FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER AND THE FRONTIER MINDSET

In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), then a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, published an essay in the American Historical Association's Annual Report for 1893, titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The essay made a splash at the time and was much discussed within the world of historical scholars. Jackson went on the teach and publish articles on his ideas about the frontier and the evolution of sections (the idea that defined cultural groups had distinct settlement patterns) in American history. Even though his scholarly output was not considered large, his few essays on the topics of frontier and section made an impact on how historians of American history viewed its development. It is my opinion that the 1893 essay has implications for our times far beyond what even Turner might have imagined.

I first was introduced to this essay as a junior in high school in a course that combined American history (using Morison and Commager's The Growth of the American Republic as a textbook) and American literature (here it was Bradley, Beatty, and Long's American Tradition in Literature). This was a year-long course that more resembled a college course than one for high school. Yet, it gave us an opportunity to survey the grand scope of American history and to weave into its crevices the literature that emerged from the relatively short span of time from our founding to its maturity back in 1963. Of course, we have come a long way in time since then, but there are some aspects of our history that still stream in the consciousness of the 21^st century. I don't think we can make coherent sense of who we are as a people and how our society is evolving without the perspective that our collective history offers us. I believe that a close look at Turner's essay of 1893 provides that perspective and raises more questions about our collective civic life today than it answers. But it is within those questions that we are able to gather together the threads of what the frontier mindset meant in 1893 and what it means for us today. I have pondered just why this particular point in our history has stayed with me all these years, why it made such an impression on me. I think it has something to do with the discovery in that history/literature course that history is an ongoing story, but that we are heirs to how it has unfolded. When it is said that we don't “learn” from history and so are destined to repeat it, it seems to me that we are always repeating aspects of history because it is a documentation of human behavior and that will always be repeated. I was struck by how Turner was able to use a data point of information and weave the information into the grand saga of a nation growing and pushing against its boundaries. The fact that what he was documenting had already passed was also of interest to me because he was able to pull us into the history that was then unfolding as he wrote. I was learning about how to view history and to see it as a narrative of human behavior in the particular context of the settlement of America, a bold experiment in all aspects. It was an exciting discovery at that stage of my life and remains so today to imagine the frontiers that we now believe we are conquering.

Frontier exploration and settlement lasted quite a short period of time in our history and Turner begins his essay noting that the 1890 bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census stated that “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.” And so the idea of “frontier” was no longer included in the periodic census. Turner's short essay didn't document the incredibly rich and complex movement that became the push towards western settlement. It was a short essay that sketched the outlines of that surge as a series of waves and it is this metaphor of fluidity and streaming that describes the settlement of the West and supports the frontier mindset that persists to this day. The coursing of that stream was a continuation of the character that had landed small loads of ship passengers on our shores at the beginning of our history as a nation. Massively underexplored, it beckoned those frontiersmen out beyond the small settlements they inhabited. Just imagine the risk and attendant excitement with which they set out into lands for which they had no maps and little foreknowledge. Surely, they were a proud bunch, self-assertive and self-reliant, mobile, egalitarian, sometimes coarse, inquisitive, inventive, restless, dominant individuals, buoyant with the freedom of open vistas, acquisitive in their desire to own land and to obtain the greater material comforts that independent investment promised.

But what of the “frontier”? What was this space, this “wilderness”? I think the unknown of the frontier and its conquest probably exaggerated the character traits of those men and women who took the risks of its exploration and settlement. They survived and so reinforced those tendencies survival required to make a life in a clear-cut forest, far away from neighbors, dependent on the land and what skills they had to make a living. It wasn't until later that any notion of community became an option and so inventiveness and self-defense were the only ways to survive in the wilderness, at the frontier line. With time, the waves of settlement consolidated into what Turner called “sections,” collections and communities often based on shared ethnocultural traditions. But it seems to me that what had made survival possible for individuals and families was easily transferred to their larger communities of shared interests and commercial activities. The character traits of the frontiersmen and women had by then become deeply embedded in the American character. I think it is some of those traits that we see now among our fellow citizens in a time when nationalism and a turn to the protections of tribalism are resurgent.

