what problem did frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis expose

Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

Reassessment of Western History

In the last half of the twentieth century, a new wave of western historians rebelled against the Turner thesis and defined themselves by their opposition to it. Historians began to approach the field from different perspectives and investigated the lives of Women, miners, Chicanos, Indians, Asians, and African Americans. Additionally, historians studied regions that would not have been relevant to Turner. In 1987, Patricia Limerick tried to redefine the study of the American West for a new generation of western scholars. In Legacy of Conquest, she attempted to synthesize the scholarship on the West to that point and provide a new approach for re-examining the West. First, she asked historians to think of the America West as a place and not as a movement. Second, she emphasized that the history of the American West was defined by conquest; “[c]onquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation, and the American West is a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences.” (Limerick, p. 22.)

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

The Rise of Western Environmental History

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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This article is a selection from the January/February 2023 issue of Smithsonian magazine

Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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17.9: The West as History- the Turner Thesis

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In 1893, the American Historical Association met during that year’s World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The young Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his “frontier thesis,” one of the most influential theories of American history, in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”

Turner looked back at the historical changes in the West and saw, instead of a tsunami of war and plunder and industry, waves of “civilization” that washed across the continent. A frontier line “between savagery and civilization” had moved west from the earliest English settlements in Massachusetts and Virginia across the Appalachians to the Mississippi and finally across the Plains to California and Oregon. Turner invited his audience to “stand at Cumberland Gap [the famous pass through the Appalachian Mountains], and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by.” 26

Americans, Turner said, had been forced by necessity to build a rough-hewn civilization out of the frontier, giving the nation its exceptional hustle and its democratic spirit and distinguishing North America from the stale monarchies of Europe. Moreover, the style of history Turner called for was democratic as well, arguing that the work of ordinary people (in this case, pioneers) deserved the same study as that of great statesmen. Such was a novel approach in 1893.

But Turner looked ominously to the future. The Census Bureau in 1890 had declared the frontier closed. There was no longer a discernible line running north to south that, Turner said, any longer divided civilization from savagery. Turner worried for the United States’ future: what would become of the nation without the safety valve of the frontier? It was a common sentiment. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner that his essay “put into shape a good deal of thought that has been floating around rather loosely.” 27

The history of the West was many-sided and it was made by many persons and peoples. Turner’s thesis was rife with faults, not only in its bald Anglo-Saxon chauvinism—in which nonwhites fell before the march of “civilization” and Chinese and Mexican immigrants were invisible—but in its utter inability to appreciate the impact of technology and government subsidies and large-scale economic enterprises alongside the work of hardy pioneers. Still, Turner’s thesis held an almost canonical position among historians for much of the twentieth century and, more importantly, captured Americans’ enduring romanticization of the West and the simplification of a long and complicated story into a march of progress.

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Frederick jackson turner's frontier thesis and the self-consciousness of america.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

In their work on Turner's formative period, Ray A. Billington and Fulmer Mood have shown that the Frontier Thesis, formulated in 1893 in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much a brilliant early effort by a young scholar as a mature study in which Turner gave his ideas an organization that proved to be final. During the rest of his life he developed but never disclaimed or modified them. Billington and Mood also add that the Frontier Thesis is meant to test a new approach to history that Turner had been developing since the beginning of his academic career. We can fully understand it, then, only by setting it within the framework of the assumptions and goals of his 1891 essay, “The Significance of History,” Turner's only attempt to sketch a philosophy of history.

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1 Billington , Ray A. , The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1971 ) Google Scholar ; Mood , Fulmer , “ The Development of Frederick J.Turner as a Historical Thinker ,” Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts , 1937–42, 34 ( 1943 ), 283 – 352 . Google Scholar

2 Turner , Frederick J. , “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin , 14 12 1893 . Google Scholar

3 Turner , Frederick J. , “ The Significance of History ,” Wisconsin Journal of Education , 21 ( 10 1891 ), 230 –4, ( 11 1891 ), 253–6. Google Scholar

4 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of F. J. Turner , Billington , Ray A. ed. ( Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall , 1961 ), 20 . Google Scholar

5 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” 17 . Google Scholar

7 Ibid. , 18.

8 Ibid. , 27.

9 Ibid. , 18.

10 Turner , Frederick J. , “Problems in American History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington, ed., 29 . Google Scholar

11 Billington , Ray A. , Frederick J. Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher ( New York : Oxford University Press , 1973 ), chapter 5 Google Scholar ; Coleman , William , “ Science and Symbol in Turner Frontier Hypothesis ,” American Historical Review , 72 , 3 ( 1966 ), 22 – 49 . CrossRef Google Scholar

12 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 1 – 2 Google Scholar ; see also “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

13 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

14 The link between the “instinct for moving” and the development of human history and culture was forcefully made by Turner in an 1891 address to the Madison Literary Club: “The colonizing spirit is one form of the nomadic instinct. The immigrant train on its way to the far west or the steamer laden with passengers for Australia is but the last embodiment of the impulse that took Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees and sent our Aryan forefathers from their primitive pasture lands to Greece and Italy and India and Scandinavia”: Turner , Frederick J. , “American Colonization,” published in Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of Frederick J. Turner ( San Marino, Ca. : The Huntington Library , 1893 ), 176 . Google Scholar

15 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 11 . Google Scholar

16 See, for instance, his treatment of populism, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 32 . Google Scholar

17 Ibid. , 37.

18 Ibid. , 4.

19 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed, 206 Google Scholar ; also: “At first the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American,” Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 4 . Google Scholar

20 Foucault , Michel , L'ordre du discours ( Paris : 1970 ). Google Scholar

21 See, Trails: Toward a New Western History , Limerick , Patricia Nelson , Milner , Clyde A. II , Rankin , Charles E. eds. ( University Press of Kansas ). CrossRef Google Scholar

22 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 – 4 . Google Scholar

23 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

24 Ibid. , 207.

25 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 2 . Google Scholar

26 See Morgan , Lewis Henry , Ancient Society ( 1877 ). Google Scholar

27 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 76 –9, 122–3. Google Scholar

28 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 21 , 38. Google Scholar

29 Ibid. , 12.

30 Ibid. , 4.

31 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 205 . Google Scholar

32 See Morgan , Lewis H. , Ancient Society ( 1877 ) Google Scholar , and Bagehot , Walter , Physics and Politics: An Application of the Principles of Natural Selection and Heredity to Political Society ( 1872 ) Google Scholar , on the first and second points respectively. The pervasive influence in late 19th century culture of Sumner Maine's theory of the transition from status to contract should also be kept in mind.

