The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis Author(s): Martin Ridge Source: Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), pp. 2-13 Published by: Montana Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4519357 Accessed: 23-10-2017 05:18 UTC

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The Life

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Political Sciencrie and History. about 1892

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of an Idea

The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis

by Martin Ridge

One of the favorite discussion topics among American historians is the question: what piece of American historical writing has been most influential in American life? Although the subject seems almost trivial, given serious thought it is a challenge. There are, after all, only a handful of historians whose work has reached beyond the "Halls of Ivy" and even fewer who seem to have had an impact on American culture. Such a group would include Charles A. Beard, Alfred Chandler, Oscar Handlin, Richard Hofstadter, Perry Miller, Samuel Eliot Morison, Francis Parkman, Arthur Schlesinger, Frederick Jackson Turner, and C. Vann Woodward, to name only the more prominent.

From the works of these authors, Frederick Jackson Turner's brief essay, "The Signifi- cance of the Frontier in American History," is the most logical choice for the most influential piece of historical writing. Turner's essay oc- cupies a unique place in American history as well as in American historiography.1 There is a valid reason for this. It, more than any other piece of historical scholarship, most affected the American's self and institutional percep- tions. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is, in fact, a masterpiece.

A masterpiece is not merely an outstanding work or something that identifies its creator as a master craftsman in the field. A master-

piece should change the way a public sees, feels, or thinks about reality. It should explicitly or implicitly tell much about its own times, but it should also cast a long shadow. It should have a significant impact on the way people at the time and afterward both perceive their world and act in it.

To look outside of history for an example and find an analogy in art, it may mean creating a new sense of reality-as Braque did with the development of cubism. All of the parts of a reality exist in a cubist work by Braque, but they compel the viewer to confront reality in a new way. The world of art has never been the same because of Braque. Some in the aesthetic community embraced it; others denounced it; Hitler and Stalin saw it as degenerate and banned it. A historical masterpiece should also strike fire. It must attract imitators but

defy emulation. Ironically, a masterpiece must have not only these favorable attributes but also it must, as in the case of cubism, generate serious criticism and hostility. "The Signifi- cance of the Frontier in American History" did all these things.

WINTER 1991 3

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Montana The Magazine of Western History Winter 1991

I I

Western American art has influenced as well as been influenced by the frontier thesis, as illustrated here by Emanuel Leutze in his painting Westward the Course ofEmpire Takes Its Way, an oil on canvas painted in 1861 as a study for a mural in the United States Capitol. (43" x 33")

rom the time Turner's essay was published in the 1890s until today it has been the one piece of American historical

writing that historians have praised, denounced, and tried to ignore. It has been called both a North Star and an albatross in American history. But even more importantly, its themes regarding American society and character as depicted in fiction, art, drama, and film have so effectively captured the American public's imagination and are now so deeply woven into the American con- sciousness that it may still be a part of the Ameri- can mentality a century from now. It is worth noting, too, that today, almost at the one-hun- dredth anniversary of the essay's publication, the March 18, 1990, issue of the New York Times Magazine as well as the May 21, 1990, issue of U. S. News and World Report carried articles attacking it as if Turner were alive and prepared to defend himself. No other historical interpretation of American society has left so lasting a legacy.2

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History" is a profoundly personal as well as histori- cal statement.3 Frederick Jackson Turner, very

1. For a discussion of this subject, see Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, Turner and the Sociology of the Frontier (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Histori- ans: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1968); and David Noble, The End of American History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

much a product of the Middle West and Victorian America, was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in No- vember 1861. His parents belonged to the nation's white, native-born, urban, middle-class elite; his father was a Republican politician, a promoter- investor in pioneer enterprises like railroads, and a newspaper editor-publisher; his mother had taught school. From his boyhood Turner learned liberal ideas from political table talk, listened to discussions about the economic potential of un- derdeveloped Wisconsin, and came to appreciate the power of the written and spoken word. Little wonder that when Turner entered the University of Wisconsin he considered journalism a proper career for an up-and-coming young man.

Turner's cultural baggage also included a keen recognition of his boyhood environment. Portage was no longer a backward Wisconsin town by nineteenth-century standards but a bustling com- munity of about five thousand inhabitants. Tales of the Indians, fur traders, trappers, and Irish lum-

2. Frederick Jackson Turner was not a prolific author. He wrote two books: Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906) and The United States, 1830-1850: The Nation and its Sections (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1935). His major essays are gathered in two volumes: The FrontierinAmerican History (NewYork: Henry Holt and Company, 1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1932). For an annotated list of Turner's works and publications dealing with the frontier, see Vernon E. Mattson and William E. Marion, Frederick Jackson Turner: a reference guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985).