Today, of course, we have no more “frontier” to settle. In fact, the opposite is the case: there are population expansions in cities that put pressure on goods and services and, in rural areas, a consolidation of agricultural land in a few hands that monopolize production and distribution of food crops. Today, our frontier consists of a mindset that challenges exploration and discovery in realms very different from those of our early history. While there may still be some appetite for conquering lands and peoples (and even extending to the colonization of distant planets and moons), those lands and peoples are far removed from our national borders and do not represent the same peaceable intentions frontier settlers had. Fear today causes us to mount fearful defenses against mostly manufactured threats. Fear of others different from ourselves now motivates people of power and influence but this is far from how Turner characterized the sentiments and attitudes of democracy as egalitarianism, individualism, and idealism. He saw democracy more as a world view than as forms of institutions. In this regard, he was characterizing the frontier as a mindset and not as land to be settled or conquered. He was describing the American people as inventive and resilient.

Turner's ideas about the development of sections also implied what those villages and cities were to become; often breeding grounds of social stratification, income disparities, enclave isolation, and patterns of political power and influence. There was often an absence of mutuality or of common and collective effort. Individualism as a trait supported private action as a premium and painted governmental action as “interference.” Individualism was often associated with a high tolerance for deviance, eccentricity, nonconformity, privacy, and dissent at many levels of the civic collective. It is some of these qualities that I think we see exaggerated now on our national stage and on the stages of other national governments. We have celebrated those qualities of individuals that make them attractive to the common imagination. We see a conformity of thought and action that seems to be the opposite of what we consider to be the traits that created the great western expansion. There is a sense that our notion of frontier has created a culture of conformity, complacency, and intolerance. Those who identify with the dark shadow side of “frontier” foster a speculative spirit, the exploitation and waste of precious resources for commercial gain, the desecration of natural beauty, the stratification of classes, petty capitalism, and tolerance of violence and ruthlessness. This, for some, is what it means to be a “rugged individualist” and to answer the call to full citizenship.

But we no longer live in a frontier society as defined by those individualists. Our frontiers lie before us at the horizons of philosophy, mathematics, the arts, education, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, genetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, space exploration (to name just a few of the long list of disciplines and realms of thought), and the interweaving of multiple disciplines that challenge contemporary thinking about what is possible for humans to achieve. I suggest that these frontiers require the same traits and characteristics that motivated the earliest settlers on the land. They require that we not allow those traits of achievement to lapse over into the shadow areas that all good virtues possess. We must climb to the high places where our efforts can support all people in their hopes and dreams for a better life, the frontier mindset that brings all people along in the stream of progress.

Enmeshed in our history and national character are traits that favor the shadow side of the human condition we share with all people over the millennia of existence: slavery, racial injustice, economic and ethnic oppression, warmongering, fear of the “other.” The side of the human condition exposed to the light favors the traits that the frontiers fostered: individual initiative, egalitarianism, the ideal of a land where all people have access to opportunities. Turner described the physical expansion of America as waves and it is in this spirit that we can now see that we are able to participate in such a streaming by choice. We can choose to favor the light or the dark side of our character and we can do this because we live in a democracy that shapes its people and is, in turn, shaped by them. Citizens have the opportunity to use the forms and institutions of government to support their choices. We no longer have new lands to settle, but we do have the frontier mindset to carry us into new realms of discovery. We have to confront our frustrated individualism as a myth of the 21^st century, just as frontier individualism became a myth after such a short period of our history. It is equally important, I think, to consider to what extent we continue to support the idea of sectionalism which becomes isolationism. Sectionalism tears at the fabric of democracy as surely as a mythical and exaggerated individualism does. Sectionalism is the new tribalism, nationalism, and white supremacy. But sectionalism can unite groups of people in communities of social change and cooperation. We have choices we can make and the strongest statements of national sentiment are made at the ballot box. Hopefully, all citizens will have the opportunity to have their say and the fabrications of gerrymandering in the body politic and minds of the politicians elected to serve will not prevail.

I suppose what I have said is that we are a nation of diverse opinion and as a nation we must confront and acknowledge our darkest shadows. We must work to mend the fabric of democracy and once again support the deepest and broadest virtues that continue to shape American society. Perhaps we can return to the virtues of kindness and fairness and service for all. Frederick Jackson Turner opened our eyes to what the “frontier” offered and we can choose the best parts of that tradition to continue to shape our republic for all citizens. We are still a stream of transitioning forces. Where are we headed? Where will the stream carry us?