33 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 30 . Google Scholar

34 Ibid. , 37; “The problem of the West,” 211 . Google Scholar

35 Ibid. , quoted.

36 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 31 . Google Scholar

37 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 213 . Google Scholar

38 Billington , , Frederick Jackson Turner , 425 . Google Scholar

39 Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Un'analisi della American Promise: ordine e senso nel discorso storico-politico,” in Bonazzi , Tiziano , Struttura e metamorfosi della civilta' progressista ( Venezia : Marsilio , 1974 ), 41 – 140 . Google Scholar

40 Baritz , Loren , “ The Idea of the West ,” American Historical Review , 66 , 3 ( 1961 ), 618 –40. CrossRef Google Scholar An important parallel can also be made with Walzer , Michael , Exodus and Revolution ( New York : Basic Books , 1985 ). Google Scholar

41 Smith , Henry Nash , Virgin Land: The American West As Symbol and Myth ( Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 1950 ). Google Scholar On the importance of foundation myths, see Voegelin , Eric , The New Science of Politics ( Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1952 ). Google Scholar

42 Noble , David W. , Historians against History. The Frontier Thesis and the National Covenant in American Historical Writing since 1830 ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1965 ) Google Scholar , and The End of American History ( Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press , 1985 ). Google Scholar

43 Turner , to Becker , Carl , 21 01 1911 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , Wilbur R. , The Historical World of Frederick J. Turner ( New Haven-London : Yale University Press , 1968 ), 135 Google Scholar ; also, Turner , to Skinner , Constance Lindsay , 15 03 1922 Google Scholar , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 56 . Google Scholar

44 Turner , , “Problems in American History,” 29 . Google Scholar

45 Ibid. , 32.

46 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 68 –9. Google Scholar

47 Ibid. , 69. This expression follows immediately upon the sentence previously quoted.

48 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 38 . Google Scholar

49 Turner , to Becker , Carl , in Jacobs , , The Historical World , 135 . Google Scholar

50 Turner , , “Contributions of the West to American Democracy,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 264 –6. Google Scholar

51 Ibid. , 258.

52 Turner , , “The Problem of the West,” 216 . Google Scholar

53 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 305 . Google Scholar

54 Turner , , “Social Forces in American History,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 331 . Google Scholar

55 Turner , , “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” Google Scholar in Turner , , The Frontier in American History , 284 . Google Scholar

56 Turner , , “The State University,” in America's Great Frontier and Sections: Frederick Jackson Turner's Unpublished Essays , Jacobs , Wilbur R. ed. ( Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press , 1969 ), 196 . Google Scholar

57 Turner , , “The West and American Ideals,” 300 . Google Scholar

58 See his “Pioneer Ideals and the State University,” 269 –89. Google Scholar

59 Turner , , “The Significance of History,” in Frontier and Section , Billington ed., 21 . Google Scholar

60 Ibid. , 18.

61 Lyotard , Jean-Francois , La condition postmoderne ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1979 ). Google Scholar

62 Reference is made here to Wallerstein , Immanuel , The Modern World-System ( New York : Academic Press , 1976 ). Google Scholar

63 Bercovitch , Sacvan , The American Jeremiad ( Madison : Wisconsin University Press , 1978 ) Google Scholar ; also Bercovitch , Sacvan , “The Rites of Assent: Rhetoric, Ritual, and the Ideology of American Consensus,” in The American Self: Myth, Ideology and Popular Culture , Girgus , Sam B. ed. ( Albuquerque : New Mexico University Press , 1980 ), 5 – 45 . Google Scholar On the “rhetorical impact” of the Frontier Thesis upon the American public mind see Carpenter , Ronald H. , The Eloquence of F. J. Turner , 47 – 95 . Google Scholar

64 Wiebe , Robert H. , The Search for Order , 1877–1920 ( New York : Hill and Wang , 1967 ), ch. 5. Google Scholar

65 The idea of a transition from an age of scarcity to an age of abundance was articulated by Patten , Simon N. , professor of economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, in The New Basis of Civilization ( New York : Macmillan , 1907 ). Google Scholar

66 Tudor , Henry , Political Myth ( London : 1972 ) CrossRef Google Scholar ; also, Bonazzi , Tiziano , “Mito politico,” in Dizionario di politico , Bobbio , Norberto and Matteucci , Nicola eds. ( Torino : UTET , 1976 ), 587 –94. Google Scholar The most important interpretation of politics based on the dialectics amicus-hostis is that of Carl Schmitt, see, among his many publications, Der Bergriff des Politischen. Text von 1932 mit einem Vorwort und drei Corollarien (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963 ). Google Scholar

67 Barthes , Ronald , Mythologies ( Paris : Editions du Seuil , 1957 ). Google Scholar

68 See Turner's articles on immigration in Chicago Record-Herald , 28 08 , 4, 11, 18, 25 09 , 16 10 1901 . Google Scholar Let us not forget, however, that Marcus Hansen was one of Turner's students.

69 Derrida , Jacques , L'autre cap ( Paris : Les Editions de Minuit , 1991 ). Google Scholar

70 Turner , , “The Significance of the Frontier,” 3 . Google Scholar

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• Volume 27, Issue 2
• Tiziano Bonazzi (a1)
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800031509

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Excerpts from writings of Frederick Jackson Turner, 1890s-1920s

Frederick Jackson Turner is most famous for expounding the influential “Frontier Thesis” of American history, a thesis he first introduced in 1893 and which he expanded upon for the remainder of his scholarly career.   See the following link for a short biography.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life and reacted on Europe. . . . [T]he frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. 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 . . .. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.

. . [T]he frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people. The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. . . . In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English   in neither nationality nor characteristics.   The process has gone on from the early days to our own.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that, to 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 last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleaveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and the little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former experience. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to coöperation and to governmental activity. Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines.

Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, coöperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.

Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West. Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preëminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation.

If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:-- Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, 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. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. 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. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.

In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.

But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.

The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this democratic experience of the West, and have they acquired sufficient momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days.

Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a hi,,her type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she offered gifts after his will." Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present.

This, at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals.

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to 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. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

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• Turner's Frontier Thesis

Americans have long mythologized the frontier. It isn't just about stories of past deeds but how Americans connect their history to today. From technology to social ideas, the leading edge of any field is typically referred to as a "frontier," a symbol of settlers creating something entirely new. Frederick Turner Jackson was a historian who looked not just at what had happened in the past but what it meant for people in his time and how it had shaped his present society. How did Frederick Jackson Turner interpret the Frontier in a way that resonated so strongly with other Americans of the late nineteenth century and beyond? 

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Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis 1893

From the 1851 exhibition in London through 1938, the World's Fair was an installation where advances in science and technology from around the world were shown to the public, while later fairs focused more on cultural issues. The fairs were highly influential, giving the public glimpses of new technologies such as the telephone. It was among one of these expositions, the World's Columbian Exposition, marking the 400th anniversary of Christoper Columbus's arrival, that Jackson delivered his thesis.

1893 World's Columbia Exposition

From the middle of the country, the city of Chicago, Jackson described what he felt the frontier meant to America. Twenty-seven million people attended the fair to see innovations such as the Ferris Wheel before the fair closed two days ahead of its planned six-month run due to the mayor of Chicago's assassination. Turner delivered his speech on the frontier to the American Historical Society gathering. Although his speech had a minor impact at the time, the society reprinted it where it lived on to gain its later stature.

Did you know?

While Turner was delivering his speech, another creator of the mythic western frontier, Buffalo Bill Cody, performed his famous Wild West Show outside the fair.

Turner's Frontier Thesis Summary

Turner viewed the frontier as the essential element in defining the American character. His work began by noting that the bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 had recently stated that there was no longer a frontier line and closed by saying that after 400 years of frontier activity, the first period of American history had ended. With the frontier intertwined with the American past, Turner interpreted it as having shaped America.

The central idea of Frederick Turner Jackson's Frontier Thesis is that as families went west into undeveloped lands, liberty, equality, and democracy arose from a condition where the highly developed society to the East was left behind and with it the old culture. At first, this East was Europe and later the East coast of the United States. As urbanization took hold and further moved west with successive waves,

Waves of the Frontier

He viewed the movement into the frontier as occurring in waves, and each waving furthering democracy and equality. As Europeans moved to the East coast of the United States, their struggles for survival and reliance on individual ability gave rise to a spirit of democracy that resulted in the American Revolution. When Americans continued west with the Louisiana Purchase in the early nineteenth century, democracy increased from the Jeffersonian to the Jacksonian periods. The new American culture came not from the high civilizations of Europe, the mixing of various peoples, and the uncivilized influence of the frontier.

