The American Frontier:
History, Rhetoric, Concept
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture
(1900-present), Spring 2007, Volume 6, Issue 1
https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2007/gouge.htm
Catherine Gouge
West Virginia University
“Our governments will remain
virtuous . . . as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and
this will
be as long as there shall be lands in any part of America.
When they [the people] get piled upon another in large cities,
as
in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe, and go
to eating one another”
–Thomas Jefferson
in a letter to James Madison
(1787)
“Frontiers breed frontiers.”
–Archer Butler Hulbert
Frontiers: The Genius
of
American
Nationality (1929)
Just over a century ago, the
American Historical Association held its annual meeting in conjunction
with the 1893 Columbian Exposition in
Chicago. As the site of both Frederick Jackson Turner’s legendary speech, “The
Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and the celebration
of the Exposition in Chicago as the “horizontal” “White City” of “the
future,” this provocative affiliation was meaningful for many reasons
– most notably, for what each suggested about what it meant to be “American” in
1893. Turner’s speech at that World’s Fair not only lamented the
official closing of the American frontier by the Census Bureau in 1890 but
was obsessed with the role of the frontier in the formation of a distinctly “American” national
identity. According to Turner, the value of the landscape of the American frontier
West had been that the promise of it made “American” a meaningful
identity category. It had, according to him, “called out” “intellectual” traits
like “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness” (36).
Indeed, in Turner’s account, the frontier had been both a virtually unpopulated
place with agricultural promise (the “Garden of the World”) and
an idea of a space with infinite resources and the promise to yield a discrete
American national identity. On one level, then, Turner’s anxieties were
about the closing of a physical, locatable frontier place, the American West;
and on another level, his anxiety was about the closing of a frontier “of
mind” – a fear of loss of an imaginative space that could rhetorically
and conceptually structure American nationalism.
According to the Exposition, however, also considered distinctly “American” in
1893 were certain technological accomplishments – all of which were a
part of the later stages of Turner’s history of American sociopolitical
development and, therefore, contributors to the closing of the frontier. In
celebration
of this technological “progress,” the Colombian Exposition in Chicago
had more lighting at the time than any city in the country, hence the nickname
the “White City.” The concurrent celebrations of the “natural” promise
of the American frontier and of the technological drama of electrical lighting
were, furthermore, accompanied by a celebration of the “horizontal city” with
cityscapes like those in late-nineteenth century London and Paris where most
of the buildings were five stories or fewer and all were accessible on foot.
Such a quilting of commemorations is interesting because it appears to map
contradictory celebrations: distinctly “American” ecology, distinctly “American” technology,
and distinctly un-American, “old world” city planning. The horizontal
White City on the occasion of the 1893 World’s Fair was, however, a quite
fitting, albeit somewhat ironic, venue for Turner to deliver a speech lamenting
the official “closing” of the American frontier West, for as it
would turn out the pronouncement of one “American” frontier closed
would be the advent of many more proclaimed “open.”
I.
Shifting Notions of
the Frontier
and the Frontier Subject
The century following Turner’s address witnessed a shift from
Americans primarily pursuing frontier places on the North American continent (like the
American West) to naming and engaging with figurative frontier spaces as
well (like cyberspace and sociopolitical and intellectual spaces).
Attesting to
the popularity of Turner’s belief that our interaction with the originary
frontier is the bedrock of American exceptionalism, many in the twentieth century
were quite outspoken, if not defensive, about the allegedly ridiculous “closed-frontier
argument.” For example, in response to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s
pronouncements about the closing of the frontier in his “Commonwealth
Club” speech of 1932, Herbert Hoover identified Democrats’ closed-frontier “explanations
for the depression and their big-government-centered plans to alleviate it
as a lack of faith in capitalism and in America itself” (qtd. in Wrobel
136). The American frontier place in the West might have been said not to exist
any longer by the 1890 Census, but American frontier spaces were imagined to
be everywhere: “There are vast continents awaiting us of thought, of
research, of discovery, of industry, of human relations, potentially more prolific
of human comfort than even the Boundless West” (Hoover, qtd. in Wrobel
136). Perhaps because the concept of the frontier was so versatile and could
be so easily invoked to justify economic and political calls to action and
condemn those who were allegedly inactive, both liberals and conservatives
have preserved the notion of a frontierist foundation of American exceptionalism
and gone so far as to promise that “frontiers breed frontiers,” as
Archer Butler Hulbert wrote in Frontiers: The Genius of American Nationality (1929).
The frontier spirit is alive and well, Hulbert wrote, as Americans
continue to pioneer “intellectual, social, and political” frontiers
(246).
Anchoring his political platform to a presumed desire for frontierism,
John F. Kennedy spoke of the “New Frontier” during his
acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in 1960:
We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier
of the 1960s – a
frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier
of unfulfilled hopes and threats. . .The new Frontier is here
whether we seek it or not.
Beyond are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems
of peace and war,
unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions
of poverty and surplus . . . [which] demand invention, innovation,
imagination, decision.
