How the Frontier Shaped the American Character
reproduction is subject to Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976. Limitations
on exclusive rights: Fair use Notwithstanding
the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted
work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phono records or
by any other means specified in that section, for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom
use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
How
the Frontier Shaped the American Character
Ray Allen Billington
From American
Heritage, The Magazine of History, IX (April 1958), 4, 7-9, 86-89.
Since
the dawn days of historical writing in the United States, historians have
labored mightily, and usually in vain, to answer the famous question posed
by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur in the eighteenth century: “What then
is the American, this new mail?” Was that composite figure actually a “new
man” with unique traits that distinguished him from his Old World ancestors?
Or was he merely a transplanted European? The most widely accepted-and
bitterly disputed-answer was advanced by a young Wisconsin historian named
Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. The American was a new man, he held,
who owed his distinctive characteristics and institutions to the unusual
New World environment-characterized by the availability of free land and
an ever-receding frontier in which his civilization bad grown to maturity.
This environmental theory, accepted for a generation after its enunciation,
has been vigorously attacked and vehemently defended during the past two
decades. How has it fared in this battle of words? Is it still a valid
key to the meaning of American history?
Turner’s
own background provides a clue to the answer. Born in Portage, Wisconsin,
in 1861 of pioneer parents from upper New York state, he was reared in
a land fringed by the interminable forest and still stamped with the mark
of youth. There he mingled with pioneers who had trapped beaver or hunted
Indians or cleared the virgin wilderness; from them he learned something
of the free and easy democratic values prevailing among those who judged
men by their own accomplishments rather than, those of their ancestors.
At the University of Wisconsin Turner’s faith in cultural democracy was
deepened, while his intellectual vistas were widened through contact with
teachers who led him into that wonderland of adventure where scientific
techniques were being applied to social problems, where Darwin’s evolutionary
hypothesis was awakening scholars to the continuity of progress, and where
searchers after truth were beginning to realize the multiplicity of forces
responsible for human behavior. The young student showed how well he had
learned these lessons in his master’s essay on “The Character and Influence
of the Fur Trade in
138
Wisconsin”;
he emphasized the evolution of institutions from simple to complex forms.
From
Wisconsin Turner journeyed to Johns Hopkins University, as did many eager
young scholars of that day, only to meet stubborn opposition for the historical
theories already taking shape in his mind. His principal professor, Herbert
Baxter Adams, viewed mankind’s development in evolutionary terms, but held
that environment had no place in the equation; American institutions could
be understood only as outgrowths of European “germs” that had originated
among Teutonic tribes in the forests of medieval Germany. To Turner this
explanation was unsatisfactory. The “germ theory” explained the similarities
between Europe and America, but what of the many differences? This problem
was still much in his mind when he returned to the University of Wisconsin
as an instructor in 1889. In two remarkable papers prepared during the
next few years he set forth his answer. The first, “The Significance of
History,” reiterated his belief in what historians call “multiple causation”;
to understand man’s complex’ nature, he insisted, one needed not only a
knowledge of past politics, but a familiarity with social, economic, and
cultural forces as well. The second, “Problems in American History,” attempted
to isolate those forces most influential fit explaining the unique features
of American development. Among these Turner believed that the most important
was the need for institutions to “adapt themselves to the changes of a
remarkably developing, expanding people.”
This
was the theory that was expanded into a full-blown historical hypothesis
in the famous essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,”
read at a conference of historians held in connection with the World Fair
in Chicago in 1893. The differences between European and American civilization,
Turner stated in that monumental work, were in part the product of the
distinctive environment of the New World. The most unusual features of
that environment were “the existence of an area of free land its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward.” This free
land served as a magnet to draw men westward, attracted by the hope of
economic gain or adventure. They came as Europeans or easterners, but they
soon realized that the wilderness environment was ill-adapted to the habits,
institutions, and cultural baggage of the stratified societies they had
left behind. Complex political institutions were unnecessary in a tiny
frontier outpost; traditional economic practices were useless in an isolated
community geared to an economy of self -sufficiency; rigid social customs
were outmoded in a Land where prestige depended on skill with the axe or
rifle rather than on hereditary glories; cultural pursuits were unessential
in a land where so many material tasks awaited doing. Hence in each pioneer
settlement there occurred a rapid reversion to the primitive. What little
government was necessary was provided by simple associations of settlers;
each man
139
looked
after his family without reliance on his fellows; social hierarchies disintegrated,
and cultural progress came to a halt. As the newcomers moved backward along
the scale of civilization, the habits and customs of their traditional
cultures were forgotten.
