
Continuity	Broken
Experience	Experiment
Society	New People
Conservatism	Boom
Duty	Advantage
Assured position	All new
Settled	Moving
Identification	Lost

On certain counts Turner could accept the assumptions of the Adams school. Like them he was interested in tracing the development of democracy, and along with most of his contemporaries he shared the general Darwinian cast of mind, the desire to make history more “scientific.” In particular, the task of laying out the stages of political and social development seemed of primary importance to him; one of his claims for the particularly revealing quality of American history had its point just here: the constant renewal of social development on the frontier, the constant reversion to primitive conditions brought about by the westward movement, seemed to him to make America a singularly good place to study the basic pattern of social evolution. For a short time after his arrival at Johns Hopkins he appears to have accepted the germ theory, writing in 1889 of the “forted village” of the frontiersmen as a place in which one could still find evidences of the “old Germanic ‘tun,’ their popular meetings, ‘folkmoots,’ and their representative assemblies, ‘witanagemots,’ meeting like the Transylvania legislature.” The facts of Western life “carry the mind back to the warrior-legislatures in the Germanic forests, and forward to those constitutional conventions now at work in our newly made states in the Far West; and they make us proud of our English heritage.” But this dalliance was not to last long. Even in the same review, Turner remarked sardonically that “America’s historians have for the most part, like wise men of old, come from the East, and as a result our history has been written from the point of view of the Atlantic coast.” The younger generation, he added with confidence, would now step forward to give our history the proportions required by the movement of the country’s center of gravity into the Mississippi basin. To the young Westerner, who had seen democratic institutions evolving on the American frontier, the notion that they had come preformed from the German forest began to seem altogether factitious. Moreover, Adams’s suggestion, as Turner later remembered it, that his seminar on American local institutions had already “exhausted the opportunities for new contributions in the field of U.S. history and would turn to European history for its next work” was a direct provocation. With the West hardly touched, was American history to be thought of as exhausted? The frontier thesis, Turner explained to Carl Becker years afterward, “was pretty much a reaction from that [i.e., the Adams school] due to my indignation.” Turner was far less interested in European germs and the hereditary side of political evolution than he was in the effects of the American environment. For a Westerner it was hard to escape the workings of the massive untenanted continent and the necessity for men to find ways of coping with it; by comparison the inherited apparatus they brought to it, in ideas, habits, and institutions, seemed quite frail. (“Into this vast shaggy continent of ours,” he wrote in 1903, “poured the first feeble tide of European settlement.”) The overwhelming American environment must be put back at the center of the story, and the inherited “germs” whether biological-racial or cultural, put in a completely subordinate place.⁸

Turner reacted quite as sharply to the preponderant concern of Eastern historians with the slavery conflict, to the limited forms of constitutional argument it had engendered, and to the sectional myopia of writers on both sides. Too much of American historical imagery had been taken up by the figures of Cavalier and Yankee, and by their selfish sectional quarrels. A new theme was waiting to be exploited, the grand story of Western development. A new figure was waiting impatiently in the wings, the Western pioneer. And the pioneer, though he had faults of his own, would prove to be somewhat more genuinely national in his loyalties and more representatively American. This side of Turner’s reaction was registered in a long and shrewd critique, written in the 1890’s, of Hermann von Holst’s multivolume Constitutional and Political History of the United States, a critique which voices Turner’s dissatisfaction with the prevailing conservative nationalist history.⁹ Pointing out that von Holst, as a German immigrant, had lived his formative years in this country on the Atlantic coast and in New York City, where the specter of Tammany Hall loomed large, Turner concluded that he had missed something essential: “With the healthy democracy of the country and the west he was not familiar.” Von Holst had formed his impressions of America during the age of Fiske and Tweed and the Crédit Mobilier scandal. He could see the sectional controversy only from the point of view of the Prussian nationalist, the rise of democracy only from that of the educated Eastern American familiar with its scandals and weary of the spoils system, and the whole work was vitiated by his failure to see the formative effects of the West as “the splendid spectacle of the real growth of national sentiment.”

