There were lulls, doubts, dissents, and counter-movements, notably in the 1930s and 1970s. No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across an endless meridian.

Frank Norris, in 1902, hoped that territorial expansion would lead to a new kind of universalism, to the “brotherhood of man” when Americans would realize that “the whole world is our nation and simple humanity our countrymen.” 2įacing west meant facing the Promised Land, an Edenic utopia where the American as the new Adam could imagine himself free from nature’s limits, society’s burdens, and history’s ambiguities. It would dilute other social problems as well, including poverty, inequality, and extremism, teaching diverse people how to live together in peace. The kind of Americanism Turner represented took all the unbounded optimism that went into the founding of the United States and bet that the country’s progress, moving forward on the frontier and into the world, would reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. But what became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis-which argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land” created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism-placed a wager on the future. military was engaged in deadly counterinsurgencies in the Caribbean and Pacific. Mexican workers were being lynched in Texas, and the U.S.

“Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.” 1 Expansion across the continent, Turner said, made Europeans into something new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous, practical and inventive, filled with a “restless, nervous energy” and lifted by “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” Turner’s scholarly career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the height of Jim Crow and the consolidation of anti-miscegenation and nativist exclusion laws, with the KKK resurgent. “The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society,” he wrote in 1893. Poetry was the language of the frontier, and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner was among its greatest laureates.

Greg grandin end of the myth