The Significance of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner

 

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 21^st 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.