For a man whose usual way it was to deal mildly and generously with others, Turner’s strictures on von Holst were severe, and by comparison his rebellion against Adams’s precepts, though firm, was free of acrimony. Indeed, one is impressed most by how much Turner owed to his Johns Hopkins period, even to the provocation he had from Adams, as well as the older man’s gentle tutelage. Adams accepted, and perhaps even encouraged, his pupil’s Western interests from the beginning. Turner was permitted to expand his master’s thesis on the Wisconsin fur trade into a doctoral dissertation, took his degree in 1890, and soon had the pleasure of hearing Adams praise his work before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Other friendships made in Baltimore were of vital importance. Among Turner’s teachers was Woodrow Wilson, a visiting lecturer, who as a Southerner shared Turner’s feeling that the New England historians had given a false slant to the nation’s history and encouraged Turner’s emphasis on the West. Wilson also introduced Turner to one of his favorite writers, Walter Bagehot, whose Physics and Politics confirmed Turner’s interest in the sources of institutional innovation, in the ways in which “the cake of custom” could be broken. Richard T. Ely, who was lecturing on economics, encouraged Turner to think about land economics and directed his attention to the works of Francis A. Walker. Walker had taken much note of the economic and historic effects of “vacant land”; his writing also strengthened Turner’s interest in the use of statistics and in devices for more systematic study than historians then customarily engaged in. Albion W. Small, later an eminent sociologist, criticized the neglect of social forces by American historians and impressed upon Turner the importance of working across the constricting boundaries of the social sciences.

During the Hopkins period Turner’s reading broadened greatly. It carried him through much of the work of Mommsen, whom he greatly admired, and to J. G. Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik, a work which owed much to Hegel and from which Turner took some of his conceptions of the social functions of historical writing. By 1892, his interest in land economics had brought him to Achille Loria’s Analisi della Proprietá Capitalista whose systematic emphasis on expansion, colonization, and free land in relation to capitalism was momentous for the young student. Turner’s range, it must be said, was wide. His remarkable essay of 1891, “The Significance of History,” was indeed ostentatiously cosmopolitan, being not only full of references to standard English and American historians but studded with citations of German writers like Schelling, Herder, Hegel, Niebuhr, Ranke, Droysen, Roscher, and Knies. The Turner thesis, though based on frontier experience and Western loyalties, had its debt not only to Eastern centers of learning but to ideas imported from England, Germany, and Italy. American democracy may have been born on the frontier, but the Turner thesis was nurtured in Siena and Padua, Göttingen, Berlin, and Jena, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Portage, Madison, and Baltimore.¹

IV

The argument, the rhetoric, and the intellectual strategy of Turner’s famous frontier essay can best be understood when it is read in context with four other notable essays he wrote between 1891 and 1903.² Although his emphatic manner later caused some critics to charge him with an inflexible and dogmatic mind, these five pieces, taken together, are quite impressive for their receptiveness and breadth. In effect, this historian, still in his thirties, charted out a very large part of the course that American historiography was to run for the next generation. Not only did he establish himself as the first writer to break significantly with the H. B. Adams and Burgess schools and the hyper-confident “scientific” history of their era, but he was—even when a certain glibness and imprecision in his own assumptions are duly noted—one of the first in this country to try to make historians more critically aware of their own presuppositions. He anticipated, however briefly and sketchily, the historical relativism that was later to preoccupy Carl Becker and Charles A. Beard. He called, in ringing terms, for a better understanding of the economic aspects of history and of the bearing of economic interests upon politics. In arguing once again that history is not just about politics, diplomacy, constitutions, and battles, not just about the doings of a ruling elite, but must deal with the full range of human activities and with the life of the common man, he anticipated clearly and unpretentiously a central argument later identified with James Harvey Robinson’s “New History.” Here he repudiated the disposition of the Adams school, following Freeman, to look upon political history as the essence of all history, and spoke boldly for the broadening of the historical enterprise. History was not to be just past politics but also past literature, past religion, and past economics. “History is the biography of society in all its departments.” In particular it must embrace, as Thorold Rogers had recently urged in his Economic Interpretation of History, the study of economic life, for the meaning of many political events grows out of economic experience. On such counts Turner’s preachings, as well as the practice of his historical followers, helped to lay the groundwork for the more aggressive use of the economic interpretation of history that came with Beard’s generation.