Individuality

Individualism has been viewed as the most central piece of American identity. Turner connected that individualism with the necessary development of self-reliance among settlers in the sparsely populated frontier. He believed that the frontier conditions were anti-social, and the representatives of foreign governments coming to assert authority were largely viewed as oppressors by the frontier settlers.

Turner picked out the tax collector in particular as a symbol of oppression to the frontier settlers.

Previous Theories

Turner broke with previous theories about the frontier and American culture by placing the emphasis, not on race but on land. Many American academics at the time believed that as Germanic people conquered the forests of Europe, they were uniquely capable of developing the most excellent forms of society and political thought. Once the Germanic peoples ran out of land, they stagnated until they reached the forests of the Americas, which reawakened German and Anglo-Saxon ingenuity. Others, such as Theodore Roosevelt, held to racial theories based upon the unifying and innovative pressures of racial warfare, as White colonizers battled back Indigenous peoples to take the western land.

Impact of Turner's Frontier Thesis Main Points

The impact of Turner's Frontier Thesis was consequential. Not just academics and historians latched on to the ideas, but politicians and many other American thinkers used Turner's interpretations. The core idea that the American character had been built around the frontier, which was now closed, left the question of how America would continue to grow and evolve in the future without new western land open. Those searching for a new frontier to conquer used Turner's Frontier Thesis to claim their goals as a recent sort of frontier.

Imperialism

With settlers having reached the end of the North American landmass, some wished to continue moving westward across the Pacific Ocean. Asia was a potential location for U.S. territorial expansion in the twentieth century. Scholars of the Wisconsin school studied American diplomacy during the early Cold War. They were influenced by Turner when they saw American diplomacy as primarily being motivated by economic expansion through the frontier and beyond into economic imperialism of the late nineteenth through twentieth centuries.

Historians' theories don't develop in isolation. Thinkers influence and criticize each other. Even more importantly, they build and expand on their colleagues' ideas. One such case is Turner and William Appleman Williams.

Although separated by decades, Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin, where the history faculty later came together around Williams' diplomacy and foreign policy theory. Turner's Frontier Thesis heavily influenced Wiliams's approaches.

The New Deal

With the New Deal, FDR expanded the role of government in Americans' lives. The frontier became an essential metaphor for these changes in the Roosevelt administration, and they often appealed the Turner's Frontier Thesis. FDR described the want and economic insecurity of the Great Depression as a frontier to be conquered.

Criticism of Turner's Frontier Thesis

Although some earlier historians appealed directly to the myth of Germanic peoples, during WWII, Turner's theory was criticized as being too similar to the "Blood and Soil" ideas of Adolf Hitler. Others asked why former Spanish colonies and indigenous populations did not go through the same transformations of thought. Turner's original speech made mention of indigenous people only as symbols representing the brutality of untamed nature and a sort of uncivilized degeneration. He believed the white settlers reverted before developing their democratic and individualist ideas.

Turner's Frontier Thesis - Key Takeaways

• It was first delivered in a speech to the American Historical Society at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893.
• Claimed that the sparse population and harsh conditions of the frontier developed the American focus on the individual.
• Viewed westward expansion and the frontier as occurring in waves.
• He believed that each wave further developed democracy in the United States.
• Influential on not just academics but the larger American society.
• Left Americans to search for new frontiers, ranging from imperialism to social and technological developments.

Flashcards in Turner's Frontier Thesis 10

Who was Frederick Jackson Turner?

A historian

What did Frederick Jackson Turner say was the status of the frontier?

It was closed 

Where did Frederick Jackson Turner first present his Frontier Thesis?

What frontier did Franklin Delano Roosevelt say that the New Deal was trying to conquer?

Economic insecurity 

What audience did Frederick Jackson Turner deliver his frontier thesis to?

The American Historical Society 

What central part of the American character did Frederick Jackson Turner tie to the frontier?

Individualism

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Frequently Asked Questions about Turner's Frontier Thesis

What was Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis

Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis was that settlers moved west across the frontier in waves, each with increasing individualism and democracy. 

How did advocates of Expansionism react to Turner's Frontier Thesis

Advocates for expansion viewed Turner's Frontier Thesis as reinforcing their idea that America must keep expanding. 

What year was Fredrick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis

Fredrick Jackson Turner delivered the Frontier Thesis in an 1893 speech in Chicago, Illinois. 

How did Turner's Frontier Thesis differ from the Safety-Valve Theory

The Safety-Valve Theory is that the frontier acted as a "safety valve" to relieve social pressure by giving the unemplyed in the East somewhere to go and pursue their economic well being.  The idea does not necessarily contradict the Frontier Thesis but addresses a more specific issue about urban social tensions. It was later adopted by Turner himself into his Frontier Thesis.

What problem did Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis expose

Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis exposed that American had been defined by the frontier, which was now closed. 

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Literature/Film Quarterly

Frontier mythographies: savagery and civilization in frederick jackson turner and john ford (2007), arthur redding, editor’s note:.

This is the first installment in a new series of articles from the archives of LFQ . I chose this article by Arthur Redding from 2007 for two primary reasons: first, I have repeatedly used the article in teaching my classes on the western and how that genre resonates within specific political and historical contexts; and second, I was curious about how Redding would look back on this work in light of our current moment where it seems like the rules of political engagement have been redrawn.

-- Elsie Walker

Preface to “Frontier Mythographies: Savagery and Civilization in Frederick Jackson Turner and John Ford”

In the early 2000s, when I was writing about American culture during the Cold War (a project of which “Frontier Mythographies” formed a part), I was struck by the ways in which contemporary political and cultural discourses drew on the available repertoire of mythic American images, icons, and narratives, the myth of the frontier prominent among them. Whatever else they signified, the terror attacks of 9/11 had shattered easy complacencies about America’s dominance over what President George Bush Seniorhad termed the “New World Order” that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As I saw it, attempts were being made (with equivocal success) to resurrect somewhat shopworn mythic narratives about America in order to make sense of contemporary life after 9/11 and to legitimate American actions in the world.

In the late 1940s and 50s, the golden age of Hollywood westerns, filmic narratives about the American frontier had buttressed a Cold War logic of heroic American expansionism. During the early sixties, however, many assumptions of Cold War culture began to dissolve. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reflected those fractures, exposed the mythic (as opposed to historical and material) construction of American power, even as director John Ford aimed (paradoxically enough) to endorse a Kennedy-esque recalibration of frontier myth to render the story of western conquest humane, inclusive, and tolerant.

According to this Imaginary, Kennedy could still function as an ideal, masculine, and benevolent protector: as both East coast elite (Stoddard/Stewart) and frontier hero (Doniphon/Wayne)—a man capable of deploying extreme violence in defense of righteousness—but also a man with a heart, with compassion, with an intellect. At the same time, the film exposes his pretense to competence and power.. The mythic ideal of the good leader, the film acknowledges, cannot be sustained: “the man who shot Liberty Valance” is a construct, a myth, a phony, a media creation.

What remains of the mythic frontier narrative in 2019, I wonder, as I look back on the early 1960s, on the early part of the 21st century? And what remains of those Bush-era efforts to resuscitate myths of a virile America that was both benevolent and heroic?

