Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1891
… history may hold the lamp for conservative reform.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1911
If the free land did it all, then we are busted when the free land goes.
—Charles A. Beard to Carl Becker,
February 4, 193[9?]
I
AS ONE STUDIES the history of the frontier thesis and of Turner’s reputation, one conclusion emerges with startling clarity: it is in large part the vagueness, the imprecision, the overstatement in Turner’s essays that have given them their plasticity and hence their broad acceptance. Plasticity: it is an intriguing quality of the frontier thesis, and also one of the reasons for using it with care, that it can be invoked to argue for or against almost anything. What it meant at first, emotionally, to Turner we have seen: a way of creating an American self-image in which the frontier and its virtues loomed over everything else, and of making this self-image particularly amenable to the pride and self-assertiveness of the Middle Westerner. Taken this way, it was a doctrine of both national and sectional uses. Its patriotic impulse was susceptible also to being pushed further than Turner himself cared to do by colonizers, imperalists, aggressive promoters of world markets, who could argue, as some did in the 1890’s and after, that with continental expansion at an end, the country needed new outlets overseas. (One thinks here of Albert J. Beveridge’s reply to those who said that expansion into the islands of the Pacific would be of a different order because these were not contiguous to mainland America. “Not contiguous! Our navy will make them contiguous.”) Ever since the days of Cooper the westward movement had been sinking deeper and deeper into the American imagination, and its heroes had become the archetypal American heroes. The slogans of manifest destiny had impressed upon many minds the idea there was something inevitable about it all, something not to be resisted, that Americans were an adventurous outdoor people, for whom some new epic enterprise was practically a biological necessity.1
But Turner had not expounded the frontier thesis for imperialist uses, and it was not mainly for such uses that others took it up. He propagated his ideas during the Progressive era, at a time when insurgent democracy and reform cried out for a historical rationale. His immediate predecessors, as we have seen, had been chiefly patrician historians writing in the Federalist-Whig tradition, Mugwump intellectuals who were dismayed at the inefficiency, corruption, and vulgarity of American politics, who scorned demagogues and spoilsmen, and who found in early American democracy, especially in Jacksonian democracy, the prototype of the things they deplored in American life. Turner was one of the first of a new breed of historians who broke with this school, and espoused the democracy created by the common man. It seemed fitting that Turner took a particular interest in the Jackson era, and that he embraced Jacksonian democracy as “strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government” and as “based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling of the frontier, in which classes and inequalities of fortune played little part.” In Turner, the manliness and hardihood of the Western inheritance seemed to become another sanction for American egalitarianism. “The West believed in the rule of the majority.…” he wrote. “The East feared an unchecked democracy, which might overturn minority rights, destroy established institutions, and attack vested interests.… The West opened a refuge from the rule of established classes, from the subordination of youth to age, from the sway of established and revered institutions.”2 It was, no doubt, a mild and vague kind of democratic assertiveness, but then the same may in fact be said about a great deal of the thought of the Progressive era. The change of tone that Turner helped to bring about can be appreciated only when one has refreshed one’s sense of the way democracy was handled by his more conservative predecessors. At last the democratic middle-class reformers, especially those rooted in the agrarian traditions of the Middle West, were beginning to find a historical basis for their politics.
But the frontier theme was a double-edged sword: it was quite as capable of being used by estranged intellectuals to cut down the myths of American democracy as it was by patriotic democrats to build them up. Oddly enough, no matter how it was used, the idea of the formative importance of the frontier became more and more established, and for a long time the very men who were digging away at Turner’s values strengthened the impact of his ideas. Whether one praised or lamented the effects of the frontier, one confirmed the sense of its fundamental importance. During the years when Turner was stating and restating the frontier theme, the frontier, as a figment of American experience, was gradually being drawn into a battle between American intellectuals and their society. The modern intellectual class, which in effect came into being in the United States only around the turn of the century, lost no time in launching an assault on the national pieties, an assault which began with the avant-garde reconnoitering of the “pianissimo revolt” of the nineties, proceeded to the cannonading of the Little Renaissance of the pre-war era, and culminated in the unconstrained frontal attack of the 1920’s. On some fronts it was a war of rebels and bohemians, realists and naturalists, against the conventions and constraints of Protestant middle-class society and the gentility and timidity of its literature, on others a war of radicals against business society, on still others of metropolitan minds against the village mind, or even, in a few instances, of a self-designated intellectual elite against the mob. But whatever its guises, and whatever was felt to be at stake, the intellectual revolt demanded a re-evaluation of America in which the pioneer heritage was commonly understood to be an issue.
The issue had been posed by the official custodians of Americanism, for whom the frontier virtues were a focal point in America’s long-continuing self-celebration. For example, Albert Shaw, the editor of Review of Reviews, declared in 1906:3 “All the conditions of pioneering were such as to create a wonderful spirit of individuality, independence, and self-direction in the average man. Never in the world has there been anything to equal this development of personality, and the capacity for private and individual initiative.” This observation led to some predictable advice: the present maturity of the country should not cause the people to abandon their individualist heritage and lose themselves in the search for ways of distributing national wealth.
In mounting their attack on this sort of thing the intellectuals did not find it necessary or strategic to deny the validity of the frontier thesis. They were glad to concede the profound formative influence of the frontier; all they needed to do was to transvalue the values of the Turners and the Shaws. Like Marx with Hegel, Van Wyck Brooks and other critics of the frontier heritage simply inverted Turner’s values while using his dialectic. The frontier, they assumed along with him, was a force of the highest importance in the making of America, but those effects that Turner merely acknowledged they chose to stress: the frontier could be invoked to account for our rampant individualism, our crass speculative commercialism, our roughness and coarseness, our vigilantes and our lynch law. Taken in conjunction with Puritanism, it seemed to account for the harshness and stringency of American life, its contempt for the amenities, its anti-intellectualism, for the thwarting, the stunting, the embitterment of its poets, painters, and thinkers. American development, they agreed, was indeed unique, but it was a unique case of pathology.
Brooks gave classic expression to this view of the matter in his America’s Coming of Age (1915) and Letters and Leadership (1918), and made it central to his stunning study of Mark Twain. He was echoed by many others. Walter Weyl, the New Republic editor, considered that the westward movement had given Americans a psychological twist that was harmful to the development of a “socialized democracy”—a conclusion whose substance would probably have won Turner’s rueful assent. Zechariah Chafee, the noted authority on civil liberties, writing at the peak of Prohibition lawlessness and Ku Klux Klan intimidation, attributed to frontier influences American hostility to law. Harold Stearns, the spokesman of the expatriate generation, thought the dubious morality of American capitalism derived from the pioneer spirit. John Dewey, discussing Bryan’s intervention in the Scopes trial, explained it as the heritage of the frontier’s hostility to ideas. Such cultural critics of the twenties as Lewis Mumford, Matthew Josephson, and Waldo Frank blamed the frontier experience for America’s inhibitions, her willingness to sacrifice culture to other purposes, her crudeness, her alleged artistic sterility.4
A further token of the plasticity of the frontier thesis was its adaptability both to the business mind and the mind of the progressive reformer. To Turner himself, as to most contemporary Progressives, the passing of free land and the industrialization of the country called for new efforts at government regulation of business. Yet to a promoter like E. H. Harriman, as Turner was aware, the captains of industry were the true inheritors of the enthusiasm, hardihood, and imagination of the pioneers; their unconstrained enterprise was the making of America. This contrapuntal play on the frontier theme continued through the 1920’s and the New Deal era. Conservatives in business and politics claimed the frontier inheritance. “The frontier still lingers,” said Calvin Coolidge, “the hardy pioneer still defends the outworks of civilization.” Herbert Hoover, the prophet of rugged individualism, thought that the greatness of the nation had come from “ceaseless contest with the wilderness in an ever extending frontier.”5 For many critics, this use of the frontier idea still calls up the image of all the businessmen who can be found on the terraces of their country clubs or in the lobbies of the grand luxe hotels of Europe lamenting the decline at home of the old pioneer hardihood and bewailing the corruption and decadence of the rest of the world. In this sense, Barry Goldwater looms disquietingly as the last of the frontiersmen.