Turner also made suggestive observations about the American intellectual temper and about the role of immigration. In time he was to be called narrow and parochial, but in the 1890’s he was pleading for an understanding of our history in its broader relations that would relieve it of the burden of provincialism. (“How can we understand American history without understanding European history?”) He argued that even “local history must be viewed in the light of world history.” He took a receptive view of related social disciplines. He had more than a hint of an understanding that history could well become more systematic, more aware of space and quantity, and he was already on the way toward devising the methods that were later to make his seminars so productive. In Germany, where critical speculation about history and its functions had reached a depth far beyond anything in the United States, Turner’s early essays would perhaps have been regarded as intelligent but rather rudimentary, but in the American environment they were impressively original and advanced. Whatever their limitations, his ideas marked a clear step beyond the preconceptions of previous historical writing. In effect what he was doing in these early essays was not just turning attention to the neglected West, but forging a new historical genre, the analytical essay, whose purpose it would be to circumvent the traditional narrative and to try to get at meaning in history. In certain ways, all modern American historical writing follows Turner in his emphasis on posing and defining historical problems, and in his belief that new methods were needed to solve them. Here Turner established himself as the first of the great professionals. Whatever else is to be said about his specific intellectual commitments, it was an achievement for a young historian only a few years past his doctorate to have eschewed both the grand narrative history and the emergent monograph, with its minute investigation of details and its massing of footnotes, to draw up a bold and prophetic new program for American historiography.

In the argument of Turner’s early essays it is clear that he shared much of the current enthusiasm for “scientific” history as well as the basic Darwinian assumptions upon which this history was then based. The metaphorical language of the early essays is largely naturalistic, full of references to evolution, development, organs, environment, adaptation, and stages of growth. “Society,” Turner proclaims, drawing on Droysen, “is an organism.… History is the self-consciousness of this organism.” Constitutional forms are “organs,” the body politic has its anatomy and physiology, the continent develops “a complex nervous system,” the rise of political institutions is a story of the evolution and adaptation of organs, American democracy marks the “origin of a new political species.”

Thus far Turner had no quarrel with the evolutionary orientation of the Herbert Baxter Adams school. His break with them grew out of an internal quarrel common to the historical Darwinists. The Teutonic school stressed the unfolding of the “germs” of democratic institutions as a more or less natural process taking place in similar ways in different environments, wherever the Teutonic stock was dominant. Turner broke with the hereditarian, and to a degree with the racist argument underlying this scheme by stressing the fundamental importance of the American environment. Whatever might be said about democracy elsewhere, American democracy (and this, though he was sometimes unclear about it, was all he pretended to account for) could not be understood if the native elements peculiar to the American environment were not recognized as central. “This new democracy … came from no theorist’s dreams of the German forest. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest.”