I am asking you to be pioneers on the New Frontier. (qtd. in
Limerick 81)
Kennedy uses a metaphoric proliferation here
to incite the American public to see their roles in the political
activity of the nation in frontierist
terms. In some ways, this works against the postulates Hoover
voices since Hoover
was using the rhetoric of the frontier to “comfort” the nation
by emphasizing the abundance of resources (intellectual and industrial) in
figurative frontiers. Kennedy’s proclamation, however, became a typical
application of frontierist thinking and rhetoric for twentieth-century Americans;
and over the course of the twentieth-century, many frontiers, both physical
and figurative, were located and claimed by American culture: Antarctica, Mars,
cyberspace, Velcro and Teflon (and a myriad other scientific and technological
advances). With this proliferation came a corresponding shift from anxieties
about colonizing the American frontier West to anxieties about exploring and
colonizing other loosely defined “spaces” as “frontiers.” In
fact, because so many different “spaces” have been labeled frontiers,
defining “frontier” has become quite a challenging enterprise.
Indeed, as Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, “elasticity and confused
weaving formed the originary frontier’s] one constant characteristic” (77).
Essentially, the shift has been from a preoccupation with the
originary American frontier to often geographically unlocatable
figurative frontiers, defined
not as places but as dynamic socioeconomic and political spaces.
This shift emphasizes the value of the concept of the frontier
to popular notions of American
exceptionalism and, thus, to the boundaries of American citizenship.
Turner’s 1893 speech at the Exposition was one of the earliest markers
of this shifting notion of the frontier. Consequently, Turner’s claim
that the frontier created “Americans” had a strong impact on twentieth-century
American historical debates which for a long time meant that frontier historians
had to position themselves in relation to Turner’s ideas. Even so, the
actual speech itself at the Exposition did not receive much of a response from
the public who attended. Historian Robert Kyff notes that “the paper
Turner read that warm July evening. . .received] only a lukewarm reception” from
those present (52). In contrast to the architectural and technological displays,
members of Turner’s audience may have found the closed-frontier narrative
a little depressing. Since Thomas More’s Utopia (1516),
the frontier had been supposed to offer Americans the promise
of unlimited resources. What
the American public and early twentieth-century historians,
however, would shortly after find so apropos about Turner’s lament was, in fact, its
potential answer to the nation’s economic and sociopolitical anxieties
and, consequently, to their doubts about national identity. Kyff writes that
Turner’s ideas
so captured the imagination of the American people. . .[because
they] suited perfectly the temperament of the 1890s. The rapid
rise of industrialism,
immigration, and urbanization, the greed and corruption of
the Gilded Age, the economic
depression of 1893, and farmers’ revolts and labor
unrest such as the Homestead and Pullman strikes, had created
a widespread feeling of anxiety
in the nation, triggering a nostalgic longing for the agrarian
past. (57)
Precisely because of this cultural climate,
in fact, the American public might have found something consoling
in Turner’s
talk. By deriving the American “spirit” from experiences with
the frontier, Turner implied the potential for that spirit to survive – if
future
frontiers could be located or even, as the technological accomplishments
displayed at the fair suggested, created. Indeed, the imagination of the
American people
would, for the most part, reconfigure the American frontier as Turner had
– as an utopian ideal of unlimited resources, a safety-valve for socioeconomic
pressures.
Because the originary American frontier of Turner’s speech had been
declared officially closed at the end of the nineteenth century, frontier
narratives
of the twentieth century more explicitly illustrated the role of the imagination
in the creation of frontier spaces and the extension of the frontier concept
to other, often figurative, frontierist spaces. Thus, in spite of the fact
that the frontier West was declared “closed” by the Census Bureau
for having more than two people per square mile, the significance of mobilizing
frontier ventures as a way of defining American nationalism would be deeply
felt by the public and reenacted in the nation’s literary, scientific,
technological, political, and social projects throughout the twentieth century.
What, then, could have been a more fitting site for Turner’s speech
than a “city of the future,” a monument to technological innovation
that suggested that Americans could participate in future figurative frontiers?
What would have been more apropos for defining America’s
future, its break from the past, than a site which included
an imperial appropriation
of the European horizontal city bordered by a few neoclassical
domes and covered
in lights in such excess that, as an 1886 article in the Journal of the
Franklin Institute imagined, “the crude buildings hurriedly erected
without any attempts at finish for a temporary purpose, were transformed
into a temple
of light, which at the first glimpse evoked expressions of delight from every
beholder” (Nye 121)?
In effect, the Exposition proved to be the perfect corollary
to Turner’s
anxiety. Rather than demonstrating that this “story of the West [would]
end with progress killing its parents” (White 46), the Columbian Exposition
countered Turner’s concern about the future of America by unveiling
that future. Throwing into relief Turner’s and his contemporaries’ uneasiness
in the aftermath of a deep economic depression, the Exposition insinuated
through such a display that, indeed, there would be future frontiers. It
suggested,
in fact, that the future would be synonymous with “progressing” in
and exploring what would later be called technological and scientific “frontiers.” Turner’s
address accompanied by the Exposition thus functioned as a call for figurative
frontiers, future “open road[s]” where “the game [could]
be played according to the rules. . .no artificial stifling of equality of
opportunity, no closed doors to the able, no stopping the free game before
it was played to the end” (Turner 342). In some ways, the legacy of
this “free
game” would be, as David Nye notes in American Technological Sublime (1996),
an “historical narrative . . .emerging with the technological
sublime: from discovery to conquest, the explorer giving way to the engineer” (83).
Instead of marking the end of the American frontier, then, Turner’s
speech at the 1893 World’s Fair proved to be one of America’s
foundational frontier narratives in which he implicitly asked, “Now
where do we go?” – an
anxiety John Steinbeck’s “Leader of the People” echoes
in 1938 when an old homesteader in the story fears that the “westering” process
is over and there is “no place left to go.”
