In truth there is no single key to American history.
—Frederick Jackson Turner, 1907
I
I HAVE LEFT to the end Turner’s use of the frontier and the many criticisms that have been made of it. A good deal of the confusion that has arisen in the controversy over Turner’s ideas can be resolved if one bears in mind the twofold character of his writings. On one side there is what both critics and followers have referred to as his poetic vision. In images of a certain economy and force Turner was giving voice to emotions deeply felt and widely shared—writing, as Henry Nash Smith has said, “with the authority of one who speaks from the distilled experience of his people.”1 Here his achievement must be understood as part of the broader inheritance of romantic nationalism. But this aspect of his work is also linked to the vagueness and imprecision of his formulations, their repetitive, almost incantatory restatement over the years, his tendency to lapse into sentiments of national and regional patriotism. On the other side there are a series of historical and sociological statements about American development which seem to hinge upon fact; in one form or another—whether as he put them or somewhat restated—they do seem to be amenable to the test of evidence, and they have tempted “scientific” historians to exercise their craft upon the Turnerian generalizations in ways that are regarded by those who share the frontier mystique as excessively literal-minded. Hence in this argument there have been mobilized against each other historians of two kinds of intellectual temperament, coinciding with the poet and the positivist that coexisted so uneasily in Turner. And the Turner who deals in fact—or who seems to ask us to do so—and the Turner who deals in values are always intertwined in such a way as to make the task of Turner criticism an exercise in nice discrimination.
Historians have debated so long and hard whether the frontier thesis is profoundly valuable or fundamentally misleading that there has been a danger of losing sight of the paradox that it can be both. Here, trying to distill what seems to be of most enduring value in the controversy, I shall work on the assumption that there is indeed something of substantial merit at the core of Turner’s views. The most valid procedure with a historical thinker of his kind is not to try to have sport with his marginal failings but to rescue whatever is viable by cutting out what has proved wrong, tempering what is overstated, tightening what is too loosely put, and setting the whole in its proper place among the usable perspectives on our past.
Even Turner’s sharpest critics have rarely failed to concede the core of merit to his thesis, and wisely so. For over two hundred and fifty years the American people shaped their lives with the vast empty interior of the continent before them. Their national existence up to Turner’s day had been involved with conquering, securing, occupying, and developing their continental empire. It is hard to believe that this process of westward settlement, so demanding, so preoccupying, so appealing to the imagination, so productive of new and rich resources for the economy, could have been carried on for so long without having some considerable effect upon their politics and diplomacy, the pattern of their nationalism, their manners, literature, and their imagination, their habits and institutions. Very little of this has really been in dispute, and if Turner had limited his claims to such terms, had been content to say that the availability of the inland empire and its development must be taken into full account in any well-rounded or complete study of the forces that have shaped the United States, it is doubtful that any reasonable man would have troubled to argue with him.
But it is also doubtful that anyone would have paid any attention. Here I think we can only defer to the soundness of Turner’s instincts—as we must in another connection to Beard’s—if not to all his reasoning; both men understood that if a new or heterodox idea is worth anything at all it is worth a forceful overstatement, and that this is one of the conditions of its being taken seriously. We have seen that many aspects of the Turner thesis were stated by other writers before Turner; but we identify him with this idea not simply because he stated it more fully but also because he hammered away at it with a certain obsessive grandeur until everyone had to take account of it.2
What troubled Turner’s critics, then, was not the core of his insight—so useful and appropriate in the setting of American historical writing during the 1890’s—but its formulation: a series of very broad assertions, very vaguely put, seemingly exclusive of other than frontier and Western forces, and resting heavily upon a Middle Western animus that was irrelevant to the tasks of historical explanation and impossible for Americans from other regions to share. But before we go on to consider how much of the Turner thesis may survive the recent barrage of criticism, it is necessary to return once more to Turner’s mode of statement. Here we must face up to a flat contradiction: Turner, as a self-conscious theorist of historical causation, was distinctly opposed to one-idea systems. As a teacher, by the unanimous testimony of his pupils, he was careful to stress the complexity of history, its multicausal character, and to avoid dogmatism and oversimplification. In 1907 he said in a lecture: “In truth there is no single key to American history. In history, as in science, we are learning that a complex result is the outcome. Simple explanations fail to meet the case.”3 On other occasions he made similar statements, and I see no reason to doubt that this clear explanation of his sense of the matter represented his mature judgment. Yet the whole Turnerian creed is set forth in a series of sharp, jarring, sweeping assertions that make inordinate demands upon our belief.
Turner’s assertions, it should be said, are not merely those of a bright young man promoting a new idea, but are repeated throughout his middle years with little or no modification or explanation:4
This ever retreating frontier of free land is the key to American development.
The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast; it is the Mississippi Valley.… The real lines of American development, the forces dominating our character, are to be studied in the history of westward expansion.
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.
The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the Great West.
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.
The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development.
The Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy.
The forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.… This forest philosophy is the philosophy of American democracy.
This at least is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West.
This new democracy that captured the country and destroyed the ideals of statesmanship came from no theorist’s dream of the German forest. It came, stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest.
American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Sarah [Susan] Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.
It is these grand verbal gestures that have brought about much of the waste motion in the debate over the frontier. What, for example, are we to make of the statement that free land and the process of Western settlement “explain” American development? An assertion like this is an embarrassing thing to have on one’s hands, and it is hardly surprising that when such dicta are referred to, an admirer of Turner will usually intervene, like some alert hostess distraught over a tactless remark, to explain that her guest really did not mean what he said. But what did he mean? We may legitimately indulge Turner, and ourselves, by passing over the complexities that philosophers would surely raise about the meaning of explanation. But still: does Turner’s proposition mean that free land and the westward movement are the only major forces in American history that we need to take account of? Or that they are so formidable that they far outweigh all the other forces put together? Or merely that they constitute the largest single force among a variety of forces? And even so, by what calibration do we measure and compare the weight of such grand imponderables as the frontier, as against the nonfeudal inheritance of America, or its Protestant background, or its ethnic mixture? It is probably safest here to fall back on Turner’s own remark that there is no single key to American history as evidence that he would in the end have agreed with us that a proposition such as this about the explanation of American history need not be taken seriously as a subject of rational discourse. Its true function was on one side emotional, to protest against the previous neglect of the West, and on the other side promotional, to call attention to the Turnerian propositions.
Again, take Turner’s often quoted statement that “the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” The context shows what Turner meant: it was at the frontier that European man, rather abstractly conceived, most quickly and surely became the American man—not in itself an implausible suggestion. But if for the moment we turn our attention away from European man to contemplate more concretely the European immigrants who flooded into the United States, the fact will be brought home to us that they had to be Americanized in those portions of America where they happened to settle, and that most of them settled in the cities. (Even as early as 1870 only ten per cent of foreign-born Americans were farmers.) We may leave to students of acculturation the question whether the small minority who went to a frontier were more rapidly and effectively Americanized than those who went to the city—with no more than the suggestion that the matter should not be settled in a circular fashion simply by defining Americanization as that which occurred on the frontier. What is most important is not to let our attention be diverted from the basic facts of urban life by Turner’s claims for the superior Americanizing efficacy of the frontier. From the early nineteenth century to the First World War thirty million Europeans were added to the American population. By what process were the ideals of the frontiersmen and the frontier experience transmitted to them and their children? We need not prejudge the question: the frontier had, and has, a profound appeal to the imagination, and something of it may have been conveyed to Italians in Providence and Poles in Hamtramck. Something, but not all, and not in its immediacy; and above all, however it was conveyed, it had to be conveyed through agencies that can be understood only as part of the urban scene. The frontier had a big maw but it cannot be made to ingest everything.
One of the earliest objections to the Turnerian generalizations had to do with the persistent imprecision of their central terms. This was especially, and perhaps most decisively, true of the word “frontier” itself. One may find a certain admirable boldness in Turner’s statement on this count: “The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition.” One may also find merit in it, in the sense that Turner is so often consciously trying to unite and draw together related things rather than to distinguish them: when we are articulate about what we are doing, it is quite as legitimate to combine and relate things as it is to break down and distinguish them. But at length one is impelled to agree with George W. Pierson’s judgment that in a thinker for whom the “frontier” affords the “explanation” of American history, looseness in using it is a serious problem. Efforts like Pierson’s famous dissections of Turner, which proceed by textual analysis and deal with internal consistency, do not have precisely the stature of a “refutation” of Turner’s views, but they provide a necessary foundation to any attempt to decide how much use we can make of them. The frontier, to Turner, was on various occasions the wilderness environment, on others empty and unsettled land, or the population living in a certain area, or “the West” generally, or the natural resources found there, or a social process of settlement and Americanization; and, in one instance where a stroke of hyper-clarity only underscores the general confusion, Turner repeated the census-maker’s definition as “the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile.”5
Criticism based on these vagaries of usage seems to me to stem from something more than the desire to have a little semantic fun at Turner’s expense. History is neither philosophy nor science, but it is rational discourse that has to proceed in accordance with certain rules, and I am disposed here to agree with Henry Nash Smith’s observation: “Sometimes … Turner’s metaphors threaten to become themselves a means of cognition and to supplant discursive reasoning.” To some readers, for example, it will make a difference whether Ohio, which can indeed be called a frontier state in 1803, can still be called a frontier state in 1833—at which point it can still certainly be called a part of “the West.” If the West and the frontier are loosely identified, then social processes that were going on in Ohio in the 1830’s, and which may be much the same as the processes general to small-town and rural America on or off the frontier, all become transmuted into “frontier” processes. Still worse: if the frontier and the West mean the same thing, everything that went on west of the Appalachians, and all the natural resources of the West itself somehow become assimilated to the frontier imagery. Turner himself was troubled by the problem, though he did little to resolve it. Of “the West” he wrote in 1901: “the term has hopelessly lost its definiteness.”6
The difference here is no mere quibble. The immediate experience of the frontier, rather narrowly and literally defined as the meeting place between civilization and the wilderness or as the edge of settlements characterized by a certain low population density, was of necessity the experience only of a very small portion of the whole American population; and as the population of the country became larger through time, it was the experience of an ever shrinking portion. But the experience of growing up in a dynamic and rapidly developing rural environment, common to almost all parts of the country and indeed especially dramatic in the West, was one very widely shared throughout our history. Much of the Turner thesis boils down, in this sense, to the understanding, sound enough, but hardly so distinctive as the frontier rhetoric suggests, that the United States was a rural society before it became an urban one, and that many of its traits were shaped by the requirements of a fast-developing capitalistic agriculture expanding into a rich terrain.