With this sentence it becomes clear that even though he was throwing overboard its genealogy of democracy, Turner was holding fast to the romantic primitivism of the Teutonic school. Democracy does not yet emerge from society or ideas or from the internal dynamics of human institutions but still comes from a forest—ambling forth, one imagines, like some amiable cinnamon bear. Here, no doubt, much of the appeal of Turner’s essays lay in their having aroused once again in a new setting an old and pervasive anti-institutional bias in American thought. Among his other achievements was to put the American historical intelligence into a more direct rapport with a side of the national mind that had fascinated imaginative writers but had received only slight attention from historians. I refer to the enduring American obsession with an escape from society—in the first instance from the society of Europe and then from that society as it was repeated, re-created, and imitated in the American East—into the original innocence and promise of nature, as represented in the vast unspoiled interior of woods and prairies. Americans were the descendants of men who had chosen to make a rupture with the Old World, and had promised themselves to look for the bounty of the New, to make the most of experiencing the start of the world, to make a virtue of having a slender past by becoming the people of the future. With his stress on the “perennial rebirth” of America under primitive frontier conditions, Turner independently arrived at a theme which had been celebrated by many of the major writers—among them Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Mark Twain—a theme in which the central symbolic figure is a natural and unspoiled man finding his most profound and satisfying relationships with the world of nature and with other natural men—a Natty Bumppo, Huck Finn, or Ishmael. “This,” D. H. Lawrence saw in his Studies in Classic American Literature, “is the true myth of America. She starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing off of the old skin towards a new youth. It is the myth of America.” This myth has created, and still creates, its heroes in verse and fiction, but for all the work of Parkman in pre-national history, it had as yet in Turner’s day found only a slender recognition in national historical writing. The explorer, hunter, trapper, cowboy, yeoman farmer (which of these is emphasized most depends upon the relative strength of the primitive or the pastoral) were still to be given their historical due.

So far as I have been able to learn, Turner was not (with the possible exception of Emerson) directly influenced by any of the imaginative writers—at least none is even casually referred to in his early essays, and there was no point at which he ever wrote of any of them with depth of knowledge or feeling. But his own Western pieties and the political traditions of the country led him in the same direction. Certainly the Edenic myth had its political counterpart in the traditions of American agrarianism. Very few American factions or traditions were altogether free of it, but it had taken its firmest embodiment in the democratic tradition from which Turner himself stemmed. The Jeffersonians had made a great virtue of the old, uncorrupted republican simplicity; the Jacksonians, even as they were tearing up the landscape with the fury of their competitive spirit, hearkened back to it nostalgically; and it had come down in a strong and sometimes militant form in the political agrarianism of the post-Civil War era, culminating in the Populist revolt. Pastoral rather than rawly primitive in its tonalities, the tradition of political agrarianism took for its central figure the worthy yeoman farmer, a symbol perhaps not more than a step removed from that of the hardy pioneer. In Turner’s preoccupation with the evolutionary stages by which the frontier of the hunter and trapper were superseded by that of the pioneer settler, and then by the increasingly complex communities of villages and small towns, he was forging a link between the Darwinian mentality of his era and the older mythology of Edenic America—joining hopes and aspirations that were as basic to the American outlook as they were poignantly self-contradictory and self-defeating. But it is this as much as any other quality—and no doubt more than its way of raising so many problems fascinating to the analytical intelligence—that explains our constant readiness to return to the frontier thesis: it touches so directly the American yearning for the simple, natural, unrecoverable past.

V

Turner’s view of American history won early acclaim. Raised to prominence by his youthful essays—some of them major substantive contributions to the history of Western state-making in the Revolutionary era and of early national diplomacy—he was soon sought after by other institutions—Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, Amherst, and the new University of Chicago, then Stanford and the University of California. In 1910, when he was at last lured from Wisconsin to Harvard, Turner also served as president of the American Historical Association at the uncommonly early age of forty-nine. Major publishers wooed him as assiduously as university presidents, and tempted him into signing contracts for several books that he would never be able to write. An impressive roster of young historians made their way to Wisconsin for graduate study under his guidance. The rapid acceptance of his ideas can be laid also to the fact that there was a new public for his writings and for those of his students, a public which was hardly less influential for being small and highly professional. In a very real sense, the Turner thesis and the historical profession grew up together. Although the great day of the wealthy amateurs was coming to a close, the writing of history had only recently become professional, academic, and specialized. The first sound and successful textbook by an American, Alexander Johnston’s History of American Politics, had been published only in 1879. As late as 1880 J. F. Jameson could count only eleven professors of history in the country, and the American Historical Association was founded only in 1884. At this stage, it was still possible for one or two exceptionally attractive graduate seminars (or seminaries as they were then called) to have a powerful shaping influence on historical research and thought. Turner’s seminar at Wisconsin became for the twenty years after 1890 what Herbert Baxter Adams’s had been at Johns Hopkins in the 1880’s.