Nearly thirty years after the 1893 Exposition, Turner himself pointed readers
of The Frontier in American History (1920) toward
future figurative frontier spaces: “In place of old frontiers of wilderness,” he wrote, “there
are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of the
race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored” (300).
And just a year after the publication of Steinbeck’s short story, the
1939 American public was treated to a glimpse of “future” technological
frontiers at the World’s Fair in New York with the theme “Building
the World of Tomorrow with the Tools of Today” which included pavilions
run by Ford, GM, AT&T, General Electric, Chrysler, and B.F. Goodrich. Similar
to frontier-seeking Americans, Nye notes that at the Fair in New York “visitors
were active rather than passive, they inhabited the future rather than the
present, and they could identify with consumption rather than attempt to understand
production” (215). Nye’s account emphasizes the way in which individuals
attending the 1939 World’s Fair (and the post-Fordist American public
generally speaking) were constructed as consumers and identifies the progression
of the shift in the ways in which the “productive” American
citizen was defined in relation to future frontiers.
Indeed, as American culture made the transition from a
pre-industrial production economy to a post-industrial
consumerist one,
there was a corresponding shift
in emphasis in constructions of the frontier subject so
that by the end of the twentieth century, an American frontier
settler is no longer defined
by a “creative” or “productive” relationship to the frontier.
Still primarily defined as male and white, the frontier subject in the post-originary
frontier period of American history is now also one who consumes the products
of figurative frontier ventures (electrical lighting, cars, Velcro, computers).
Perhaps to facilitate such an identification, the New York World’s Fair
situated consumable objects in a landscape of consumption. Nye argues that
such landscapes were a “detailed response” to
the Great Depression. He writes that
the successful exhibits [like Ford’s ‘Road of Tomorrow’]
did not address these concerns [about jobs, money, success] directly; rather,
they immersed visitors in what Victor Turner calls a liminal state. . .And
who but the corporations took the role of the ritual elders in making possible
such a reassuring future, in exchange for submission? (215)
Interestingly, Victor Turner’s “liminal state” shares many
frontierist qualities and is characterized by “a relatively undifferentiated
. . . community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together
to the general authority of the ritual elders,” an allegedly transitional
or interstitial position (91).
Individuals at the 1939 World’s Fair, even more so than those at the
1893 Fair, were thus encouraged to see their potential roles in pursuing
future frontiers of technological developments, “unwon fields of science” (Kennedy),
and “better social domains” (Kennedy) in consumerist terms: follow
the corporate "elders" (Victor Turner) into
a consumerist future and your employment and cash-flow
concerns will be magically resolved.
The notion of participating in frontier ventures as a
consumer was not, of course, an entirely new concept
in 1939. Richard Hakluyt’s “Discourse
of Western Planting” (1584) and other colonial promotional literature,
for example, had presented America as a land from which resources could be
extracted and consumed. However, the post-originary frontier period in America
witnessed a resurgence in promotional texts which identified the frontier
subject primarily with “his” function as a consumer – a
phenomenon attributable to the national desire to “open” figurative
frontiers. Anchoring figurative frontier ventures to consumerism makes a
great deal
of sense in
a post-Fordist economy since it serves both the American nation-states’ need
to preserve a notion of American exceptionalism and industry’s need
to sustain itself through promoting consumption. Increasingly throughout
the twentieth
century, America’s figurative frontier subjects would thus continue
to be defined as consumers of man-made resources rather than “natural” ones.
Furthermore, over the course of the century, language based on a production
model (“invent, build, and put to work”) would increasingly be
transposed onto discussions about social “spaces,” frequently
in late capitalism to encourage the public to identify as consumers of the
products
of “new” sociopolitical technologies, not
producers.
Lewis Corey argued in The Decline of American Capitalism (1934)
that the “‘expansion
of the frontier’ had ensured the growth of capitalism in America, and
the industrial boom of the 1920s had sustained its growth” (qtd. in
Wrobel 139). Indeed, supporting the expansion of capitalism, a great many
twentieth-century
texts (artistic, historical, political, etc.) have further defined and named
frontiers for the American public in consumerist terms. The American media
have sold everything from outer space to cyberspace to Velcro to pizza delivery
services as vehicles for participating in a national, collective frontier
venture, a way of allegedly increasing our power both as individuals and
as citizens
of an increasing powerful and wealthy, capitalist American nation-state.
These pronouncements of literal and figurative frontier ventures work in
the service
of an ideology of frontierism which insists that we must continue to be consumerist
frontier subjects – and we therefore must continue to name and pursue
various frontiers in science, technology, physical spaces, and bodily spaces
– or cease to be “American.”
Indeed, late-twentieth century narratives of travel through
outer and cyberspaces use the discourse of exploration and
empire building to invoke romantic Turnerian
associations of exploring and settling the American frontier
West and, ultimately, rewrite what exploration and empire-building
are; and some narratives which
work to expand the boundaries of American citizenship
to create a space for excluded minority groups do so by anchoring
the identity category to a frontierist
fiction. Such narratives emphasize, as Turner’s did over a century before,
the displacement of the “American dream” of unlimited resources
to a space that is always just beyond, emphasizing the ways in which frontiers
regulate a psychic national identity which structures itself through a frontierist
episteme. Feeding this national self-regard, Ronald Reagan proclaimed at an
Independence Day celebration in 1982 that the “conquest of new frontiers
is a crucial part of our national character” (qtd. in Limerick 84). To
put it simply, as inheritors of this investment in the power of the frontier,
to be “American” in the late-twentieth century, or so the logic
goes, we need frontiers. Consequently, even the rhetoric of twentieth-century
American narratives of “new” frontier spaces
imports an ideology of the originary American frontier
which is predicated on the assumption that
exploring and colonizing frontier spaces has been integral
to the formation of a distinctly American national identity.