The New Dealers were disposed to concede, even to insist upon, the importance of the frontier in the past, but reverted to Turner’s own proposition that the end of the frontier made new devices necessary. In 1931, the governor of Wisconsin, Philip F. La Follette, invoked Turner by name in attributing the old American freedom and opportunity to free land. “But, in one respect, the frontier was a liability as well as an asset,” he pointed out. “For as long as this freedom of movement to new opportunity existed, neither the leaders nor the people were under the pressure of necessity to keep the political, social, and economic processes of American life progressively adapted to changing needs and changing conditions.… Today, if we find our freedom restricted and our opportunity denied, we cannot seek a new freedom and a new opportunity by running away from these restrictions and denials into some new territory. We must find our freedom and make our opportunity through wise and courageous readjustments of the political order of State and Nation to the changed needs and changed conditions of our time.”6
The same theme was used (and judging by some verbal similarities borrowed) the following year by Roosevelt’s speech writers for his famous Commonwealth Club campaign speech. This statement, drafted by A. A. Berle with the assistance of Rexford Guy Tugwell, was based upon the safety-valve idea, and the disappearance of free land. “Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land.… There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start.” Now government intervention becomes the substitute for vacant lands: “Clearly, all this calls for a re-appraisal of values.… Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to re-establish foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of underconsumption, of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. The day of enlightened adminstration has come.”7
The pessimism here was not altogether characteristic of F.D.R., who indeed did not see this speech before he delivered it. But the free-land interpretation of American economic history, which did have pessimistic overtones, tended to be linked with stagnationist views of the depression. If the character and vitality of the United States really derived from yeoman farmers and pioneer promoters, how could it be restored, now that free land was gone? Some New Dealers were even taken in by the back-to-the-land movement which was strong in the early 1930’s, whose proponents argued that usable land was not in fact gone and that the only way to restore the nation’s economic and moral health was to relocate the unemployed on subsistence farms. “Hardly a week goes by,” the agricultural writer Russell Lord observed in 1933, “but some new leader of public opinion discovers the space between cities as a God-given dump for the unemployed.”8
As late as 1936, Joseph Schafer, one of Turner’s most devoted followers, wrote that “the real American farmer” was “in the truest sense a free man” whose basic character was unchanged by hard times. The small cities, towns, villages, and the countryside, uncorrupted by the big cities, Schafer asserted, “still retain the old primal American virtues.… The farmers, from this point of view, are the hope of the nation’s future as they have been the chief dynamic force of our country’s past.”9 The agrarian myth died hard.
It was only the belated coming-of-age of urban America and the appearance of a new generation of metropolitan historians that finally unseated the Turner thesis in the historical profession. During Turner’s lifetime, when his view of America seemed to hold almost undisputed sway among historians, fundamental criticism of his ideas, despite one sharp critique by Beard, was rare. However, during the 1930’s and afterward, as though someone had opened the floodgates, a consistent and relentless flow of Turner criticism swept through the historical profession, and it is only in the past ten years or so that there has once again appeared a disposition to revive Turnerism in a chastened form. In a very real sense, despite the preceding decades of experience with industrialism, the urban-industrial mind did not come into its own until after the shock of the Great Depression. Even then it did so rather hesitantly, and it was characteristic that the country waited until the 1960’s to accept the fact that modern American problems must be understood as city problems and to begin to disenthrall itself from the dictation of rural and small-town politicians.1 In the course of the general reconsideration of rural pieties and the agrarian myth made inevitable by the Depression, the Turner thesis also began to be questioned.
Perhaps the wave of Turner criticism was in some respects no more than a natural response of critical men to a doctrine that seemed all too preponderant and threatened to become ossified. No doubt many of the historians were beginning to respond to the disenchanted view of the frontier expressed by such cultural critics as Brooks and Mumford; but in the surge of optimism and the rediscovery of the folk that came in with the New Deal and the radicalism of the thirties, it had become a moral necessity to look upon the American inheritance with greater affection. Now neither Brooks nor Turner would do. The clash of world ideologies, the battle of Marxism and Fascism, also colored the rising interest in American intellectual history. There was a new emphasis on the role of ideas in history, shaped in part by the effort to mark out what was distinctive in the American mind and what was borrowed; but in any case an emphasis on the history of ideas had to bring some writers into conflict with Turnerian environmentalism. As George W. Pierson asked, in one of the most influential early essays in Turner criticism, “Above all, what happens to intellectual history if the environment be all?”2 In particular, the development of rather sophisticated techniques of linguistic and philosophic analysis, stemming, on native grounds, largely from the Lovejoy school at Johns Hopkins, struck at the heart of the romantic primitivism latent in Turner’s work. If there had been set loose in American philosophy a type of mind capable of distinguishing thirteen varieties of pragmatism, what would it eventually do with the grand, indiscriminate intellectual gestures of Turnerism? It was as though a new Johns Hopkins seminar was to have its revenge at last on the heretic from Portage.
But Turnerism came under fire above all because its premises seemed incongruous with the realities of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Its intellectual isolationism seemed to belong to another age. Turner’s celebration of American individualism rang false at a time when too many were suffering from the excesses of the individualists. The latent pessimism in the exhaustion-of-free-land theme—an aspect of his ideas that troubled Turner as well as others—was unsuited to the activist mood demanded by any radical attempt to cope with the Depression. The vogue of Marxism among intellectuals turned attention to class conflict and made historians more skeptical of an emphasis on geographic conflict and sectionalism. The idea that the safety valve was gone led some writers to question whether, in the light of the fits of turbulence in our labor history, it had ever been there. Finally, the Depression brought to maturity a new generation of historians from big-city backgrounds and often from ethnic minorities for whom the mystique of rural America was only a phenomenon in the books. Deeply affected, as their teachers could not have been, by the economic collapse and by Marxism, by the global ideological struggle, they moved in an intellectual world in which Turner’s Middle Western loyalties began to seem quaint at best, and one can readily imagine them gagging at the sentiment of such essays as “The West and American Ideals” or “Middle Western Pioneer Democracy” and balking at Turner’s tribute to “the Boy Scouts who are laying the foundations for a self-disciplined and virile generation worthy to follow the trail of the backwoodsmen.”3 At the time of Turner’s death in 1932, Turnerism rested on emotional commitments that were fading.
