Frederick Jackson Turner
In 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner gave a speech at the Chicago World Fair in which he claimed that there no longer existed an American frontier, that all the land had been settled. His paper argued that the process of moving from the East to the West shaped the American character. In other words, Turner wrote that by moving from settled to unsettled land, Americans shed the ''European'' part of themselves, and became American in the process. Read the excerpt below from Turner’s paper. Then, read how two historians interpret Turner’s claims.
The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the farmer's frontier. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York. As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. . . .
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. . . .That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom--these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. . . . [N]ever again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. . . . And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
Source: Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 1893.
Historian A
In the decade of the 1890s Americans were prone to seek some escape from their rapidly changing society. An increasing number of people now realized that the agrarian civilization that had been characteristic of the United States in the nineteenth century was rapidly declining and was being replaced by a new industrial—urban order. The depression of the 1890s underscored that change, and the anguished cries of the Populists, and their ultimate defeat, reiterated the impression that the day when the United States was a nation of sturdy yeomen-farmers had passed. Within that context, Turner’s pronouncement that the frontier was gone only added the finishing touch to the perception that one major era in American life had passed and that another—whose full dimensions were still unknown—was about to start. . . .
Between 1890 and 1920, therefore, some historians of the West lost themselves in nostalgia as they invented a lost golden age, an earlier period in Western history which was the very antithesis of the rapidly changing West of their own day. Novelists, artists, and the purveyors of popular culture did much to reinforce their impact. This West of their imaginations was an uncomplicated, sparsely populated area characterized by a majestic, uncluttered landscape rather than by a crowded urban environment. This West was peopled by noble and distinctive individuals, personified by mountain men, trappers, or cowboys, and hardy pioneer farmers. They were a stark contrast to the millions of faceless immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who were just then pouring into the nation’s urban centers. And the dominant Anglo setters of this mythical region displayed great nobility of character and the finest values of the nineteenth-century Protestant Ethic, individualism, self-reliance, courage, and a love for freedom.
Source: Nash, Gerald. Creating the West: Historical Interpretations 1890-1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1991. 207-208.
Historian B
In the West, settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets. This was true in California with the Gold Rush and mineral rushes elsewhere, but it was most true after the Civil War when the railroads funded and subsidized by federal, state, and eventually local governments penetrated the region. ''Population,'' in Richard Overton's words, ''followed the rails.'' Except for Mormons, Anglo-American settlement of the West really had no pre-market or even weak market phase. There was subsistence agriculture in the West, but it was largely Indian and Mexican American. The great flood of migration brought commercial farmers who came in on railroads and depended upon them to get their crops to market. This was settlement by a mature commercial and increasingly industrial society, and from the beginning of the period, the West was a place of large and powerful corporations.
Source: White, Richard. ''Born Modern: An Overview of the West.'' http://www.historynow.org/09_2006/historian.html
Questions:
1. According to Turner, how was the West settled? What American characteristics have resulted from the frontier experience?
2. According to Historian A, what was the context for Turner’s paper? Why did people respond so enthusiastically?
3. According to Historian B, what did Turner get wrong?