In certain ways, Frederick Jackson Turner’s mythic mapping of America still holds firm: in 2016, we could still map voting patterns more or less along the lines Turner drew: blue states huddled along the coasts, red states on the far side of Turner’s frontiers. Westerners remain devoted to what they understand as liberty. (This pattern holds true at least for older white voters; changing demographics are rapidly changing the politics of states across the American South, Midwest, and West). Even so, libertarian-inflected American populism has chosen a mighty strange hero to carry its banner. One wonders what repertoire of mythicized American masculinity his persona draws upon. Beloved as he may be in the heartland, Donald Trump is hardly a cowboy hero. Unlike Bush, unlike Reagan, unlike Kennedy, he doesn’t even pretend to be.

And westerns may no longer have a whole lot to say. While it is true that excellent westerns continue to be made and such television serials as Deadwood (2004-06) have had their share of popularity, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) may well be the last western movie of any genuine political significance. Unforgiven can be read effectively as an elegy for the Cold War: the “good guy” effectively wins the day, but no good can be salvaged. All pretense to moral clarity, righteousness, or justice, has been abandoned by film’s end, as Will Munny (Eastwood) proclaims to Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) just before murdering him: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” No-one has made credible claims about the revival of the western since then. Even Eastwood, who in real life dissimulates nostalgia for an Eisenhower-era model of straitlaced Republicanism—he endorsed Mitt Romney, but has been blessedly mum about Trump—has largely abandoned the genre.

No doubt Trump has his mythic antecedents in American lore: the snake oil salesman, a huckster, a swindler, a braggart, a liar. Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, P.T. Barnum, perhaps, George C. Parker, a touch of Gatsby, a dose of L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz (and a dollop of MGM’s). Mark Twain, were he writing today, would do Trump justice, so too would Ambrose Bierce. To his adoring fans, Trump comes off as an impish but loveable boaster and braggart, a plucky loser, who doesn’t quite know he is a loser: Harold Hill, in The Music Man , Thurber’s Walter Mitty. To his enemies, he is a villain: Melville’s diabolic Confidence Man, perhaps, but not Liberty Valance. Trump is hardly a cowboy hero, unless he might have held a minor role on the television comedy F-Troop . Jim Backus might have played him as part Mr. Magoo, part Thurston Howell.

The most prophetic film contemporaneous with Liberty Valance turns out to be John Frankenheimer’s paranoid political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate (1962): the right-wing nutter ascending to the White House really is a KGB asset, unwittingly working on behalf of communist China! In that film, at least, Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) was able to save the day, preventing foreign agents from taking over the presidency. Even Hollywood, it seems, pales before the chaos that is American politics. Perhaps mobster films come closest to describing the universal corruption and inanity of Trumpism. And gangster movies are enjoying something of a resurgence today: Scott Cooper’s Black Mass (2015); Andrea Di Stefano’s The Informer (2019); Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019). But, in what film does the con man make it all the way to the Presidency? In what farcical world is vice so rewarded? In what universe, we might ask, does a schlub like Donald Trump get to be an alpha male?

The answer is simple: in the Marvel Universe. Ever heard of Peter Parker?

As contemporary allegories of power and justice, Hollywood superhero films are to post-Cold War America what Hollywood westerns were to Cold War America. The Hollywood western was ascendant from the formative years of the Cold War between, say, 1948 (the year the two most classic instances of the form were produced: Ford’s Fort Apache and Howard Hawkes’ Red River ) through to 1962 ( Liberty Valance ), when, as I argue, the ideological buttresses of Cold War liberalism began to founder. We can read the popular trajectory of the superhero film along the same lines. Since 1989 (the year Tim Burton’s Batman appeared and the year the Berlin wall came down), we have witnessed the ascent of genre; and the years between 9/11/01 and 2019 mark the apex of their popularity. Not only are superhero movies cinema ( pace Scorsese!), they may well be the most telling cinema of our times, in terms of how they dramatically expose our political unconscious.  They are moral fables and fantasies where an almost unlimited imperial power is only haphazardly yoked to an ethics of universal righteousness: time and again, in these movies, has the superhero to measure her or his moral fitness to wield the superpowers with which she or he has been endowed. And so too America. Like the Cold War western, too, superhero films cover a broad spectrum of ideological positions, from the cynical left libertarianism of Zack Snyder’s The Watchmen (2009) to the anarcho-nihilism of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (2010) to the Afrofuturism of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018).

We can push the analogy even further: what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was to Kennedy’s America, so Todd Phillips’s 2019 Joker is to Trump’s America. On the one hand, the film functions an unqualified endorsement of Trump’s politics of white ressentiment . Read across the grain, however, Joker exposes and laments the ideological barrenness and vacuity of Trumpism.

In an age of “fake news,” I can’t let the depiction of the fourth estate in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance go unremarked. Note that Ford’s movie presents a heroic vision of the press as speaker of truth to power, in the form of Shinbone Star publisher Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), who is terrorized for his commitment to unveil public corruption. Yet, later, in the hands of editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), we witness the Star as propagandist, as spinner of ideological yarns, as toady to the impostures of the powerful.  Can the press be both? Much as Trump claims to despise MSNBC, he would not hold office but for the airtime he was given by the liberal press. Trump is as purely a creature fabricated by the popular media as is the legendary man who shot Liberty Valance.

-- Arthur Redding

“T his is the West, sir,” declares the newspaperman Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), editor of the Shinbone Star, toward the conclusion of John Ford’s classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) (see Figure 1). “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this iconic and iconographic scenario Scott tears up his notes and decides not to print the “true story” of Liberty Valance, thus accentuating the media’s complicity in defining and perpetuating the myth of the American frontier. As Catherine Ingrassia notes, “the film demonstrates the unreliability of categories like ‘news,’ ‘history,’ and even ‘identity’ while affirming the power of language to construct a reality based on deception” (5). Legend becomes fact. On the frontier, myth or legend usurps the place and power of history; we might even say that the frontier exists fundamentally as myth.

And it is a myth that is at the very core of American self-understanding, as such different thinkers as Henry Nash Smith, Patricia Nelson Limerick, and Richard Slotkin insist. For Smith, whose 1950 Virgin Land virtually defined the “myth and symbol school” of American Studies that was to dominate Cold War representations of American identity, competing thematic understandings of the frontier—as the key to international trade, as character forming crucible of the American character, and as “garden of the world”—dominated nineteenth-century efforts to build and defend the nation. Such struggles, mythologized in works of literature, film, and history, continue to provide the defining materials within an evolving repertoire of American self-conceptions. Limerick writes:

As a mental artifact, the frontier has demonstrated an astonishing stickiness and persistence. […] Packed full of nonsense and goofiness, jammed with nationalist self-congratulation and toxic ethnocentrism, the image of the frontier is nonetheless universally recognized and laden with positive associations. […] Somewhere in the midst of this weird hodgepodge of frontier and pioneer imagery lie important lessons about the American identity, sense of history, and direction for the future. (94)