II
As a writer of substantive histories, Turner’s main interest lies in the light his books shed on the implications of his essays. Here the arresting fact is that he wrote no history of the frontier or the West, indeed that he found the writing of history onerous and oppressive and did very little of it at all. For a major historical figure his yield was strikingly lean. Two volumes were published during his lifetime: Rise of the New West, which appeared in 1906 as part of the American Nation series, and the essays in The Significance of the Frontier in American History; two volumes were published posthumously: the essays brought together in The Significance of Sections in American History, and a lengthy, unfinished work, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections, brought out in 1935 three years after his death—a total of four books in a working career of almost forty-five years, many of their pages taken up by somewhat repetitive restatements, sometimes even with the same illustrative matter, of a few basic ideas.
If the disparity between his productivity and his reputation and influence troubles us, we may be sure that it troubled Turner even more. The great historians had been in the main figures of steady and lavishly fruitful work. One need not go to such a fountain of energy as Ranke, with his fifty volumes, but need only compare Turner with some of his American contemporaries like McMaster, Rhodes, or Beard to see how humiliatingly small his yield must have seemed to him. In this respect, in having a major reputation and a memorable leading idea but only a minor body of work, he is perhaps most reminiscent of Lord Acton—a man whose high repute, resting on a long and imposing shelf of unwritten books, might well have been considerably diminished if he had ever taken the trouble to do them. Turner enjoyed developing and illustrating his ideas in essays of moderate length, and left some two dozen of them that are rewarding to read. But the writing of full-length works of history, which he felt he ought also to be able to do, bored and oppressed him. His two works of substantive history do however shed much light on his qualities of mind and on the tormenting difficulties of his intellectual development.
When one examines these two books, one is immediately struck by the fact that, for all the charges of overemphasis on the West which have been made against his essays, Turner had much too much common sense to try to write a history of the United States simply in terms of the West, still less of a narrower and more constricting conception like the frontier. The animating idea in these books is not the West, narrowly construed, but sections and sectionalism in American history—an idea which made it possible to give the West the prominent place Turner thought it deserved without putting on it an exclusive or excessive burden. It is indeed this idea, embodied in the title of one of his later essays, “The Significance of the Section in American History,” which is the leading idea of Turner’s mature working years.
Because of their obvious points of continuity, it is possible to look at the idea of the section as no more than an extension of Turner’s original idea about the West and the frontier. The use of the section as a central organizing device still carried on with his commitment to geographical and spatial categories; also the sectional idea was still a good vehicle for pressing his claims for the importance of the West. But in certain respects the section, as a basic theme, represented a partial retreat from the frontier interpretation, since it gave Turner an opportunity to stress the polylateral character of historical development and to dwell on the interplay between sections rather than the single force of the role of the West. One might expect to find a detailed exploration of the suggestions in his essays, but in the index to Rise of the New West there is not so much as an entry under “frontier.” Nor are we told very much about such leading conceptions of Turner’s essays as democracy or individualism. The development of democracy is passed over with a few casual references and in a rather perfunctory two-page sequence on changes in the suffrage; the meaning of American individualism is not explored at all. The history of the common people and their way of life, another demand of the early essays, gets very little attention, while a good deal of space is given to sketches, often nicely drawn, of the leading political heroes—a practice which may have had ample justification, in Turner’s scheme, in the truth that they were “democratic” and representative men.
But even here certain vital problems are only touched upon. “We can see the very essence of the west in Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson,” writes Turner; but since he is well aware that they were quite unlike each other, we wait with unsatisfied eagerness for the resolution of this commentary on the nature of the West, to be told only that Clay represented the business and propertied interests and Jackson the great masses: “If Henry Clay was one of the favorites of the west, Andrew Jackson was the west itself.”4 There is also relatively little feeling for institutions—singularly little for that basic American institution, the political party, which was undergoing formative changes in the period 1819–29, marked by the emergence of a new party system. (The chapter labeled “Party Politics” deals mainly with the personalities and strategies of four leading figures, John Quincy Adams, Calhoun, Clay, and Jackson.)
Both of Turner’s substantive histories are organized in the same manner: they begin with a series of deft sectional sketches—New England, the Middle States, the South, the major segments of the West—and then go on to tell the story of political events, mainly of legislation in Washington as it was affected by the demands, the bargains and compromises, of the several sections, and by the ambitions and strategies of their outstanding leaders. The merits of the sectional approach are easy to see here: the country was already big and far from homogeneous; the sections were quite distinct; it is impossible without becoming tedious to discuss, state by state, the affairs of twenty-odd states and territories; and even the modern, relatively homogenized America created by industry and mass communications still has to be understood in part through its sectional divisions. The sectional idea does enable the historian to illustrate different cultural styles. Moreover, much of the politics of the period did take the form of sectional maneuvering, and the sectional principle helped to make it intelligible. Other historians, out of sheer necessity, had resorted to something like the same device. Henry Adams, for example, a historian perhaps as different from Turner as one could expect to find, had begun his great history with regional sketches much in the same fashion—except that in true New England style he had slighted the West.
But there are also serious limitations to a pronounced emphasis on sections. An obvious dramatic one, especially important for the narrative historian, lies in the difficulty of beginning a book with long, relatively static portraits. Turner’s two books are, respectively, one third and more than one half over before the political action starts. More important from the standpoint of political history, which was the author’s main concern in these works, sections, for all their significance in the political bargaining that went on in Congress, are not political centers in their own right—that is, they do not have governors, legislatures, budgets, political foci of their own on their home grounds. States do; and in the attempt to look at the section, the character of American politics at the vital local roots, in the actions of the state legislatures, is likely to be passed over.5 This is particularly true of the essential efforts of the states in the field of economic development, and of their significant effort to develop a system of mixed enterprise.6
The sectional principle of organization, like most such devices, solves certain problems for the historian and makes the solution of others more difficult. Its greatest danger lies in what it may cause him to leave out. It may cause him to play down class or group conflict within the sections. It may cause him to describe people somewhat too much in terms of where they were, geographically, not enough in terms of what they were, vocationally and socially. It can lead to an underemphasis on those institutions that are characteristic of the whole nation and on which the sections present only variations, or on which the existence of sections sheds only a marginal light—the party system, the legal and constitutional order, the Supreme Court, the pattern of business enterprise, religious organizations and religious style. One is tempted on this count to adopt the rhetoric of the Turnerian exaggerations themselves and to suggest that the true point of view in the history of this nation is not what is merely sectional but what is common to all sections, and that the history of our national institutions is the really American part of our history.
