Pioneers and Pedantry

Pioneers and Pedantry: The Turner Thesis and Its Relevance in 21^st Century America
By
Varo Borja

In former songs Pride have I sung, and Love, and passionate, joyful Life,

But here I twine the strands of Patriotism

And Death. – Walt Whitman

The frontier in American history has been a source of inspiration, debate, and propaganda throughout the past two centuries since it has become a relevant topic. The Turner Thesis is but one document stating the importance of the Western frontier in America; we are to find this construct throughout our culture here in the United States. From the cowboy substrata still present in much of the South and found on CMT, to the fascination our current president has with playing Us vs. Them with the rest of the world in a circled-wagons, fight till the death, prolifically ignorant struggle to hog-tie the United and rogue Nations of the Earth into submission. The Turner Thesis stated, in grandiloquent terms, the overriding importance the Western frontier played in the early and adolescent development of the United States of America. In this essay I will attempt to relate some of the points stated by the Turner Thesis, and provide counterpoint to these assumptions from my own views and from two scholars who criticized, not only the relevance of Turner’s argument, but the very foundations upon which it was based.

Turner began his thesis by stating that, “Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say fearfully--growing!" (Turner, 1) This is quite a grand assumption, and not without merit. The westward expansion of the people of the United States of America certainly was filled with new and wonderful experiences for those who were brave enough to undertake the journey. Many of the people who pushed westward were of either Scotch-Irish or German heritage, and felt no love for the machinations of the English-style republic growing to fruition with the backing of the southern Tidewater elite and the Yankee traders of dubious Puritan heritage. Turner also states that, “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.” So, according to Turner, the man who emerged from the wilds, wielding both tomahawk and pointed plow was a new creation: a self-reliant, and self-governing American. However, what shaped these primeval urges for rebellion, autonomy, and adventure? Was it not, at least in the case of the Scots-Irish pioneers, the love of free land and the age-old desire for self-government found in the lowland Scots as early as the twelfth century? The Scots had always fought off the mantle of English government and were bred with an intense dislike of Whitehall and its machinations. There were, of course, many Scots who had relinquished freedom to the English for land and title, but they were not to be found on the American frontier. No, the Scots-Irish of the American West were the poor souls who had come to this country with nothing more than a dram and a dream; they had an innate desire for land upon which they could farm and raise prodigious families, and they were heady with the fresh air of freedom from indentured servitude and English hegemony. However, the political philosophies adopted by those same pioneers were nothing new. According to Benjamin F. Wright, Jr. the system of government adopted by the westerners was, “Imitative, not creative. They were not interested in making experiments. Their constitutional, like their domestic, architecture, was patterned after that of the communities from which they had moved westward. However different their life during the period of frontier existence may have been from that of the older communities, they showed no substantial desire to retain its primitive characteristics when they established laws and constitutions of their own choice.” (The Turner Thesis, 64). So, in effect, Mr. Wright says that the torrid frontier conditions shaped nothing new in terms of government; the pioneers brought with them the same political constructs and ideologies that had been shaped and set into place on the Atlantic seaboard, if not in Old Europe.

