Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier

In 1893, at the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a young historian from the University of Wisconsin offered what might still be the most influential history lecture ever given in America. Titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner laid out a compelling political and cultural anthropology of the frontier in American life and a lament for its apparent passing. Basing his analysis in the 1890 census, Turner argued that the frontier was now, for all intents and purposes, filled up. Sparse population in some regions there may be, but the tide of settlement had nevertheless run the continent, and all was being brought under the control of barbed wire and the telegraph. No more wilderness was left to be claimed and tamed. For Turner, this fact carried enormous implications for American society. An era had passed, and the capacity of the frontier to generate what was unique about the Americans had passed with it. What became known as Turner’s “frontier thesis” enthralled a generation of leading American opinion makers, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who feared for the sake of the country’s future, and, in particular, for the fate of American manhood.

Population density based on the 1890 census.

​​​Turner held that the frontier was the forge of American culture. “Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment” he wrote and the incubator was not within American cities or farms but rather out at the fringes of American civilization. Turner defined the frontier as “the outer edge of the wave--the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” There, at the frontier, the American was offered an eternal test, to civilize the savagery with which he (presumably) was confronted. This struggle made the American character, distinguishing it from a pretentious and enervated European culture. The frontier struggle made Americans-–men, in particular--endowing them with the independence and individuality that in turn produced the innovative genius of American political and commercial institutions.
               
Civilization would master the savage wilderness with the plow, the rifle, and the railroad, but not before the wilderness left its indelible mark on the American: “The wilderness masters the colonist,” Turner provocatively offered. “It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.” Those of us who have visited the capitals of European fashion but prefer our suede and denim outerwear might feel a tinge of recognition.
 
What we might call the frontier’s residual savagery is what accounts, in Turner’s estimation, for American genius: “[T]o the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.”
 
The analysis, however, came with a warning that many of Turner’s contemporaries would come to see as dire. With the continent now filled up, there could no longer be a fruitful encounter between savagery and civilization. With the wilderness now pacified, so the logic went, perhaps the spark of American creativity, practicality, and spiritedness would now lay fallow. The gendering of the fear is clear enough: With no challenge to master, American manhood was doomed to the effete listlessness of the docile European. Perhaps worse, the restless energy heretofore discharged at the frontier might now turn itself inward, rooting again in eastern cities with all the menacing urban degradation that such worries presaged. For elites such as Roosevelt, a new frontier arena of struggle was called for. And thus precisely at the moment the US Census Bureau announced the closing of the continental frontier, American officials such as Roosevelt turned their expansive energies beyond the continental limits to new frontiers in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
 
In his later work Turner expanded on his original insight and identified a whole series of geographical frontiers, most moving from east to west, but some north and south, which defined key points in American historical development. The frontier became more of a concept and a process than a precise geographical space. In any case, Turner distinguished between frontiers and borders, the latter a “fortified boundary line running through dense populations,” offering a useful distinction between the frontier and what is in fact the frontier’s opposite, the border, from which meaningful interaction is expressly excluded. 
 
Turner’s thesis purported to account for what made Americans unique. It remained a powerful explainer of American exceptionalism for decades. Today’s historian is cool to Turner’s understanding of American cultural dynamics, skeptical of claims to exceptionalism, and more likely to credit the nation’s creativity and dynamism to its peculiar mix of cultures. There is much to be said for the modern analysis; so much of what makes American culture historically interesting is undoubtedly the product of urban admixtures. But Turner did--and does--help us understand how Americans’ encounter with their frontier helped shape their imperial culture, and in so doing shows how frontiers define an empire's development. Frontiers signal the endless horizons and limitless possibilities on which imperial ideology depends. Acknowledging that Americans’ encounter with their frontier produced as much myth as reality, the myth nevertheless remains an important component of imperial culture and imperial self-understanding.
 
Key parts of American culture certainly have derived from the frontier experience. Not very long after Turner’s thesis made its splash, Owen Wister pulled together the gathering lore of the now-eclipsed frontier and created a genre: the Western. His novel The Virginian was one of the early depictions of what would become a national trope: the noble, laconic, gunslinging cowboy. The Virginian’s immortal warning to a taunt from his chief antagonist, Trampas--“When you call me that, smile.”–-carried the paradoxical combination of threat and restraint that characterize so many interactions at all imperial frontiers. Wister’s depiction of the hero’s gunfight with Trampas crystallized the essential climax of the American epic for the first time; Hollywood would soon render Wister’s dramatic scene a banal cliché. It is no mere coincidence that Roosevelt and Wister were old school chums.
 
In America, Westerns are not just fictionalized national history. They are origin stories of empire. They replay forms and structures of imperial justification, imperial violence, and the moral virtues of imperial citizenship. In their depiction of the stoic and yet quick-to-violence hero a microcosm of the supposed forces against which the American empire unfolded itself reenact themselves. As we continue to probe empires and their frontiers we may start to become less secure that the American frontier made Americans unquestionably unique in the world, as Turner and his disciples were convinced. Frontiers do their work of mixing and hybridization and amalgamation whether in North America, Asia, Africa, or elsewhere. The American frontier is undoubtedly not as exceptional nor as heroic as Turner or Wister or Roosevelt maintained. But thanks in no small measure to Turner, we can understand how the frontier achieves its catalyzing and mythological influence in this empire, and how national dramas of imperial expansion are rendered natural, inevitable, worthy, and deeply personal.
 
Further reading:
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (repr., Dover, 1996).