All in all, Rise of the New West is a somewhat disappointing book to have as the only finished work from the hand of a major historian. To say that it was one of the best books in the American Nation series is a comment on the parochial scale of American historical writing and a very limited compliment. The book will hardly bear comparison in its texture—its scope was of course much more limited—with what Henry Adams had done on the chronological period preceding it. Other writings of the same era are more striking for the light they shed on the development of American institutions—one thinks, for example, of Moisei Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (1902) or Henry Jones Ford’s brilliant and all but forgotten The Rise and Growth of American Politics (1898). As a work of prose Turner’s has none of the brio of George Dangerfield’s two volumes written in our own time on roughly the same period. The book was, of course, a commissioned work, representing a type of assignment that proved uncongenial to Turner,7 a work that had to be forced out of him against all the dictates of his temperament. It has few signs of the argumentative surge and the persuasiveness of his essays, and it shows occasional traces of fatigue. One can only conclude that, faced with the difficult problem of covering a period of rapid and confusing change in a relatively brief work, Turner lost as much as he gained, perhaps more, from his choice of the section as an organizing principle.
As for the second of the two volumes, which must be assessed as a work neither finished nor revised, it was cut out of the same pattern. Unlike the first, it was badly written (some clue to its quality may be found in Turner’s effort to dictate it directly out of his voluminous file of notes). But as a work of historical analysis it has a somewhat greater solidity in proportion to its bulk. A brave synthesis of the scholarship of its time, it was impressively well informed, and a professional historian can still find cues in it after thirty years. But the general reader will find it a dead book. Turner believed that history, for all that he tried to do on its “scientific” side, is an art; the art of his epoch-making essays was not matched in his histories.
III
His choice of the significance of sections as the leading idea for the second phase of his career may be taken, I think, as a clue to the characteristic problem of Turner’s development as a thinker. By about 1910 he had substantially exploited, so far as this could be done through his favored medium of a series of essays, his first insight into the importance of the frontier, and he had already seen the frontier theme win wide historical recognition. For him the theme was now practically exhausted, and he seems to have been casting about for another major line along which he could develop his talents. The disparity between his spendid reputation and his productivity seems to have begun to trouble him, and he apparently hoped for a reprise of his original success with the frontier idea. It is beyond conjecture that his experience in writing Rise of the New West had made him acutely aware of the necessity of thinking of American history in sectional terms. In 1907 he read before the American Sociological Society a paper entitled “Is Sectionalism in America Dying Away?” which marked the beginning of a long-term effort to explore the idea of sectionalism—an effort that was climaxed in his lifetime by his essay of 1925 on “The Significance of the Section in American History” and by the detailed exploitation of the theme in his posthumous books.
What the theme of sectionalism meant to Turner is not hard to see. He witnessed with deep and understandable reluctance the easternization of the West, the development of industry, the threat that modern industrialism would homogenize the country, and that the distinctively Western values would disappear. One could see, he wrote in 1908, “that the forces of civilization are working toward uniformity, and that these forces tend strongly to counteract sectionalism in the United States and to promote social unity.” But, he went on, sectionalism as well as nationalism was still in evidence, and he added wistfully that it was “too early to predict an American society in which the vast spaces of the United States will be occupied by a uniform type.”8 It was an important part of the message of these essays that sectionalism would survive, would continue to compete with nationalism, and would offer an alternative to total uniformity.
Again, Turner’s answer to the threat of a uniform civilization was couched in geographical rather than sociological terms: the truly reliable source of pluralism lay not in institutions but in geography. “Geographical conditions,” he wrote in 1908, “and the stocks from which the people sprang are the most fundamental factors in shaping sectionalism. Of these the geographic influence is particularly important in forming a society like that of the United States, for it includes in its influence those factors of economic interests, as well as environmental conditions, that affect the psychology of a people.”9
In this respect, in its emphasis on geography, physiographic correlations, and racial “stocks,” Turner’s mind looks backward to the post-Darwinian nineteenth-century frame of mind rather than forward to the modern concern with human institutions and patterns of thought. He was still mentally locked into the grand spatial metaphor that had dominated the first phase of his work. In studying the sectional battles in Congress during the period 1820–50, he had been concerned to establish the point that the sectional dialogue did not involve only the North and the South but was also entered into by the West with a strong and independent voice, that indeed the Atlantic sections had found it necessary to compete for Western support. This tripartite bargaining he saw followed by a more complex bargaining in recent times. One could indeed find much evidence for this view, and it was certainly useful to warn that under modern nationalized conditions historians might fail to see the importance of sectionalism in the past. Unfortunately, however, Turner, unable to resist the temptation to exploit his idea out of all proportion to its consequence, went far beyond this: to him the section was more than a waning but still visible factor in American politics; he insisted that it had survived in full force and even went on to suggest that its importance might be expected to increase. The basically valid idea behind the sectional theme was that the United States is too big to be looked at as a simple nation or even as a federation of states; that it embraces a whole continent of heterogeneous parts, and has become, in effect, a federation of sections. “The significance of the section in American history is that it is the faint image of a European nation and that we need to re-examine our history in the light of this fact. Our politics and our society have been shaped by sectional complexity and interplay not unlike what goes on between European nations.”1 After the First World War, Turner thought that the example of the United States as a federation of sections might be of some use as an example to the world—a League of Sections as a guide to the League of Nations.
But his fundamental and most surprising commitment was to the idea that the country would have a static future in which the role of sections would actually grow larger: “The significant fact is that sectional self-consciousness and sensitiveness is likely to be increased as time goes on and crystallized sections feel the full influence of their geographic peculiarities, their special interests, and their developed ideals, in a closed and static nation.”2
We may well begin to suspect here that the geography-bound, space-obsessed mind is getting him into trouble. Long before, in 1891, Turner had pointed out that history must adjust to the machine age and cope with economic questions: “The age of machinery, of the factory system, is also the age of socialistic inquiry.” But his exaggerated claims for sectionalism show that he had not in fact been able to incorporate into his sense of the recent American past an appreciation of the dynamic quality of industrial life, its voracious appetite for bureaucratizing and rationalizing (in the Weberian sense) human affairs, its extraordinary ability to break down barriers of space and time. That he should, with his background in the West, have found it distasteful to contemplate an America in which the farming segment of the population would shrink to less than ten percent of the whole, is altogether understandable as a matter of values. But he permitted it to blind him, even in the post-World War years, to the significance of modern industrial mass society. Hence we find him predicting in the early 1920’s that the new device, the radio, will of course “diminish localism,” but will do nothing to affect sectionalism. We also find him enmeshed in futile Malthusian speculations arising from his fixation on closed space and exhausted land supplies. By the early 1970’s, the United States, he thought (he was not alone in holding this idea), would be facing a catastrophe arising from an insufficient food supply, as population pressed upon the now limited amount of land. It would thus be driven to perpetuate its farming regions, and the enforced persistence of agriculture would firmly underpin the survival of sectionalism.3
Around 1921, stung by the charge that he had excluded class conflict from his sectional scheme, Turner wrote in an unpublished fragment that sectional contests are quite consistent with class contests and that “to a considerable extent the American class struggle is itself sectional.” And then, after a rather confusing passage, Turner asks us to postulate the triumph in the United States of “Bolshevistic labor ideas.” “New England,” he goes on, “might then divide into Northern and Southern halves according to its economic interests. Assume a combination of Southern New England, the Middle States, and West Virginia, with radical miners of the Mountain States and of the Middle West. Add for full measure a Negro revolution in the South. What would happen? Would not race antagonism afford grounds for sectional divergence between Northeast and South? Would not the Pacific Coast and West North Central States join to resist agricultural expropriation? Russian experience would seem to say so.”4 At this point the manuscript breaks off, as though Turner was uncomfortably aware that he was descending to nonsense. But one does not learn whether he ever realized that if there were a national triumph of “Bolshevistic labor ideas” and a Negro revolution in the South, no one would in the least care what the internal regional pattern of New England was. What was fundamentally wrong with his insight into sectionalism was not that it lacked validity, but that it lacked the importance with which he so solemnly tried to invest it.