Gradually,
however, newcomers drifted in, and as the man-land ratio increased, the
community began a slow climb back toward civilization. Governmental controls
were tightened and extended, economic specialization began, social stratification
set in, and cultural activities quickened. But the new society that eventually
emerged differed from the one from which it had sprung. The abandonment
of cultural baggage during the migrations, the borrowings from the many
cultures represented in each pioneer settlement, the deviations natural
in separate evolutions, and the impact of the environment all played their
parts in creating a unique social organism similar to but differing from
those in the East. An “Americanization” of men and their institutions had
taken place.
Turner
believed that many of the characteristics associated with the American
people were traceable to their experience during the three centuries required
to settle the continent, of constantly “beginning over again.” Their mobility,
their optimism, their inventiveness and willingness to accept innovation,
their materialism, their exploitative wastefulness-these were frontier
traits; for the pioneer, accustomed to repeated moves as he drifted westward,
viewed the world through rose-colored glasses as he dreamed of a better
future, experimented constantly as he adapted artifacts and customs to
his peculiar environment, scorned culture as a deterrent to the practical
tasks that bulked so large in his life, and squandered seemingly inexhaustible
natural resources with abandon. Turner also ascribed America’s distinctive
brand of individualism, with its dislike of governmental interference in
economic functions, to the experience of pioneers who wanted no hindrance
from society as they exploited nature’s riches. Similarly, he traced the
exaggerated nationalism of the United States to its roots among frontiersmen
who looked to the national government for land, transportation outlets
and protection against the Indians. And he believed that America’s faith
in democracy had stemmed from a pioneering experience in which the leveling
of poverty and the uniqueness of local problems encouraged majority self-rule.
He pointed out that these characteristics, prominent among frontiersmen,
had persisted long after the frontier itself was no more.
This
was Turner’s famous “frontier hypothesis.” For a generation after its enunciation
its persuasive logic won uncritical acceptance among historians, but beginning
in the late 1920’s, and increasingly after Turner’s death in 1932, an avalanche
of criticism steadily mounted. His theories, critics said, were contradictory,
his generalizations unsupported, his assumption inadequately based: what
empirical proof could he advance, they asked, to prove that the frontier
experience was responsible for
140
American
individualism, mobility, or wastefulness? Ile was damned as a romanticist
for his claim that democracy sprang from the forest environmerit of the
United States and as an isolationist for failing to recognize the continuing
impact of Europe on America. As the “bait-Turner” vogue gained popularity
among younger scholars of the 1930’s with their international, semi-Marxian
views of history, the criticisms of the frontier theory became as irrational
as the earlier support rendered it by overenthusiastic advocates.
During
the past decade, however, a healthy reaction has slowly and unspectacularly
gained momentum. Today’s scholars, gradually realizing that Turner was
advancing a hypothesis rather than proving a theory, have shown a healthy
tendency to abandon fruitless haggling over the meaning of his phrases
and to concentrate instead on testing his assumptions. They have directed
their efforts primarily toward re-examining his hypothesis in the light
of criticisms directed against it and applying it to frontier areas beyond
the borders of the United States. Their findings have modified many of
the views expressed by Turner but have gone far toward proving that the
frontier hypothesis remains one essential tool-albeit not the only one-for
interpreting American history.
That
Turner was guilty of oversimplifying both the nature and the causes of
the migration process was certainly true. He pictured settlers as moving
westward in an orderly precession-fur trappers, cattlemen, miners, pioneer
farmers, and equipped farmers-with each group playing its part in the transmutation
of a wilderness into a civilization. Free land was the magnet that hired
them onward, he believed, and this operated most effectively in periods
of depression, when the displaced workers of the East sought a refuge front
economic storms amidst nature’s abundance in the West. “The wilderness
ever opened the gate of escape to the poor, the discontented and oppressed,”
Turner wrote at one time. “If social conditions tended to crystallize in
the east, beyond the Alleghenies there was freedom.”