II
The counts on which Turner has been criticized are bewilderingly numerous, though not all are of equal importance. Some of his concerns—like plotting out the “stages of development” through which a frontier area would pass—seem to belong largely to the immediate post-Darwinian intellectual climate in which his ideas were first expressed, and it is not any longer of central interest that his version of a more or less unilinear sequence has been quarreled with by some specialists in frontier history. It will perhaps be more feasible to consider how only a few of his major contentions have fared, and to concentrate on his views concerning the effects of the frontier on democracy and individualism.
Probably the most important is the conception that our democracy is the outcome of the experience of the American people in dealing with frontier expansion and the West. In assessing Turner’s approach to democracy, certain peculiarities are important to reckon with. The first is a disposition to illustrate but not to define. Perhaps it is easy for a historian to assume that, in writing about democracy for a people who experience and practice it, definition is not necessary. As we shall see, this tendency to circle about the question of democracy without coming to rest on a definition was also one of the problems inherent in Charles Beard’s book on the Constitution. A second point is that Turner’s real concern was not in fact with democracy as a general phenomenon of political development but only with the distinctive features of American development—a matter to which I shall return. Again, Turner here, as in most situations, has a disposition to synthesize rather than to analyze. He is more interested in combining things that he sees as related than he is in making sharp distinctions between things that can in fact be distinguished. Finally, when he speaks of democracy, he is much more likely to relate it to sentiments and attitudes or to specific historical measures than to the forms of institutions. In particular, he is likely—and this is very American—to identify democracy with egalitarianism. This view of it has obvious limitations: it gives us no way of accounting for societies like England which have a strong deferential social system and a well-developed sense of class but also highly developed democratic institutions. Most of us today are disposed to define democracy as a system of parliamentary government in which there is a universal or nearly universal base of suffrage, in which officeholding is not restricted to a limited class, in which criticism of the policies of the government is tolerated and takes an institutional form in an opposition party or parties, and in which there are adequate formal legal sanctions to protect such criticism. Turner did not show a systematic interest in the development of democracy in this sense, but rather in the history of certain attitudes and issues that reinforced the spirit of egalitarianism.
Turner also finds democracy in American experience intimately associated with “individualism.” Insofar as he sees any tension between the two, he sees it only as a product of the modern era, the era after the disappearance of the free lands. “The frontier individualism,” he wrote in his famous essay, “has from the beginning promoted democracy.” The “democracy born of free land” he sees as being “strong in selfishness and individualism.” The old pre-Revolutionary West he calls “a democratic self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more pronounced than in the community life of the lowlands.” Elsewhere he speaks of “the old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development.” Democracy was associated with individualism because collective action took place “without the intervention of governmental institutions.” Only in the modern post-frontier era, an era Turner speaks of as the era of “organized democracy,” do democracy and individualism come into conflict: “Organized democracy after the era of free land has learned that popular government to be successful must not only legitimately be the choice of the whole people” but must also recognize that “specialization of the organs of the government, the choice of the fit and the capable for office, is quite as important as the extension of popular control.”7 When free lands came to an end and the Americans lost their isolation from Europe, they lost their immunity from the costs of mistakes, waste, inefficiency, and inexperience. And with the rise of industrialism they also needed to cope with its ills through social legislation.
More often than not, “democracy” in Turner’s writings is an attitude, a spirit, the quality of a certain kind of political or social movement. Jacksonian democracy, for example, was “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.” It was the opposite of conservatism: the West brought “a new type of democracy and new popular ideals. The West was not conservative.…” It was high-minded: “Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic.” It was fraternal: Middle Western democracy involved “a real feeling of social comradeship among its widespread members”; it was “an enlarged neighborhood democracy … based upon good fellowship, sympathy and understanding.” It was, of course, anti-aristocratic, since it stood for the predominance of the farmer as against the planter class. Above all it was a quality of the pioneer: “The strength of democratic movements has chiefly lain in the regions of the pioneer.” The pioneer was passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, to keeping the road open to opportunity, to circumventing or checking monopoly. He saw no right in the successful to look down on their neighbors, no vested title to superiority.8
In other contexts Turner also sees democracy as being an attribute of certain kinds of movements, measures, or institutional forms. “Restless democracy” demanded changes in taxation, in the apportionment of legislative representation between East and West, a broader suffrage. It was also identified with the demand of the frontier for more local self-government. In one passage, which illustrates the breadth of his conception of democracy, Turner linked it with the liberalization of apportionment and the suffrage, with “disregard of vested interests, and insistence on the rights of man,” with reform of laws for imprisonment for debt, with “general attacks upon monopoly and privilege,” and with Jackson’s attacks on aristocracy and “the credit and paper system.” Certainly democracy gains impetus in American history as the process of Western settlement grows more and more important. “Already in the first part of the eighteenth century, the frontier population tended to be a rude democracy.” Then Jefferson appeared as “the first prophet of American democracy,” representing “the Western democracy into which he was born.” But it was only with Jacksonianism that frontier democracy finally became the ruling national principle, with Western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison. It was particularly congenial to the area into which the country moved when it crossed the Appalachians: “The Mississippi Valley has been the especial home of democracy.”9
Within a certain limited framework, Turner’s evocation of the character of American democracy still rings true. The idea that the frontier had much to do with the shaping of American egalitarianism is one of the Turnerian notions that instantly commends itself to our sense of reality, and indeed with sufficiently careful qualifications it may outlast the many criticisms that have been made of it. But its vulnerability is most acute for students of political development who are interested in the general evolution of modern democracy and for those who look at the problem of democracy from the standpoint of political theory or constitutional history. Here Turner’s approach does have two grave difficulties, which were pointed out long ago in notable critiques by Benjamin F. Wright, Jr., and which have been expanded by a number of writers since.1 The first is that the frontier interpretation isolates the growth of American democracy from the general development of democracy in Western civilization, of which it is a part. The second is that when we try to apply it mechanically as the exclusive, or even the primary, explanation of a variety of problems or phases in the development of American democracy itself, it yields chiefly a series of stale clichés and misconceptions. One may say that Wright and his successors have been talking past Turner rather than to him, insofar as they are concerned with the development of democracy in general, something Turner never tried to cope with, and not with its American variations and peculiarities. But Wright’s criticisms serve to remind us that our whole sense of the nature and importance of American variations on democracy can be based only on a firm sense of its comparative development and upon an acknowledgment of American borrowings.
“The proper point of departure for the discussion of the rise of democracy in the United States,” Wright argued, “is not the American West but the European background.” American democracy could be understood only as the product of centuries of development in which the English experience was an integral part. It was of vital importance that American civilization had taken its cues from English civilization, and that in England feudalism had been extinct for many generations before the founding of New England. Again, America’s sources in the Protestant Reformation had shaped its organizational forms on the relatively decentralized and democratic models that prevailed in the Protestant denominations, and the American temper had been profoundly affected by attitudes toward power that were bred in the tradition of dissent. Wright conceded that the frontier probably had a further democratizing effect, but he pointed out that frontiers do not everywhere produce democratic societies: what counts more than the frontier environment is the system of habits and ideas, expectations and institutions, that a people brings to the frontier. The presence of a frontier did not bring about in French Canada a political or social system like that of the United States, nor did it prevent the Dutch from creating a patroon system, or the Spaniards from establishing great haciendas in Mexico.2 Even in the United States, slaveholding planters produced a different society on the southern frontier from that produced in the Northeast by free labor. One can best capture the profound consequences of Turner’s neglect of human culture in his stress upon the environment, if one imagines what kind of political society would have been created on the frontier if it had been settled, say, by Hottentots or Maori.
Again, while it is probably true that life was frequently more egalitarian in frontier communities than in settled areas, the truly significant facts are the brevity of the frontier experience, the relatively small numbers of people who are involved in and directly affected by it, and the readiness with which, once the primitive stage of settlement is past, the villages and cities only recently removed from their frontier life reproduce the social stratification, political forms, and patterns of leadership and control that exist in similar communities far to the east.
In the forms of government and law, moreover, we do not find, as we might expect, that the West changed Eastern ways, for here the West was imitative rather than innovative. Western settlers were apparently not discontented with the state of constitutional forms in the Eastern regions they had left, for generally they tried to reproduce the types of state and local governments they were familiar with. It is of course true that they reproduced (and in a few cases somewhat strengthened) the democratic aspects of these constitutions—their restraints on the powers of legislators and governors, for example—but they also reproduced their less democratic aspects, including that most fundamental of all checks on popular democracy, judicial review.
