Grizzly @ Adams

American Studies. In 1893, in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the long-term existence of the American frontier was the single most important factor in shaping America up to that time. He argued in particular that the strength of American democracy derived principally from the frontier experience. That experience, said Turner, transformed the servile, dependent European personality into a new kind of self-sufficient, freedom-loving citizen that we recognize as specifically American.

Because the Census Bureau had declared the frontier “closed” in 1890, just a few years before Turner first presented his paper, he suggested that a crucial “first period of American history” had ended, and that perhaps the nation’s future would see the undoing of some or all of the benefits of the frontier. Without a frontier to democratize American politics and empower its citizens, perhaps America would cease to be exceptional and would become just another nation.

Turner’s frontier thesis became extremely influential in American historiography and American studies. It also provoked considerable dissent. Among the critics was the economic historian Louis M. Hacker, who held that “Turner and his followers were the fabricators of a tradition which is not only fictitious but also to a very large extent positively harmful” (61). For Hacker,

[t]he free lands of the West were not important because they made possible the creation of a unique “American spirit,” that indefinable something that was to set the United States apart from European experiences for all time, but because their quick settlement and utilization for the extensive cultivation of foodstuffs furnished exactly those commodities with which the United States, as a debtor nation, could balance its international payments and borrow European capital in order to develop a native industrial enterprise.

In this view the importance of the frontier is not that it developed character but that it “served…the capitalist development of the nation” (63-64). Hacker claims that the frontier further served the interests of American industrial capitalism by forestalling resistance on the part of labor:

[T]he presence of the frontier helps to explain the failure of American labor to preserve a continuous revolutionary tradition: class lines could not become fixed as long as the free lands existed to drain off the most spirited elements in the working and lower middle-class populations...and to prevent the creation of a labor reserve for the purpose of thwarting the demands of organized workers. (64)

Hacker specifically rejects Turner’s claims for American exceptionalism:

The historical growth of the United States...was not unique; merely in certain particulars and for a brief time…. With settlement achieved — that is to say, the historic function of extensive agriculture performed, class (not sectional!) lines solidified, competitive capitalism converted into monopolistic capitalism under the guidance of the money power, and imperialism [became] the ultimate destiny of the nation — the United States once again was returning to the main stream of European institutional development. (64)

Finally, note that Hacker insists that Turner’s thesis was not merely wrong, but also harmful — because it functioned as a red herring that distracted historians from other, more appropriate forms of analysis:

What is of greater concern is the perverted reading Turner gave to American history in his insistence upon the uniqueness of American experience…. The unhappy results, for forty years, were the following: a turning inward of American historical activity at exactly the time when all trained eyes should have been on events going on beyond the country’s physical borders; an accumulation of supposed evidences of the development of American institutions entirely in nativistic terms without an understanding of how closely American institutional growth paralleled the European; an almost complete disregard of the basic class antagonisms in American history; and a profound ignorance of the steps by which monopolistic capitalism and imperialism were being developed in the country. (63)

It might be a good idea for American studies to avoid what Hacker said happened to American historiography. Even though it’s called American studies, in our search for insight we should not neglect “events going on beyond the country’s physical borders,” and in our concern with what makes America unique we should not lose sight of “how closely American institutional growth parallel[s] the European.” Nor should we ignore the tremendous importance of economics.

Thanks for reading this far. Here’s your question: What are some ways in which what we’re calling “environmentalism as culture” seems to be determined not so much by local considerations but by global economic forces?

Source: Hacker, Louis M. “Sections—Or Classes?” George Rogers Taylor, ed. The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Boston: D. C. Heath, 1949: 61-64. Reprinted from The Nation 137 (26 July 1933): 108-110.