2. 1
Frederick Jackson Turner’s striking 1893 thesis is a remarkable collection of ideas
drawn together into coherent exposition on the development of the American character via the
American frontier. Turner is even more remarkable for the lack of racism he demonstrates
towards the American Indians; this recognition of their basic civilization and contributions to the
United States was anything but a common outlook at the close of the 19th
century.
I find it quite remarkable how Turner turns the tables on the expected narrative of
American civilization taming the West and bringing it into submission. He opens his thesis by
noting just how much American institutions had been forced to adapt themselves to “the changes
involved in crossing a continent” in order to develop that wilderness into a modern, civilized
society.1
This institutional evolution was a phenomena Turner noted occurred time and time
again, and I think he really hit on something interesting here. Despite the difference in the
economic base of the developing Old South (slavery) and Old North (fishing, trade, and
burgeoning industry), the same pattern was repeated as each section moved westward from the
beaches to the piedmonts and finally across the mountains.
European life entered the continent, and immediately began adapting. Ancient European
civilization landed on our shores, and the frontier (in the 17th
centuries, this was the Eastern
Seaboard) showed the Europeans that new modes of dress, industry and husbandry had to be
learned. New modes of government had to be developed because there was no true recourse to a
king who was three months away (in favorable weather) across an ocean. The frontier, even as
1
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Primary Sources: Workshops
in American History. Accessed May 12, 2015.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html
3. 2
it marched west deeper into the continent, “strips off the garments of civilization and arrays
[settlers] in the hunting shirt and moccasin.”2
The ever-advancing frontier forced those who
were drawn towards its siren song of a new life to give up many European ideas of social strata.
It’s kind of difficult for a “noble lord” to maintain his dignified station when there are no cities
and developed farms and treasuries to base his wealth off of. The “noble lord” must get off his
horse, take up an axe, and begin felling trees himself if he wishes to have a stout log cabin
protect him from the elements.
I believe Turner’s central point regarding the historical forces acting on American
settlement (forces leading to our Revolution and even our Civil War) is that the American settler
had to become independent to survive. Turner described the environment as being too strong for
the man; the man has to accept the environment on its own terms. Here is where Turner’s
remarkably forward-thinking analysis of the American Indians comes into play. The Indian
nations may not have been as technologically or politically advanced as their European
counterparts, but the Indians knew how to survive and thrive in this New World. The most
significant impact historically for America was the advancing frontier meant a continual process
of cultural movement “away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence
along American lines.”3
Viewed in the light Turner shines on it, the divergence of the American colonies from
Britain becomes more understandable. Unlike the Spanish colonies that were founded by a much
more traditional absolutist monarchial government, the American colonies were founded by
Englishmen with a tradition of local self-government. Meeting the frontier of the tidewater and
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4. 3
piedmont areas in the late 17th
and early 18th
century began the process of maturing this self-
governing tradition into something new. It also began a process of separating the idea of
survival from dependence on the mother country (Britain, in our case) to one of surviving by
adapting to and overcoming the local challenges of the frontier.
Another departure from the traditional narrative of “white men” settling an untamed
frontier is Turner’s analysis and recognition of the different European ethnic groups that spilled
out west along the ever-moving frontiers. “First, we note that the frontier promoted the
formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” Turner states.4
For a “composite
nationality” to exist, a multitude of ethnicities must exist. Tuner traces many of these, all the
while tying each of them to some form of integration with the natives already here. Obviously
America started out with English settlers on the coast. However, despite English rule, other
nationalities quickly moved into the early western areas. Some were French, intent on trying to
claim that land for their own French Empire. The Pennsylvania Dutch (properly known as the
Palatine Germans) put such deep roots down in western parts of modern Pennsylvania that today,
more than 230 years later, we refer to this are as “Pennsylvania Dutch” county.
The Germans settled so heavily into modern Wisconsin that Turner notes “leading
publicists looked to the creation of a German state” by concentrating the German population into
specific areas.5
These Germans kept their language for generations and the emerging political
parties in the 19th
century published newspapers and political appeals in German. Irish
immigrants settled in Appalachia, but there again they met the frontier and adapted to it,
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
5. 4
adopting Indian ways to survive as they hewed towns and cities out of the mountains over
generations.
David Walker Howe echoes Turner’s thesis in his 2007 work What Hath God Wrought.
He notes the frontier was fluid, ever moving, and created sense of shared experience. The
settlers going west “traded civilization for land, but they did not want the trade-off to be
permanent.”6
The shared experience of the settlers was to adapt, take on the hunting shirt and
moccasins (as Turner eloquently put it), but then begin the process of creating towns, roads,
industry, and bringing civilization to themselves. This process fused their old European ethnic
identity and ideas with the realities of the American frontier and American Indian ways to create,
as Turner noted, a “composite” national identity (and this brief discussion has not even touched
on the slave population of the U.S. or its impact on the ever-moving frontier).
Part of this identity is the American ideal of the rugged individualist. Ironically,
individualism did not last, mainly because the settlers worked hard to bring civilization to
themselves within a generation of each reaching their part of the ever-moving frontier, but the
tradition lasted. This rugged individualism is marked by a “coarseness and strength combined
with acuteness and inquisitiveness”7
that also perhaps fostered the tradition of American
invention and innovation. I do not believe it is stretching logic to see the Wright Brothers’
conception and invention of the airplane out of a bicycle shop as an extension of the tradition of
self-reliance, innovation, and invention that grew out of conquering the frontier.
6
David Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 41.
7
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Primary Sources: Workshops
in American History. Accessed May 12, 2015.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html
6. 5
This analysis of Turner’s thesis has been limited to the part of the continent that we today
call the Midwest, Old Northwest, and Great Plains. But this story played out in the south. Just
as a single example: the rodeo. A quintessential part of Southwest American lore and
entertainment, the rodeo was absorbed into America as the lands taken from Mexico in the
Mexican War were settled and the process of cultures colliding and assimilating began again.
The “Old West” of popular myth did not spring out of a vacuum once the Civil War
ended. The frontier was not always some desolate desert with parched men searching for water
sources as they drove cattle in great herds. The frontier was not even always in the West. For
the settlers in California, their frontier was in the east as they pushed inland toward the
Continental Divide. The frontier in Florida can be said to have lasted well into the 20th
century
as the southern swamps were invaded and settled. The frontier was simply the outer boundary of
civilization—a civilization that started out European but was quickly conquered by the American
wilderness, surviving only by adapting itself to native ways and blending multiple ethnic
identities together in a composite national identity.
And then it was over. In 1893 Turner noted in closing, “The frontier has gone, and with
its going has closed the first period of American history.”8
8
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Primary Sources: Workshops
in American History. Accessed May 12, 2015.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html
7. 6
Bibliography
Howe, David Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Primary
Sources: Workshops in American History. Accessed May 12, 2015.
http://www.learner.org/workshops/primarysources/corporations/docs/turner.html