Even the effect of the early West on manhood suffrage has been misconstrued. The new states of the trans-Appalachian West did accelerate the broadening of the suffrage, a process already begun in the Revolutionary era before they were settled, but they did not try, and showed no desire, to carry the process beyond the goal previously reached in several of the older states. On one count, Negro suffrage, the new states denied a right that had already been granted by New York and five New England states. It could be conceded that the new states were somewhat advanced in dropping property and religious qualifications for officeholders, and in increasing the number of executive and judicial offices elected by popular vote. But in summing up the Western contributions in this area, Wright concluded: “The result of developments in the newer sections seems to have been somewhat to accelerate the rate of growth of the democratic movement, not to change its direction.” So far as the right to vote is concerned, Wright’s conclusions have been strengthened by later research. Turner had argued in 1903: “It was only as the interior of the country developed that [suffrage] restrictions gradually gave way in the direction of manhood suffrage.” Apparently somewhat troubled by the realization that Eastern states were modifying their suffrage requirements at the same time, he found a way of attributing it to Western development: the Western states, he thought, influenced the Eastern ones, partly because the Eastern states feared that unfranchised laborers would move off to areas where they could vote. Chilton Williamson, in his comprehensive history of the suffrage, finds that the facts of suffrage reform in the seaboard states do not fit Turner’s argument. The possible drain of population was never a major issue in the discussion of suffrage policies in any Eastern state. What is more important, such states as Vermont, Maryland, and South Carolina had divorced property from suffrage as early as 1812 under circumstances that seemed to owe little to Western influences. Some Western states were not so advanced as legend would have it. Williamson concludes: “In view of the extent to which Western suffrage history was a recapitulation of the suffrage history of the Eastern seaboard, it is difficult to believe that the New West was unique or that it made any new contribution to the growth of suffrage democracy.”3
Briefly surveying certain focal episodes in American history, Wright pointed out in terms that still seem convincing how unsatisfactory, at point after point, an excessive Western or frontier interpretation of American democracy proves to be. During the century and more before the American Revolution, when the English communities grew in size from straggling settlements to well-populated colonies and pushed the frontier line from the tidewater to the mountains this process did not cause them to make many striking extensions of the democracy they already had; in some respects, especially in the degree of social stratification, egalitarianism actually lost some ground. The first strong new push toward democracy came with the Revolutionary era. In the background of the Revolution, it is true, problems of the West played a part of considerable importance, but in view of the consistent agitational initiatives of Eastern leaders, the predominance of Eastern agitators and propagandists employing ideas not imported from the backwoodsmen but from English Whigs and dissenters and from Continental writers, it would be impossible to assign priority to the West in this movement. The West contributed its share to the effort; but in at least two colonies, North Carolina and Georgia, the backwoodsmen were strongly Loyalist. Finally, as Wright remarks, the state constitutions adopted on the seaboard in the revolutionary era “contained nearly all the fundamental principles followed by the state and national governments ever since.”
Jeffersonian democracy, again, was more an Eastern than a frontier movement. Turner had written that “Jefferson was the first prophet of American democracy, and when we analyse the essential features of his gospel, it is clear that the Western influence was the dominant element.” Jefferson, as Turner had it, was born on the Virginia frontier, and “his father was a pioneer.” He was surrounded by democratic pioneer farmers, and became the spokesman of their ideas.4 During the Revolution his Virginia reforms were intended to throw the political power of the province into the hands of the interior settlers and take it out of the hands of the coastal aristocracy. His presidential regime was an attempt to realize the agrarian ideals of the “Western democracy into which he was born.”
Here one may go beyond Wright’s criticisms to say that almost everything Turner says about Jefferson, though most of it is still integral in the American gospel, is either badly nuanced, a misleading half truth, or flatly wrong. It is true enough that Jefferson was born on the frontier (where his “pioneer” father, who married into Virginia’s upper class was, as Turner knew, the engrosser of a thousand acres, and where he employed a steward and five overseers) and that he spent his first years in a new community. But the rest of his life, including the profoundly formative late adolescent years, was spent in the more sophisticated, thoroughly Anglicized society of Williamsburg, under the social influences of the governing planter class and under the intellectual influences of English Whiggery and the European Enlightenment. His ideas, in this respect, were not markedly different from those of many of his contemporaries in Virginia and in the North, who had always lived on the seaboard. He was a slaveholder, and an integral part of the Virginia planter class, and in slighting the profound moral paradox of the slaveholder’s democracy, Turner falls in line with the tradition, so evasive about slavery and race, of American progressive democratic theory.5 Jefferson’s Virginia reforms, far from laying the ax to the root of Virginia aristocracy, were directed mainly against feudal survivals that had become a distinct nuisance to many planters, and only on one point, religious disestablishment, were they gravely controversial. His brand of democracy, which accepted the conventional notions of balanced government all but universal among the American governing classes, was basically that of a mildly radical English Whig; and the acceptance of an elite leadership, which is evident in his ideas of natural aristocracy and even in his views of the function of education (raking, he said, the true talents out of the “rubbish”), qualified his democratic convictions in a manner not ordinarily associated with militant frontier egalitarians. His presidency embodied agrarian ideals common to great planters and small farmers alike, not to the latter alone, and in relating the history of these ideals, it seems important to say that a coalition of planters and farmers was incapable of applying them successfully in practice or even maintaining them in theory. The changes in Jefferson’s views, on this count, are well known. Jefferson himself, like the political movement he created, was complex, fascinating, and paradoxical. The simple rubric of the frontier democrat wipes out all those glorious ambiguities and complexities of his achievement that the serious historian has learned to relish.
The case of Jacksonian democracy was rather different, for Jackson, unlike Jefferson, can indeed be called a Western type, and much of the force as well as the tone of Jacksonian democracy can fairly be attributed to Western influences. But on the whole, Wright forecast later scholarship in emphasizing that Jacksonian democracy was a nationwide movement rather than a sectional one—one need only look at some of Turner’s own political maps to see that this was so—and in emphasizing the Eastern provenance of its basic ideas. Wright took an almost malign pleasure in pointing out that Jackson’s Tennessee was slow to remove the last of its property qualifications for the right to vote, and he might well have enjoyed even more Thomas P. Abernethy’s devastating excursions into Jackson and Tennessee democracy, which show how clearly Jackson was aligned against the democratic movement in his own state.6 Partly because of the obviously national character of Jacksonian democracy, and partly because of its many internal complexities, modern scholarship pays little regard to the notion that it was distinctively a frontier product, and the debate over its meaning has shifted to a concern with the relative importance of its entrepreneurial and labor elements and related questions.7 Again, the humanitarian reforms that agitated the Jacksonian era, and which very often drew their strength from a very different social constituency from that of the Jacksonians, were parallel to those going on in Europe and strong in the Eastern states. The demand for women’s suffrage, pioneered by Frances Wright, a wealthy immigrant Scotswoman, flourished mainly in the East, as did the movements for prison reform, for public schools, for the humane care of the mentally ill; and abolitionism, which had its inception in the East, was not monopolized by either section.
Yet it has been possible to find a way of squaring the facts of American development with Turner’s sense—which corresponds with our own—that American democracy owes much to the frontier. American democracy: his disciples have been all but unanimous, and I believe wholly right, in pointing out that what Turner was trying to account for was not the evolution of modern democracy in general, but only the distinctive features of its American version.8 Democratic societies have emerged in so many frontierless countries that it would be bootless to argue that a frontier is essential to democracy as such. In the end it is probably more important to see American democracy as a part of western European democracy than it is to stress its uniqueness—especially to those who are interested in the survival of democracy and who want to understand the most general conditions for its existence. In this sense, the frontier theory will be of little more than marginal concern to the cosmopolitan political theorist who is primarily interested in the institutional foundations of modern democracy. Still, for a student of the American past, the peculiarities of American democracy are as legitimate an object of concern as our manners and morals or the American character or the themes of American literature. If we grant, then, that what is fundamentally at stake in the Turnerian scheme is not the sources of democracy but the element of American uniqueness, we have perhaps arrived at the soundest basis for rehabilitating in some degree the frontier thesis.