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Martin Ridge

berjacks, who had made up the early history of the place, were still told in the streets. Later, Turner himself recounted that he had seen Indians being shipped off to a reservation, loggers tying up their rafts, and the victim of a Iynch mob left hanging as an example to would-be wrongdoers. To live in Portage duringthe immediate post-CivilWaryears, for Turner, was to feel a part of the great surge of national energy that was subduing, taming, devel- oping, exploiting, and making America. That pow- erful force was also Americanizing Wisconsin's immigrants. These people, especially the Germans who lived near Portage, were entering fully into Arnerican society and sharing both political power and economic opportunity.

More than people and events influencedTurner. He embraced an implicit contradiction: on the one hand he took pride in American economic develop- ment, while on the other hand he felt that the Arnerican wilderness was a limitless pristine Gar- den of Eden, a view fashioned by his familiar Wisconsin countryside, with its sparkling brooks, its fish-filled lakes, its pristine piney forests. It is wrong to assume that Turner's response to the wilderness was naive Emersonianism. In a very real sense Turner never abandoned the country- side, even when he taught at Harvard or retired among the citrus groves at the Huntington Library in California. Turner never escaped his contradic- tory belief in an Edenic vision of underdeveloped America, which he both praised and tried to recon- cile with his faith in economic progress.

The University of Wisconsin was a small land- grant college in 1880 when Turner arrived in Madi-

son. As an unusually bright, highly motivated, articulate, well-bred youngster from a good small- town family, he was very successful. He joined a social fraternity, edited the school paper, engaged in debates, and walked off with the prestigious Burrows Prize, the most coveted oratorical award the university could bestow. Iwhis was at a time when the college orator rather than the college athlete was the campus hero. Although he read widely and studied rhetoric, his first love was history; and he was profoundly influenced by Pro- fessor William F. Allen, a Harvard-educated, Ger- man-trained scholar of ancient and medieval his- tory who was the university's first and sole professor of history.

P raduated in 1884, the year the { American HistoricalAssociation was orga- 5_ nized, Turner briefly tried journalism, working for the Milwaukee Journal and the Chi- cago Inter-Ocean, before returning to Wisconsin to prepare for a teaching career. The decision to become a historian was a courageous one because jobs were scarce Wisconsin had only one history professor and a potential faculty member needed both Ph.D. and considerable skill as a lecturer. While a graduate student at Wisconsin, Turner taught rhetoric which was then public speaking and composition and history.

After earning a master's degree, he moved on to Johns Hopkins University for a doctorate because

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Montana The Magazine of Western History Winter 1991

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Frederick Jackson Turner in 1881 as a fresh- man at the University of Wisconsin

it was the best place to study. The Johns Hopkins faculty, German in training or scholarly orienta- tion, played a major role in introducing the critical seminar to America. At Hopkins, Turner rubbed shoulders with fellow graduate students and stud- ied with professors who were to be the scholarly giants of the age: Charles Homer Haskins; Woodrow Wilson; J. Franklin Jameson; Richard T. Ely; and Herbert Baxter Adams.

The faculty and students at Hopkins worked in an atmosphere of zealotry approaching a religious revival. Determined to make the writing and teach- ing of history into a true profession, convinced that they could find and propound objective truth, they sought to create a new discipline of history that was based on larger knowledge and a more rigorous method of research.4 They were exposed to the works of leading European scholars. Turner thrived in this environment, where no assumption was sacred and where ideas were shared, debated, and openly criticized.

3. Forbibliographical information regardingTurner, see RayAllen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

4. For a discussion of the rise of the scientific objectivist school of historians, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Ques- tion" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, Mass.: Cam- bridge University Press, 1988).

5. Herbert Baxter Adams was not only a power within the profes- sion but also a "master promoter" who helped organize the American Historical Association. See David D. Van Tassel, Recording America's Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 171.

The Hopkins history department, however, was not free of doctrine. Herbert Baxter Adams, its dominant figure, espoused the so-called "germ theory," which explained historical development more in terms of origins than of dynamics.5 Therefore, according to Adams, American institu- tions were merely an extension of medieval Teu- tonic structures that had been transferred first to

England and then to North America. His thinking was compatible with that of the major literary scholars of the period, who were busy tracing historical linkages between Anglo-Saxon and En- glish literature as it was taught in American schools. This approach was virtually sterile to historians deeply interested in their own past, however, be- cause it denied the possibility that anything origi- nal or unique could stem from the American expe- rience.

When Turner returned to Wisconsin in 1889, where the untimely death of his mentor, William F. Allen, opened the way for his advancement, he carried with him all the skills, zeal, and goals acquired at Hopkins. But he also brought with him both a profound faith in, and emerging doubts about, how to study American history. He slowly distanced himself from Herbert Baxter Adams'

view of history and changed his perception of how to understand the past. He accepted the broadest conception of history-denying that it was merely past politics or the activities of only elite groups- and insisted that historians should not overlook

the doings of the "degraded tillers of the soil."6 Yet he was loath to abandon Adams' position com- pletely because he still believed in historical con- tinuity but was sorely troubled by how to unite the present and the past. Turner, like others of his generation, believed that objective historical scholarship could serve a higher purpose. Thus, Turner wrestled with severe intellectual problems in his early years of teaching and writing. Adams' interpretation not only led away from any analysis of a national entity but also conflicted with Turner's personal experience, with his interest in his native Middle West, and with his historical imagination.

