The American
Frontier Rough ‘n’ Tumble mindset has a psychology of its own. What occurred in
the clash of cultures in the Wildlands of the New World was not a mere transport
of ideas and ways from The Old World, i.e., Europe.
Be those ideas
combat, trade, politics, economics, law, hell, even the sciences took their own
doglegged tack in the new land.
We can get a
broad overview on how this unprecedented mindset manifested in Frederick Jackson
Turner’s 1893 thesis, The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
The ideas were later
developed in greater detail, notably by the eminent Librarian of Congress
historian, Daniel J. Boorstein, in many linked works on the uniqueness of this
era.
Let us begin
with Mr. Turner as our guide into this roughshod, pragmatic, self-made mindset,
this psychology of pluck and grit.
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.
·
Each
new environmental or social encounter, be it the land itself with its own
peculiar climate, or the inhabitants of that region called forth the need for
new skills, new ways, adaptations, adjustments, and in some cases abandonment
of old ways.
In this
advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between
savagery and civilization.
The American
frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified
boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing
about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free
[unsettled] land.
·
Old
World history [European] is a long tale of the same familiar landscapes played
upon a stage explored and settled long ago.
·
Much
of Old World history struggles against quite similar folks in quite similar
lands.
·
The
Americas were a different stage altogether with all the players cast in
unfamiliar roles.
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. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an
American environment. Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional
students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The
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, not simply the
development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of
reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is
American. 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.
·
Keep
this uniqueness in mind as you ponder not merely the cultural and survival differences,
but how this separation from “Motherland” creates modes of thought that see
little regard in fealty to Old Ways, and, yes, that includes kneeling abjectly
before lines of lineage or dedication to dogma be it religious or even old
martial/combat ways.
[Mr. Jackson on
how the Indigenous was the original Pathfinder, and those who followed not so
much “tamed” the “Savage” as were molded and forged by the “Savage.”]
And yet, in
spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader and the farmer, the
Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization. The buffalo trail became the
Indian trail, and this became the trader's "trace;" the trails
widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were
transformed into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of
the South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada. The trading posts reached
by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages which had been placed in
positions suggested by nature; and these trading posts, situated so as to
command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as
Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas
City. Thus civilization in America has followed the arteries made by geology,
pouring an ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of
aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the complex
mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated by
lines of civilization growing ever 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 to-day 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.
[Many think of
the roots of “Democracy” as coming from European philosophers but…those in the
know then and what is being rediscovered now is how much the influence of
freedom was found within the Indigenous peoples and then carried back across
the pond, to only be regurgitated back to us in the prose of the “Great Minds.”
See The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
and David Wengrow for a massive scholarly work on the enormous debt both sides
of the Atlantic owe to what they found preexisting upon these shores.]
But the most
important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here
and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of
individualism. 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. Prof. Osgood, in an
able article, [30:1] has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in
the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American
Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all
effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of
instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier
individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy.
[On this new
psychology.]
The men and
women who made the Middle West were idealists, and they had the power of will
to make their dreams come true. Here, also, were the pioneer's
traits,—individual activity, inventiveness, and competition for the prizes of
the rich province that awaited exploitation under freedom and equality of
opportunity. He honored the man whose eye was the quickest and whose grasp was
the strongest in this contest: it was "every one for himself."
[And this from a
letter of the time.]
"Some of
our fellow-citizens may think we are not able to conduct our affairs and
consult our interests; but if our society is rude, much wisdom is not necessary
to supply our wants, and a fool can sometimes put on his clothes better than a
wise man can do it for him." This forest philosophy is the philosophy of
American democracy.
[Consider this
but please read the bracket afterwards.]
Western
democracy included individual liberty, as well as equality. The frontiersman
was impatient of restraints. He knew how to preserve order, even in the absence
of legal authority. If there were cattle thieves, lynch law was sudden and
effective: the regulators of the Carolinas were the predecessors of the claims
associations of Iowa and the vigilance committees of California. But the
individual was not ready to submit to complex regulations. Population was
sparse, there was no multitude of jostling interests, as in older settlements,
demanding an elaborate system of personal restraints. Society became atomic.
There was a reproduction of the primitive idea of the personality of the law, a
crime was more an offense against the victim than a violation of the law of the
land. Substantial justice, secured in the most direct way, was the ideal of the
backwoodsman. He had little patience with finely drawn distinctions or scruples
of method. If the thing was one proper to be done, then the most immediate, rough
and ready, effective way was the best way.