IV
His ruminations on sectionalism convey the detached, unworldly, and unusually gentle quality of Turner’s mind, as well as a certain perverse gift he had, when confronted with an uncongenial problem, for irrelevance or disproportion. His was a mind amply endowed with curiosity and perception, and graced by a singular relish for the right detail, the revealing quotation, the fresh and unobserved historical reality. It was, despite its occasional strange excesses, a sensible mind, and it was notably generous, but it was also rather lacking in intellectual passion. Turner’s enthusiasm was more like that of a collector of Americana than a critic of the human scene—one thinks of him in his later years, working at the Huntington Library, when he would periodically burst into Max Farrand’s office with boyish gusto to report some new discovery that delighted him, much in the spirit of a lepidopterist with a new specimen. Explaining his feeling about history to a Phi Beta Kappa group in 1908, he said: “There is a charm in restoring the past, in compelling the procession of leaders of human thought and action again to traverse the stage of human consciousness, in rescuing from oblivion what is worth the memory of the present day. The events of past years, the institutions that have passed away, the life and manners of societies that are gone, are a precious heritage, not to be wantonly ignored in the heat and bustle of the day. Life becomes a richer thing when it is viewed largely, when it is seen as a continuous movement, reaching back to generations that are gone.”5 One would hardly care to quarrel with what is here, but it is interesting what Turner chose to leave out. “Charm” is not the salient quality that many historians feel in restoring the past. One can only conclude that Turner lacked a strong feeling for the tragedy of history—and also, since very few historians have, it is hardly surprising that he had very little sense for its comedy.
Again, while Turner was moved, and rightly so, by a feeling for the achievement of America, he had little countervailing response to the shame of it—to such aspects of Western development as riotous land speculation, vigilantism, the ruthless despoiling of the continent,6 the arrogance of American expansionism, the pathetic tale of the Indians, anti-Mexican and anti-Chinese nativism, the crudeness, even the near-savagery, to which men were reduced on some portions of the frontier. He did not fail to acknowledge now and then the existence of such things, but he did neglect to write about them with specificity or emphasis: it was not just that they did not arouse his indignation but that they seem not to have deeply engaged his interest and that he saw no imperative reason why Americans should be encouraged to confront these aspects of their frontier heritage. He saw history partly as science, partly as art, partly as a fountainhead of national and sectional pride, but he used it very sparingly as an instrument of intellectual or social criticism. In 1889, calling for a fuller account of the “progress of civilization across the continent,” he said: “Aside from the scientific importance of such a work, it would contribute to awakening a real national self-consciousness and patriotism.”7 Would remorse or self-criticism have any part in this? We are left uncertain. One might perhaps expect a historian who as a young man had poled down the Wisconsin River with Indian guides to have written at least a few poignant lines about the subject of Indian removal in the 900-odd pages of his two books on the middle period. But Rise of the New West has a few detached pages on Georgia’s troubled Indian affairs which are retold mainly as an episode in state-federal relations. The Southwestern Indians, Turner blandly tells us, “had developed a very considerable agriculture and a sedentary life. For this reason, however, they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.… The secretaries of war … made many plans and recommendations for their civilization, improvement, and assimilation. But the advance of the frontier broke down the efforts to preserve and incorporate these primitive people in the dominant American society.”
A later passage on Georgia’s way of dealing with the Indians closes simply with: “Thus Georgia completed her assertion of sovereignty over her soil both against the United States and the Indians. But this phase of the controversy was not settled during the presidency of [John Quincy] Adams.” Indeed it was not, and one looks expectantly to the succeeding volume to see if the excruciating final phases of Indian removal are dealt with, only to find that still less is said: the Indian has almost entirely disappeared as an actor or a victim from American history; the denouement is mentioned in two paragraphs, but again only as an aspect of state-federal relations.8
My point, I hope, will not be misunderstood: it is not that the historian is under an obligation to be a muckraker or a moralist, or to venture upon some nagging one-sided quarrel with the behavior of ancestors and predecessors who were morally no frailer than himself. My point is simply that the anguish of history, as well as its romance and charm, is there for the historian who responds to it, and that the response of a historian of the frontier to the Indian problem, as it is sometimes called, is one way of taking his intellectual temperature. It is possible that “the smiling aspects of life,” to use Howells’s phrase, were those that Turner thought should be featured in historical writing that aimed to awaken “a real national self-consciousness and patriotism”; but it is more likely that his decisions were taken less consciously and deliberately, out of a deep and calm satisfaction with the American past. The main rebellious note in Turner’s work was not a difference with the national history but with the national historians; and even his demand to get the place of the West in American history recognized at last, as against the neglect or indifference or snobbery of the older historians, was, after all, a note of the most genteel insurgency. What is more, his rebellion here was apparently quieted at a relatively early point by its own success. Turner’s basic aim, like that of so many historians, was a patriotic one; his main enterprise was a foray in search of the American identity. In a nation where identity had been made uncertain and insecure by social and physical mobility, by immigration and ethnic differences, by sectional clashes, and by the weakness of traditions and of many institutions, Turner was trying to forge a common identity based on the idea of a pioneering spirit and pioneer democracy, and to assimilate it as close to the Western American as the facts of reality would admit. “We need,” he said, “a natural history of the American spirit.”9 His was, of course, a gentle and basically humane nationalism, quite adaptable to an international world order, and it would be wrong to picture him as a Treitschke in coonskin. Quite the contrary, it is the blandness of his nationalism that most stands out, as it is the blandness of such social criticism as he attempted, the blandness indeed of his mind as a whole.
Turner’s political views were those of a moderate Midwestern progressive, and he succeeded in keeping his detachment even when the winds of controversy were blowing strong. In 1896, as a liberal Democrat, he persuaded himself with some misgivings to vote for Bryan. As for the Populists, though he plainly sympathized with some aspects of their protest, he could never approve of what he considered to be their financial irresponsibility. His coolness in the heat of the battle of 1896 was notable: when he wrote an article on “The Problem of the West” for the Atlantic Monthly that year to popularize the frontier thesis, it proved in first draft so remote from the exciting events of the moment that Walter Hines Page had to prevail on him to include more references to the background of the current agrarian uprising. In later days Turner admired T.R. as “the most important single force in the regeneration of this nation in his day,” and a man of “elemental greatness.” Woodrow Wilson, who would “also rank with the great ones of this earth,” won Turner’s approval both for his domestic policies and his war policies; Turner was moved by Wilson’s passion for peace and shared the dream embodied in the League of Nations.1 In his general acceptance of progressive tendencies and progressive leadership, as well as his support for America’s role in the war, Turner shared the views of millions of middle-class men and women of good will, and struck a note quite characteristic of the era of T.R. and Wilson.