Several generations of scholars have sought to determine exactly how and when Turner changed his ideas and how they evolved. They have searched for the sources of his thought in his reading notes and clipping files, his day book, his rhetorical

6. Martin Ridge, ed., "The Significance of History" in, Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin's Historian of the Frontier (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1986), 51. Turner's continuing interest in studying the lives of ordinary people is captured in a 1923 letter to Dr. Theodore Blegen where he used within quotation marks the phrase "history from the bottom up." There is some irony in the fact that the phrase was popular in the 1960s among radical social historians who rejected Turnerian thinking. Jesse Lemisch was probably unaware of its origin. See FJT to Blegen, March 16, 1923, Turner Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Martin Ridge

Turner, second from right, with students in his American history seminar about 1893-1894 in the State Historical Society library in the Wisconsin Capitol.

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the State Historical Society library in the Wisconsin Capitol.

studies, and his teaching. Some historians argued that the ideas he expressed were so common that they were in the air-everybody was thinking and talking about them.7 But as far as Turner was con- cerned, one thing is clear-his genius lay in a mind that was capable of what psychologists identify as both convergent and divergent thinking. Conver- gent thinking is required in areas of compelling inferences-in seeking solutions to questions. Divergent thinking is important for breaking new ground. These qualities were demanded of him when Herbert Baxter Adams recommended that

he present a paper at the World Congress of Histo- rians to be held during the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition in July 1893.

Turner, at age thirty-three, probably under hur- ried conditions because he was a procrastinator, wrote "The Significance of the Frontier in Ameri- can History."8 It is far more a manifesto, albeit a very florid one, than a piece of research. He called on Americans to turn away from the accepted paradigms of their past. "Our early history," he conceded in a nod to his graduate school mentor, Herbert Baxter Adams, "is the study of European

7. For example, see Lee Benson, "The Historical Background of Turner's Frontier Essay," Agricultural History, 25 (April 1951), 59-82; Lee Benson, "Achille Loria's Influence on American Economic Thought, Including his Contribution to the Frontier Hypothesis," Agricultural History, 24 (October 1950), 182-99; Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study of Historical Creativity (San Marino: Hun- tington Library, 1971); and Ronald H. Carpenter, The Eloquence of Frederick Jackson Turner (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1983).

germs developing in an American environment." But he added, 'Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins; too little to the American factors." He was equally critical of the constitutional historian Hermann Von Hoist of the University of Chicago and the gifted amateur James Ford Rhodes for overemphasizing slavery and politics. In this way he eliminated two rival paradigms for understand- ing American development.

Turner said more: he called on historians to

recognize the major American historical disconti- nuity of their own time. To dramatize this disfunction Turner quoted from the report of the Superintendent of the Census, who pointed out that by 1890 it was no longer possible, as it had been since 1790, to indicate on a map of the United States the existence of a frontier line of settlement.

This simple statement, he asserted, marked "the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day," he wrote, "America has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." And he added, 'The existence of an area of free land … and the advance of American settle-

ment westward, explain American development." Turner left the definition of the frontier vague- '"The term is an elastic one," he wrote, but the most

8. All of the quotations used are taken from Ridge, ed., "The Sig- nificance of the Frontier in American History," in Frederick Jackson Turner: Wisconsin's Historian of the Frontier. The history of the publi- cation, republication, and exhibition of the essay is reported in James P. Danky, "A Bibliographical Note," ibid., 63-65.

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significant thing about the frontier was that it existed "at the hither edge of free land." The frontier was one of several vital forces behind

constitutional forms, "that call these organs into life," he wrote, "and shape them to meet changing conditions."

The nation's institutions owed their originality to the fact that they had been "compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people-to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in develop- ing at each area of this progress, out of the primi- tive economic and political conditions of the fron- tier, the complexity of city life." The reconstruc- tion of society made the frontier-"the meeting point between savagery and civilization"-the area of the "most rapid and effective Americanization."

The frontier helped create a new people and new institutions. Americans were a mixed race, as the term was used at the close of the nineteenth

century. Newcomers on the frontier, whether from abroad or from different parts of the country, were integrated into a new American economic and political community, a process that redefined their cultural and national identity. They were "English in neither nationality nor characteristics." Fron- tier conditions made everyone more national than parochial because only the central government had the power to care for its new communities, build roads, provide for law and order, maintain an army to control Indians, and above all subsidize the economies of new regions. "Loose construc- tion of the Constitution," resulted and, Turner argued, "increased as the nation marched west- ward." The Louisiana Purchase was an outstand-

ing example.