Moreover, American university culture developed with startling rapidity from 1890 to 1910, spreading throughout trans-Appalachian America, drawing strength from the rapid improvement of the state universities, and appealing widely to a new public of potential academics recruited from all parts of the country. The Midwest particularly was now prepared to make a formidable contribution to American culture; in history alone it was producing, in addition to Turner himself, such men as Beard, Becker, Parrington, and James Harvey Robinson. Aspiring academics, coming from the farms and small towns of mid-America, and often from families of modest means, were disposed to respond enthusiastically to Turner’s sectional bias and to his mild democratic nationalism, as well as his gift for opening up new areas of historical interest close to their own formative experiences.

Years afterward, in 1926, Turner published one of his most interesting essays on this generation of Middle Western intellectuals, “The Children of the Pioneers.” In 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge published in the Century an essay that seems to have rankled in Turner’s mind over all the intervening years, and Turner’s piece was in the nature of a long-delayed answer. Writing on the distribution of ability in the United States, Lodge had made a statistical study of the names listed in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography and had come up with the striking conclusion that New England and the Middle Atlantic states had produced together three fourths of the ability of the entire country. Turner pointed out that Lodge had been writing about a generation at whose time of birth much of the Middle West was thinly developed. Examining Who’s Who for 1923–24, Turner found that he could make formidable claims for the creativity of those born in the North Central states roughly from 1860 to 1875, whom he called “the pioneer children” of these states. His assumption that the parents of all these children, simply because they were resident in the region, and regardless of their social status or the size and maturity of the community in which they lived, were “pioneers” was simply a part of the mystique of the so-called frontier; and it led to the incongruity of defining such comfortably reared children as, say, Jane Addams, Charles A. Beard, and William Jennings Bryan as “children of the pioneers.” Nonetheless, Turner’s basic point, as a social historian and an embattled Midwesterner, that his region had produced its full share of leadership in industry, politics, scholarship, science, and the arts, was impressively made by a long roster of distinguished names which evokes much of the intellectual history of the era. Setting forth a strong list of historians alone, Turner remarked on a common quality of their work which he attributed in good part to their regional background: “not only in striking out new lines of investigation, but in interest in the common people; in the emphasis upon economic and social, geographical and psychological interpretation; in the attention to social development rather than to the writing of narrative history of the older type, wherein the heroes were glorified.”³

Turner was describing here the men of his own generation and that of his earlier students, and perhaps even consciously accounting for some of his own influence. Some evidence suggests that there was among the academic generation Turner trained at Wisconsin a solemn dedication to “democratic” history. That there was a high degree of self-conscious Westernism we can hardly doubt. The quality of this Western sentiment was already registered in the difference between the amateur local historical societies, East and West. The privately financed societies of the East tended to be like social clubs, antiquarian in cast, much concerned with the genealogies and obituaries of their prestigious members, but unconcerned with relations with professional historians. The Western societies were dominated by regional rather than family pride, called upon the states for financial support, enlisted the interest of men of affairs with keen promotional spirit, and cooperated with professional historians, particularly those in the state universities. In 1907 the Western professionals were impelled to found their own organization, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association. Turner’s own state was an especially strong center of this kind of activity. It had long been the beneficiary of the promotional and collecting genius of Lyman C. Draper, who had begun to put the faltering State Historical Society of Wisconsin on a sound footing as early as the 1850’s. With Turner’s help, Draper’s successor, Reuben Gold Thwaites, made Wisconsin’s the best financed of all the state historical societies, and in 1900 Thwaites was at last able to persuade the state to bring the society to the campus of the University of Wisconsin and to put its collections in the same building with the university library. Turner’s own work was based in good part upon its splendid materials. More important, his mind refracted the Wisconsin angle of vision. Like many other Western states, Wisconsin had a long history of exploration, Indian trade, involvement in imperial wars, and precarious early settlements. Unlike the Eastern states, it had no claims to individuality and glory based upon contributions to the Revolution or the early Union, but it had a memorable pioneering history. In the West, it has been observed, “local historical and pioneer societies concentrated, almost to the neglect of all else, on the ‘golden age’ of the pioneer period and territorial days.”⁴