No
one of these assumptions can be substantiated in the simplified form in
which Turner stated it. His vision of an “orderly procession of civilization,
marching single file westward” failed to account for deviations that were
almost as important as the norm; as essential to the conquest of the forest
as trappers or farmers were soldiers, mill-operators, distillers, artisans,
storekeepers, merchants, lawyers, editors, speculators, and town dwellers.
All played their role, and all contributed to a complex frontier social
order that bore little resemblance to the primitive societies Turner pictured.
This was especially the case with the early town builders. The hamlets
that sprang up adjacent to each pioneer settlement were products of the
environment as truly as were the cattlemen or Indian fighters; each evolved
economic functions geared to the needs of the primitive area surrounding
it, and, in the tight public controls maintained over such
141
essential
functions as grist-milling or retail selling, each mirrored the frontiersmen’s
community-oriented views. In these villages, too, the equalitarian influence
of the West was reflected in thoroughly democratic governments, with popularly
elected councils supreme and the mayor reduced to a mere figurehead.
The
pioneers who marched westward in this disorganized procession were not
attracted by the magnet of “free land,” for Turner’s assumption that before
1862 the public domain was open to all who could pay $1.25 an acre, or
that acreage was free after the Homestead Act was passed in that year,
has been completely disproved. Tuner failed to recognize the presence in
the procession to the frontier of that omnipresent profit-seeker, the speculator.
Jobbers were always ahead of farmers in the advance westward, buying up
likely town sites or appropriating the best farm lands, where the soil
was good and transportation outlets available. When the settler arrived
his choice was between paying the speculator’s price or accepting an inferior
site. Even the Homestead Act failed to lessen speculative activity. Capitalizing
on generous government grants to railroads and state educational institutions
(which did not want to be bothered with sales to individuals), or buying
bonus scrip from soldiers, or securing Indian lands as the reservations
were contracted, or seizing on faulty features of congressional acts for
the disposal of swamp land and timberland, jobbers managed to engross most
of the Far West’s arable acreage. As a result, for every newcomer who obtained
a homestead from the government, six or seven purchased farms from speculators.
Those
who made these purchases were not, as Turner believed, displaced eastern
workers fleeing periodic industrial depressions. Few city dwelling artisans
had the skills or inclination, and almost none the capital, to escape to
the frontier. Land prices of $1.25 an acre may seem low today, but they
were prohibitive for laborers earning only a dollar a day. More over, needed
farm machinery, animals, and housing added about $1,000 to the cost of
starting a farm in the 1850’s, while the cheapest travel rate from New
York to St. Louis was about $13 a person. Because these sums were always
beyond the reach of factory workers (in bad times they deterred migration
even from the rural East), the frontier never served as a “safety valve”
for laborers in the sense that Turner employed the term. Instead, the American
frontiers were pushed westward largely by younger sons from adjacent farm
areas who migrated in periods of prosperity. While these generalizations
apply to the pre-Civil War era that was Turner’s principal interest, they
are even more applicable to the late nineteenth century. During that period
the major population shifts were from country to city rather than vice
versa; for every worker who left the factory to move to the farm, twenty
persons moved from farm to Factory. If a safety valve did exist at that
time, it was a rural safety valve,
142
drawing
off surplus farm labor and thus lessening agrarian discontent among the
Granger and Populist eras.
Admitting
that the procession to the frontier was more complex than Turner realized,
that good lands were seldom free, and that a safety valve never operated
to drain the dispossessed and the malcontented from industrial centers,
does this mean that his conclusions concerning the migration process have
been completely discredited? The opposite is emphatically true. A more
divergent group than Turner realized felt the frontier’s impact, but that
does not minimize the extent of the impact. Too, while lands in the West
were almost never free, they were relatively cheaper than those in Europe
or the East, and this differential did serve as an attracting force. Nor
can pages of statistics disprove the fact that, at least until the Civil
War, the frontier served as an indirect safety valve by attracting displaced
eastern farmers who would otherwise have moved into industrial cities;
thousands who left New England or New York for the Old Northwest in the
1830’s and 1840’s, when the “rural decay” of the Northeast was beginning,
would have sought factory jobs had no western outlet existed.
The
effect of their exodus is made clear by comparing the political philosophies
of the United States with those of another frontier country, Australia.