II.
Histories of the Frontier
Historical accounts of the originary frontier theorize, either
explicitly or implicitly, Americans’ relationship to the land in the American frontier
West and other so-called frontier spaces. These theories support Turner’s
notion that Americans’ collective relationship to frontier spaces is
essential to an understanding of what the identity category “American” signifies.
For the most part, the representations fall into one or more of the following
categories: frontier as a safety-valve; frontier as a site of closeness and
conflict; and frontier as a space of unlimited, unexploited resources. This
is not to say, however, that the ideas of one frontier scholar might not fall
into more than one category; nor do I mean to suggest that they ideas of any
one of them fit neatly into one category that I have listed. My catalogue is
not meant to be exhaustive nor evaluate presentist concerns. Such a catalogue
simply allows us to examine the range of responses to the originary “American” frontier
in the last century so that we can better understand
the ideological force of the concept of the frontier
on turn-of-the-twentieth century narratives
of American national identity.
A. Frontier as Safety-Valve
In many ways Frederick Jackson Turner’s ideas can be traced to Jeffersonian
agrarianism. In fact, at the time of Turner’s speech at the Exposition,
he was certainly not the first to narrate the transformative power of the “American” landscape
to produce a national identity – serving as an escape from the cluttered “old
world,” purifying and, therefore, transforming European colonists.
Over a century before Turner’s speech, Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782)
proclaimed that the European colonist “leaves
behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners. . .[and becomes] a new
man who acts upon new principles. . . .the simple cultivation of the earth
purifies
them” (7). Crevecoeur demonstrates an intense investment in the transformative
powers of the land. In fact, Leo Marx notes that “without
this sense of landscape as a cardinal metaphor of
value, the Letters could not have
been written” (110). However, the ultimate
value of the frontier for Crevecoeur lay in its function
as a safety-valve for the non-frontier,
more heavily-populated
eastern portions of the United States and Europe.
Likewise, Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the purifying American landscape
also anticipates over-population concerns that Turner would find to be of critical
importance at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a letter to James Madison
in 1787, Jefferson insisted that American “governments” would “remain
virtuous . . . as long as they are chiefly agricultural” (qtd. in Wrobel
6). This virtue, he further argued, was dependent on the free lands which would
not last forever. And “when they [the people] get piled upon another
in large cities, as in Europe,” Jefferson wrote, “they will become
corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another.” The cannibalistic
outcome of the loss of free lands suggests, ironically, that the end result
of a “civilizing” process is “savagery,” and that because
resources in a civilized territory are so scarce, a Hobbesian war of all against
all ensues. It suggests, furthermore, that the closeness and dense population
of an urban landscape may remain relatively “civil” as long as
there is an accessible open space to relieve the pressure of so many people.
Also equating a “virtuous” or “civil condition” with
open space, Hegel wrote of America in the early 1820s that “the continuation
of the existing civil condition there is guaranteed . . . .[until] the immeasurable
space which that country presents to its inhabitants shall have been occupied” (85-87).
Franklin D. Roosevelt, who became familiar with Turner’s ideas while
at Harvard, lamented in a Commonwealth address in 1932 that “our last
frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free
land. . . . There is no safety-valve in the form of a Western Prairie to which
those thrown out of work by Eastern machines can go for a new start” (qtd.
in Jacobs 111). This lament was, as I noted earlier,
part of his explanation for the Great Depression.
Responding to the nature/civilization dichotomy such
accounts imply, Henry Nash Smith writes that “the capital difficulty of the American agrarian
tradition is that it accepted the paired but contradictory ideas of nature
and civilization as a general principle of historical and social interpretation” (260).
Significantly, this general principle is at the heart of the many romanticized
images of the frontier which elide the sociopolitical and economic contradictions
of frontier ventures and liberal democracy. Even Turner felt some responsibility
to acknowledge these contradictions, and so while he frequently noted the transformative
power of an agrarian wilderness in what he called the “Middle West” of
Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, he also lamented the consequences
of “destructive competition” (among “wheat states,” for
example), which Crevecoeur and Jefferson did not
live to see.
Indeed, while Turner may have been more invested
in a “stable-agricultural” type
of frontier place than an “unstable-extractive” one,
as Michael Malone argues in Historians and the American West (1983),
for the most part Turner posited that the virtually
utopian promise of the frontier was that it had been
a space
with unlimited intellectual resources characterized
by a “healthy” sense
of competition:
To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking
characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness
and inquistitiveness;
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 evil, and
withal that bouyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these
are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because
of the existence of the
frontier. (36)
Turner here posits a causative logic. He suggests
that for engaging in such a space of unlimited intellectual resources,
Americans are rewarded with
intellectual traits such as “acuteness and inquisitiveness,” “bouyancy
and exuberance.” Furthermore, such rewards can be “called out,” significantly
for Turner’s thesis, merely because of the “existence of the
frontier” “elsewhere.” Indeed,
simply having a frontier space “there” – “somewhere,” or
believing that it is – was clearly central to Turner’s sense
of the creation of an American national identity and history. Exploring and
settling
the American
frontier wilderness was certainly not for everyone (including Turner, many
historians note), but the result of the efforts of an “adventurous” minority
individually realizing their identities as “pioneers,” Turner
claims, is a nation collectively solidifying its identity as “practical” and “inventive” with
a paradoxically “dominant individualism, working for good and evil” and
a “masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but
powerful to effect great ends.” According to Turner’s argument,
then, which considered only white male American colonists as frontier protagonists,
the frontier
space in the West functioned comprehensively in relation to the non-frontier
space in North America – it allowed for
the formation of a distinctly American national
identity.