Turner went on to state in his thesis that the movement of ideologies and culture flowed backwards from the frontier to the Atlantic seaboard. He named such statesmen as Andrew Jackson and others who had a great impact on this country during its early adolescent period, and even later personages such as Abraham Lincoln who, fresh from splitting rails, attempted to stay the schism of the Union. Turner did give place in his thesis for the overwhelming impact of the middle states and the Scots-Irish and German peoples who issued from there into the gulf of the West to take up residence in a leap-frog fashion; the pioneer would clear the land and cultivate it for a period of time, and then move on westward once the men of capital came close to develop the area further. (The Turner Thesis, 15) In a rebuttal to the thesis published in 1940, George Wilson Pierson, a Yale scholar long familiar with the Turner Thesis stated, “For how shall we account for the Industrial Revolution? By the Frontier? Do American Music and Architecture come from the woods? Did American Cattle? Were our religions born of the contemplation of untamed nature? Has science, poetry, or even democracy, its cradle in the wilderness?” (The Turner Thesis, 70) This is a very good question, considering all these disciplines and goods came from Old Europe primarily, and not from the Western wilderness. Another apropos statement was made by a more modern critic of the Turner Thesis in 1946 by Carlton J.H. Hayes, a devoted scholar in his own right and one time U.S. ambassador to Spain. He stated, “If we belonged to a Moslem or Confucian culture, or to a purely indigenous one, we would not have the mores which we have. We would not, for instance, be free on Sundays for church or for golf or for surreptitious privacy in library and laboratory. Probably we would not use knives or forks, and we would wear different clothes.” (The Turner Thesis, 109) Mr. Hayes also reminds us that we as Americans, just because a frontier existed once in this country where there were “savages” of a sort, and the people of this country were influenced by conversation and close proximity with them, that that very conversation and close relations did not make us “into” them any more than we are made into a country of Asiatic origins because of international trade with Japan. (The Turner Thesis, 110) Mr. Hayes goes on to warn that the idea of cultural and physical isolationism propounded by Mr. Turner through his thesis was and is dangerous to this country because we are surrounded by a world from which we came, and which we must still reach out to if we are to exist as a nation ad infinitum. However, Mr. Hayes is not a universalist; he makes that quite clear in his statements against a willy-nilly, heady idealism found in part four of his essay. (The Turner Thesis, 111)

In conclusion, I feel it is important to state the views of one of the many defenders of the Turner Thesis. Avery Craven, a one-time student of Dr. Turner’s and a professor of American History at Chicago University quoted Thomas Jefferson in his attempted refutation of the claims that Dr. Turner’s essay was “worthless”, or at least no longer relevant. The quote reads as follows, “Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly toward our seacoast. These (the Indians) he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subsisting and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find these on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed to our own semibarbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation, to the present day.” (The Turner Thesis, 128) Dr. Craven went on to state that although misunderstood, and certainly misrepresented at times by his critics, Dr. Turner was a deliberate and thorough researcher who was not only hampered by the times in which he lived, but was open to criticism, as long as that criticism contained the seeds of truth and helped to further the knowledge of mankind. Frederick Jackson Turner’s magnum opus, although certainly narrow in scope in regards to today’s research, was very influential and helped to build the sense of self that the United States as a body politic lacked after the Civil War and the years of the Reconstruction South. Those times were riddled with internal strife, sectional hatred and outright embarrassment on the part of many Americans. If nothing else, Dr. Turner’s thesis could be seen as a type of salve for the wounds of a healing nation. However, Mr. Carlton Hayes’s statements prove the more prophetic in that we as a nation still insist on isolating ourselves from other cultures and creeds, and we rely too heavily on the myth constructed at places like Little Big Horn, The Alamo, and Wake Island (Fatal Environment, 10). Too many of us see the rest of the world as enemies with different colored skin or different gods, or divergent dress and foreign customs. A closer look reveals these very same attributes applied to us by other nations with, at different times, more accuracy. Other frontiers have existed for the peoples of the Earth that have engendered in them nationalistic tendencies and bold, self-aggrandizement: The interiors of the South American and African continents for example. Also, in a metaphorical sense, a religious frontier existed for the Islamic peoples of the Middle East in the coming of Islam nearly 1500 years ago and the development of a strained, but viable brotherhood under the prophet Muhammad. Where we, as United States citizens go awry is not in the esteem with which we hold our own sense of self and the importance of our own conquered frontier. Where we overstep our bounds is when we try to enforce our sense of supremacy and our self-centered egoism on the rest of the world through subversion and outright force. The people of the United States forget all too well that this type of force was attempted on us not too long ago by a “superior” nation who thought it had our best interests at heart, and with dire consequences. So, the relevance of Dr. Turner’s thesis lies in its ability to bolster the self-esteem and legitimate pride of a nation made up of people from all hemispheres, but not as an ideological weapon to be used to alienate and isolate us from countries and cultures just as proud and certainly as viable as our own.

Works Cited:

The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, Third Edition. Edited and with an introduction by George Rogers Taylor, Amherst College: D.C. Heath and Company. Lexington, Massachusetts. 1972.

The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. Found at: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/TURNER/

Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890. Richard Slotkin: Harper-Perennial, New York, New York. 1985.