Probably the most impressive neo-Turnerian attempt to give a theoretical character to new findings has been that offered by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick.9 They waste no effort in pretending that the institutions brought to the environment are unimportant—in fact they make such differences an integral part of their theory. Nor do they deny what they call “the absurdities of Turner’s logic.” But while granting that Turner’s insights were “crude in form,” they still find in them “in many ways the closest thing we have had to a seminal contribution to the theory of American history.” Much of Turnerism they are prepared to give up—but not the central idea that the frontier had a great deal to do with the development of political democracy as a habit and the American as a unique political creature. They start with the proposition that the problem must be approached with a new working—that is, testable—definition of democracy, adapted to the assumption of American uniqueness. What they find is a reality with three main facets: a manipulative attitude toward government shared by large numbers of people; wide participation in public affairs (and by this they do not mean merely voting); and a widespread sense of personal competence to make a difference in the management of affairs. Their primary contribution has been to try to show how these traits develop most quickly during the initial stages of setting up a new community, a community relatively unencumbered with the accretions of the past in customs, in clearly assigned functions, and in the sheer accumulated physical paraphernalia of life. Their insight is fortified by an elegantly drawn analogy with some modern community studies, in which they are able to compare a housing development which began its existence well planned and smoothly worked out with one, more analogous to frontier conditions, where little was adequately prearranged and many serious problems of community life confronted the first settlers. Their findings suggest that political life can be altered not by the “frontier” in the narrow and constricted sense of that term, but by the whole process of moving and resettling, common to America from the seventeenth century onward, and of forming new communities. The important factors are the new community, the sudden confrontation of its settlers with a mass of new, unanticipated problems, the presence of a relatively homogeneous population (not necessarily in the ethnic sense, but in the sense that it is not highly stratified in wealth and status), and finally the lack of a firmly developed pre-existing structure of leadership. To imagine the relevant factors at work, one has to imagine a type of community the authors believe came into formation over and over again in the Northwest: one which had at first to work and survive, somehow, without hospitals, churches, schools, and courts, and in which the functions of the policeman, the judge, the priest, the politician, the teacher had to be improvised and shared, and in which many citizens were called upon to make new decisions, assume new functions, and develop the capacity to lead, to solve problems arising from brigands, Indians, plagues, locusts, droughts, fires. Then, in a second stage, when a new kind of leader and a new kind of community morale has been created, one must follow the same personnel into the period of developing town life. Now the emergence of market agriculture, the search for adequate transportation and credit, the possibilities of land speculation, the avenues of manipulation, appeasement, and accommodation, the whole atmosphere of small-town enterprise, give a series of new opportunities to the alert citizenry that has been called into being by the processes of first settlement. The authors suggest that this happened more readily in the Northwest than in the Southwest—here the rigid environmentalism of Turner goes by the board—because planter capitalism in the latter region provided a much firmer and less fluid leadership structure, because the courthouse-clique system of government could more easily be transferred westward from the older South, and because certain regional simplicities and certain features of the plantation economy limit and curtail the second stage of town enterprise. The characteristics of Northwestern development are not here wholly absent, and they manifest themselves in several similarities of political tone; but the substance is different.
Looking, as a kind of postscript, at the frontier of Massachusetts Bay, Elkins and McKitrick find that here, even where a firm leadership structure did exist, it was subjected, whether primarily because of the migratory process itself or because of the frontier or some interaction between the two, to tremendous strains, which resulted in serious modifications, even in the first generation. On the local basis, under the stress of the town’s multiple concerns, secular, religious, civil, and military, expanded roles opened for almost everyone. The forms of democracy had indeed been brought in the Susan Constant and the Mayflower; but since democracy, being more than a matter of forms, is a matter of experience, it is essential to look at the modifications that were made.1
There are, of course, certain limitations on this way of getting at the problem, though they hardly affect the fundamental purpose of the authors, which was to find a way of translating Turner’s general assertions about the West and democracy into a set of testable propositions. Like Turner, Elkins and McKitrick do not seek to go outside the self-limiting framework of American uniqueness to answer questions about the character of democracy as such. And even within the American framework, their interest is in local democracy. To what extent is the central achievement of the United States—that of uniting what is virtually a continental area under stable representative institutions—accounted for by these forays into local government? Is local democracy the source of democracy in the federal government or vice versa; or are the relations simply reciprocal? Many writers have pointed out that, for all that we may acknowledge about the limitations of democracy, this nation is and has long been more consistently democratic at its center, in its national government, than it is on its varying and heterogenous peripheral elements, its states and localities. This is true partly because the conduct of the national government, under modern conditions, is much more visible and salient for the citizenry than local government; and partly because the two-party system, which does not really exist in many states and localities, does come into play at the national level. Here it may be that the authors have deferred more than one would wish to that piety about local management which is one of the primary features of American agrarianism. Finally, I have some reservations about “participation,” beyond voting, as the fundamental test. They can hardly be developed here, but they may be suggested by referring to David Granick’s remark concerning participation in Soviet “democracy” that it “consists in participation in everything except basic decision-making.”2 To me it seems that in great modern centralized democracies, direct participation in government (outside of small local matters) becomes a hopeless criterion of the efficacy of democratic institutions.
Some confirmation for the Elkins-McKitrick categories at the local level, particularly on the counts of social homogeneity, multiple leadership, and versatility and adaptability of function in the face of new conditions, emerges from the intensive study by Merle Curti and his associates of the life of a Wisconsin frontier county in the period from the 1850’s to the 1870’s.3 Setting aside the effort to elaborate Turner’s “brilliant and far-ranging but often ambiguous presentations” in favor of a detailed study of frontier life, Curti emerged with a general picture that might have pleased Turner and would probably not have surprised him. It might be disturbing to literal-minded Turnerians that Curti found more democracy in Trempealeau County in the 1870’s than in the two previous decades—that is, as it moved away from its pristine frontier condition. It might also be disturbing that the distribution of property in a frontier rural county so closely resembled that of certain nonfrontier rural counties chosen for comparison. But on the whole, in the openness, fluidity, mobility, optimism, and fundamentally democratic ethos that it found, the Trempealeau County study gave some body and substance to the Turnerian picture of the agricultural frontier, not too literally construed.
In sum, we can clarify our search for the validity of Turner’s views on the place of the frontier in the making of democracy if we bear in mind that his concern was with the extent to which America is unique or differentiated, and also that he was interested not so much in the basic institutional forms upon which democracy rests as in the formation of the particular activist, egalitarian spirit that seems clearly to have prevailed in the United States. Turner was most vitally interested in, and most sound on, the atmospherics of American democracy. The idea that frontier expectations and problems made a distinctive contribution in this respect still seems valid, so long as it is not permitted, in the interest of our pursuit of uniqueness, to obscure our institutional and intellectual borrowings (of America from England, of the West from the East); or to cause us to neglect, in our concern for popular attitudes, the institutional requirements of democracy, or to overlook the fact that democracy must be a national as well as a local reality. Finally, I believe there is an unfilled gap in the thought of the Turnerians that promises that further inquiry will be rewarding. It is easy to believe them when they tell us that the frontier process greatly spurred democratic feeling and developed, so to speak, the talents of democracy. But Turner failed to solve what may be called the problem of cultural transmission. Most Americans lived where there had been a frontier, but only a very small minority actually lived on a frontier or lived through the frontier process themselves. In what ways and to what extent was the experience of the frontier era, and its generation of actual pioneers, transmitted as a live social force to their descendants and successors? How was its characterological residue preserved? In what ways and to what extent were its effects transmitted to the large body of those back east who were remote from the frontier all their lives and who did not even have any family history or legend through which to be exposed to its influence? When such questions have been given more attention, we will no doubt know a great deal more about America; but I suspect that in the attempt to answer them our sense of the impact of the frontier as a democratic force will have been cut down to size.
IV
What of the idea that the frontier promoted individualism? It is doubtful that Turner was as troubled as he could have been by the baffling complexities of this term. There are at least four senses in which it can be used. First, a culture may be called individualistic if it offers favorable conditions for the development of personal assertiveness and ambition, encourages material aspiration, self-confidence, and aggressive morale, offers multiple opportunities for advancement and encourages the will to seize them. Second, it may indicate the absence of mutuality or of common and collective effort, in a society that supposedly functions almost as a conglomerate of individual atoms. Third, it may designate a more or less formal creed in which private action is at a premium and governmental action is condemned—as a synonym, in short, for laissez faire. Finally—and I believe this usage can be quite misleading—it may be used as though it were synonymous with individuality, that is, with a high tolerance for deviance, eccentricity, nonconformity, privacy, and dissent.
Turner certainly used “individualism” in the first three of these four meanings; though I am unsure whether he ever meant to convey also the last of them, it is very likely that this sense of the term was read into him by some of his followers. In the first sense of the term, having to do with morale and creative energy, it seems to me that Turner was entirely right in his claims for the frontier, and that an overwhelming mass of evidence, all of it, to be sure, impressionistic, argues for his case. There is hardly an observer of the United States during the nineteenth century who did not notice the hard, energetic, pushing materialism of the Americans, their ready nose for opportunities, their extraordinary exertions in the pursuit of them; and those who knew the West tended to find these qualities developed there to their highest pitch. The only qualification one might wish to enter here is that the phenomenon, however highly developed on the frontier, was not developed there alone, and that it is likely to be found in any country or region where there is rapid economic development under conditions of freedom. Like democracy, individualism was brought to the frontier.
Moreover, the applicability of the second and third of these senses of the term does not follow automatically from the first. It seems clear that Turner was talking about individualism as a more or less formal creed concerning the proper uses of government when he said that the farmers of the Mississippi Valley began by believing in individualism but, having found their democracy endangered by unrestricted competition, turned away from it to demand regulatory social legislation. Again he describes the pioneer as “impatient of any governmental restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness.” More characteristically, and in numerous passages, Turner speaks simply about the enormous assertiveness of Western culture, its resistance to any kind of control. At one point frontier individualism is defined simply as “antipathy to control” and is even characterized as being “antisocial,” though on the same page it is credited with having “promoted democracy.” Again: “Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit.”
Finally, in the third sense, society appears almost to lack solidarity, mutuality, or comity: the frontiersman, we are told at one point, knew how to preserve order and was ready to combine ad hoc, even illegally, to do it. “But the individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations.… Society became atomic.… The individual was exalted and given free play.” In another passage Turner says, defining the “ideal of individualism,” that the democratic frontier society was not like a disciplined army where the collective interest destroyed individual will and work. “Rather it was a mobile mass of freely circulating atoms, each seeking its own place and finding play for its own powers and for its own original initiative.” Elsewhere we are told that this was “not a complex, highly differentiated and organized society. Almost every family was a self-sufficing unit.…”4
The conception that early Western America was committed to individualism as an economic creed will no longer bear examination. Guy S. Callender, one of Turner’s contemporaries, long ago pointed out that “this country was one of the first to exhibit this modern tendency to extend the activity of the State into industry.”5 In fact it was the opening of the West that spurred state promotion of enterprise by creating the need for transportation and other works of internal improvement that the resources of private capital could not manage. Although many Americans had constitutional and political objections to the national government as a promotional agency, very few had similar objections to seeing their state and local governments act in this capacity. They developed an entirely pragmatic approach to governmental as against private promotion which was expressed succinctly by Lincoln: “The legitimate object of Government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot do so well for themselves in their separate or individual capacities.”