There, lands lying beyond the coastal mountains were closed to pioneers
by the aridity of the soil and by great sheep ranchers who were first on
the scene. Australia, as a result, developed an urban civilization .and
an industrialized population relatively sooner than did the United States;
and it had labor unions, labor-dominated governments, and political philosophies
that would be viewed as radical in America. Without the safety valve of
its own West, feeble though it may have been, such a course might have
been followed in the United States.
Frederick
Jackson Turner’s conclusions concerning the influence of the frontier on
Americans have also been questioned, debated, and modified since he advanced
his hypothesis, but they have not been seriously altered. This is true
even of one of his statements that has been more vigorously disputed than
any other: “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 a new strength
each time it touched a new frontier.” When he penned those oft-quoted words,
Turner wrote as a propagandist against the “germ theory” school of history;
in a less emotional and more thoughtful moment, he ascribed America’s democratic
institutions not to “imitation, or simple borrowing,” but to “the evolution
and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment.” Even this
moderate theory has aroused critical venom. Democracy, according to anti-Turnerians,
was well advanced in” Europe and was transported to America on the Susan
Constant and the
143
Mayflower,
within this country democratic practices have multiplied most rapidly as
a result of eastern lower-class pressures and have only been imitated in
the West. If, critics ask, some mystical forest influence was responsible
for such practices as manhood suffrage, increased authority for legislatures
at the expense of executives, equitable legislative representation, and
women’s political rights, why did they not evolve in frontier areas, outside
the United States-in Russia, Latin America, and Canada, for example-exactly
as they did here?
The
answer, of course, is that democratic theory and institutions were imported
from England, but that the frontier environment tended to mako them, in
practice, even more democratic. Two conditions common in pioneer communities
made this inevitable. One was the wide diffusion of land ownership; this
created an independent outlook and led to a demand for political participation
on the part of those who bad a stake in society. The other was the common
social and economic level and the absence, characteristic of all primitive
communities, of any prior leadership structure. The lack of any national
or external controls made self-rule a hard necessity, and the frontiersmen,
with their experience in community cooperation at cabin-raisings, logrollings,
corn-huskings, and road or school building, accepted simple democratic
practices as natural and inevitable. These practices, originating on the
grass roots level, were expanded and extended in the recurring process
of government-building that marked the westward movement of civilization.
Each new territory that was organized-there were 31in all-required a frame
of government; this was drafted by relatively poor recent arrivals or by
a minority of tipper-class leaders, all of whom were committed to democratic
ideals through their frontier community experiences. The result was a constant
democratization of institutions and practices as constitution-makers adopted
the most liberal features of older frames of government with which they
were familiar.
This
was true even in frontier lands outside the United States, for wherever
there were frontiers, existing practices were modified in the direction
of greater equality and a wider popular participation in governmental affairs.
The results were never identical, of course, for both the environment and
the nature of the imported institutions varied too greatly from country
to country. In Russia, for instance, even though it promised no democracy
comparable to that of the United States, the eastward-moving Siberian frontier,
the haven of some seven million peasants during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, was notable for its lack of guilds, authoritarian
churches, and all-powerful nobility. An autocratic official visiting there
in 1910 was alarmed by the “enormous, rudely democratic country” evolving
under the influence of the small homesteads that were the normal living
units; he feared that czarism and European Russia would soon be “throttled”
by the egalitarian currents developing on the frontier.
144
That
the frontier accentuated the spirit of nationalism and individualism the
United States, as Turner maintained, was also true. Every page of the country’s
history, from the War of 1812 through the era of Manifest Destiny to today’s
bitter conflicts with Russia, demonstrates that the American attitude toward
the world has been far more nationalistic than that of non-frontier countries
and that this attitude has been strongest in the newest regions. Similarly,
the pioneering experience converted settlers into individualists, although
through a somewhat different process than Turner envisaged. His emphasis
on a desire for freedom as a primary force luring men westward and his
belief that pioneers developed an attitude of self-sufficiency in their
lone battle against nature have been questioned, and with justice, Hoped
for gain was the magnet that attracted most migrants to the cheaper lands
of the West, while once there they lived in units where co-operative enterprise-for
protection against the Indians, for cabin-raising, law enforcement, and
the like-was more essential than in the better established towns of the
East. Yet the fact remains that the abundant resources and the greater
social mobility of frontier areas did instill into frontiersmen a uniquely
American form of individualism. Even though they may be sheeplike in following
the decrees of social arbiters or fashion dictators, Americans today, like
their pioneer ancestors, dislike governmental interference in their affairs-
“Rugged individualism” did not originate on the, frontier any more than
democracy or nationalism did, but each concept was deepened and sharpened
by frontier conditions.
