Introduction

On July 12th, 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” for the first time at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner’s thesis asserted that the “closing” of the American Frontier, as demonstrated by the 1890 Census data, was the end of the most important era of American history. The Frontier, both the physical land and the ideological idea of it, Turner said, had infused American society with a unique blend of European refinement and untamed coarseness. This combination in turn encouraged the development of individualism, inventiveness, and an “antipathy to control.” The constant push of settlers into the Frontier resulted in a sort of “perennial rebirth,” the Thesis argued, defining American society as existing “between savagery and civilization.”

“What would happen to American society now that the Frontier had effectively been settled?” Turner wondered. Was the influence of the Frontier so great that American society would begin to decline? Or would this new society find an equally daunting challenge to take on?

In the following assignment, you will first read two claims or arguments based on modern interpretations of Turner’s Thesis (Secondary Sources), then describe which you find more convincing and why. Second, you will read two primary source speeches given soon after the publication of the Turner Thesis and make an assessment of their arguments in relation to the two claims.

To complete this assignment, make a copy of this worksheet. Follow along and fill out your answers as you read through the documents.

Part One: Assessing the Frontier Thesis

Secondary Sources

Step 1. Carefully read the two claims made by historians about Turner’s thesis. Then answer the corresponding questions within the worksheet.

Claim A (Author: Andrew Fisher, William & Mary)

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Claim B (Author: Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College)

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. . . 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.” By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the progenitor of the American practical and innovative character: “that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again.

Part Two: The New Imperial Frontier

Primary Sources

Frederick Jackson Turner’s concern when he wrote the Frontier Thesis in 1893 was that the settling of the West would cause tension and conflict in American society. With no more wilderness to be tamed, the Anglo-Saxon-American Americans who featured in the Thesis would have no mold to form them into rugged, democratic, individualists, Turner claimed. The early Populist movement and its conflict with corporate interests seemed to confirm Turner’s theory. However, with the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it seemed that the U.S. had found another “Frontier” on which to focus its energy: overseas territories.

The scope of American imperial interests soon included the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and then Alaska in 1912. The debate about what the United States would become without a Frontier seemed to have been decided. The question was how this new American society would transition into an Empire in the new century. There were many different opinions on America’s imperial activities, ranging from enthusiastic support to disgusted opposition and everything in between.

The following part of the assignment will demonstrate two of these opinions through speeches given in 1899, one by future-president Theodore Roosevelt and one by Massachusetts Senator George Hoar. These speeches illustrate contemporary opinions of American Imperialism and relate to Turner’s Frontier Thesis.

Step 2: Read these two excerpts of speeches from America’s Age of Empire. First, answer a few questions about each speech in the space provided on the worksheet.

Excerpt 1: New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, “Strenuous Life” speech (Chicago, Illinois, 1899), at a meeting of the Hamilton Club, a Republican social and civic club for men.

“In speaking to you. . . men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. . . that highest form of success which comes. . . to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. . . A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. . . We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. . .

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who. . . live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. . . for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. . . The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth. . .

Many [Filipinos] are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. . . I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. . .

The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by. . . then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”