It is Turner’s account of the “atomic” character of the frontier that has drawn most fire from writers,6 who have invoked facts of frontier life that Turner knew well but tended to subordinate rather drastically. The frontier experience, with its new problems and its exceptional hardships, was a disciplinary experience, and it inspired a great many collective efforts and fostered habits of mutual aid. The example of the Mormons provides an extreme case of its organizing demands. Turner himself understood that the settlement of the Southwest, in which irrigation was essential, also imposed limits upon individualistic action. But it remains true that the image of the lonely pioneer, or of the isolated yeoman accompanied only by his family, fills too large a part in the Turnerian picture, and subordinates the official, the corporate, and the collective aspects of settlement. The West was in large part explored by men who were acting on commission from one or another arm of government. It was in good part settled under the well-organized supervision of speculators, land companies, and railroads—even Daniel Boone, that archetype of the solitary pioneer, was an agent for a land company. A great deal of westward migration took place in organized groups, moving under a disciplinary code. Planters, for example, moved whole plantation communities en bloc into the older Southwest of the cotton boom. On exposed frontiers the necessity for mutual protection against Indians or, on occasion, outlaws, was a powerful force. Cooperative labor was a common feature in log-rollings, house-raisings, and in the cattle roundup. Trials brought solidarity: men joined together to round up the widow’s cattle, to plow the ground of a sick neighbor. The struggle against speculators and railroads and the demands of squatters gave rise to claim associations and land associations, then to movements like the Grangers, the Farmers Alliances, and the Populists.7 In this sense Turner’s belief that when the farmers turned from individualism to the collective demands of Populism they had undergone a change in a hitherto set philosophy is debatable. Private enterprise was always regulated when regulation was felt to be necessary and when the forces of dissatisfaction mustered the necessary political power.
The Western population may have been, in Turner’s words, “impatient of restraint” when the restraint, coming from outside their communities and their control, was seen to be inimical to their interests; but they subscribed to no creed that prevented them from using governmental restraint to protect these interests. The frontiersman, in brief, was not ideological about individualism; he left that to his romancers. Nor was his family altogether an atomistic unit. Frontier social organization was a mixture of the familial and the collective, of the private and the governmental, whose devices were arrived at through experience and at the dictates of expediency.
Finally, there is the issue of individuality. It is hard to say whether Turner meant to argue that the frontier was a nursery of individuality as well as individualism, and it is a large question, not to be attempted here, whether individuality flourished in nineteenth-century America. The prevailing view, which stems from Tocqueville, runs to the contrary. Tocqueville was impressed by conformity, enforced by public pressures, as a basic and inescapable American trait. If he was right, and if we are to agree that the basic American traits were forged on the frontier, we find ourselves in considerable difficulty, which we can escape only by divorcing the two terms, individualism and individuality, as fully in our thinking as they are divorced in reality. The metropolis, with its size, heterogeneity, and anonymity, enjoys a better reputation for fostering privacy and respecting dissent than the countryside or the small town;8 though the hard-bitten rural independent is a stereotype not unknown to our literature, and it may offer a cue to an overlooked side of our life. Individuality is a precious and fragile thing. Wherever we may conclude that it was best fostered, it will be useful not to assimilate it to individualism—for it was individualism that generated the agencies, and often the animating impulse, that made it possible to submerge the individual.
V
What is said on one side or another about individualism serves only to remind us how much of the controversy over Turner is a controversy, only half-articulated and yet very thinly disguised, over values. On this count, historians are arguing not just over what it was that went on in history, but also, and perhaps primarily, how, in the light of what we wish ourselves to be, we can most usefully think of ourselves as having been in the past. Turner’s views of the American past are linked on one side to a pastoral agrarian sentimentalism which, however deeply native, however touching, and indeed however acceptable on some counts in its emotional commitments, may be very misleading about the facts of settlement, especially as one approaches the modern era. Again, there has been a widespread sense that an excessive emphasis on the frontier encourages American complacency, anti-intellectualism, and anti-Europeanism, and finally that it undercuts the intellectuals’ function of social criticism. Beyond doubt Turner pictured the frontier in bright colors. His disciples are quick to answer that he somewhere mentioned almost every dark aspect of frontier influence that his critics cite—but the point is precisely here: Turner mentioned them in passing, and they have the position in his essays only of faint qualifications in a full-throated paean to American virtues. And while he was admitting American cultural shortcomings, he was also at bottom apologizing for them, partly on the old and familiar ground of want of time for cultural achievement, partly on the ground that they were a price well paid for the benefits of the frontier heritage. The whole rationale, as George Pierson has put it, suggested that America and art were perpetually at odds: “If his essays mean what they appear to mean, then the doctrine is that we were most American just when we were least cultivated.”
Like most human achievements, American development was a mixed bag of tricks, and any conception that purported to “explain” it might well have undertaken to account for the qualities that Turner’s essays slight: the highly commercial character of western settlement, as of American society generally; the speculative spirit of the westward movement, giving adequate attention not merely to the role of the large land speculator but also to the gambling habits of the ordinary farmer; the careless, wasteful, and exploitative methods of American agriculture; the hostility of farmers to “book farming” and scientific improvement; the general waste of resources and the desecration of natural beauty; the failure of the free lands to produce a society free of landless laborers and tenants, its developing class stratification; the rapacity and meanness so often to be found in the petty capitalism of the new towns; the conformist pressures of small-town America, West or East, the assaults on individuality which must be weighed against the individualism of which Turner spoke so highly; the crudeness and disorder, the readiness to commit and willingness to tolerate violence; the frequent ruthlessness of the frontier mind, to which Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans could testify and which had its repeated reverberations in national policies; the arrogant, flimsy, and self-righteous justifications of Manifest Destiny engendered by American expansionism; the smugness, provincialism, and cant anti-intellectualism common to most of America but especially keen in the West.
Then there was a kind of self-satisfied anti-Europeanism, which Turner himself did not always quite escape. We may find good grounds, of course, for taking some pride in the American achievement of the nineteenth century, and they have hardly diminished in our time, when we compare our political culture to that of Europe from 1918 to 1945. But we must ask whether there cannot be too much of this pride and above all whether it is useful to encourage Americans to play down the deficiencies of their culture or to think of themselves not as a part of Western civilization or of the world community but as a unique and self-contained society perpetually marked off by the frontier tradition from the common fate of modern societies. Here Turner seems to have had no misgivings. It was with evident satisfaction that he wrote of Andrew Jackson: “He had the essential traits of the Kentucky and Tennessee frontier. It was a frontier free from the influence of European ideas and institutions. The men of the ‘Western World’ turned their backs upon the Atlantic Ocean, and with a grim energy and self-reliance began to build up a society free from the dominance of ancient forms.” In his essay of 1910 on “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” Turner found it possible to attribute this type of institution, in which he put such high hopes, entirely to the ideals of pioneer democracy and to avoid all reference to the European ideas and models without which, in fact, it was unthinkable; to avoid also all references to the anti-intellectual pressures under which the middle western state universities so often suffered and of which he was poignantly aware. In the same essay he writes: “It is in the Middle West that society has formed on lines least like those of Europe. It is here, if anywhere, that American democracy will make its stand against the tendency to adjust to a European type.” And elsewhere: “By this peaceful process of colonization a whole continent has been filled with free and orderly commonwealths so quietly, so naturally, that we can only appreciate the profound significance of the process by contrasting it with the spread of European nations through conquest and oppression.”9
It seems important to add that Turner’s tendency toward intellectual isolationism was not paralleled in his politics, that in his characteristically open way he embraced Wilsonian internationalism, and that by 1914 he made clear his approval of states like Wisconsin for throwing off the American attitude of “contemptuous indifference” to European social legislation and beginning to study it.1 But Turner’s personal politics, once again, can hardly alter the underlying dynamic of the frontier idea, its drive toward the conviction that America is wholly original, uniquely virtuous, and self-sustaining, its suggestion that America had not just made a contribution to or forged a variation on democracy, but rather had a monopoly of it.
One is driven, in brief, to agree with Pierson’s indictment on the relevant counts when he characterizes the frontier thesis as “too optimistic, too romantic, too provincial, and too nationalistic to be reliable in any survey of world history or study in comparative civilization.” Other writers might well have added “too conservative”—though this was perhaps part of what Pierson had in mind when he spoke of optimism. Certainly among the considerations that weakened Turnerism in the minds of the post-depression generation was the fear that if they applied the Turnerian insights in substantially the same spirit in which Turner himself applied them, their sense, as historians, of the complexities of American history would be dulled and their capacity as intellectuals to contribute to national self-criticism would be blunted.
Quite inflammatory to many of Turner’s critics, I believe, is the way in which the mythology of the frontier is linked to a rugged, masculine, overassertive vision of character which is increasingly seen to be hopeless of emulation under modern conditions and which is felt to impose upon the modern American a character ideal that is both impossibly demanding and deeply flawed. The mind of the modern American intellectual is nothing if not self-doubting and self-critical, and it is asked by the frontier mythology to live with the humiliating contrast between the imperfect thing it knows it is and the almost superhuman figure of the individualist pioneer. And make no mistake about it: though Turner was a gentle and modest man and his personal politics were pre-eminently Apollonian in tone, humane, and moderately progressive in substance, his version of the frontier cannot easily be dissociated from the heavy, menacing image of rugged individualism and frontier hardihood.
