#frontier thesis

[peashooter85]

The Frontier Thesis

from The Cynical Historian

[kenyatta]

John Gast - American Progress (1872)

[sgreffenius]

Frederick Jackson Turner And The History Of The American West - Wisconsin Life

Perhaps no American historian stirs a more impassioned response than Frederick Jackson Turner. His ideas about the western frontier were both admired and maligned, sparking controversy across decades. He wasn’t the first American to call attention to the frontier, but he was the first to say outright that the frontier explained America.

“History, both objective and subjective, is ever becoming – never completed. The centuries unfold to us more and more the meaning of past times.” ~ Frederick Jackson Turner

P.W. Parks and AP history.

A.F. Greffenius, and his desire to practice law in North Dakota, one of the nation’s last frontiers.

He went all the way out to Mott, ND, to clerk as he prepared for his career as an attorney.

Related articles on Turner and North Dakota:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frederick-Jackson-Turner

https://www.cooperative.com/remagazine/articles/Pages/Flashbacks-Electricity-Comes-to-a-North-Dakota-Farm.aspx

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So I sit down in my first and only advanced placement class, in American History, during my junior year at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa. The instructor’s name is P. W. Parks, well known for peering over the top of his glasses, as he sips tea from his enormous thermos during class. His students love him for his somewhat wry, even whimsical way of speaking, his intellect, and a self-effacing quality that both contradicts and highlights how smart he is. He goes by Phil to those who know him well.

Now you want to know why I bother to recall an advanced placement class I took more than fifty years ago. Seems I might have more immediate subjects to write about, given the state of our nation. Yet at a certain age, your mind begins to center on memories, not so often on current affairs. I have evidently reached that stage, though you would not know it from progress I make, or do not make, on matters of family history.

What does family history have to do with P. W.’s first day of class in American history? This connection only came to mind during the last weekend, as my puppy turned seven months old, and New England skies rained especially hard for December. However bad tornadoes were in Kentucky, Massachusetts must have thought, well we can have some weather here, too, though not nearly as dramatic or deadly.

P. W. opened the first day of class with reference to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis. As we listened to his account, I thought, “This exposition does not fit the textbook stuff that sustains teachers and students in the regular curriculum,” stuff we all recognize as ‘names and dates’. If you could learn names and dates, you did not need to know history’s connecting tissue. It was not testable, and therefore not important for pedagogical purposes.

The class presented a curious mixture of historiography, intellectual history, and explanatory rigor that the old-style textbook treatment could not touch. I say curious, not because these qualities did not belong together - on the contrary, Parks fit them together gracefully, seamlessly, with far more artistry than was necessary to prepare us for the AP exam. The historiographical and intellectual qualities made one curious about why things happened the way they did, a story told both by participants, and by later observers who had some distance from the narrative.

Let’s go back to F. J. Turner. I do not know if Turner set specific years for the period that marked the closing of the American frontier. If he did, it was probably a mistake, as these kinds of transitions unfold gradually enough that a specific beginning and a numerical end are not usually appropriate. Would we want to place the end at the close of the last war against Native Americans in the West? Would we want to place the beginning sometime during the decade or more after the Civil War? Historians like to argue about those things, but if you wrote a dissertation on the subject, you would not want to be too specific about dates.

To follow these remarks about when exactly the American frontier closed, my grandfather, Albert Frank Greffenius, was born in 1887 near Ripon, Wisconsin. That places his birthday during the momentous transition Turner identified, a period when American culture and character adapted to major changes in settlement, ways of life, and outlook. Clearly Wisconsin was not on the frontier, as people understood that concept at the time. It entered the Union as the thirtieth state in 1848, thirty-nine years before Albert Frank was born. Yet just beyond Minnesota lay the Dakota Territory. This large piece of real estate did not split into North and South Dakota, to enter the Union until 1889. That is where my grandfather wanted to go shortly after he returned from service in the Army after the World War I.