While Turner argued that the process of Americanization
might be “called
out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier,” he had claimed
that the frontier “line” marks the furthest advance of this process.
Indeed, he posited that “the frontier is the line of most rapid and
effective Americanization” (3-4). At the same time, however, the power
of the frontier West to signify “American,” according to this
thesis, must be evoked through the European colonists’ interaction
with it. “Moving westward,” Turner
writes, “the frontier became more and more American” (4). National
coherence, according to Turner’s foundational frontier narrative, is
thus predicated both on the promise of “free land” and on the
process of that land mastering and being mastered by “dominant individuals.” This
anticipates Edward Soja’s assertion nearly a century later that “social
life must be seen as both space-forming and space contingent, a producer
and product of spatiality” (Postmodern Geographies 129).
Furthermore, “Spaces,
times, and places are relationally defined by processes,” David Harvey
writes, “they are contingent upon the attributes of processes that
simultaneously define and shape what is customarily referred to as ‘environment’” (Justice 263).
The dynamic relationship between the process
of acculturation and “environment” that
Harvey describes expands Turner’s representation of the interrelationship
between the “American” landscape and “American” identity
to include time and space, implying a tension between space and place. The
ideology of the originary frontier proposes, then, that just as the frontier
makes inhabitants
of the United States “American” we make the frontier American
through our interaction with it in an historically specific context – one
which Turner
surprisingly repressed.
In arguing for the role of “frontier conditions” (37) in the creation
of a certain kind of democratic frontier subject which he called “American,” Turner
chronicles the development of that subject formation and credits this process
with the formation of our allegedly democratic political ideals and sense of
American exceptionalism. To this end, he writes that “this at least is
clear: American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of
the American people in dealing with the West” (266). In this way, he develops
a frontierist theory which posits that the influence of the existence of “free” land
extends to a political economy and acknowledges
a crucial socio-spatial dialectic. As Harvey
writes,
The Jeffersonian land system, with its repetitive mathematical grid that
still dominates the landscape of the United States, sought the rational partitioning
of space so as to promote the formation of an agrarian democracy. In practice
this proved admirable for capitalist appropriation of and speculation in
space,
subverting Jefferson’s aims, but it also demonstrates how a particular
definition of objective social space facilitated the rise of a new kind of social
order. (Justice 240)
Thus, while Turner argued that “so long as free land exists, the opportunity
for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power” (32),
he might as well have said, "So long as a frontier exists for appropriation
and speculations," both literal and figurative. Indeed, the frontierist
socio-spatial dialectic which Turner articulates did “facilitate the
rise of a new kind of social order.” It
assisted the growth of capitalism in the
United States. This romantic narrative of
a frontierist socio-spatial
dialectic
is, in fact, advanced by many post-originary
American frontier narratives which attempt
to naturalize the contradictions of the economic
and political
imperatives
of liberal democracy.
Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) – the first widely-recognized
revisionist history of frontier narratives – identifies many other
inconsistencies in Turner’s
thesis, some attributable to the mythic quality of his narrative. This fictional
and mythic narrative elided a number of American “realities” which
often resulted in socioeconomic conflict. Although in Smith’s version
of American Studies identifying something as a myth does not necessarily
connote
disapprobation, with regard to Turner the designation is not a positive one.
Smith writes that in Turner’s narrative of the West, “We have
been transferred from the plane of the economist’s abstractions to
a plane of metaphor, even of myth – for the American forest has become
an enchanted wood” (253). Furthermore, Smith recognizes,
The image of this vast and constantly growing agricultural society in the
interior of the continent became one of the dominant symbols of nineteenth-century
America – a
collective representation, a poetic idea (as Tocqueville noted in the early
1830s) that defined the promise of American life. (123)
While this Turnerian myth, with roots in an
eighteenth-century Jeffersonian agrarian tradition, proposes
that colonists could, indeed should, maintain
a harmonious
union with the land, Smith points out
the ways in which Turner’s representation
did more to compromise our union with the land than it did to enable it. According
to Smith, Turner’s “Myth of the Garden” negatively
affected farming legislation so that
when applied to the arid trans-Mississippi,
the myth
of a fertile garden prevented much-needed
reform of the public land system. Furthermore,
Smith writes,
Agrarian theory encouraged men to ignore the industrial revolution . . .
. The covert distrust of the city and of everything connected with industry
that
is implicit in the myth of the garden has impeded cooperation between farmers
and
factory workers in more than one crisis of our history (259).
Ultimately, Smith asserts an interest in agrarian
ideals while recognizing, more explicitly than Turner, the real
effects of the imagination on land
value. Smith’s
analysis, in fact, draws our attention to the importance of considering the
ways in which the often romantic Turnerian version of the role of the frontier
minimizes
significant realities of frontier places – people,
climate, and resources.