Consider how Turner portrays his pioneer, his frontiersman. Except in matters of art and thought, he is all but omnicompetent, an almost monstrous archetype of aggressive masculinity. He is “independent,” he shows all too readily his “love of wilderness freedom,” and he is endowed with “stalwart and rugged qualities.” He has “coarseness and strength,” a “practical, inventive turn of mind,” “a masterful grasp of material things,” and at the same time “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” He has experienced many “hardships and privations” in his life on the frontier, but they have only called out “the militant qualities.” He “looks at things independently,” with “buoyant self-confidence and self-assertion,” addresses himself to life with “energy, incessant activity,” he “contends for mastery,” “builds empires,” leads “a conquest over vast spaces,” showing, all the while, “creative vision, restless energy, a quick capacity for judgment and action,” which may well have been honed to its keenness of edge by his “fight with nature for the chance to exist.” The frontier has given him “a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness, in destructiveness,” and one need hardly be surprised to find him “masterful and wasteful,” a thing of “rude strength and wilful achievement.” Yet at the same time this man is an idealist, who “dreams dreams and beholds visions,” a force in the “belligerent Western democracy,” who has “rebelled against the conventional,” who is “conscious of the mobility of his society and glories in it.” His is not, then, “the dull contented materialism of an old and fixed society.” But his idealism has not the least softened him, since his society is rather like a Darwinian battleground, an arena of rigorous and demanding competition, and he is “the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunity under competitive conditions achieved superiority.” “From this society … came the triumph of the strongest … the prizes were for the keenest and strongest.” “He honored the men whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was the strongest in this contest: it was ‘every one for himself.’ ”2
After such fathers, what sons? Indeed, what sons can there be? As if the traits were not demanding enough, Turner’s imagery adds to the provocativeness of these frontier demands. The West is portrayed in feminine imagery: she is shaggy and wild, it is true, but also generous, abundant, receptive. When the men of Europe came, she “took them to her bosom,” taught them and trained them in her ways, “opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies … with her material treasures.” She bore great sons: Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. She gave her men wealth and power “vaster than the wealth and power of kings” but at the same time she nourished the “unhappy and oppressed of all lands.” “Great and powerful as are the new sons of her loins, the Republic is greater than they.” After this it is not surprising to be reminded, concerning the men she reared, that “the rifle and the ax are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer.” As the pioneer shoots and hacks his way across the virgin continent, it is natural to expect, too, that the prizes go to “the keenest and the strongest”—that they take “the best bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the richest ore-beds.”3 It is all rather overbearing; and it is again not surprising that the modern intellectual sons of such fathering have been in such haste to rise up and kill the frontier image that they have at times trampled upon what is good and usable in Turnerism.
I have spoken of the important and usable core of truth in Turner’s ideas, but thus far have delineated criticisms with which in the main I agree. It remains then to say what this core of truth consists in. It goes well beyond our common awareness that Turner was the first historian to see clearly the importance of the West and to insist upon its adequate recognition, thus breaking in on the fraternal dialogue of the coastal historians with a fresh voice. Turner’s merit hangs in part upon the fact that he was the first, at least among the influential historians, to understand thoroughly that if the distinctive American pattern and the American character are worth understanding at all they have to be understood not alone in the familiar terms of the old narrative history, but in terms of repetitive sociological processes, and that to understand these processes the historian must lean upon the distinctive types of insight that economists and sociologists bring to historical development. Turner saw many of the features of what was literally an open society, a society with a growth before it that was patently irresistible. It rests upon his perception of the intangibles, of the psychological and moral effects of the West, its role in orienting the American mind toward space and expansion, giving it a different cast and direction from the European mind with its deeper roots in time and its higher fixity; its role in underwriting American confidence, optimism, and adaptability; the way in which it peopled the American imagination with a whole gallery of hero types, and above all of heroes who were not, so to speak, chivalric or operatic but recruited from the ranks of the common people—the explorer, the prospector, the trapper and the hunter, the Indian-fighter, the cowboy, the covered-wagon pioneer, the Western farmer. Turner incorporated into history-writing an understanding that in the receding and lamented past the American frontier was different: that in the European complex a frontier was a border, a boundary, a limitation, a place that is costly to defend, and where one might be called upon to die, whereas in America the frontier was the edge of the new and unused, a source of opportunity, a place where one might earn a reputation or a fortune.
But there is still more than this to be said for him: many of his substantive assertions will have their durability. Here it is important to remember that not all the returns are in, that the work of discovery still goes on; each of the past several decades has been marked by some new turning in the course of historical thought; there is good reason to believe that this process will be continued, that in its course some old ideas will be revived, and some recent ones will prove not very viable after all.
A case in point is the history of the safety-valve thesis, which seems to me to be central for our continued interest in Turnerism. The safety-valve idea, one of the first of the Turnerian notions to inspire detailed new research, prodded an avalanche of criticism from the early 1930’s onward, and about ten years ago most historians would have agreed that it was dead or dying. In recent years it has been redefined and I believe quite effectively resuscitated. This may point to a moral, but more than that, it points to a vital process on which the viability of the Turner thesis may in the end depend. There is a certain irony in this: though I believe the idea of a Western safety valve for Eastern discontents was implicit in a great deal of what Turner wrote, there are in his writings only a few relatively brief and casual passages in which he explicitly formulated it, and it has often been thought for this reason to rank among his suggestive throw-aways. It is also one of his ideas that is perhaps less distinctively his, insofar as more of the forerunners of Turnerism anticipated the safety-valve idea than any other aspect of his thought. The idea that the frontier was an outlet for the laboring class has been an idea of international consequence, having played an important part in the answer to the haunting question of Werner Sombart, so vital to Marxian theorists, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten ‘keinen’ Sozialismus? Turner, in his 1893 essay and elsewhere, seems to have thought of the frontier as a safety valve mainly for the farmer; in 1901 he spoke of “the farther free lands to which the ruined pioneer could turn.” In due course, however, he added the worker. “Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East,” he wrote, “whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier.… Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking.”4
When historians began to criticize the safety-valve idea, they tended at first to focus their fire upon this notion of a safety valve for labor discontent. Systematic study of migration produced strikingly little evidence of working-class migration to the West. It was also easy to show that workers were least able to move during periods of depression and unemployment, or that, quite aside from the lack of farming skills among most urban workmen, the costs of removal to the West, the acquisition of land and equipment, were prohibitive. Some writers pointed to explosive episodes in the history of labor as evidence that the safety valve was not letting off enough steam. It was also useful for Fred A. Shannon, in an article confidently titled “A Post-Mortem on the Labor-Safety-Valve Theory,” to point to the characteristic net migration of the surplus farm population to the cities and to argue that for the period after 1860 the fast-growing cities of the United States and the proliferation of industry actually provided a safety valve for discontent in the rural population. Shannon went so far as to say that the free lands did not even act as an indirect safety valve by attracting eastern farmers who might otherwise have gone into the labor force.
The safety-valve idea, however, has benefited in recent years from the post-war concern with economic growth among economic historians.5 The new safety-valve theorists find most previous formulations and criticisms alike irrelevant. It did not matter, they say, whether very few Eastern workmen went west to take up farms, or that the frontier did not prevent panics, unemployment, farm tenancy, or occasional labor unrest. The heart of the problem is elsewhere: did the West have an effect on Eastern wage rates, on the level of per capita income, on the development of class consciousness and unionism? Here they arrive at a view of the effects of the free lands rather like Turner’s. The role of the West, as they see it, was a many-sided thing, involving not merely new lands for farmers but new resources of every kind—forests, oils, minerals—for exploitation, for investment that created new mines, mills, and factories, new towns and cities. The laboring force for this development had to come from somewhere. So also did the middle classes, the small property owners, professionals, promoters, investors. A new social order was springing up, quite open to talents, and it was the hope and energy and resourcefulness primed by this that made the land so rapidly exploitable and yielded a population of such striking vocational versatility and innovative genius. A tremendous social fluidity of the kind pointed to by Turner was engendered by this process. Cities, fortunes, reputations—not just farms—were built in the West, and if nothing else the West thus served as a great social safety valve for the American middle class, enlarging its opportunities, preventing its proletarianization, sustaining its morale.