Turner argued that the frontier imbued Americans with a certain restlessness. Of course, the Germans who left Prussia to immigrate to the United States mid-eighteenth century were already restless, or they would not have made that long trip. The same can be said for many other ethnic groups who came over the Atlantic. If they came to the States to find room for ambition, hard work, advancement, and the rewards that go with these qualities, they found these rewards, especially when they settled in sparsely populated states that had already absorbed a generation or two of immigrants to prepare the way. That was true of Wisconsin after the Civil War, as it was of the Dakota Territory near the end of the eighteenth century.

My grandfather was a restless, ambitious man. He held so many jobs, and lived in so many places after he graduated high school in 1905 or so, no one in our family actually knows what he did. We know he lived in Iowa for a time, that he learned shorthand in a business class, that he worked as a clerk in a bank, to learn that business as well as he could. Then he joined the army in 1917, at a time when a great deal of anti-German prejudice existed in the country. His letters home before he shipped off to Europe show that he went to war partly to demonstrate his patriotism. By 1917, he was thirty years old. The Army made him a mess sergeant.

Significantly, he did not settle down to work a farm in central Wisconsin, which is where his parents stayed. His older brother, William, moved out to Colorado to become a postmaster. His step-brother, Frank Lieske, moved out to South Dakota to run a hardware store. Damned if he would stay on a farm in central Wisconsin, which offered a lot of hard work, but little advancement. If you wanted to improve yourself through hard work, better to enter a profession. That was my father’s credo, likely learned from his father. Enter a profession.

So my grandfather moved out to Mott, North Dakota, a couple of years after the war, to clerk in a law office there. He had no college degree, no law school degree, no formal professional training before that, unless you count that business class for typing and shorthand. Mott lies in the southwest quadrant of the state, not so far from the location of Theodore Roosevelt’s ranch several decades earlier. That is to say, he found a job in one of the most remote, frontier-like places that still existed in the States after the war.

As far as I know, North Dakota did not require a bar exam to practice law in the state. I need to read more of my grandfather’s letters to know why he settled in Valley City, North Dakota, after his clerkship. I believe he found a partner there. It was common then, as now, for young attorneys to partner with more senior attorneys as they begin their own practice. Albert Frank stayed in Valley City, sixty miles west of Fargo and some distance north of Frank Lieske’s hardware store, until the end of his life in 1954.

In photographs, my grandfather does not appear to be a restless man. He appears stern, even more stern than you might expect from someone who grew up in a household where his parents spoke German, or a mixture of German and English. Yet restlessness is a quality that does not generally appear in photographs. It appears in the pattern of your life, in the breadth of your activities and interests, in the sorts of people you meet. My grandfather was a restless, ambitious man.

As with so many individuals, the Depression forced him to modify or trim his ambitions, to accept less from his career than he had hoped. In a semi-arid, agricultural region that practically lost its cash economy as topsoil turned to dust and blew away, he turned to debt collection to sustain his family. You cannot collect debts where farmers have no money. He could see things were a bit better back in Wisconsin, when he returned with his wife and son to visit relatives during the summer, but not a lot better. He and his family weathered hard, insecure years during the thirties. The outlook did not improve until the early 1940s, after Pearl Harbor. That is when his son joined the Air Force in 1942, to train for duty as a fighter pilot.

That war goes beyond this story, though. My grandfather’s story fits Turner’s description of individuals, and of a culture, that sought out challenges on the country’s frontier, and had to adapt to fundamental changes that occurred during the twentieth century. The Depression came well after the frontier closed, though we should note that full electrification did not come to North Dakota until after World War II. Roads and communications remained poor in the area until the country redirected its considerable energy to domestic development in the late 1940s. Thus places like North Dakota felt remote long after other parts of the country became more integrated for automobile travel, reliable telephone communications, and power plants located on an electrical grid.

I sat in P. W. Parks class only a little over twenty years after all these changes arrived in Valley City, where I grew up. Des Moines was a big city, a lot bigger than any city in the Dakotas. That is why our family moved there: my father felt he had accomplished everything an attorney could accomplish in Valley City. He wanted opportunities to do more. He remarked later about whether he ought to have stayed in Valley City, “Perhaps I could have been a state legislator.” Yet he did not want to be a politician. He wanted to practice law, and fly airplanes. He was just as restless as his father, and flight offered the broad horizons that he and his father both sought.