When Turner decided, after much painful hesitation, to leave Wisconsin for Harvard in 1910, he was hurt by a few surprisingly tart and unsympathetic letters of reproach from former students for deserting the West. A more genial comment came from Thwaites, who was amused at Turner’s account of his early weeks in Cambridge: “To have a man with your Jacksonian ideas established in a mansion on Tory Row comes very near creating heart rupture in this neck of the woods.” Heart rupture—the words were not ill chosen; for Turner the experience, which at one point brought him to tears, was rather more like expatriation than professional advancement. “I feel as though I were abandoning a very dear dream,” he wrote; and the Madison Democrat lamented his departure as “the loss of the acknowledged leader … among those who approach American history from the western point of view.” Turner found himself well treated at Harvard, after having endured much sniping and denigration from the Board of Regents at Wisconsin. Still, after almost a decade, he wrote: “I am not sure that New England ever accepts anyone, whether ‘lion’ or not, who doesn’t conform and roar in tune with at least some New England key.” Although contented, he was never wholly comfortable, and he might easily have understood the point of Herbert Baxter Adams’s caution of many years before: “Identification … Lost.” After an evening spent in the company of Mrs. William James, he reported to his daughter: “I couldn’t do more than admire her conversation in brilliant spells of silence.” In 1913 he confessed: “I am still a western man in all but my place of residence.” But one could always find solace in one’s Western identity, and it was confirmed by further observation of life in Cambridge. “There is advantage,” he wrote to Becker, “in a region which ferments over one which—doesn’t.”⁵ It was a very American, as well as a Western, judgment.

VI

Although his most effective graduate instruction was done in Madison, Turner did not cease to have, even in Cambridge, responsive students. The situation of the graduate seminar and the requirements of the doctoral dissertation gave him perfect ground for his unusual gifts as a teacher. One of the basic needs of professional, specialized history and the supervision of doctoral work was, and is, to work out a historical genre suitable to the talents of large numbers of students who have inquiring minds and sometimes distinguished intellectual abilities but who have at the same time little gift for or interest in narrative history in the grand manner. Turner’s interests and perceptions here were as useful as his ideas were congenial. He had the wide knowledge of sources, the patience for factual detail, the new techniques (the use of maps, slides, statistics, soil analysis, the plotting of votes and allegiances), and above all the now established medium of inquiry, the analytical monograph.

Several students have paid tribute to Turner as a teacher. The portrait that emerges is one of a certain openness and generosity of character rather strongly reminiscent of Christopher Newman in Henry James’s The American; or perhaps of the good American, Cadwallader, in Cooper’s The Travelling Bachelor: “Truly, there was something so naïf, and yet so instructed—so much that was intellectual, and withal, so simple—a little that was proud, blended with something philosophical, in the temperament and manner of this western voyager.…” Students might be struck at the very beginning by Turner’s mellow, almost caressing voice, and they would soon respond to the friendly interest behind it—an interest which led in many cases to lifelong attachments—to his non-authoritarian manner, his habit of posing questions rather than offering answers, his unwillingness to tell his students what to think, his lack of pretense and academic snobbery, his way of engaging enthusiastically and immediately with the subject matter without obtruding himself. His lectures, often improvised from whatever sheaf of notes he had at hand or whatever historical problem was uppermost in his mind, might or might not come off; but in the end they had the merit of allowing his students to see his mind spontaneously at work on the subject matter. His seminars, better planned, were well calculated to spur the students to share in his insatiable appetite for facts, his relish for problems.