Limerick, a historian of the American west, wants to repeal the mythic stature of the frontier and replace it with a clearer sense of what actually happened—and still happens—in the American west. But the legend is already in print; the west was written as myth; that is, any deployment of the language of the frontier resurrects an entire mythic apparatus of American genesis, character, and values. Even today, Limerick writes, “the scholarly understanding formed in the late nineteenth century still governs most of the public rhetorical uses of the word ‘frontier’” (94). The scholar she indicts as primary mythmaker is Frederick Jackson Turner.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s notorious and troubling 1893 paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” set out the fundamental structural tensions underlying these myths of American genesis. His famous “frontier thesis,” which makes the extravagant and sweeping claim that the frontier, given “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain[s] American development” (55), places the frontier at the heart of the American self-imagination. The frontier, which he defines variously as “the existence of an area of free land” (55) and “the meeting point of savagery and civilization” (56), furnishes the environmental conditions under which “Americans” come into being. In his methodological synopsis, Turner insists that the historian’s task is to reveal the underlying “vital forces […] behind constitutional forms and modifications,” that determine the “evolution” of social, economic, political, religious, and cultural institutions from simple into “complex organs” (56). In keeping with the great nineteenth-century endeavor of transforming history into a “science,” Turner reveals himself as a rigorously Darwinian thinker; he applies the same systematic approach to explain the evolution of new social and historical species—the American—as Darwin applied to natural history: natural selection and the struggle for survival, survival of the fittest under conditions of scarcity, adaptation, and the development from primitive to complex organisms. The agonistic, dynamic model of complex evolution traces out the genesis of the American as a new organism, a new historical species, in a very real sense:

The wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing even more numerous. It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why we are today one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country. In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist. (62-63)

The uniqueness of American development, according to Turner, lies in the manner in which society and social beings were perpetually compelled to re-adapt themselves to ever-changing environmental conditions; pioneers were forced to either “adapt or perish” (53). This openness to adaptation, for Turner, “this fluidity of American life” is what distinguishes “a new product that is American” (57).

Dominant among the features of this new “American” was a cherished system of American values, which still figures largely in political and cultural discussions of American life. Two of these values are tolerance and individualism, which, according to Turner’s framework, must be understood as evolving from the conditions of frontier settlement rather than merely being transplants of Enlightenment ideas originally developed in Europe. According to one distinct strain of Jeffersonian thinking, for example, a functioning republican democracy demands vast quantities of space, a notion that in part underwrote the western expedition of Lewis and Clark. In 1803, Jefferson’s administration insisted upon making the Louisiana Purchase, which he considered not simply an investment in land and natural resources, but equally a broad experiment in the national character-building necessary to produce a healthy and functioning citizenry. The virtuous citizen must, like the virtuous nation itself, be independent, self-reliant; Jefferson’s ideal yeoman farmer was envisioned as the male head of a household who could produce enough food to feed his own family and household, effectively training him in the frugal but strenuous exercise of responsibly administering one’s own freedom. Such landowners would be wise and effective statesmen and legislators, it followed. But individual land ownership—and the desire to own one’s own home is even today at the core of the “American dream”—also formed the moral basis for enhancing what we today would call an acceptance of diversity. “The larger our association,” explains Jefferson in his second inaugural address as he defends his expansionist policies, “the less will it be shaken by local passions” (318). Freedom of speech and of thought, freedom of the press, and certainly freedom of religion, depended on people living far enough apart so that their differences would not lead to bloodshed. Anyone is free to think and practice pretty much anything they like, as long as they do it “over there,” out of my sight and, preferably, out of earshot. As long as each group had its own turf, and as long as there was enough space between the different neighborhoods, freedom of religion, for example, could be accommodated (the process repeats itself in the history of American urbanization, as different religious and ethnic groups mark their own geographical neighborhoods and their own cultural and labor territories as well). A nation could tolerate even mutually hostile viewpoints if there was a frontier, if there was free land, according to Jeffersonian thinking. Jefferson—whom Smith terms “the intellectual father of the American advance to the Pacific” (15), and whose political lineage he traces in such subsequent advocates of western mobility as Thomas Hart Benton, Asa Whitney, William Gilpin, and even Walt Whitman—and Turner were early advocates of what would come to be known as the “safety valve” theory of American development. 1

According to the “safety valve” argument, the existence of the frontier allowed the United States to cultivate a functioning democracy by avoiding full-scale violent conflicts between competing social and economic forces. As long as there was open territory into which antagonists might expand, final conflict between contending forces might be avoided: “so long as free land exists, the opportunity for competency exists” (Turner 73). In America, for example, labor and capital confronted each other in a long series of struggles. However, the revolutions that shook Europe all through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century never took place in the US. The idea was that the expanding labor force, composed increasingly of European immigrants by the end of the nineteenth century, did not have to confront capital in an enclosed territory. Tensions and working conditions were as dismal in the company towns of New England as in Manchester, of course; but immigrants unhappy with their lot could simply pack up and move west, transforming themselves into homesteaders and farmers. Their right to avail themselves of land in the territories was secured by the Homestead Act of 1862; the life and conditions of Slavic and German plains settlers are perhaps best described in the novels of Willa Cather. My Ántonia , for example, envisions a progressive and functioning “multi-cultural” society overseen by the benevolent patronage of tolerant aristocrats (embodied primarily in the character of Jim Burden), where the economic and political power of the elite east-coast trusts is reinvigorated by the spiritual and cultural resources of Midwest immigrant populism. (And despite Turner’s contention that the frontier closed in 1890, the government, in collusion with the railroads, kept bringing displaced Europeans to the plains well into the twentieth century.)

The frontier promotes individualism; if arms and munitions were the means to self-sufficiency (and the frontier was a violent place), open land and space nonetheless ensured that differences can be tolerated with a minimum of bloodshed, according to this logic. At the same time, however, Turner points to the “nationalizing tendency of the West” (71). “The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government […] was conditioned on the frontier” (68). The need to regulate commerce and administer land in the newly opened territories necessitated the construction of a strong federal government, whose power would ultimately be secured by Lincoln’s administration when the North won the Civil War. It was the federal government that legislated internal improvements in the west and distributions of the lands, while it also secured the power of the railroad; it was the federal government that regulated interstate and inter-territorial commerce; it was the federal government that ultimately appropriated the right to adjudicate between competing social groups and to police the West. Once the federal army had become, under Lincoln, a constitutional fait accompli , once the nation-state had secured for itself what the sociologist Anthony Giddens terms a “monopoly on violence,” troops were sent to the Plains and the Northwest to settle the “Indian” question in a series of wars that effectively ended with the massacre of the Teton Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890.

And it is in 1890, argues Turner, that the frontier was closed. The nation was effectively finished, and the new species, an American, had evolved. “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history” (77). While most commentators underline Turner’s optimism about the continuing vitality of frontier virtues, Turner in fact closes his essay with a series of prophetic and rather pessimistic speculations about the shape of the future. Tolerance and individualism, he points out, are perpetually in conflict. What he warns of, precisely, are the dangers that will follow once the safety valve has been sealed up. For the two great achievements of the frontier, the construction of a libertarian American individual and the production of centralized Federal power, are directly opposed to one another. The western individual fears and distrusts federal authority; in turn the national government, for the sake of social harmony, seeks to limit unregulated individualism. Once the frontier is closed, Turner implies, Americans must find ways to live with our differences in an enclosed space. Too much liberty cannot be tolerated.

And Turner is explicit about the dangers. “The most important effect of the frontier,” writes Turner, “has been in the promotion of democracy. […] As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism” (72) or what his older contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would so famously term “self-reliance.” But these same values that ensured survival under frontier conditions could now constitute a menace. “Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression” (72). And thus “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its danger as well as its benefits” (73). Turner lists several examples of the dangers of unregulated individualism in the nineteenth century. For the purposes of my argument, however, I want to demonstrate how Turner’s systematic theories dominate the mythic tensions of the American self-imagination all through the twentieth century.