His
opponents have also cast doubt on Turner’s assertion that American inventiveness
and willingness to adopt innovations are traits inherited from pioneer
ancestors who constantly devised new techniques and artifacts to cope with
an unfamiliar environment. The critics insist that each mechanical improvement
needed for the conquest of the frontier, from plows to barbed-wire fencing,
originated in the East; when frontiersmen faced such an incomprehensible
task as conquering the Great Plains they proved so tradition-bound that
their advance halted until eastern inventors provided them with the tools
needed to subdue grasslands. Unassailable as this argument may be, it ignores
the fact that the recurring demand for implements and methods needed in
the frontier advance did put a premium on inventiveness by Americans, whether
they lived in the East or West. That even today they are less bound by
tradition than other peoples is due in part to their pioneer heritage.
The
anti-intellectualism and materialism which are national traits can also
be traced to the frontier experience. There was little in pioneer life
to attract the timid, the cultivated, or the aesthetically sensitive. In
the boisterous western borderlands, book learning and intellectual speculation
were suspect among those dedicated to the material tasks necessary to subdue
a continent. Americans today reflect their background in placing the “intellectual”
well below the “practical businessman” in their scale of
145
heroes.
Yet the frontiersman, as Turner recognized, was an idealist as well as
a materialist. He admired material objects not only as symbols of advancing
civilization but as the substance of his hopes for a better future. Given
economic success he would be able to afford the aesthetic and intellectual
pursuits that he felt were his due, even though he was not quite able to
appreciate them. This spirit inspired the cultural activities-literary
societies, debating clubs, “thespian groups,” libraries, schools, camp
meetings-that thrived in the most primitive western communities. It also
helped nurture in the pioneers an infinite faith in the future. ‘The belief
in progress, both material and intellectual, that is part of modern America’s
creed was strengthened by the frontier experience.
Frederick
Jackson Turner, then, was not far wrong when he maintained that frontiersmen
did develop unique traits and that these, perpetuated, form the principal
distinguishing characteristics of the American people today. To a degree
unknown among Europeans, Americans do display a restless energy, a versatility,
a practical ingenuity, all earthy practicality. They do squander their
natural resources with all abandon unknown elsewhere; they have developed
a mobility both social and physical that marks them as a people apart.
In few other lands is the democratic ideal worshiped so intensely, or nationalism
carried to such extremes of isolationism or international arrogance. Rarely
do other peoples display such indifference toward intellectualism or aesthetic
values; seldom in comparable cultural areas do they cling so tenaciously
to the shibboleth of rugged individualism. Nor do residents of non-frontier
lands experience to the same degree the heady optimism, the rosy faith
in the future, the belief in the inevitability of progress that form part
of the American Creed. These are pioneer traits, and they have become a
part of the national heritage.
Yet
if the frontier wrought such a transformation within the United States,
why did it not have a similar effect on other countries with frontiers?
If the pioneering experience was responsible for our democracy and nationalism
and individualism, why have the peoples of Africa, Latin America, Canada,
and Russia failed to develop identical characteristics? The answer is obvious:
in few nations of the world has the sort of frontier that Turner described
existed. For he saw the frontier not as a borderland between unsettled
and settled lands, but as an accessible area in which a low man-land ratio
and abundant natural resources provided an unusual opportunity for the
individual to better himself. Where autocratic governments controlled population
movements, where resources were lacking, or where conditions prohibited
ordinary individuals from exploiting nature’s virgin riches, a frontier
in the Turnerian sense could not be said to exist.
The
areas of the world that have been occupied since the beginning of the age
of discovery contain remarkably few frontiers of the American kind. In
Africa the few Europeans were so outnumbered by relatively uncivilized
native inhabitants that the need for protection transcended any
146
impulses
toward democracy or individualism. In Latin America the rugged terrain
and steaming jungles restricted areas exploitable by individuals to the
Brazilian plains and the Argentine pampas; these did attract frontiersmen,
although in Argentina the prior occupation of most good lands by government-favored
cattle growers kept small farmers out until railroads penetrated the region.