A principal function of the frontier, as Turner saw it, was the "promotion of de-

mocracy here and in Europe." He es- poused the idea that political democracy and land ownership were virtually inseparable. His frontier democracy was "born of free land," which resulted in the distribution of both political power and economic opportunity more equally than it had been in any country in the western world. This was part of a process that transformed the concept of Jeffersonian republicanism into the national re- publicanism of James Monroe and ultimately into the democracy of Andrew Jackson.

For Turner, America's political democracy re- flected its frontier origins. It displayed the inde- pendent spirit of a landed class rather than the subservience of a peasant class. American democ-

Frederick Jackson Turner in 1917 at Harvard where he was

a professor of American history

What Frederick Jackson Turner and others described as a frontier line, running

roughly north and south through the nation's midsection and dividing populated

areas (defined as more than two people per square mile) from unpopulated areas, was clearly discernible in the 1880 census

map of population (above). Except for Indian reservations and discrete

population centers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, few regions between

the hundredth meridian and the West Coast could be described as "settled."

Ten years later, however, the 1890 census map (below) shows populated areas stretching across the West and

meeting those along the coast. Although large portions of the West remained

unpopulated, a specific frontier line no longer existed. From this graphic

information, Turner and others concluded that the nation's great frontier era was

over. (Both maps are from Volume 1, 1890 Population Census, U. S. Department

of the Interior, Census Office.) 8

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– |

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Montana The Magazine of Western History Winter 1991

racy was strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and educa- tion, and tended to press individual liberty beyond its proper bounds. It encouraged lawlessness, lax business honor, harmful currency policies. These behaviors, Turner pointed out, alarmed the less democratic East and resulted in severe tensions and conflict between the East and the West. In a

sense, Turner implicitly argued that sectional con- flict rather than class conflict was more significant in American history. He believed that the struggle on the frontier to redistribute political power and economic resources was one of the major issues in the nineteenth century.

Turner also sought out national traits spawned on the frontier that distinguished Americans from Europeans. In this context he wrote, 'To the fron- tier the American intellect owes its striking char- acteristics": coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; a practical in- ventive turn of mind, quick to accept expedients; a concentration on material things but a lack of concern for the aesthetic; a restless, nervous en- ergy; a dominant individualism working for both evil and good; and, foremost among all these, the optimism and enthusiasm that came with the freedom of choice and place. These traits, he ob- served, were bred into the American people by three centuries of frontier experience.

In conclusion Turner returned to his original theme of historical discontinuity: the frontier era was at an end. He posed the critical question: what would happen to the United States without a fron- tier. As Turner's most impassioned advocate of the past generation, Ray Allen Billington, put it: "Never again would nature yield its gifts so generously. Never again would a stubborn environment help break the bonds of custom and summon mankind to accept its conditions. No longer would frontiering," as Turner saw it, "'furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate to escape from the bondage of the past."' Now Americans would have to man- age their economy and their politics in order to live in a closed-space world.9 For Turner, the first pe- riod of American history had ended with the clos- ing of the frontier.

In asking Americans to reconsider their history through the prism of the frontier Turner did sev- eral things. First, he produced a radical manifesto for historians. Second, he advocated a theory of secular, democratic, American exceptionalism. Third, he asserted that the American people were a unique nationality or race, as the term was used at that time, with distinctive cultural traits based primarily on their own experience and not Teu- tonic antecedents. The unstated leitmotif of his essay was a strident chauvinism. Fourth, he claimed

that the essence of American identity was not to be found in the New England Puritan mind or in the mentality of the former slaveholding tidewater South but among people on the moving frontier. Fifth, he insisted on the existence of a historical disjunction-the nation stood on the threshold of a new age: the story of how the frontier formed America remained to be written. And finally, he recognized that America in the 1890s represented the end product of a triumphal if bloody march of a pioneering people from a cluster of New England villages and tidewater plantations across the conti- nent. Moreover, in a Darwinian sense it depicted a national evolutionary process from a simple ex- tractive and pastoral entity to a complex urban organism. The essay was written in the idiom of modern evolutionary science.

ore is the pity the voices of race, class, and gender were muted or absent in Turner's essay. This did not mean

that Turner had sanitized the westering experi- ence. It means that he legitimated the use of the frontier to explain the nation's history for wider audiences from the perspective of his generation and his personal experience.

If Turner expected anger or anguish from his- torians who held a dissenting view, he was surely disappointed for the immediate response to the essay was initial silence followed by an academic yawn. There was no discussion. There was not even a ripple. Turner repeated the paper at a December 1893 meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, after which it was published by the Society. Turner also published it in The Americ