Turner, Frederick J. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston 1920.
In his book, The Frontier in American History, Frederick Jackson Turner seeks to explain the process by which European emigrants—bringing with them European attitudes, institutions, and culture—formed a distinctly new American culture when they arrived in the New World. How did European monarchists become American democrats who dressed, ate, and thought differently from their cousins across the sea? For Turner the explanation for the distinctive new American character and institutions can not be found in either these immigrants’ European heritage or in their interactions with different cultures, such as African slaves and American Indians. Rather, Turner claims, America developed its institutions as it did fundamentally because the country had an ever receding frontier between settled ‘civilized’ areas in the east and wild ‘primitive’ ones to the west. Following a common pattern throughout American history, the successive frontiers were colonized by a succession of groups (fur traders, herders, farmers, and industrialists) who slowly transformed and civilized the landscape and were in turn transformed by the experience. In taking land from ‘hostile’ Indians and carving a civilization out of a primitive wilderness, Turner argues, European-Americans defined what it meant to be American and secured a democratic form of government. Tracing the repeated pattern of settlement in each successive frontier—the frontier of Massachusetts Bay, the Old West, the Middle West—Turner identifies many American traits and institutions that grew out of their interaction with the land.
For example, Turner suggests that the mixing of people from different American regions and European countries on the frontier fostered the assimilation of these diverse peoples and encouraged their cooperation. Confronted with the same hardships and obstacles presented by the frontier, immigrants from a wide variety of places “were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race,” losing or adapting their distinctive European traditions (22). On the frontier of the British colonies, for example, English colonists interacted with Germans, Scotch-Irish, and other Europeans and eventually formed a “composite nationality for the American people” (22). Later, in the Mississippi Valley, pioneers from the diverse Eastern states mixed together and “sectionalism first gave way under the pressure of unification (215). Isolated from their homes and thrown together with alien peoples, the immigrants on the frontiers, then, created distinctly new traditions and institutions. The frontier tendency toward small farm ownership instead of large European landholdings, in turn, encouraged relative economic equality on the frontier (212).
For Turner, however, the “most important effect of the frontier has been the promotion of democracy here and in Europe” (30). The unique conditions of the frontier experience, and not ancient European traditions or contemporary European political theory, contributed to the development of democracy in a number of ways. The isolated and primitive frontier, first of all, was “free from the influence of European ideas and institutions…a society free from the dominance of ancient forms” (253). Severed from these influences, Americans could begin to create new institutions adapted better to the new circumstances. Given the inability of Eastern governments to control the frontier effectively and the self-reliance created by pioneers carving an existence out of a hostile environment, Turner suggests, the frontier produced the American ideal of individualism and resistance to government regulation. The frontier’s inhabitants, furthermore, demanded the right to govern themselves arguing that “every people have the right to establish their own political institutions in an area which they have won from the wilderness” (248). In addition, the frontier areas, offering free conditions beyond the reach of an obtrusive government, provided a hedge against obtrusive governmental interference. If the Eastern governments became to authoritarian, after all, people could always flee to the relative freedom and autonomy of the frontier. This ever-present possibility of escape forced the Eastern states to remain democratic and free, lest they lose their populations to the frontier (274). The tendency of frontier areas toward democracy explains why the settlers of the Ohio Valley, for example, were the first to call for universal manhood suffrage, and why the frontier produced such fervent democrats as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.
Yet, Turner’s claim that the United States owes its unique social and political institutions, especially the development of American democracy, fundamentally to the presence of an unsettled frontier on its western border is questionable. Although it may be anachronistic to criticize Turner for not considering the importance of cultural exchange between Indians, Africans, and Europeans in establishing American institutions, it is unlikely that any work that omits this interaction would be complete. Furthermore, exposure to the wilderness is neither a prerequisite for the development of democratic ideas, nor does the existence of a frontier make a people naturally democratic. Despite Turner’s claim that democracy sprang “stark, strong and full of life, from the American forest,” many of the guiding principles of American democracy had their precedents in ancient English political traditions and in Enlightenment political thought. The genesis of American representative government owes as much to the Parisian salon and Montesquieu, as it does to the American frontier. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson, who Turner heralds “as the first prophet of American democracy,” owed an obvious intellectual debt to John Locke and the Declaration of Independence reads at times like the Reader’s Digest version of Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (250). At the same time that democratic ideas can emerge in the absence of a frontier, on the other hand, the presence of such a frontier does not necessarily create democracy. Although he claims that “Neither the French nor the Spanish frontier is within the scope of this volume,” Turner might have done well to examine the both frontiers. Even though France and Spain established colonies with frontiers much like those of British North America, neither New France nor New Spain developed any democratic tendencies. These colonies indeed remained rigidly hierarchical and did not recreate the American democracy. It is unlikely, therefore, that the mere presence of a frontier was responsible for the creation of American democracy.
Andrew Sturtevant