But all of Turner’s later thought was colored by his uneasy resistance to the pessimistic implications of the frontier idea. If, as he had said, American democracy was born of free land and gained new strength every time it touched a new frontier, might it not gradually lose strength after the disappearance of the last frontier, and ultimately die for lack of its distinctive nourishment? He refused to accept this conclusion; yet, having a view of social development founded on spatial expansion rather than the dynamics of institutions, he had difficulty imagining what would keep the American system going; and his positive suggestions, which hung on the persistence of sectionalism and the pioneer spirit, never seemed to bear any proportion to the immense problems he clearly saw ahead. Usually he fell back upon the hope that something would keep the old pioneer spirit alive, that somehow the old ways could be adapted. “This nation was formed under pioneer ideals.” “How shall we conserve what was best in pioneer ideals?” Somehow it must be possible to find a way of drawing on these ideals to civilize and reform industrial democracy. “Let us see to it,” he urged at the close of an essay written in 1903, “that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good.”2 Almost all experiences were to be tested by the touchstone of the frontier. During the First World War Turner proclaimed: “It is for historic ideals that we are fighting,” and the context made it clear once again that the ideals of the frontier would sustain us in war as they had in peace. The war, Turner thought, made it possible to see more clearly than before the significance of the lives of the pioneers. In a kind of litany at the dedication of a new building of the Minnesota Historical Association in 1918, Turner linked his piety about the pioneers, his feeling about the historian’s vocation, and his sense of American nationhood: “As our forefathers, the pioneers, gathered in their neighborhood to raise the log cabin, and sanctified it by the name of home, the dwelling place of pioneer ideals, so we meet to celebrate the raising of this home, this shrine of Minnesota’s historical life. It symbolizes the conviction that the past and the future of this people are tied together; that this Historical Society is the keeper of the records of a noteworthy movement in the progress of mankind; that these records are not unmeaning and antiquarian, but even in their details are worthy of preservation for their revelation of the beginnings of society in the midst of a nation caught by the vision of a better future for the world.”3
Turner did not fail to see that a new America had come into being with the twentieth century: this was indeed one of the implications of the exhaustion of free lands. He devoted much of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1910 to underscoring what this meant: the disappearance of the frontier, the massing of capital in large aggregates, the appearance of a large immigrant proletariat, the sharpening of class conflict, the development of world trade and imperialist commitments. Like most Progressives, he was willing to endorse more governmental action to meet these problems: as a safeguard of democracy the now vanished free lands would have to be replaced by a new social resourcefulness. The unrestricted competitive individualism that had been engendered by pioneer conditions was now at odds with democratic ideals and would have to be subordinated to them. He was troubled by the thought that the dangers of social conflict would be greater, not only because the safety valve was closed and “classes are becoming alarmingly distinct,” but also because the prejudices of native-born employers and the native middle classes against immigrant workers intensified the struggle. As a boy he had seen the older immigrants, the Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, English, and Canadians in the process of Americanization under the favorable conditions of the frontier. As a young historian he had witnessed with a certain repugnance and alarm the invasion of the new and less congenial masses of southern and eastern Europeans, and his comments on the habits and potential influence of the southern Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and Slovaks had been sharp and unsympathetic. As he grew older, his distaste became qualified by compassion. He had always hoped that a better environment would improve them. “Even in the dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe,” he wrote in 1910, “the idea of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land of pioneer democratic ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify.”4
Yet there were moments when it seemed to Turner that the whole development of the New World, from the freshness of the virgin continent to the assembly lines and blast furnaces of modern industry marked a gigantic regression—a regression to a form of society which one might easily wish to see destroyed. Take Pittsburgh, he once said: there Braddock and his men long ago “were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods,” and now “huge furnaces belch forth perpetual fires, and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded life.” Reflecting on this contrast between the woods and the furnaces, he was reminded of T. H. Huxley, who had found even the best of modern civilization exhibiting no ideal worthy of the name, and was tempted to think it might be just as well if some “kindly comet” would sweep the whole thing away. And yet, said Turner (using—was it for the first time?—the phrase that John F. Kennedy was to hit upon for the 1960’s), if there was shock and apprehension in industrial civilization, there was challenge also: “In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored.”5
Turner’s sense that the trials of the industrial world might be successfully met was not given substance by any program of his own. He was of course sympathetic to the general direction of the Progressive reforms, and he believed in the advance of government regulation as a necessary condition of reform. But the only particular suggestion he had for the times—aside from his belief that the need for agricultural produce would help to sustain a healthy sectionalism—was breathtaking in its simplicity and its insularity: it was the state university that would keep pioneer ideals alive, translate them into the terms required by industrialism, reaffirm the democratic spirit of the country, keep opportunities open, sustain mobility, provide democratic leadership, and, in the end, “safeguard democracy.”6 The note of naïveté and of Midwestern parochialism in this confidence in the state university is all too plain; yet there is something to be said for it. Turner was among the earliest of modern American scholars to see how important the expert would become in the business of government, and he did realize that modern democracy would require the services of groups of trained experts of the kind he thought the state universities would be particularly well equipped to turn out—lawmakers, administrators, judges, commissioners, and the like—men “who shall disinterestedly and intelligently mediate between, contending interests.” The University of Wisconsin, as he had had occasion to see, had played just such a role in the reforms of the La Follette era, and had established an intimate and productive relation to the state’s political leaders.
In seeking for an intelligent and disinterested class of experts, Turner struck a characteristic Progressive note, somewhat reminiscent of Brandeis’s conception that a corps of lawyers with a proper sense of social responsibility would hold “a position of independence between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either.” Turner had also shifted ground: he conceded that the old pioneer prejudice against the expert and the specialist was among the frontier traits that must be abandoned. He thought that if the expert showed enough “creative imagination and personality,” he could overcome this residual prejudice and that the new class of experts could best be produced in the state universities because these institutions were the direct inheritors of the democratic spirit. Historians too would have their place among the experts, as shapers of the right kind of social mentality: “A just public opinion and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems demand that they be seen in their historical relations in order that history may hold the lamp for conservative reform.”7
Of course, Turner expected much more of the state universities than they could give, and they have hardly justified the notion that they would save democracy. There is a certain irony too in the thought that Turner’s most memorable manifesto on the state universities as the salvation of democracy was delivered in 1910, the very year when his own discontents with Wisconsin, one of the best of them, drove him to Harvard. It is not hard to be swayed by his belief that modern democracy would need more widespread, and cheaper, public education and that the state universities would contribute both to social mobility and to the sum of social intelligence; but one is struck here, once again, by the imbalance between the major problem he perceived and the minor means he proposed to solve it.