Turner, as revisionist historians have pointed out repeatedly, is a dismal historian. His primary failure, perhaps, is that his method is far too schematic and reductive, and, though Turner was no bigot, his ideas consequently harbor the systemic racism endemic to the nineteenth century. He views the frontier as merely the dramatic struggle between “savagery and civilization,” that is, between indigenous or primitive Native Americans and a superior Anglo-American culture. But the historical record is infinitely more complex, and there were various other folks about, as contemporary western historian Sarah Deutsch points out. Neither do the civilized or the savage constitute distinctly homogenized social groups. In any social struggle, and particularly in the American west, historical

shifts not only occurred in relations between majority and minority groups but affected relations among minority groups. Spanish Americans and Mexicans also constructed definitions of “otherness.” All of the groups called the intimate connections among race, sex and gender systems into play in this process of reshaping cultural and social boundaries. They embedded this constellation of issues in a particularly western heritage of conquest and territoriality. (Deutsch 111)

What Turner offers is not a history of the west, but a damned good story of its settlement. For all his aspirations to scientism, Turner is primarily a spinner of yarns, compressing the complex of historical factions and struggles into a tight dramatic narrative of a struggle between protagonist and antagonist, between savagery and civilization. The teleological thrust of narrative, of course, ensures there will be a winner and a loser, that there is a moral dimension to the tale, that values can be assigned to various characters, and so forth. Americans are produced, we might say, not simply through historical experiences but more powerfully through the stories that we tell about them; cultural myths and stories enable us to locate our destiny and fabricate our collective and individual identities from the chaos and complexity of lived history. Who we are is less a product of our raw experience than the narrative structure that delimits and describes our experience; and so where Turner fails as a historian, he succeeds brilliantly as a mythmaker. And so, while “experience” itself is never innocent of a narrative structure, the compelling political question involves the variety of ways in which nation narrates itself and the ways in which those historical and mythic narratives are enlisted in contemporary struggles.

The American political and social imagination is still underwritten by the mythicized frontier in exactly the terms Turner lays out. The struggle between federalism and libertarianism virtually defines our national elections, for example. When a presidential candidate wants to “get big government off our backs,” he dresses up like a cowboy, as did Ronald Reagan, who twice ran successfully on an anti-federalist platform. In the west, “tax-and-spend” liberals are demonized as east-coast Washington insiders and ignorant bureaucrats, as tax-collectors, and, ultimately, as effeminate. Libertarian values are strong in the heartland; we think of ourselves as self-reliant, fiercely independent, and competent. We like guns and we like settling things for ourselves. Membership in the National Rifle Association is high; lawyers and legislators are frowned upon. Consider the two most recent presidential elections: the south and most of the Plains states were won by George W. Bush, posing as a rugged entrepreneur and oilman, as a westerner, a “good old boy.” His opponents Al Gore, who set himself up as an efficient legislator, and John Kerry, by contrast, won in New England, the Atlantic seaboard, and California. Turner’s mythic vision of federal power versus individualism describes these tensions. 2

So, too, can the mythicized language of a struggle between savagery and civilization describe the mythic dimensions of our economic and social life. The rugged individualism of the frontier serves as a metaphor for unregulated entrepreneurial capitalism. On the frontier, individual speculation can threaten the social good, and Turner describes the wildcat banking scandals of the nineteenth century in terms that prophecy the Saving and Loans scandals of the nineteen eighties. During those oil-boom years, unregulated Savings and Loans institutions (not banks, which are under federal supervision) in Texas and Louisiana (obviously) loaned money to shady venture capitalists for all sorts of crooked schemes; when the market went bust billions were simply lost. The Federal government stepped in and protected the institutions (deregulation is usually an alibi for corporate welfare, but our current president’s brother, Neil Bush, did serve time). Consider another example. Timothy McVeigh was libertarian, and hated the national government. He blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on 19 April 1995—where else but in Oklahoma City? The event that had most spurred McVeigh’s wrath was the 1993 standoff between the Clinton Administration and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. David Koresh did something as American as apple pie: just like the puritans, just like the Mormons, he founded his own religion and moved west, where he supposed that no-one would bother him. And he protected his right to do so with guns: he was initially targeted by the federal government for illegal possession of firearms. On April 19, when the federal forces moved in after a long standoff, a fire was started and the Branch Davidian compound burned to the ground. As Americans, we live out our mythic dramas in terms supplied by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis: “the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers” (73).

In his encyclopedic cultural analysis of frontier mythologies, Richard Slotkin defines myths as “those stories drawn from a society’s history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain” (5). Further, he argues:

the Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries. According to this myth-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and “progressive” civilization. (10)

Perhaps the purest proponent of frontier mythologies is the film director John Ford, whose various westerns in different ways dramatize the emergence of America from the struggles between savagery and civilization. His 1939 Stagecoach defines both the iconography of the west (Ford filmed this and many subsequent westerns in Monument Valley, Utah) and the quintessential western character: Stagecoach introduces the John Wayne persona, a figure whose relentless and larger-than-life individualism—the embodiment of the frontiersman—is starkly defined (see Figure 2). Never after will Wayne play anything else apart from “John Wayne.” According to Slotkin, Wayne is the cinematic version of the classic frontiersman, the “man who knows Indians.” Borrowing from James Fennimore Cooper, Slotkin defines the archetype:

As the “man who knows Indians,” the frontier hero stands between the opposed worlds of savagery and civilization, acting sometimes as mediator or interpreter between races and cultures but more often as civilizations most effective instrument against savagery—a man who knows how to think and fight like an Indian, to turn their own methods against them. (16)

On the frontier, one must be somewhat savage in order to secure and defend civilization. Wayne is the successor to a long lineage of this figure (Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, in Cooper’s romances, Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, Huckleberry Finn, among others). In Turner’s terms, the frontiersman is both savage and civilized; he exists at the cusp of settlement. He has learned enough from Native American Indians to survive in the wilderness, and yet he puts his considerable skills to use in the service of civilization. What is key, however, is that the civilization he fights for will have no place for him; he is himself too primitive, too savage, to fit comfortably in the new social order. In cultural terms, as Smith has suggested in his genealogy of types, it is the tension between the civilized, genteel hero, who conforms to the conventions of the genteel romance and who represents civilization, and the potentially subversive character of the anarchic frontiersman, that underpins the history of the western genre. Once the frontier is closed, as Turner acknowledges, self-reliance becomes dangerous, and the frontiersman risks “pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds” (73). Leatherstocking, Crockett, and Finn continually light out for the territories, seek new frontiers, new adventures. There is no place for them in a newly civilized society.

And so too will Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, be sacrificed in Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence . This movie represents a Kennedy-esque tweaking of the mythic frontier heritage, and best dramatizes the tensions between an imagined communal consensus, overseen, administered, and protected by a benign federal power, and a menacing western libertarianism that must be subdued if the community is to survive. 3 At a primary level, this film, like almost every western ever produced in Hollywood, imagines a compromise between individualism and communalism (the violent sacrifice of the savage is usually the way in which the compromise is effected). Yet, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ironically confesses to the very limits of this vision of harmony. The mythic apparatus more or less collapses in on itself; and the film confesses that the myth is simply that: a lie that is trying to pass itself off as genuine history. “This is the West, sir,” Post announces, and “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Until that point, the press, as embodied in the figure of Dutton Peabody (Edmund O’Brien), had served as the purveyor of truth; here the third estate confesses itself to be in the service of mythic propaganda (see Figure 3). And not only does the film self-consciously confess that Jackson’s frontier historiography amounts to legend rather than “truth,” it exposes the very limits of the legend. That is, Ford’s 1962 work acknowledges that the frontier struggle between savagery and civilization no longer provides mythic sustenance for the America of the 1960s.