In Canada the path westward was blocked by the Laurentian Shield, a tangled
mass of hills and sterile, brush-choked soil covering the country north
and west of the St. Lawrence Valley. When railroads finally penetrated
this barrier in the late nineteenth century, they carried pioneers directly
from the East to the prairie provinces of the West; the newcomers, with
no prior pioneering experience, simply adapted to their new situation the
eastern institutions with which they were familiar. Among the frontier
nations of the world only Russia provided a physical environment comparable
to that of the United States, and there the pioneers were too accustomed
to rigid feudal and monarchic controls to respond as Americans did.
Further
proof that the westward expansion of the United States has been a powerful
formative force has been provided by the problems facing the nation in
the present century. During the past fifty years the American people have
been adjusting their lives and institutions to existence in a frontier
less land, for while the superintendent of the census was decidedly premature
when he announced in 1890 that the country’s “unsettled area has been so
broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly Ile
said to be a frontier line” remaining, the era of cheap land was rapidly
drawing to a close. In attempting to adjust the country to its new, expansion
less future, statesmen have frequently called upon the frontier hypothesis
to justify everything from rugged individualism to the welfare state, and
from isolationism to world domination.
Political
opinion has divided sharply on the necessity of altering the nation’s governmental
philosophy and techniques in response to the changed environment. Some
statesmen and scholars have rebelled against what they call Turner’s “Space
Concept of History,” with all that it implies concerning the lack of opportunity
for the individual in an expansion less land. They insist that modern technology
has created a whole host of new “frontiers”-of intensive farming, electronics,
mechanics, manufacturing, nuclear fission, and the like-which offer such
diverse outlets to individual talents that governmental interference in
the nation’s economic activities is unjustified. On the other hand, equally
competent spokesmen argue that these newer “frontiers” offer little opportunity
to the individual-as distinguished from the corporation or the capitalist-and
hence cannot duplicate the function of the frontier of free land. The government,
they insist, must provide the people with the security and opportunity
that vanished when escape to the West became impossible. This school’s
most eloquent spokesman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declared: “Our last frontier
has long since
147
been
reached. . . . Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.
. . . Our task now is not the discovery or exploitation of natural resources
or necessarily producing more goods. It is the sober, less dramatic business
of administering resources and plants already in hand, of seeking to reestablish
foreign markets for our surplus production, of meeting the problem of under-consumption,
of adjusting production to consumption, of distributing wealth and products
more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service
of the people, The day of enlightened administration has come.” To Roosevelt,
and to thousands like him, the passing of the frontier created a new era
in history which demanded a new philosophy of government.
Diplomats
have also found in the frontier hypothesis justification for many of their
moves, from imperialist expansion to the restriction of immigration. Harking
back to Turner’s statement that the perennial rebirth of society was necessary
to keep alive the democratic spirit, expansionists have argued through
the twentieth century for an extension of American power and territories.
During the Spanish-American War imperialists preached such a doctrine,
adding the argument that Spain’s lands were needed to provide a population
outlet for a people who could no longer escape to their own frontier. Idealists
such as Woodrow Wilson could agree with materialists like J. P. Morgan
that the extension of American authority abroad, either through territorial
acquisitions or economic penetration, would be good for both business and
democracy. In a later generation Franklin D. Roosevelt favored a similar
expansion of the American democratic ideal as a necessary prelude to the
better world that he hoped would emerge from World War 11. His successor,
Harry Truman, envisaged his “Truman Doctrine” as a device to extend and
defend the frontiers of democracy throughout the globe. While popular belief
in the superiority of America’s political institutions was far older than
Turner, that belief rested partly on the frontier experience of the United
States.
These
practical applications of the frontier hypothesis, as well as its demonstrated
influence on the nation’s development, suggest that its critics have been
unable to destroy the theory’s effectiveness as a key to understanding
American history. The recurring rebirth of society in the United States
over a period of three hundred years did endow the people with characteristics
and institutions that distinguished them from the inhabitants of other
nations. It is obviously untrue that the frontier experience alone accounts
for the unique features of American civilization; that civilization can
be understood only as the product of the interplay of the Old World heritage
and New World conditions. But among those conditions none has bulked larger
than the operation of the frontier process.