Wilbur Jacobs, in a study of the
influence of Turner’s ideas in the twentieth
century, observes that Turner was terribly concerned with Malthus’ predictions
of over-population and notes that Turner “heavily marked” his copy
of Warren S. Thompson’s conclusion
in Population: A Study in Malthusianism (1915)
that “Malthus was essentially correct.” In Turner’s
1903 essay, “Contributions of the West to Democracy,” he further
demonstrated that his concerns about the closing of the frontier were, in large
part, concerns about the influence of high-density population on sociopolitical
conditions and the seriousness of a loss of “free
land.”
Indeed, as much as Turner proclaimed
the power of the wilderness to
transform and purify, his motivation
for doing
so may have been, in effect, more
influenced by Social Darwinism
and Malthusian concerns about over-population
than Jeffersonian
agrarian ideals. Like his predecessors,
Turner understood one of the primary
benefits of “free land” to be its function as a safety valve for
over-population in eastern portions of the continent. Perhaps in response to
the national anxiety surrounding the official closing of the frontier, in 1890
and 1893 alone, seventeen million acres of Native American land was reallocated
by the U.S. government, taken away from the Sioux and Cherokee and made available
for U.S. settlement. The massacre, or “battle,” of Wounded Knee,
which followed the “repossession” of eleven million acres of South
Dakota land from the Sioux, effectively ended Native American resistance to U.S.
settlement in North America. One strategy used by Turner to imply that the public
viewed the frontier West as a free space was to refer to Native Americans only
in passing as the “Indian question” (9) and, thus, effectively elide
those “Americans” who
had already been inhabiting various
portions of the continent when
Europeans arrived to colonize it.
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 the gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier.
.
. . The free lands are gone. (qtd. in Jacobs 111)
As Turner’s lament acknowledges, the alleged “free lands” of
the frontier were imagined by many to be a route of “escape” from
sociopolitical and economic “pressures” created
by high-density population. This
ideology of escapism persists
today in many popular narratives
as one of
the primary motivations for desiring
access to both figurative and
literal frontier spaces.
B. Frontier as a Site of Closeness and Conflict
In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream (1989),
a collection of essays about the frontier in American literature,
David Mogen defines the
American
frontier West as the “conflict between an Old and New world.” In
the same collection, Mark Busby writes of the frontier as “a cluster
of images and values that grew out of confrontation.” Similarly, when
Turner defines the frontier early in his speech as “the meeting point
between savagery and civilization” (3), he suggests that characterizing
the frontier is not quite as simple as idealizing the immense space and ecological
conditions
of the frontier and assigning value to the “free lands.” In fact,
as many revisionist projects have documented, this “meeting point” involved
much more than a “meeting” of different cultures, and it was
hardly as simple as marking a “line of progress,” as Turner had
also suggested. Beginning as early as the 1920s, revisionist historians have
responded to and
critiqued Turner’s ideas explicitly to explore the West as a political
and ecological space. While Turner was definitely interested in the promise
of the frontier to effect great sociopolitical and economic change “back
East,” he
was relatively uninterested in
the complex and often troubling
sociopolitical conditions of
the frontier space in the West.
For example, as I discussed
earlier, he seemed relatively
untroubled by rhetorically and
imaginatively containing
Native Americans and African
American pioneers, referring
to them only in passing and infrequently.
In
the second half of the
twentieth-century, historians of the West became increasingly more
interested in examining the conflict
and power imbalance in
the Western region. In 1962 Jack Forbes began a campaign
to define
the frontier as “an inter-group contact situation,” “an
instance of dynamic interaction between human beings,” involving “such
processes as accumulation, assimilation, miscegenation, race prejudice,
conquest, imperialism,
and colonization” (207, 205). Annette Kolodny’s The Lay
of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975)
responds
indirectly to this call
as well as to Smith’s call for alternate
ways of understanding our relationship to the land by examining the conflicting
images
of a feminized landscape in American texts of the sixteenth, seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Kolodny identifies that most characterizations
of the
West either posit it as an eroticized “virgin land” or as a
regressively desired “maternal land.” Neither
is an appropriate representation
of our relationship to
this land, according to
Kolodny,
since both incite
aggressive and, therefore,
unacceptable desires.
While she explicitly discusses
Turner’s ideas only
briefly, Kolodny notes
that The Frontier in American History is
guilty of the same feminizing
tendencies she identifies
in other frontier literature.
In “Contributions to American
Democracy,” she notes that Turner narrativizes the masculine pioneer’s
relationship to his virgin/mother land as such:
European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American
wilderness,
and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new
way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation
to the
conditions of the New World, to the creation of new institutions to meet
new needs; and ever as society on her eastern border grew to resemble the
Old World
in its social forms and its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in
the ideals of democracy, she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies
in her most distant domains with her material treasures and with the enobling
influence
that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from hewing out
a
home,
making a school and a church, and creating a higher future for his family,
furnished to the pioneer. (emphasis mine; 267)
According to Kolodny, Turner’s representation of a feminized virgin
landscape – always and already beyond our grasp – calls forth
an aggressive and possessive desire
which is unrealizable and will, therefore, according to Kolodny, lead to
a more general desire to master the feminine. While such descriptions were
common in
depictions of land other than North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries,
what Americans need, Kolodny asserts, quoting Richard Hakluyt, is “a
radically new symbolic mode for relating to [the frontier,] ‘the
fairest, frutefullest, and pleasauntest [land] of all the worlde’” (148).
Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology
of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973)
further and forcefully
recognizes the violence
in the American frontier
mythology. He acknowledges
that early colonists
conceived of America
as a land of opportunity
with regenerative powers – politically,
spiritually, economically. But, he argues, “the means to that regeneration
ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through
violence became
the structuring metaphor of the American experience” (5). Similarly,
Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken
Past of the American West (1987)
focuses more on the
Native American/ white
conflict in the West
and posits the frontier
West as a place, not
a process as she says
Turner had
argued. Limerick explicitly
constructs the conflict
as a racial conflict
(Native American
vs. white) rather than
as a conflict of national
identity (the various
Native American national
identities vs. European).
She writes that “if
Hollywood wanted to capture the emotional center of Western history, its
movies would be
about real estate” (54). She further asserts that this particular
real estate, however, is “symbolic of a source of disunion, of bi-racial
conflict between whites and Indians” (54).
Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
not only defines the
frontier as “borderlands” characterized
by closeness and conflict,
but notes that this
conflict and confrontation
witnessed by the
frontier was economic
as well as cultural.
Indeed, Anzaldua draws
our attention to the
economic and political
contradictions of liberal
democracy which narratives
of frontiers often attempt to naturalize. She writes that
the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge
each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory,
where under,
lower, middle and upper-classes touch, where the space between two individuals
shrinks with intimacy. . . .Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent
features of this landscape. (19)
Anzaldua’s representation emphasizes a frontier characterized by “intimacy” and
suggests that we could name any space of such socio-economic confrontation
a “borderland” or
frontier. Indeed, the “hatred, anger and exploitation” of
the frontier dynamic
remain some of
the most troubling
effects of frontier
ideology and experience
in late-twentieth
century frontier
spaces.
C. Frontier
as a Space with Unlimited, Unexploited Resources
While the terms of the debate have shifted somewhat over the last 100 years
and while there has been much disagreement over the characteristics and
problematics of frontier economics, the imagined economic potential of
frontier spaces
has long been identified as a primary motivation for frontier exploration.
In 1959
Richard Wade argued for the significance of urban economics on the frontier
in
Urban Frontiers, a book that Zane Miller’s introduction
calls “the
most devastating critique of Turner yet published” (xviii) – in
spite of the fact that Wade considered himself a Turnerian historian and
initially
expected
his project to confirm Turner’s ideas. According to Wade, cities
did not follow the settlement process in the frontier as Turner had argued.
He concludes
that St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Columbus were cities which
for many years lay far beyond the line of western settlement, and maintains
that this
omission from western histories is a serious one because it underestimated
the settlers’ ability to master their own economic fates. This debate
played out in interesting ways with the construction of the transcontinental
railway
in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some argued that the rail should
be laid to make the Western farmers “count” from a mercantilist
point of view; others argued that the settlers should be allowed to create
a need for the railway
first. “Turner’s frontier,” William
Cronon argues in Nature’s
Metropolis (1991), “far from being an isolated rural society, was
in fact the expanding edge of the boosters’ urban empire . . . .
Frontier and metropolis turn out to be two sides of the same coin” (51).
The economic intimacy
between frontier
and metropolis
that Cronon notes
is implicit in
Turner’s assertion that the frontier was most valuable
precisely at the moment when it shifts from a “savage” state
– as the untamed, unexploited wilderness – to a “civilized” state
– economically productive, and connected, communities. This liminal
state is interestingly
a virtually pre-capitalist
state which precedes the permanent settlements and connecting technologies.
Furthermore, this construction recognizes the bedrock motivation for all
colonial ventures
which is, of course, resource extraction for the benefit of consumers in
the non-frontier. While James Folsom asserts that the frontier is “a
land of heart’s desire, untainted by the commercial values of the
present,” many
late-twentieth
century historians
have argued just
the opposite. Frontier
economics, in fact,
only promised to
be an ideal economy
of equality; for
many, opportunity
was hardly equal.
Even for European
Americans, as Gregory
Nobles notes, “Most
people came poor and stayed poor. By almost all accounts, living conditions
in settlements would quickly disabuse anyone of the notion that the early
frontier
was a land of opportunity” (107). Especially for minority groups
(like the Chinese) whose labor was often exploited, the market was biased
– though it
should be noted
that this exploitation was a consequence of sociopolitical prejudice, not
because capitalism recognized the distinctive characteristics
of laborers.
Cronon details
the ways in which,
before the end
of the nineteenth
century and the “ascendancy of rail transportation, the frontier economy
was hardly ideal due to the inability of merchants and consumers to negotiate
supply and
demand in a timely fashion” (319). Quite often, Cronon notes, “demand
for goods was communicated through word of mouth and only as quickly as
the river transport or horse could carry the person with the information” (320).
He includes communication between a storekeeper in Illinois and a merchant
in Iowa: “We have a great demand for Eggs and hear,” the storekeeper
wrote, “there are plenty of them in your place, and request you,
to send us 5 or 6 Barrels of them immediately. . . .” (qtd. in Cronon
320). Such a request could be quite profitable for the Iowa merchant, but
because of this
distance and the slow pace of communication, there was a lot of risk involved
in such a transaction. Someone else might fill the order first, or the
eggs could be damaged while being transported. “All too often,” Cronon
writes, “a
merchant went to the expense to send goods in the direction of a recent
rumor, only to find the market glutted by the time they arrived” (320).
The winter months
presented even
greater challenges
for such exchanges
since transporting
goods became increasingly
difficult as snow
and other inclement
weather interfered.
In most western
locales, resource
extraction, furthermore,
was hardly economically
profitable until
the rail system
provided both the
means for transport
and for storing
large quantities
of goods. Echoing
Richard Wade’s
argument for the paradoxically intimate relationship between cities and
the allegedly “rural” frontier,
Cronon records the ways in which “city and country formed a single
commercial system, a single process of rural settlement and metropolitan
economic growth” (47).