The country’s frontier may have closed after 1900, more rapidly in some places than in others. Similarly, people’s outlooks changed more or less rapidly, depending on their circumstances. I truly wish my own life offered more opportunities to expand as I pass out of middle age into later life, but my father reminded me of the truism that options narrow as you grow older. I do appreciate the qualities my grandfather passed on to my father, though. He left home not long after the turn of the century, around the time America accepted more limited possibilities for domestic expansion. Theodore Roosevelt reminded people that other parts of the world still needed our attention, that we did not have to turn all of our energy inward.

Turner began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1889. He delivered his lecture on unique qualities in America’s character, and published his famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in 1893, as my grandfather entered the first grade in Ripon. I wonder if he knew of Turner’s contribution as he educated himself, in and out of the classroom during the 1890s and early 1900s. Whether or not my grandfather knew of Turner, his life suggests that Turner grasped significant elements of American culture, as it developed during the period my grandfather grew up.

[jedamitchell]

Do Exceptional Empires Come from the Frontier?

A big way of stripping away the U.S.’s perceived uniqueness is by positioning the nation among Winston Churchill’s “English Speaking World,” and classifying the U.S. as just another “settler colony.” But there is another group of settler colonies that, while included in the larger discussion of imperialism, are traditionally excluded from the the topic of settler colonies, and are almost always differentiated from the U.S. by the major historical narratives.

These excluded areas are the nations of Latin America, predominantly Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, among others. When studied, they reveal some important things about the U.S.

There are a great many reasons why the nations of Latin American may not be included in discussions of the "White Dominions"/settler colonies. Origins. Settlement patterns. Religion. Race. These reasons can account for the omission.

Partly, there is a similar sentiment to these nations' non-inclusion as there is to why the U.S. sees itself as different than the other settler colonies ("White Dominions.") Recent studies do, in fact, include the nations of Latin America as part of the settler colonies.

The focus of study that has been used to study all the nations together, both the so-called "White Dominions," the United States and Latin America is the idea of the "frontier.”

Defining the frontier is problematic because it is difficult to define, as the word doesn't always mean the same thing everywhere. The evolution of the term over historical time also makes it difficult to define.

In American history the word "frontier" had been used to denote many things that the U.S. viewed as unique, and special, about its history. A good source of instruction about the meaning of the word lies with a historian of the late-19th century named Frederick Jackson Turner and his "Frontier Thesis" of 1890.

He lamented the closing of the "frontier," saying that, with the result of a new census in the U.S., it was possible to say that there was no more line that separated areas of bare settlement in the contiguous U.S., that the frontier of settlement was forever closed, and with the closing of the frontier, so ended a source of all the things that Turner, and other Americans in-agreement, considered American and made the U.S. "exceptional" among nations.

In many ways the concept of the frontier is a cornerstone of the myth of American Exceptionalism. Those exceptional qualities of the U.S. - freedom, individualism, religious tolerance, democracy, free-enterprise - were born on the frontier, with the push of settlement across the North American continent that spread these institutions and changed conquest from an imperial mission to an enlightened crusade.

Empire building, and the type of special American empire that was created...that was exceptional too. Conquest wasn't conquest. Settlers spread civilization. An American empire didn't look like an empire.

How exceptional is that really, though?

Read "Somos Immigrantes" @Fictionade Magazine.

[betweenhereandcool]

If you drive west in the morning you have the light behind you and it illuminates everything in your path, and the world feels young and hopeful and beautiful. Driving east in the morning blinds you. Things look washed out and glaring and uninteresting. And perhaps it’s that simple: when people, from time immemorial on, woke up in the morning, they preferred to feel happy and hopeful rather than sun blinded. And so they headed west. The hopeful direction has always been to the west. If the earth had spun the other way, I wonder if we would we have gone East.

Peter Brown, on the Frontier Thesis, photography, and the open road