The Reading History Project: Yes, I Am Obsessed with Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner is a historian who could be said to have gone down in history pretty much for what amounts to an essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893.*   According to Colin Woodard in How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start in Smithsonian, Turner arranged to have Significance of the Frontier in American History published in the American History Association's annual report, taught his thesis to graduate history classes, and lectured about it, but he never wrote a book on the subject. Yet in Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of The American Frontier by Walter Nugent in The Athenaeum Review describes the essay's influence up until the 1970s and '80s.

I first heard of Turner's essay in high school. I got a totally wrong impression about what the thing was about that I carried with me for many years. So many years. This is my misinterpretation:

In The Closing of the American Frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner said that the frontier served as a place for Easterners who didn't fit in where they were to move where there weren't so many social restrictions and they could get along better. Turner was concerned about what would happen when there was no longer an American frontier and society had no place to send these people.  

Let's be clear, Turner did not write anything called The Closing of the American Frontier. In the nine pages of excerpts that I read from the essay he did write, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, I found nothing about the frontier being used as a dumping ground for Easterners who didn't fit in in Boston and Hartford. 

Did I come up with this myself, as a result of watching too may Westerns on TV while growing up? I have to say, I'm wondering about my high school history teacher now. Was this some kind of Turner interpretation when he was at UVM back in the day? Is it a Turner spin he came up with himself, as a person who reads history?

Also, why did I remember this, particularly since it was wrong?

At any rate, Turner's actual essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History 1893, was embraced for generations. Though Turner didn't write a book about it, himself, he and Significance of the Frontier turn up in other historians' books to this very day.

What Jackson Really Said About the Frontier

In Significance of the Frontier, Turner argues that

 "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."

This experience, happening over and over again as the people on the East coast moved West, settled, then moved further West "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." 

He describes conflicts between East and West, saying, "The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it." Nonetheless, "Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World."

The frontier experience made all of America what it was, not just Western America.

Note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land." He mentions it more than once. And how does he define "frontier?" "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization."

I will also point out here that these days the word "colonization" carries some negative connotations involving oh, taking land from others, enslavement, destroying cultures, and other things of that nature.

What Others Have to Say about Turner

A Historian of His Times. In These Truths: A History of the United States Jill Lepore describes what was going on in the field of history in the late nineteenth century when Turner delivered his paper. History, like other fields then, was professionalizing. Turner was one of the first Americans to hold a doctorate in history. He read his paper at a meeting of The American Historical Association, which had only been founded in 1884. Lepore says: 

"...historians borrowed from the emerging social sciences, relying on quantitative analysis to understand how change happens."  

How does Turner begin The Significance of the Frontier in American History? With a quote from the 1890 Census. 

"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports."

He was using a quantitative analysis of something from the present rather than something from the past in his material but by turning to something so scientific he was marking himself as being from and of his period. In fact, the AHA meeting where he presented his paper was held during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago where all kinds of new things were displayed. They had a Ferris wheel! 

A Historian Who Said Something People Liked.  Megan Kate Nelson writes about Turner in the recently published  The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier. She's not the only writer to point out that Turner's reading of his essay didn't immediately take the academic world by storm. She says that pre-Turner most historians believed the United States became the United States because of European influence. In fact, Turner may be talking about that when he refers to "germs" in his paper. "Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment."

But according to Nelson popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies (providing that free land Turner talks about) encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed in a frontier story they thought explained them even if they'd never been West of the Mississippi. Or West of anything. That's mythic.   

A Historian Whose Thesis Is Now Dated.  Remember I asked you to note that Turner writes about the "existence of an area of free land" and defines "frontier" as "...the meeting point between savagery and civilization?" 

Well.

In Thinking About History Sarah Maza says,

"Turner's vision of early Americans marching into "free land" is today discredited by our awareness that in most cases the lands European pioneers trekked into and grabbed already had owners, namely indigenous peoples, and were not theirs to claim by right or destiny."

Nowadays we are also likely to recognize that areas described in the past by Europeans as "savage" and "uncivilized" did have civilizations, they were just not civilizations familiar to Europeans and therefore deemed savage. 

A Historian Who May Have Been Ready to Move on Even If American Culture Wasn't 

In How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start, Colin Woodard says that Frederick Jackson Turner eventually rethought his frontier theory. 

"...he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier's environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture..."

Turner is supposed to have spent years working on a project that didn't treat the frontier as some kind of unifying force but instead involved the differences among America's various sections. But, Woodard says, Turner was a procrastinator. The work was never completed.

Instead The Significance of the Frontier in American History continued to be taught for decades, promoting a belief in American characteristics involving individualism, democracy, and nationalism.  

______________________________________

*This link directs you to nine pages of excerpts, which is all I read.