V
Whether there was any relation between the bland and conventional qualities of Turner’s mind and his difficulties with his writing and with the development of his talent is a question that must be left to his biographers. There does remain about his career something extraordinary and puzzling: it began with such gusto, such an onrush of inspiration and major insight, it was encouraged by such prompt recognition, that it is inexplicable to see it foundering before it had even got to mid-passage. Turner’s success in conceiving and promoting the frontier theme in the 1890’s was never to be followed by any achievement even remotely comparable, and his career becomes an unexpected instance of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sweeping dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Turner once told his pupil Merle Curti that “a man does not make a fundamental discovery or effect a profound alteration in science after he is thirty.”8 This fixation on youth is extraordinary for a historian: poets and mathematicians are reputed to bloom young, but history is one of those pursuits in which talents usually ripen slowly and in which the highest achievements can be expected in the middle or later years. For Turner, however, the remark has its poignant reality. His basic idea had crystallized when he was about thirty, and during the half-dozen or so years immediately following it had given him the warm, inspired moment that yielded his important early essays. By the time he had reached his early forties, this idea had been exploited about as fully as it could be in illustrative and exhortatory essays, and the further development of Turner’s talent now required either that he elaborate it fully in major books of Western history or go on to develop some new central idea. The first Turner could not do; the second he attempted, with results I have already tried to assess, in the notion of sectionalism.
Turner’s receptivity, at least, did not wane: he was always prepared to see things he had missed before, or to qualify his formulations. Near the end of his life he told Arthur M. Schlesinger that he thought there was much to be learned from an urban interpretation of American history. But it seems undeniable that Turner’s mind, which developed with such rapidity and effect during his thirties developed very little afterward. I trust I have made clear that Turner’s early interest in the frontier, though it may have originated in a somewhat parochial concern, was developed with anything but parochial intellectual means. During the 1880’s Turner looked eagerly for insight and guidance from whatever quarter he could find it—not only from books of geography and census reports and observations of native reformers like Henry George, but from English historical writing, German historical thought, and contemporary French scholarship, from statistics, economics, and sociology. He continued, of course, in his later years to call upon historians for this kind of collaboration with other disciplines, but, aside from his efforts to keep up with trends among geographers, he seems to have done rather little of it himself. I find no evidence in his published writings that he followed his early interest in German historical thinkers with any acquaintance with that remarkable efflorescence of sociological work that came in the era of Max Weber. Or, for that matter, that the work of a native social thinker like Veblen, whose experiences and ideas might have been expected to excite his interest, had any effect on him; or that he found anything to learn from other interesting contemporary sociologists like Ward, Ross, or Cooley. Or that he was interested in the emergence of pragmatism, or in the functionalist psychology being developed by John Dewey and related thinkers. Or that he was excited or instructed by native political scientists like Charles E. Merriam, J. Allen Smith, or A. F. Bentley, or, for that matter, Charles A. Beard. Or that the rise of Fabianism in England or of American socialism or later the coming of the Bolshevik Revolution inspired him to any extensive reading in the Marxian tradition. Or that he was at all stirred by the fresh and rebellious American literature of the period between the 1890’s and the First World War. Or that he was even intimately concerned with the emergence of the economic interpretation of history, which in this country owed so much to his own earlier suggestions. What he appears to have done, as he dug himself deeper and deeper into the vast materials of Western Americana and kept carefully in touch with the large, proliferating literature of monographic scholarship, was to lose sight of the greater world of ideas that was changing with such rapidity during his middle years. It is tempting to speculate where his mind might have turned if he had taken a cue from any one of a number of major ideas of the era. And though we have no right to try to budget his time, it is tempting too to wonder what might have happened if, instead of writing more essays devoted to showing once again the importance of the Middle West or the Mississippi Valley, or to celebrating once again the pioneer ideals, he had written an essay on, say, the significance of land speculation in American history, or on class stratification on the frontier or (since he discovered a new interest in the city) on the frontier cities; or indeed to wonder what his mind might have turned to if he had been able to forget about geography and physiography, to abandon his intricate maps, and to read with any of his former enthusiasm in contemporary sociology and literature, where he might have found new resources for the distinctive quality of his insights, which at their best were usually of a sociological character.
What complex of events brought about this arrested development in Turner must remain largely a matter of speculation. Although his productivity even during the 1890’s was not notably high in quantity, it was of such quality as to give several publishers the impression that in him they might have found the writer of a whole series of significant works. But somewhere in his early forties Turner himself must have begun to be aware that something was wrong; certainly he began to feel with special pain the burden of writing, and he began to develop so perfectly and completely the syndrome of the nonwriting writer that the remaining mystery for us must be not why he did not write the half dozen or so major books that might have been spun out in pursuit of his insights but how he managed, as he did, to force out a fairly steady trickle of short pieces. It is perhaps fairest to think of him not as a rich productive force full of primal energy who perversely failed to realize his talents, but rather as a constitutional non-writer whose work was wrung out of himself at immense psychic cost.
It is hard to imagine anything that would have made Turner an easy writer, but domestic tragedy went far to dampen his spirit. In 1899 the Turners lost two of their three children, a daughter of five and a son of seven, to childhood diseases, and in the anguish of this experience, which left him troubled over the health of his wife, a great deal went out of him. “I have not done anything, and have not had the heart for anything,” he wrote to Becker at this time. After a trip to Europe and a hiatus of a few years in his work, the small steady flow of his writing resumed; but a certain resilience was gone, and those who knew him felt that he was never quite the same. If he was not so self-critical as to be unhappy about the somewhat repetitive character of his work, its lack of forward impetus, he was keenly distressed by his inability to get much done, a trait over which the demanding editorship of A. B. Hart might have made him more self-conscious than he had been before. Ray Allen Billington has written a sympathetic and revealing account of Turner’s struggles with himself, which mark him with all the stigmata of the prototypical nonwriter. He became haunted by the suspicion, so clear to his biographer, that he was temperamentally “incapable of the sustained effort necessary to complete a major scholarly volume.”9 “I hate to write,” he blurted out to a student in later years, “it is almost impossible for me to do so.” But it was a self-description arrived at after long and hard experience. In 1901, when he was forty, Turner had signed contracts for nine books, not one of which was ever to be written and only a few of which were even attempted, and his life was punctuated by an endless correspondence with disappointed publishers. For an academic family, the Turners lived expensively and entertained generously, and the income from any of the textbooks he promised to write would have been welcome, but the carrot of income was no more effective than the stick of duty and ambition. Turner’s teaching load at Wisconsin was for a time cut down, in the hope that it would clear the way for his productive powers, but what it produced was only a misunderstanding with university trustees. Turner’s reluctance to address himself to substantive history was so overwhelming that A. B. Hart, a martinet of an editor who presided with ruthless energy over the authors of the American Nation series, extracted Rise of the New West out of him only by dint of an extraordinary series of nagging letters and bullying telegrams. Hart in the end counted this his supreme editorial achievement. “It ought to be carved on my tombstone that I was the only man in the world that secured what might be called an adequate volume from Turner,” he wrote to Max Farrand; and Farrand, one of Turner’s closest friends who watched his agonized efforts to produce his last unfinished volume in the splendid setting provided by the Huntington Library, sadly concluded that he would not have finished it had he lived forever.
