Legacy of the Frontier Chaos
Edward J. Dodson
[Reprinted from
Land & Liberty, September-October, 1988]
A speech in 1893 marked the beginning of a debate that has continued
ever since among historians. Speaking in Chicago at a conference of
the American Historical Association was a 32-year-old historian who
revolutionized historical thought in the United States -- Frederick
Jackson Turner, originator of what has come to be known as the "frontier
hypothesis".
Jackson's approach to American history stressed the crucial role
played by the sparsely populated interior in forging both a uniquely
American democracy and a people of common national character.
Running through Turner's original presentation was an emphasis on the
importance of free land and how this distinguished North America from
Europe. Turner felt that the Americanizing of European immigrants
occurred not in the established centers of commerce and government
along the Atlantic coast, but at the frontier and beyond.
Not until the new arrivals broke from the European-like cities of
Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore or New York did a new and distinct
character arise, the two most important influences on these migrants
being the wilderness itself and the people who had roamed the
continent before its settlement by Europeans.
Historians have both vehemently challenged and defended him at great
length. What is apparent, and what I believe most important, is that
Turner was one of the few academicians of his era to recognize the
forces -- both positive and negative -- let loose by the widespread
access to free or very cheap land. In his A.H.A. speech he observed:
"So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a
competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But
the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and
individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and
education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds,
has its dangers as well as its benefits.
"Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to
government al affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system
and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly
developed civic spirit."
Yes, the frontier presented opportunity -- far greater opportunity
for the unpropertied masses than had existed in Europe or even in the
Atlantic coastal colonies, governed as they were by transplanted
European land barons or tightly controlled charter companies.
That same frontier society, unfettered by inherited social and
political arrangements and without a new and just foundation, also
contributed to the subversion of republican spirit in favor of
unbridled individualism.
Nevertheless, one cannot but agree with Turner that the American
frontier permitted a postponement of the day of reckoning for the
oligarchies of Europe and Eurasia, by absorbing the Old World's
propertyless and allowing those societies to survive beyond what
natural pressures from within would have sustained.
America the safety value, the land of hope, the world's melting pot
was also the land of castoffs, of racial and ethnic hatreds, of rising
conflict between classes, of religious intolerance, of violent labor
strikes and monopoly-capitalist retaliations, of slavery and a
disregard for the environment, of ghetto tenements and child labor;
and, of the near annihilation of fiercely proud but technologically
inferior peoples -- at whose expense what we call the "frontier"
arose, literally over the graves left behind by their defeated tribal
civilization.
Turner optimistically called the frontier period "one of the
wonderful chapters in the history of the human race" and
concluded that "the West gave the oppressed of all lands a vision
of hope."
The reality held far less promise than the vision. It became so for
the overwhelming majority of the Irish, after fleeing a homeland
controlled by absentee-landowners whose enclosures and consolidations
had produced famine; or Africans, brought to America in the chains of
slavery and later given the freedom to compete for subsistence wages
in the North or sharecrop under a new generation of Southern
overlords; or, the Chinaman, Russian, Italian, or German who
experienced economic deprivation often worse than in his or her former
homeland.
Reality meant that despite the essentially open interior, getting
there and starting a new life required both skills and money;
generations of immigrants lived and died before the movement out of
poverty began. For some, particularly the non-Europeans, that struggle
continues. Meanwhile, the very concept of free land disappeared in the
face of land grants to the railroads and a relentless erosion of the
public domain in favor of monied interests.
If, as Turner felt, the quest to conquer the frontier assured the
permanence of democratic institutions, the cost in human terms was
extremely high.
As a historian, Turner provides part of the picture; unfortunately,
neither his contemporaries nor his successors (detractors or admirers)
have offered a clear analysis of the dynamics which created our system
of socio-political arrangements and its history.
From one historian, Steven Cord, we are told that Turner (unlike most
others who pursued academic specialization) possessed the educational
background of the political economist and was well acquainted with the
writing of the nineteenth century's last great political economist,
Henry George.
Turner had studied George's Progress and Poverty as a
graduate student at Johns Hopkins where he also gained exposure to the
new "economics" under Richard Ely (Ely, it should be noted,
was one of the few professional economists of the period to give Henry
George's thesis a thorough examination).
Also of interest is Turner's presence at Harvard at a time when
fellow faculty member Thomas Carver offered the academic community a
serious response to George's analysis of American democracy and
justice. In his Essays in Social Justice, Carver wrote that
despite his disagreements with so-called "single taxers" as
to whether allowing private interests to claim Ricardian rent was
unjust, he recognized that by collecting economic rent through high
land taxes; government would greatly reduce the negative effects of
land speculation; and, in his words, doing so would "work well
for the nation."
Turner, exposed to George directly and at the center of intellectual
debate over the "land question", incorporated much of
George's earlier insights into his analysis of American history. As
Steven Cord observed, Turner's debt to George is clear.
What both George and Turner realized was that the settlement of the
frontier contributed to the dichotomy of simultaneously producing both
privilege and greater equality of opportunity; equality in the short
run, growing privilege over time.
Because there, was no serious attention given to the establishment of
a just system of land tenure, a system that would preserve the
benefits of private control yet distribute land's socially-created
value, migration into the interior simply fostered an era of
tremendous chaos, exploitation, lawlessness, warfare and monopoly. As
a result, within the American system was built a certainty of gradual
erosion of individual liberties under a growing body of positive law.
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