Resource extraction, therefore, while certainly the primary motivation
for most colonial ventures, could not have been economically viable on
this continent
without the communication and transportation technologies – associated
with the closing of the frontier and often located in the realm of figurative
frontiers
in the years since the official closing of the originary frontier West
– which linked the rural frontier with urban industrial society.
Indeed, resource
extraction could not have been possible without the labor of those (the
Chinese and Irish)
who built the transcontinental railway. Furthermore, as Nye writes, “the
rugged western landscape and the transcontinental railroad were complementary
forms of the sublime that dramatized an unfolding national destiny” (76).
This unfolding
national destiny
would include,
significantly,
the disenfranchisement
of the Chinese
laborers who were
fundamental to
the construction
of the transcontinental
railroad. American
exceptionalism
often minimizes
the
crises of disenfranchisement
in an attempt to consolidate an allegedly stable, white default
citizenship.
Varying accounts of the originary American frontier
West demonstrate that what Turner and others have suggested is
the “inherent” value
of “American” frontiers – to
provide us with real (agricultural) and imaginary (intellectual) resources
– is a mutable and unquantifiable value. As the arguments of the
historians I document illustrate, there is a tension that emerges more
explicitly
in twentieth-century
dialogue about the originary American frontier between understanding
it to be a locatable place (characterized by “openness” and
resources) and understanding it to be a dynamic space (characterized
by instability and human
intervention). For this reason, these analyses beg an examination of
the constitution of post-originary frontiers – for such accounts
illustrate, among other things,
that the value of the frontier is hardly inherent at all. As Moore argues,
value and meaning “are not intrinsic in spatial order, but must
be invoked” (qtd.
in David
Harvey, np).
Indeed,
if it were
to profit
(or even
harm)
us in any
way, the
frontier
has always
required
our real
and imaginary
participation;
and the
value of
the
frontier
is, effectively,
to consolidate
the psychic
and
intellectual
boundaries
of American
citizenship,
which in
turn
facilitates
the political
and economic
strength
of the nation.
What changed
with the
Census Bureau’s declaration in 1890 was not, therefore,
even according to Turner’s thesis, the land itself but the imagined value
of that land to a people he called “Americans.” And
so, while
the 1890
census
recorded
an increase
in
population
that suggested
the place of
the American
West was
filling up,
as I noted
earlier,
Turner
was not simply
lamenting
the “filling-up” of a place as he spoke before the group at the Columbian
Exposition; he was grieving for the fact that the originary frontier place could
no longer officially be imagined as a dynamic space of unlimited opportunities
and resources. He was, in effect, both explicitly lamenting a redefinition of
that frontier place and implicitly calling for a shift from thinking of “the
frontier” primarily as a literal place to thinking of “frontiers” as
imaginative
spaces as
well.
Indeed, as
the twentieth-century
unfolded
and America
experienced
more and
more
temporal
distance
from the
originary
frontier
West,
frontier
narratives
increasingly
emphasized,
however unintentionally,
the constructedness
of frontier
spaces. New
conceptualizations
of frontiers
as both literal
and figurative
spaces
thus make
available
an extension
of the frontier
concept and
a corresponding
extension
of ideas
of the frontier
as safety-valve,
site of closeness
and conflict,
and of unlimited
unexploited
resources.
Ideas of
frontiers
as safety-valves
at
the turn-of-the-twentieth
century are
not primarily
about the
pressures
of
population
density.
Sociopolitical
pressures
tend
to be most
prevalent.
Similarly,
while “new” conceptualizations
of frontiers in the late-twentieth/turn-of-the-twentieth century elide the closeness
and conflict that now seems such an obvious component of the originary American
frontier experience, such closeness and conflict continue to be an effect of
frontier ventures. And the “new” frontiers
continue
to emphasize
the
value of
the frontier
as
a space of
unlimited
resources.
In spite
of the “corrections” of many twentieth-century historians,
the widespread influence of Turner’s ideas about the value of the
frontier in consolidating American citizenship has resulted in the often
unselfconscious
transposition of an utopian, Turnerian frontierist notion of equal opportunity
to turn-of-the-twentieth century, consumerist “frontier” spaces.
Tuner’s ideas and rhetoric have made an indelible mark on the post-originary-frontier
period of American history. Indeed, Turner’s ideas have proved
quite useful in promoting the proliferation of “new” frontier
spaces as well as to our understanding of that proliferation. His understanding
of the spatial
ordering of the American “frontier” West as a “free
space” thus
continues to influence American rhetoric and define popular narratives
which articulate expectations of the promise of “new” frontier
spaces. These expectations reveal, in fact, that American cultural desire
for the frontier
West is ultimately a capitalist desire for a utopian narrative of unlimited
sociopolitical resources, “no artificial stifling of equality of
opportunity, [and] no closed doors to the able” (Turner). As the
range of responses to the frontier and Turner’s foundational narrative
illustrate, both the alleged value of the frontier and its dangers have
been identified repeatedly in terms of the
consequences of imagining that the frontier is “ours” to
exploit – physically, psychically, economically, and politically.
Such responses therefore not only
emphasize the weight of the frontier as a conceptual category as well
as the weight of frontierist rhetoric, but they also demonstrate the
enduring frontierist
legacy of our country’s attempts to understand what it means to
be “American.”
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