The whole effect, as Carl Becker reported in a warm tribute, was that of “a lively and supple intelligence restrained and directed by some inexhaustible fund of sincerity, integrity and good will.” Presiding over it all was that “intense and sustained interest which an abundance of ideas can alone generate.” And this no doubt was the key to Turner’s achievement as a teacher, as well as a writer: his sense that American history was still in great part unwritten, his ability to propound large, congenial leading ideas that pointed to whole areas of inquiry, and behind this to marshal a host of specific insights as to how this or that subject might receive a meaningful treatment. Woodrow Wilson, commenting on a paper of Turner’s at the American Historical Association in 1896, hit it off well when he said that Turner was one who gains “the affection of every student of history by being able to do what very few men manage to do, to combine the general plan and conception with the minute examination of particulars; who is not afraid of the horrid industry of his task, and who can yet illuminate that industry by knowing the goal to which it is leading him, and the general plan by which it should be done.”⁶

When one looks at the products of Turner’s graduate seminars, one is impressed both by the number and professional eminence of his students and by the wide range of subjects they were put to work on. Not only was there Becker himself, but an impressive roster of men and women—almost three dozen of them trained during his years in Madison—who became leading scholars in the history of the West and the territories, the South and slavery, of sectional tendencies in the Eastern states. It is a roster of writers whose names are not, on the whole, recognizable to the general reading public, but whose monographs were, and in some cases still are, the staples of the professional literature and whose cumulative work refashioned American history. The sharp and rather dogmatic form in which the frontier thesis had been set forth in Turner’s essays never inhibited significant scholarship dealing with a wide range of problems outside frontier or western history, narrowly construed—problems of foreign policy, political conflict, transportation, immigration, agricultural development, interstate migrations, the disposal of the public lands, constitutional development, even the history of ideas. In effect Turner’s own students themselves realized a large part of the program for historical scholarship that he laid down in his ambitious early essays. And, though the training of doctors in American history was sufficiently diffused so that no one historian could lay claim, as Turner’s contemporary Franz Boas could for anthropology, to have raised almost singlehanded an entire generation of professionals, Turner was not far wide of the mark. Within fifteen years or less from the presentation of Turner’s famous paper at Chicago, his ideas were well on the way to achieving a place in the work of American historians somewhat proportionate to the place the West had long occupied in the American imagination. The historical profession, it was later said, was converted into one large Turner-verein. It is an awkward joke, but it mocks with a certain ironic effect at the passing of the Teutonic school, the abandonment of the German forests in favor of the native woods.

¹ “Turner’s ‘The Frontier in American History,’ ” in Books That Changed Our Minds, ed. by Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith (1938), 61.

² The address did not appear in book form until the publication of The Frontier in American History (1920), 1–38, hereafter cited as Frontier. It has been printed in many places, but the most accessible work for readers today, which contains Turner’s significant early essays, is Ray Allen Billington, ed., Frontier and Section (1961).

³ In his “Problems in American History” (1892); Frontier and Section, 29.

⁴ Beard, “Turner’s ‘The Frontier in American History,’ ” 67.

⁵ Godkin as quoted by V. L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (1930), III, 161; for Woodberry, see Joseph Doyle, “George Edward Woodberry,” unpublished dissertation, Columbia University (1952), 157, 168, 215.

⁶ Turner to Mrs. Alice Perkins Hooper, February 9, 1916; W. F. Poole, “The Early Northwest,” American Historical Association, Papers, 3 (1889), 277–300; William F. Allen, Essays and Monographs (1890), 92–III; Turner, “The Winning of the West,” Dial, 10 (1889), 71–3.

⁷ For references on Turner’s precursors in this and the following paragraphs, see the relevant section in the Bibliographical Essay.

⁸ On this crisis in the nineties see my essay, “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), and on the agrarian crisis as a background for Turner’s address, Lee Benson, “The Historical Background of Turner’s Frontier Essay,” in Turner and Beard (1960), 41–91; for Walker see 73.