The film is beautifully structured around the theme of doubles, each symbolically aligned with either “savagery” or “civilization.” The story takes place somewhere in the American southwest when, in Turner’s terms, the “ranchers’ frontier” is being definitively replaced by “the farmers’ frontier.” The political backdrop is the struggle between the lawless cattle barons who wish the region to remain a territory (the wild west, which they rule by force) and the newly arrived population of smaller farmers (many Mexican or immigrant), who wish to fence in and cultivate the land and who seek to enter the federal Republic as a state. The cattle barons, in an irony that Dick Cheney might appreciate, represent corporate power, in an unholy alliance with lawless “savagery”; they are associated with guns, wilderness, brute power, the desert. Their hired goon is the aptly named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a character who is savagery personified (see Figure 4).

Valance, as his name implies, represents in Turner’s language the menace of unregulated liberty. In the town of Shinbone on the other side of the Pickaxe river the forces of civilization are arrayed: the town, the law, technological progress in the form of the railroad, representative democracy, a free press, racial tolerance, and so forth, all championed by the greenhorn from the east, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart). The stagecoach in which he arrives is held up by Liberty Valance. A gentleman, Stoddard comes to assist one of the women Valance is terrorizing, and he is viciously beaten and left for dead in the desert. His law books, representing both an orderly society and literacy, are the central targets of Valance’s savagery: “I’ll teach you the law of the west,” Valance screams sadistically.

Stoddard is rescued by Tom Doniphon (Wayne), who finds him lying prone in the desert and carries him to town. Doniphon is both savage and civilized, ruthless and gentlemanly. He can read, for example, but not very well. He owns cattle, but his ranch is small. He lives in the desert, but sympathizes with the townsfolk. He can handle a gun, but puts his gun in the service of the law. He brings a wild desert rose to his lover, Hallie (Vera Miles). “Ever seen a real rose, Hallie?” asks Stoddard (see Figure 5). Stoddard represents law and order. He wishes to arrest the outlaw Valance, not to kill him. He hangs his shingle out as a lawyer, but ends up a schoolteacher, giving lessons on the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights to the United States Constitution. Under Doniphon’s tutelage, Stoddard’s task is to “civilize” the savage territory.

Yet the rights to civilization must be secured through violence; even the new west must be won. As in many westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a drama of masculinity. If eastern civilization is too effeminate, then the west is too driven by testosterone. A compromise must be achieved, a social balance. Law and order can only be secured, according to the myth, when one is capable of violence. Civilization depends upon a small homeopathic injection of savagery. To civilize the west, then Ransom must take a page from Doniphon’s book and become a little bit savage himself. In other words, he must learn to “be a man.” The gender dynamics of the film are remarkable. Ransom Stoddard spends most of the film trying to stand erect. He is flaccid, passive, castrated at the beginning of the film and is challenged to reclaim his manhood. He must prove his right to paternal power in the new west. Early in the film he appears more or less in drag (an apron) and does women’s work (dishwashing and waiting tables). He is harassed, in a flirtatious, sexually aggressive manner, by Liberty Valance, and Tom Doniphon must come to save and defend his honor. Ultimately, Stoddard must learn to shoot, and be ready to kill Liberty Valance. Tom takes him to the desert, and instructs him in savagery. Not only does the lawyer learn to shoot, but he learns to cheat (see Figure 6). When Doniphon plays a trick on him, he tells Stoddard: “I don’t like cheating either, but that’s what you’ll have to do to beat Liberty Valance.” And Stoddard sucker-punches Doniphon.

With this act of violence, Stoddard has symbolically crossed the line into savagery. Because of this, he merits civilization. He has demonstrated his own capacity for violence and his own “lawlessness.” He has proven himself a man and thus secured his right to patriarchal privilege. With this act of violence, Ransom Stoddard becomes the new man in town; indeed he will earn the epithet “the man who shot Liberty Valance.” From here on in, the roles of Stewart and Wayne are reversed. Ransom Stoddard learns to stand on his own two feet, and Tom Doniphon is increasingly supine: Doniphon drinks and staggers, he falls over, he burns down the house he is building for his fiancée, and finally he dies. As Ransom Stoddard stands up, Tom Doniphon lies down. And Doniphon concedes power to Stoddard willingly and deliberately. The town hopes to elect Doniphon a delegate to the territorial assembly to decide the question of statehood; he persuades them instead to send Stoddard. He gives up his wooing of Hallie so that she might marry Stoddard, who has taught her to read, who civilizes her and takes her east to Washington DC when he becomes senator (see Figure 7). Doniphon’s ultimate act ceding patriarchal power to Stoddard is this: he compels Stoddard to take credit for killing Liberty Valance.

Valance beats and tortures the newspaperman, Dutton Peabody. Incensed, Ransom Stoddard picks up a gun and calls Valance out in the street for a showdown. Valance, drunk, teases Stoddard, toying with him. As Valance finally gets a bead on Stoddard, Stoddard lifts his own weapon and fires wildly. Valance falls and dies, apparently killed by Stoddard’s lucky shot. And so Ransom Stoddard becomes the town hero, “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” and rides his fame from political triumph to political triumph, eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the country. He returns from Washington years later to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon, who has died penniless and obscure. What actually happened, as the audience is shown in a flashback sequence, is that Tom Doniphon had saved his life. As Stoddard and Valance faced off, Doniphon, hidden in a back alley, had killed Valance with his rifle (see Figure 8). Doniphon is the man who shot Liberty Valance, but he ensures that no-one knows. This is the story Stoddard tells Maxwell Scott years later; this is the story Scott refuses to print. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

As I have mentioned, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance rewrites the myth from Kennedy’s perspective. Kennedy, who spoke famously of a “New Frontier” when he accepted the Democratic nomination in 1960, positioned himself as both military hero and statesman, both frontiersman and tax-collector. Like Ransom Stoddard, he could and would use violence to protect himself and society, but his primary commitments were not to himself but rather to community and nation. What the film points to is an ideological ideal in which excessive liberty can be purged and we can find ways to live in harmony. Dutton Peabody gives a nomination speech for Stoddard that is cribbed almost verbatim from the pages of Turner, even as it consciously echoes Kennedy’s rhetoric. African Americans are welcomed into the social compact in the film (in the character of Pompey (Woody Strode) as are immigrants and Mexican Americans (see Figure 9). The myth of the frontier argues that an effective community can only be sustained provided it maintains contact with frontier virtues (violence and self-reliance). This, in fact, is the very purpose of the Hollywood western during the Cold War years: to reconnect Americans mythically to the virtues of the frontier. One only has the right to community if one is willing to defend it, and, for Americans, our capacity to successfully defend ourselves has been tempered and proven in the frontier experience. In westerns, we return there, at least imaginatively, to rediscover our strengths and renew ourselves for the global struggle against international communism.