Over the years Turner had built up a staggering variety of psychological and mechanical devices, familiar to all observers of academia, to stand between himself and the finished task. There was, for example, a kind of perfectionism, which sent him off looking for one more curious fact or decisive bit of evidence, and impelled the elaborate rewriting of drafts that had already been rewritten. There were the hopelessly optimistic plans for what he would do in the next two or twelve or eighteen months, whose inevitable nonfulfillment brought new lapses into paralyzing despair. There was an undisciplined curiosity, an insatiable, restless interest in everything, without a correspondingly lively determination to consummate anything; a flitting from one subject to another, a yielding to the momentary pleasures of research as a way of getting further from the discipline of writing. (“I have a lot of fun exploring, getting lost and getting back, and telling my companions about it,” he said, but “telling” here did not mean writing.) There was overresearch and overpreparation, with the consequent inability to sort out the important from the trivial—a small mountain of notes, for example, gathered for a trifling projected children’s book of 25,000 words on George Rogers Clark. There were, for all the unwritten books, thirty-four large file drawers bulging with notes on every aspect of American history. There were elaborate maps, drawn to correlate certain forces at work in American politics. There were scrap-books, and hours spent filling them. There was summer-session teaching, often needed to meet family expenses. There were, as a necessary source of relief, long camping and fishing trips. (Turner needed the outdoors so much that shortly after his removal from Madison to Cambridge he set up a tent for a time on his back porch so that he could sleep out of the house.) There were the absorbing affairs of the University of Wisconsin—a duty—and for a long time the burdens of the departmental chairmanship. There was a crusade against the overemphasis on college football, a movement to elect a new president. There were the needs and demands of his graduate students, always warmly and generously met (“Turner gives all his time to us, instead of spending it writing books and articles like the others!”), and there was the irresistible lure of over-teaching which caused Turner in 1923–4, his last year at Harvard, to redo the notes for a course which he had given many times and would never give again. There were the professional affairs of the American Historical Association; there were commencement and dedicatory addresses. There were, of course, long letters of explanation to publishers, and other letters setting forth new plans for books. There was indeed an entire set of letters to Henry Holt and Company, examining various possible titles for the last unfinishable volume—letters that the exasperated publishers finally cut off by suggesting that the matter might well wait until the book itself became a reality. Finally, there was, after the possible bounty of his middle age had been lost, a series of wasting and depressing illnesses during his last fifteen years that cut deep into his working time. At the end, Turner was, as always, good-humored and apologetic. There was a last word for Farrand: “Tell Max I am sorry that I haven’t finished my book.” And one can only hope that he found consolation in the thought that, even without his book, he had redrawn the map of American historiography.
1 For an illustration, see Walter Hines Page, “The War with Spain and After,” Atlantic Monthly, 81 (1898), 721–7. On this use of the frontier, see William A. Williams, “The Frontier Thesis and Foreign Policy,” Pacific Historical Review, 24 (1955), 379–95.
2 Frontier, 303–3; Sections, 24–5; for a good estimate of the change marked by Turner’s view of Jacksonian democracy, See Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 44 (1958), 615–34.
3 “Our Legacy from a Century of Pioneers,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 5 (1906), 320.
4 On this phase of criticism of the frontier, see Warren I. Susman, “The Useless Past: American Intellectuals and the Frontier Thesis: 1910–1930,” Bucknell Review, 11 (1963), 1–20.
5 For Turner on Harriman, see Frontier, 318–19; for Coolidge and Hoover, Susman, “The Useless Past,” 10–11.
Turner took comfort in the thought that “even those masters of industry and capital who have risen to power by the conquest of Western resources came from the midst of this society and still profess its principles.” He cited, as one example, Andrew Carnegie, who “came as a ten-year-old boy from Scotland to Pittsburgh, then a distinctively Western town.” Whatever the tendencies of the steel trust, “there can be little doubt of the democratic ideals of Mr. Carnegie himself.” Frontier, 264–5.
6 Quoted in Everett Edwards, References on the Significance of the Frontier in American History (1939), 43–4.
7 Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses (1938), I, 742–56. In 1935 Roosevelt reiterated his acceptance of the safety-valve idea in a public address. Edwards, ibid., 3. See also Curtis Nettels, “Frederick Jackson Turner and the New Deal,” Wisconsin Magazine of History, 17 (1934), 257–65.
8 Russell Lord, “Back to the Farm?” Forum, 89 (1933), 97–103.
9 The Social History of American Agriculture (1936), 271, 293.
1 It is not yet disenthralled. In spite of the Supreme Court’s rulings on reapportionment, the small-town mentality still enjoys an overrepresentation that makes it difficult for Congress to take a sympathetic view of the problems of the great metropolitan areas. In 1967, 225 of the 435 members of the House and 56 of the 100 members of the Senate came from towns of 50,000 or less. Time, August 11, 1967, 17.
2 George W. Pierson, “The Frontier and American Institutions: A Criticism of the Turner Theory,” New England Quarterly, 15 (1942), 224.
3 Frontier, 358.
4 Rise of the New West, 185, 188.
5 See Turner, per contra: “Sections are more important than states in shaping the underlying forces in American history.” Sections, 183.
6 It would certainly be too much to expect that Turner, whose writing did anticipate so much fruitful work, should have anticipated also the modern emphasis on state enterprise that is associated with such historians as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Louis Hartz, Carter Goodrich, Milton S. Heath, James Neal Primm, and others. But it is true that this whole school had been brilliantly anticipated in 1902 by Guy S. Callender in an article “The Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States in Relation to the Growth of Corporations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 17 (1902), 3–54, of which Turner was aware (Rise of the New West, 349).
7 For the circumstances under which the book was written, see Ray Allen Billington’s Foreword to the Collier Books edition (1962).
8 Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy, 184, 186.
9 Sections, 288–9. “Most of the political and economic history of such states as Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Alabama and Mississippi can be written in terms of geology.” Legacy, 66. Fortunately no one has tried it. And Turner himself was ready to concede the inadequacy of such notions. “I think it clear,” he wrote privately in 1926, “that those who believe in geographic determinism go too far.” Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (1966), 21.
1 Sections, 51; cf. 23, 37.
2 Ibid., 45.
3 Frontier, 279, 294, 314; Sections, 35; Legacy, 84; on the radio, see Frontier and Section. 152; Legacy, 62. The text of a lecture on sectionalism reprinted here, 52–69, is illuminating. For the appeal of 1891, see Frontier and Section, 17.
4 Legacy, 78.
5 Legacy, 169.
6 “It is a wonderful chapter, this final rush of American energy upon the remaining wilderness.” Frontier, 312. No doubt, but it was something more than that.
7 “The Winning of the West,” Dial, 10 (1889), 73.
8 Rise of the New West, 115, 309–13; The United States, 1830–1850, 393–4.
9 Sections, 16.
1 Ibid., 229–32. Turner’s view on contemporary politics during his Harvard years were often set down in his correspondence with Alice Perkins Hooper, soon to appear under the editorship of Ray Allen Billington and Walter Muir Whitehill.
2 Frontier, 269, 281, 268.
3 Ibid., 335, 338–9.
4 Frontier, 320–1, 280, 277–8; see Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 122–37, for Turner’s views on immigrants.
5 Frontier, 299–300.
6 Ibid., 269–89, especially 282–7.
7 Ibid., 285, 323–4; for Brandeis see his Business—A Profession (1927), 337.
8 Early Writings, 35 n.
9 Billington’s judgment in “Why Some Historians Rarely Write History,” Mississippi Valley Historical Revieiv, 50 (1963), 15; the facts in the following paragraph are from this account.