⁹ “Mr. Goldwin Smith’s ‘Views’ on our Political History,” Forum, 16 (1893), 495–7; “The Proper Perspective of American History,” ibid., 19 (1895), 551. Though the first of these articles came hard upon Turner’s address, it was, by Wilson’s statement, derived from it and not an independent conclusion. “All I ever wrote on the subject came from him,” Wilson later declared. “I am glad,” Turner wrote to Wilson at the time of the first Forum essay, “that you think I have helped you to some of these ideas, for I have many intellectual debts to repay you.” See George C. Osborn, “Woodrow Wilson and Frederick Jackson Turner,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, 74 (1956), 218, and Wendell H. Stephenson, “The Influence of Woodrow Wilson on Frederick Jackson Turner,” Agricultural History, 19 (1945), 250.

¹ “Turner’s Autobiographic Letter,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 19 (1935), 102–3.

² Ray A. Billington, “Young Fred Turner,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 46 (1962), 40.

³ Ibid., 45; the italicized word is Turner’s, the italicized sentence mine.

⁴ On the democratic theme in Turner’s early years see Fulmer Mood, “The Development of Frederick Jackson Turner as a Historical Thinker,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 34 (1939), 290–4, and Smith, Virgin Land, 252–3.

⁵ “My work really grew out of a preliminary training in Mediaeval history, where I learned to recognize the reactions between a people in the gristle, and their environment, and saw the interplay of economic, social and geographic factors in the politics, institutions, ideals and life of a nation and its relations with its neighbors.” To Arthur M. Schlesinger, April 18, 1922; cf. Turner to Curti, August 8, 1928.

⁶ H. B. Adams, “Germanic Origins of New England Towns,” Johns Hophins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 1 (1883), 8, 10.

⁷ W. Stull Holt, Historical Scholarship in the United States, 1876–1901 (1938), 157.

⁸ Turner, “The Winning of the West,” Dial, 10 (1889), 71; Frontier, 267; on Adams’s statement see Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy (1965), 17.

⁹ The essay was not published until the publication in 1965 of Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy, 85–104.

¹ For Turner’s Hopkins period, see Fulmer Mood, “Development” and Mood’s introduction to The Early Writings of Frederick Jackson Turner; see also Jacobs, Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy; and, on Loria’s influence, see Lee Benson, Turner and Beard.

² The others were: “The Significance of History” (1891), “Problems in American History” (1892), “The Problem of the West” (1896) and “Contributions of the West to American Democracy” (1903). All are in Billington’s selection, Frontier and Section, already cited; quotations in the following paragraphs are from this edition, 12–13, 17, 20, 21, 64, and Frontier, 216.

³ Turner, Sections in American History (New York, 1932), 277–8. His aim in this essay, Turner explained to a friend, was to show “that Eastern fears lest the West should produce only ‘barbarian’ children [haven’t] been fully realized.” Turner to Alice Perkins Hooper, March 8, 1926.

⁴ Van Tassel, Recording America’s Past, 100n; cf. Higham, History, 18–19. It is perhaps significant that three of Turner’s four major essays of the 1890’s appeared first in local periodicals of limited circulation. The famous essay on the frontier appeared first in the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1894, though it was reprinted shortly afterward in The Annual Report of the American Historical Association. The last of these essays, “The Problem of the West” (1896), came out in the Atlantic Monthly.

⁵ On this move, see Ray Allen Billington, “Frederick Jackson Turner Comes to Harvard,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 74 (1962), 51–2, 75, 81, 82. See also Turner to Alice Perkins Hooper, January 23, 1919. This essay, which sheds much light on conditions at the University of Wisconsin, shows that Turner was moved in part by the hope that his resignation would redound to the ultimate benefit of the university by inflicting a defeat upon the conservative forces in the Board of Regents and the state legislature. To some extent, Turner’s departure does appear to have had that effect. I believe also that Turner was afflicted by one of the characteristic fantasies of the nonwriting writer: the idea that moving would help him become productive. He hoped that being at last disengaged from all the familiar affairs of Wisconsin, where he had been chairman of his department for twenty years, and going to an institution in which he did not have a deep personal stake would free him for his own work.

⁶ Carl Becker, “Frederick Jackson Turner,” in Howard W. Odum, ed., Pioneers and Masters of Social Science (1927), 289, 292; Osborn, “Woodrow Wilson and Frederick Jackson Turner,” 226.