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Rugged Individualism: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier Thesis
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18050 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
4,694 Words |
| Author
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Forrest McDonald
Forrest McDonald is professor of history at the University of
Alabama and author of Novus Ordo Seclorum. |
At a meeting of the World Congress of Historians held in Chicago in the summer of 1893, a young professor from the University Wisconsin named Frederick Jackson Turner read a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." In it, he developed two general propositions. The first was that the frontier - defined as an ever-receding border "between savagery and civilization," beyond which lay a vast expanse of "free land" - had been the primary determinant shaping the American character. The other was that, as of 1890, the frontier was closed, only isolated pockets of free land remaining, and "with its going has closed the first period of American history."
Turner's frontier hypothesis was a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of the age. For quite some time the prevailing view, at least among intellectuals, had been that the essential qualities of Americanness (most notably the Americans' spirit of enterprise and their capacity for self-government) were legacies from the Old World, specifically from their English forebears and, before that, from the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Turner challenged this "germ theory" - so called because it postulated that American institutions were the product of European seeds planted in New World soil - both as to the origins and as to the content of what was truly American. As for origins, Turner asserted that, except along parts of the Atlantic seaboard, people of English extraction had not been in a majority even during colonial times. More importantly, he insisted that Americans of whatever ethnic background - English, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Irish, German - had been forced to shed their European cultural baggage once they took up the life of pioneers and to develop into an entirely different breed of men. As for American traits and values, Turner declared that the most general of these were individualism, democracy, nationalism, equality of opportunity, spatial and vertical mobility, and - yes - idealism.
The immediate reaction to this daring "frontier thesis" was minimal. A reporter who covered the meeting for the literary magazine The Dial did not regard it as being worthy of mention in his story. Only one local newspaper found space, on an inside page, for even a brief reference to it. Of those people to whom Turner sent copies of the paper, only one responded with anything warmer than politeness.
In little more than a decade, however, the frontier thesis became a new orthodoxy. Turner himself helped popularize it by writing articles in such influential magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and also by training a host of graduate students who fanned out
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