Here too a basic anomaly in American economic development has to be considered. The usual situation in countries undergoing industrialization is that a more or less static or perhaps even a declining agricultural sector feeds its surplus laboring population into industry. It is most unusual to find a very rapid industrial expansion going on simultaneously with a considerable growth both in the productive efficiency and the sheer bulk of the agricultural sector of the economy, and yet this is what happened in the United States. (During the great spurt of American industrialization that took place from 1860 to 1900, land in farms more than doubled and the number of those gainfully employed in agriculture increased by almost one half.) Again, where most undeveloped countries are likely to offer an abundance of labor in conjunction with scarce capital and limited resources, the United States had a scarcity both of capital and labor but, thanks to its developing inland empire, abundant land and resources. Nineteenth-century Europe, by providing a high level of demand for American staples, sustained prolonged spurts of rapid economic growth, for which Europe was also able to supply capital and immigrant labor. The resources of the American interior were not only lavishly abundant but prime in quality, and were exploited with an intensely progressive technology, with the consequence that the labor applied to them was high in productivity. Constant expansion into new areas, as George G. S. Murphy and Arnold Zellner have put it, kept feeding new “slabs” of rich resources into the more developed sectors of the economy, keeping wage rates high, and sustaining the nineteenth century’s highest level of per capita income and highest rate of increase in per capita income. Technological innovation, stimulated by labor scarcity but also by the fluidity of the whole American situation (Stanley Lebergott speaks aptly of “the reckless adaptiveness of the American labor force”), joined with a growing stock of capital and a series of successive rich frontiers to underwrite the high-wage economy. Labor received a higher proportion of the payments to the various factors of production than was common elsewhere, and American real wages were unmatched. While high wages alone do not always suffice to prevent the growth of class-consciousness (as a comparison with Australia, another high-wage economy, will show), they did here create an important material foundation. At the same time the mobility and optimism engendered by American expansion and the opportunities offered by the West probably did their share to deprive the working class of solidarity and even to strip it of many potential leaders. Critics of the safety-valve idea had argued that the West, by helping to draw millions of immigrants to the country, so increased the labor force that by raising supply it undid whatever its expansive processes contributed to raising demand. But it would be an unenviable task to try to prove that the West stimulated as much supply of labor as it did demand for it, and it is undeniable that American real wages always enjoyed a substantial margin over those of the Old World. Moreover, as recent writers point out, a laboring population, supplied by immigrants from low-wage or peasant areas with relatively modest aspirations, came in at the bottom of the social order, taking the poorest jobs and pushing their native predecessors upward in the job hierarchy and also in the ethnic status hierarchy. Hence the peculiarities of American development, to which the West contributed, created a built-in status elevator, whose effects can be seen in the ethnic and craft snobberies and the long-divided organizational pattern of American labor. At the bottom of the system was an immigrant and unskilled labor force, poor and exploited, no doubt, but collecting wages that usually equaled and frequently surpassed their European expectations and experiences. At the top was a skilled native labor force, privileged with the best jobs, basically middle class in its psychology and often in its style of living, and upwardly mobile.
Not only has the safety-valve effect thus been re-argued but some historians and sociologists, prodded in part by a concern with Turner’s categories, have gone on to related insights which, insofar as they are at odds with Turner’s ideas, rather extend and incorporate than contradict them. This is particularly true of several writers who have concerned themselves with the general phenomenon of mobility; their work suggests that the frontier process can be considered as a special instance of the much more general process of constant movement and migration.6 In the picture these writers draw, the United States emerges as a vast arena for movement of all kinds—not just from the East to the frontier but from Europe to America, from South to North, from farm to farm, from farm to city, from city to city, from city to suburb, and from house to house. Turner saw clearly that the frontier was an important stimulus to all this, and his own writing has in its way been an equally important stimulus to investigation. Turner, as Elkins and McKitrick have remarked, “did, after all, represent the first major effort—after Tocqueville—to deal with motion as a basic cultural fact in American life.”7 But what the recent writers have seen is that Turner, by focusing attention so sharply on the frontier, fell short of exploiting its more general significance; and they are also more keenly aware that the American habit of movement has continued in full force even after the disappearance of the frontier.8 As recently as 1950 about three quarters of the nation’s city people were living in places where they had not resided in 1940. The movement stirred by the Second World War may have made this an exceptional decade, but the pattern is only slightly exaggerated. One is impressed, for example, to learn that in 1940 the average American farm had been in the same hands for only twelve years. Or that at age fifty nearly two out of five native Americans have set up residence outside their state of birth—a figure which, of course, takes no measure of the intrastate movement. In recent times the normal pattern has been for one in five Americans to move from one house to another within each year, and for one in fourteen to migrate from one county to another. Again, as Elkins and McKitrick have pointed out, it is not only individuals that have moved but institutions, and one of the conditions for the survival of institutions has been their transportability; one of the facts in their development has been the necessity of changing when transplanted in order to meet new conditions. The large number of adaptable voluntary organizations illustrates this process—replaceable parts, more or less identical in their mode of procedure no matter what town they are found in (the Lions, the Rotary, the Kiwanis); so also do the innumerable secular functions taken over by the churches. But of course individuals too are both selected and affected by the migratory process, in ways that have not yet been fully explored. The great imaginative book on American movement has not yet been written. What will it reveal about the effects of movement on the family—on the breakup of extended kinship groups, the limitation of size in the nuclear family; or about the pattern of American sociability, or our ways of conformity, our superficial human relationships, our rootlessness, our carelessness about newly acquired surroundings that Americans can only regard as temporary? What will it tell us about the pattern of our nationalism, or our status hierarchy?
Such considerations not only suggest that much of the Turner thesis can be salvaged but also point to some of the necessary modifications in its form. But let it be clear that in enumerating some of them we are, for the most part, working with familiar elements that can be found in Turner. Turner was not rigorous, but he was circumspect; a Turner disciple is very likely to rise up and argue, with documentation on each count, that the master had anticipated all these points. However, even if we are working entirely with colors that can be found somewhere on Turner’s palette, the point is that we are dropping some, toning some down, intensifying and recombining others, so that the resulting picture, for all the similarity of its elements, is quite different from his.
First, I think we must get away from the immediate post-Darwinian frame of mind with its simple categories of man and environment, and consider the whole process of movement in terms of institutions, habits, and ideas. This will help us to accept the fact that democracy and individualism—however we are precisely to define them—had to be brought to the frontier before they could be developed or intensified there. We must abandon the narrow, primitivist conception of the “frontier” as the cutting edge of society where it impinges upon the wilderness—it will be too difficult to balance many social explanations on that fine edge—and think rather of the great West in its relation to American economic development. We must, in short, sacrifice some of the romance of the frontier to our sense of the great American bonanza. We must give up—at least for the moment—the attractive figure of the omnicompetent pioneer with his rifle and his ax as our central actor (we can put him back in later, but he will then fall into his proper marginal place), and accept the fact that the American farmer was a little capitalist, often by necessity a rather speculative one, operating in the new and uncertain Western world along with big capitalists like the land speculator and the railroader. We must not forget or unduly subordinate the role of speculation in Western development. Nor can we think of this development simply as an internal American phenomenon: it must be portrayed in connection with the international market for staples and the international flow of capital and labor. We must give up the excessively agricultural and rural overtones of the thesis as Turner usually stated it,9 and remember that the rapid emergence of Western towns and cities, with their open, breezy, petty-capitalist atmosphere, were just as much a part of the Western story as agriculture and free land. We must think of the West as a magnificent area for the rapid expansion of middle-class society, and remember that the “pioneer” went westward not to be a self-sufficient yeoman but to find a stronger position in the market, not to live forever in a log cabin or a sod house but to build as soon as possible a substantial frame house, not to enjoy a primitive or wilderness environment but to recreate for himself the American standard of living as he had seen it in the East, and finally, not to forge a utopian egalitarian society but to re-enact the social differences of the older world—with himself now closer to the top. We must do openly what Turner has been criticized for doing implicitly: understand that the West meant not just free land but the whole glorious natural abundance of interior America, its resources of all kinds, including timber, coal, oil, minerals; and that the westward movement involved the conquest of these resources and their incorporation into the machinery of American capitalism. We must get away from the excessive and parochial Midwestern bias and remember that if the frontier process was effective, it ought to have been effective from the days of first colonial settlement, when there was still more frontier and there were fewer people. We must remember that the “Valley of Democracy” had no monopoly on democracy. We must get away from the defeatist overtones of the frontier idea—the notion that democracy and opportunity are so closely linked with the frontier process that the end of free land represents a disastrous major break in history—and contemplate the situation of countries like England whose democracy developed without benefit of an internal frontier. As students of the open society, we must consider what modern sociological inquiry seems to find, that the processes of industrial organization yield a rate of social mobility that is no smaller, perhaps notably larger, than that of the old agrarian society. We may do well to drop all rhetorical formulations which suggest that we have found a way either of ruling out alternative explanations or of measuring intangibles against each other—like the statement that the frontier “explains” American development—or the subtle but provocative intellectual demagoguery involved in assertions about “the really American part of our history.” Finally, the process of Western development will fall into its proper place if we develop alternative perspectives on American history and simply consider the frontier process in its relation to these other factors, instead of making futile claims for its “importance” as against theirs.