[These same
“lawless” ones taking the “law” into their own hands, were not mere capital
storming rowdies. They were improvising in a land where legislation hadn’t
reached. The stories of meetings and observance of habeas corpus and
other niceties of common law being observed in a meticulous manner show no mere
slip-shod emotionalism. The germs of self-organized order are to be found here.
Rough n rowdy, rough n ready? Yes. Slipshod, fly-off-the-cuff—No.]
[The below was
the general attitude towards Old World thought that considered its ways
superior to the untutored, “uneducated.”]
"A fool
can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for
him,"—such is the philosophy of its petitioners.
[The next
observation from Turner and echoed by Boorstein is KEY. The “mythology” here
was an actuality. Much of it can still be appreciated for its difficulties. I
invite anyone to accompany me on any back country expedition to see just how
quickly things can go South even in the 21st century when
confronting some of these physical barriers, ofttimes a mere handful of miles
from a modern city. Extrapolate these meagre difficulties to NO “civilized”
refuge Anywhere---then you have a scintilla taste of what realities created
this so-called American “mythology.”]
The first
ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to fight with nature
for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did this contest take place
in a mythical past, told in folk lore and epic. It has been continuous to our
own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast
forests blocked the way; mountainous ramparts interposed; desolate, grass-clad
prairies, barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of
savages, all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the ax are the symbols
of the backwoods pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive courage, in
domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness.
[The above shows
us how the environment helped forge new physical skills in response to environment,
the next points the light on how this in turn shapes cognitive possibilities
for the ambitious and self-sufficient.]
Besides the
ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal
development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a
civilization based on individual competition, and he brought the conception
with him to the wilderness where a wealth of resources, and innumerable
opportunities gave it a new scope.
[Next Jackson
delves into how it shaped Man’s relationship with other Men.]
Among the
pioneers one man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance;
conditions were simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality.
An optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people, a devout
faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became almost the religion of the
pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that he was building under
freedom a new society, based on self government, and for the welfare of the
average man.
·
Note:
Jackson is Not discussing democracy with a large D as we think of it now in political
theater.
·
He
is referring to the democratic relationship in the “man to man” “how we get
things done” sense of the word.
·
More
along the lines of the spontaneous organization for wagon trains, mountaineering
expeditions, or the group dynamics of small LRP [Long Range Patrol] units in
warfare.
·
The
democracy here is small scale reality, not large-scale theory.
American
democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan
Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the
American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new
frontier. Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural
resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America
for three centuries while it occupied its empire.
·
Again,
I highly recommend the work of historian Daniel Boorstein to deeply highlight
this principle of small-scale self-creation, that later is assumed to be the
product of Aristocratic Tinkering.
·
And
again, see Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything to see exactly
where the “original” political writers cribbed their democratic ideals from. Enlightening
illuminating stuff.
The moment
you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the
man who has the most talent, you make aristocratic institutions impossible.
·
The
above idea is key. The class/aristocratic levelling was demonstrated ability,
not tweeted, touted, claimed ability.
All that was
buoyant and creative in American life would be lost if we gave up the respect
for distinct personality, and variety in genius, and came to the dead level of
common standards. To be "socialized into an average" and placed
"under the tutelage of the mass of us," as a recent writer has put
it, would be an irreparable loss.
·
Contact
with reality, time in the wilderness, true effort vs. true struggle not gym
struggle or “emotional” struggle creates our differences both physically and in
the gray matter within our skulls.
·
These
venturers forth were created and forged by the venture, not by mere word
of the venture or study of the venture, or affiliation with the venture no
matter how passionately one touts it.
·
One
must make the trek to claim to be the voyager, the rest of us just wear the
t-shirts donned like the Varsity jacket donned to show we are going steady with
the person who actually earned the jacket.
These
slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and
live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had at first small
interest in town life or a share in markets. They were passionately devoted to
the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which assumed that under free
conditions in the midst of unlimited resources, the homogeneous society of the
pioneers must result in equality. What they objected to was arbitrary
obstacles, artificial limitations upon the freedom of each member of this
frontier folk to work out his own career without fear or favor. What they
instinctively opposed was the crystallization of differences, the
monopolization of opportunity and the fixing of that monopoly by government or
by social customs. The road must be open. The game must be played according to
the rules. There must be 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. More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real feeling,
that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able to achieve
preëminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down upon their
neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter of pride and to
the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the less successful.
·
The
Rough n Tumble, Frontier mindset, Venturer’s Psychology is not mere wistfulness
for a past that never was.
·
It
was [and can be again] a lived fact, a living breathing day-in/day-out Vision
Quest of Life.
But…
To grasp that
mindset, one must Live it, not simply agree with it.