And yet, the film also insists, we never “had” the frontier experience, only its legend. Our experience is simply a legend, a lie. Ransom Stoddard had the courage to face the bad guy, but he did not have the skills to defeat him. Hollywood works its ideological magic by conflating virtue with individual power: the good guy always wins. It is not that “might makes right”; nor is it, simply, a question of right eventually making might, although this phenomenon is always appealed to. In Ford’s film, the people are encouraged to come together collectively to defeat the evil cattle barons, but they never do so. The hero has to face the bad guy alone. In Hollywood’s version of the frontier myth, rather, might and right become embodied in the person of the frontiersman. In most westerns, the hero has the courage to take on the bad guy and the capacity to defeat him because he has been forced, under frontier conditions, to evolve both virtue and skill: he has had to adapt or die, as Turner points out. And the frontier promotes both virtue and skill with guns in the figure of John Wayne. But in this film Wayne is sacrificed; his story is never told. All of western literature poses the same question: how might the community honorably bury its dead? Doniphon is buried dishonorably and unrecognized, however. The hero is someone willing to “die with his boots on”; significantly, in Liberty Valance , the undertaker has stolen Doniphon’s boots. The stand-in hero, Stoddard, is exposed as a little more than a good-hearted fraud. The idea that good will has prevailed is admitted to be merely a legend, a lie.

What the ending of the film exposes, ultimately, is a kind of ideological exhaustion: not only can the old myths no longer sustain us, we would be foolish to suppose that they ever could. The myth of the frontier is simply a hoax. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was made at the beginning of the 1960s, a decade that would see all myths of American virtue crumble. By 1963, Kennedy himself would fall victim to a kind of frontier violence in Dallas, Texas; the “Cowboys versus Indians” screenplay would look laughable in a Vietnam landscape; and My Lai would turn the encounter between savagery and civilization backwards, forwards, sideways, and down. The problem, as Slotkin sees it, is not simply that myth has supplanted history, but that the prevailing myth no longer works as myth. Speaking of the Reagan administration’s efforts to resuscitate a bankrupt Cold War version of frontier mythologies, Slotkin writes:

Myth is the language in which a society remembers its history, and the reification of nostalgia in the mass culture and politics of the 1980s is a falsification of memory. If a new mythology is to fulfill its cultural function, it will have to recognize and incorporate a new set of memories that more accurately reflect the material changes that have transformed American society over the last forty years. The historical adventure of our national development will have to be reconceived to incorporate our experience of defeat and disappointment, our acquired sense of limitation, as well as the fabulous hopefulness that has perennially transformed and energized our culture. (655)

Sadly, we have seen little sign of this. In the face of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, American public discourse has been saturated with the same tired myth of savagery versus civilization. The war in Afghanistan was packaged as a frontier drama: the savages were the Taliban and al-Qaeda; the Americans and their allies were civilized. We had to be a little savage, of course, to defeat the savages in guerilla warfare; in Afghanistan, we even had our half-wild Tom Doniphon character: the Northern Alliance. But such mythic language will seem shopworn and tired in the global struggle against Islamic and third-world discontent, a struggle that will have to be carried out in the real world rather than on the silver screen, genuinely, rather than mythically. Myth is available to all parties in these struggles, of course, and will everywhere be enlisted in the cause. As Douglas McReynolds has noted, “the Old western myth is still viable. […] What we see is not a new myth or a debunked one, but changing perspectives [and] increased self-consciousness in movie-making” (47). 4 But, however much such filmic celebrations of stoicism as Blackhawk Down (2001) or the very recent Jarhead (2005) protest to the contrary, Baghdad will never be Dodge City. What remains to be seen is whether it will be Shinbone, where a fraudulent and murderous victory over “evil” is served up in an accommodating press as the legend of American triumph.

1   See chapter eleven of Robert V. Hine and John Mack Fragher, The American West: A New Interpretive History, for an elegant synopsis of the safety valve approach to the west.

2   Obviously race is the other dominant factor in national elections as Republicans rather callously mobilize white fears of blacks for easy votes; even so, the connections between a cultural logic of racial dread and libertarian fantasies of individualism and self-reliance are easy enough to trace. The genius of Reaganism, for example, was his good-natured insistence that “welfare cheats” are manipulating and abusing the national bureaucracy of the welfare state; the “savagery” against which the individualist NRA member must contend is everywhere figured as the “criminal” (read black) element.

3   Both Stanley Corkin and Alan Nadel have offered readings of Liberty Valance that explicitly reference the Kennedy administration and the Cuban missile crisis. For Nadel, Ford’s film is an explicit example of “imperialist nostalgia,” which laments that masculine heroism and a clear national moral purpose have been consigned to the past. Bob Beatty and Mike Yawn document Ford’s cynicism about reviving such heroism (although they find the roots of Ford’s pessimism rather in his personal life than in politics). Mark Roche consequently sees the film as ambivalently documenting the historical transition from Vico’s age of “heroes” (Wayne/Doniphon) to an age of men (Stewart/Stoddard). Nadel’s political interrogation is perhaps the most subtle, emphasizing the film’s implicit if ambiguous endorsement of the values represented by Stoddard, who personifies Kennedy’s rather fraudulent and even postmodern politics. Stoddard, Nadel argues, is a figure of continuity between a “golden age” of the frontier and the present rather than rupture. “That continuity is based not on the triumph of law over brute force but rather by the co-optation of legal means by physical, of direct action by covert, of self-defense by murder, of speech by action. It is also the co-optation of event by legend, that is, by writing” (196-97). Finally, in an important essay on Dorothy Johnson and John Ford, Walter Metz has demonstrated how auteur theory, itself resonant with Cold War ideologies of masculine heroism, has served to erase the author of the short story on which Liberty Valence was based, adding yet another layer of irony to the film’s insistence on how mythic realities are textually constructed.

4   McReynolds is writing in 1998, prior to the September 11 attacks, about such works as the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989), City Slickers (1991), Unforgiven (1992) and others. While the genres of action-adventure thriller and the war film are flourishing, there have been curiously few “westerns” produced since the attacks.

Works Cited

Beatty, Bob, and Mike Yawn. “John Ford’s Vision of the Closing West: From Optimism to Cynicism.” Film & History 26.1 (1996): 6-19.

Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004.

Deutsch, Sarah. “Landscape of Enclaves: Race Relations in the West, 1865-1990.” Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . Ed. William Cronon, et al. New York: Norton, 1992. 110-31.

Giddens, Anthony . The Nation-State and Violenc e: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism vol. 2 . 3 vols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History . New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Ingrassia, Catherine. “‘I’m Not Kicking, I’m Talking’: Discursive Economies in the Western.” Film Criticism 20.3 (Spring 1996): 4-14.

Jefferson, Thomas. “Second Inaugural Address, 1805.” The Portable Thomas Jefferson . Ed. Merrill D. Peterson. New York: Viking Penguin, 1975. 316-21.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century.” The Great Plains: Writing Across the Disciplines . Ed. Brad Gambill, et al. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2001. 78-99.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . Dir, John Ford. Perf. John Wayne and James Stewart. Paramount, 1962.

McReynolds, Douglas J. “Alive and Well: Western Myth in Western Movies.” Literature/Film Quarterly 26:1 (1998): 46-52.

Metz, Walter. “Have You Written a Ford, Lately? Gender, Genre, and the Film Adaptations of Dorothy Johnson’s Western Literature.” Literature/Film Quarterly 31:3 (2003). 209-20.

Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Roche, Mark W., and Vittorio Hosle. “Vico’s Age of Heroes and the Age of Men in John Ford’s Film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance .” Clio 23 (Winter 1994): 131-48.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America . 1992. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.

Smith, Henry Nash. Vi rgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth . 1950. New York: Random, 1970.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1893.” Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner . Ed. John Mack Faragher. New York: Holt, 1994. 31-60.