If these other factors are not neglected, the role of the frontier will fall into its proper place. No historian who wants to explain American development or American institutions will want to neglect the fundamentally Protestant character of American society in its formative phases and indeed throughout its history, with all this implies about its dissenting bias, its preference for lay government, its occasional antinomianism, and its penchant for the diffusion of authority outside of a carefully structured hierarchy. Nor will he, without necessarily embracing all of Max Weber’s debatable thesis about the Protestant ethic, fail to consider the possible role of the Protestant dynamic and Protestant economic morale—a consideration which may rise in his estimation if he compares the development of the United States with that of Latin America. Neither will he overlook the postfeudal and nonfeudal inheritance of the country, nor forget how much of the heavy weight of feudal apparatus was lost in the Atlantic crossing; nor how little the feudal cast of mind survived among the American upper classes, nor how the corresponding reaction of the middle and lower classes lost in militancy and acerbity. He will, in this respect, think of America as a country that has had patrician leadership but not aristocratic domination. He may wish to consider the effects of selective migration—not merely in the sense that dukes and bishops did not emigrate and that the American population drew mainly upon the middle and lower orders of Europe, but also in the less demonstrable sense that, since millions more suffered from one form or another of malaise and oppression than actually removed themselves, there may have been some selection by psychological as well as social type, with America receiving more than its share of the exceptionally restless, the exceptionally bold, the cranky and the intractable. He will not want to stress the forest environment to the extent of minimizing the English political heritage or English political thought, nor try to write of the American mind without reference to Locke and the whole tradition of English Whiggery and English radicalism. The causes and consequences of the national birth trauma, the Revolution, will not shrink in his estimation of American habits, nor will they easily be wrenched out of their Atlantic context and absorbed into the wilderness. The legalistic, moderate, nonregicidal, and largely nonterroristic character of the American Revolution will interest him, as well as its impact, through confiscation and emigration, on the class structure, and its important quickening of democratic tendencies. He will concern himself with the origins of the two-party system, in which Americans pioneered, and the early development of a pattern of legitimate opposition. He will surely want to take account of the peculiarities of American federalism, which at once made it possible to organize a veritable continent under one political and economic roof and at the same time imposed certain rigorous limitations upon the political system. When he deals with American politics and with the development of this federal system, slavery and race will still loom very large in his account, and not simply for what they tell about the foreground of our history—the Old South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and indeed the racial agitation of recent years—but also for what they tell us about the dark background and the deeper recesses of the American conscience. Concentration on the vastness of the frontier will not cause him to forget what was once the vastness of the oceans, or that the United States had not only free land but free security; that isolation from the European centers of power, compounded by Europe’s own internal divisions and our ability to exploit them, made it possible to maintain American security and advance American ends with the expenditure of only a fraction of what the older nations had to expend and within the framework of a civilian mentality; and that our earlier national objectives were realized at the cost of weak or distracted opposition from Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, the British only when they were locked in a death-grip with Napoleon, the Central Powers only when war had bled them to exhaustion. When he turns his attention to American economic history, he will have his mind fixed on an area of continental scope with immense spaces to conquer and staggering resources to exploit, organized under a single political system. He will want to remember the highly capitalistic and speculative character that American agriculture assumed, and its long favorable position in a stimulating world market. He will consider the formative effects of material abundance upon a variety of American habits, from child-rearing to military strategy. He will be concerned about the timing and the setting of the nation’s entry upon the path of industrialism and the stimuli to economic innovation. He will be interested in the mixed racial and ethnic composition of its labor force, with all that this implies for working-class aspirations, social hierarchies, and political behavior. He will be acutely conscious of a nation constantly mixed and stirred by mobility in all its forms, social and geographic, and with the rootlessness, the restlessness it has implanted within us.
If the simple, primitivist rubric of “the frontier,” or even the more open conception of “the West” were allowed to displace all these complex considerations, or cause us to neglect them in our historical thinking, our sense of the American past would be impoverished. But to take account of them does not deprive the frontier process of its place, for it is a part of most of them and interacts with all of them. The great merit of Turnerism, for all its elliptical and exasperating vagueness, was to be open-ended. The frontier idea, though dissected at one point and minimized at another, keeps popping up in new forms, posing new questions to its questioners, always prodding investigation into new areas. Turner once said that his aim had been not to produce disciples but to propagate inquiry. He did both; and the inquiry propagated among critics and friendly revisionists has now reached a volume that overmatches the work of his disciples. This mountain of Turner criticism is his most certain monument. Among all the historians of the United States it was Turner alone of whom we can now say with certainty that he opened a controversy that was large enough to command the attention of his peers for four generations.
1 Virgin Land, 251.
2 “I do not think of myself as primarily either a western historian or a human geographer. I have stressed those two factors because it seemed to me that they had been neglected.” Turner to Carl Becker, October 3, 1925.
3 Legacy, 170; this remark was made in a lecture of 1907 published the following year. Cf. Legacy, 38–41.
4 Frontier and Section, 29; Frontier, 1, 3, 4, 205, 190, 206–7, 266, 216, 293.
5 See Frontier, 3 for Turner on both counts. Two essays by Pierson are indispensable: “The Frontier and Frontiersmen of Turner’s Essays,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 64 (1940), 449–78, and “The Frontier and American Institutions,” New England Quarterly, 15 (1942), 224–55.
6 Virgin Land, 254; Frontier, 126.
7 Frontier, 30, 32, 107, 258, 343, 357, cf. 305–7.
8 Ibid., 302, 210, 261, 345–6, 250–1, 274, 342.
9 Ibid., 192, 98, 250–1, 31, 190.
1 See his “American Democracy and the Frontier,” Yale Review, 20 (1930), 349–65 and “Political Institutions and the Frontier” in D. R. Fox, ed., Sources of Culture in the Middle West (1934), 15–38.
2 In some respects, Turnerians have been able to take comfort in the findings of comparative frontier studies. A. L. Burt, for example, has argued persuasively that the frontier process had a considerable democratizing effect on New France, The Frontier in Perspective, ed. by W. D. Wyman and C. B. Kroeber (1957), 59–77, and other frontiers yield similar suggestions. A frontier, other things being equal, may or may not have some democratizing effect. But none of these findings seem to me to touch the essential point of Turner’s critics. Their point is that the forest environment does not create the essential institutions upon which democracy rests, and that these institutions are far more effective than the wilderness or the new lands in establishing the preconditions of democracy.
3 Frontier, 250, 30–1; Rise of the New West, 175–6; Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy (1960), 208–9, 221–2. For a balanced discussion of the limited contribution of the West to political democracy, see Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (1966), chapter vi.
4 Frontier, 250, 93–4.
5 Staughton Lynd deals rather harshly with Turner and Beard on this count, but I believe his case is basically correct. See his “On Turner, Beard and Slavery,” Journal of Negro History, 48 (1963), 235–50.
6 See his From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee (1932).
7 On this count, see Sellers, “Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,” already cited.
8 “What I was dealing with was in the first place, the American character of democracy as compared with that of Europe or of European philosophers.” Turner to Frederick Merk, January 9, 1931. The difficulty was that Turner assumed the elements of American uniqueness and did not actually carry out the comparison.
9 “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier,” Political Science Quarterly, 59 (1954), 325–30, 585–94.
1 It is instructive to read Sumner Chilton Powell’s remarkable study of an early New England town, with an ear to its echoes of the Elkins-McKitrick categories. “Each town, each leader, was on his own … the differences between his own experiences and those of Englishmen who had been living in distinctly different types of English towns … special authorizations to meet distinct, often new social problems … a community which was active, militant, and demanding on its members … many surprises in store for him … to be able to blend these contrasting backgrounds into a new whole.… Neither his status nor his privileges in his new society remained as clearly defined as it had been in the old borough … accomplishing a virtual social revolution in the systems of social and economic status of each community … a broad base of responsible citizens … an amalgam of English institutional influences, as well as new solutions to new problems.… More than 650 orders, ‘agreed by the town,’ were passed in this period, a staggering number compared with the legislative activities of the Suffolk [England] borough … experimenting in government and law, imposing a type of local justice by mutual agreement of all concerned.… The townsmen had to change or abandon almost every formal institution which they had taken for granted.… They made a staggering number of changes … they constructed an entirely new type of town.” Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (1963: Anchor ed., 1965), 3, 4, 13, 18, 20, 26, 73, 107, 112, 118, 119, 143, 179, 181–2.
2 The Red Executive (1960), 196.
3 The Making of an American Community (1959).
4 Frontier, 203, 272, 307, 30, 32, 212, 306, 153; italics are mine.
5 “The Early Transportation and Banking Enterprises of the States in Relation to the Growth of Corporations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 17 (1902), 111. For a good brief review of some of the findings of modern scholarship on this count, see Robert A. Lively, “The American System,” Business History Review, 29 (1955), 81–96. See also George R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (1951), chapter xvi.
6 Notably from Mody C. Boatright, “The Myth of Frontier Individualism,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 22 (1941), 14–32.
7 Charles Beard, always a sharp critic of American “individualism,” was among those who were skeptical of this side of Turner’s work. “I knew in my youth pioneers in Indiana who had gone into the country of my birth when it was a wilderness. My early memories are filled with the stories of log-cabin days—of community helpfulness, of cooperation in building houses and barns, in harvesting crops, in building schools, in constructing roads and bridges, in nursing the sick, in caring for widows, orphans, and the aged. Of individuals I heard much, of individualism little. I doubt whether anywhere in the United States there was more community spirit, more mutual aid in times of need, so little expectation of material reward for services rendered to neighbors.” “Turner’s ‘The Frontier in American History,’ ” 67–70.
8 “The pioneer,” writes one student of the West, “was most certainly an ill-mannered inquisitor, showing no respect for privacy as he sought to ease the loneliness of his life and broaden his cultural horizons with a few tidbits of information.” Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (1966), 214.
9 Frontier, 253, 282, 169–70.
1 Ibid., 294. On intellectual isolationism see Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The American Frontier—Frontier of What?” American Historical Review, 51 (1946), 199–216; and Smith, Virgin Land, chapter xxii.
2 Frontier, 15, 18, 22, 30, 37, 65, 70, 78, 153, 154, 209, 210, 211, 214, 249, 256, 263, 269, 270, 271, 355. I have changed a few of Turner’s tenses.
3 Ibid., 267, 268, 271.
4 Frontier, 21–2, 148, 259; cf. 274–5.
5 For the relevant literature see the section on the safety valve in the Bibliographical Essay.
6 I do not mean to suggest here that Turner’s work was the sole stimulus to an interest in mobility among historians, or even necessarily the most important one. But among our major historians he was surely the first to have aroused an interest in it.
7 “Institutions in Motion,” American Quarterly 12 (1960), 188.
8 In fact the proportion of native-born Americans living in states other than that of their birth has actually risen in recent decades over the level at which it was in 1850. Stanley Lebergott, Manpower in Economic Growth (1964), 17.
9 Not always; as urban society formed, Turner once wrote, there were “mill sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in the law, in politics—all the varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew how to seize the opportunity.” Frontier, 271–2.