Great God Pan

The frontier had traditionally provided a mythical destination for "old stock" Easterners and immigrants alike; those restless ones seeking a better life. But for those who stayed behind it functioned as a "safety valve" for those who were having difficulty accepting the new social order arising out of urbanization and industrialization. The theory was that these troublemakers would drift west where law and oppression was less stringent, thereby keeping the cities safe for the decent folk. "Out there" these lawless ones would be tamed and eventually civilized. With the closing of the frontier, however, this safety valve was closed and activism and radicalism, as well as urban poverty, increased in the bigger cities. This was a frightening prospect to many, Turner among them. In a 1920 essay he predicted an America with no frontier. He described population pressures, diminishing food supplies, the exhaustion of forest, oil and coal reserves, the threat of war, and the horror of the dreaded "chemist's bomb." Most threatening he believed, was a "tendency toward conformity" resulting in a "decline in self-confidence." America was in peril without the challenge of the frontier.

In his book The Incorporation of America, Alan Trachtenberg introduces Turner as a portrayer of America at "a critical juncture." "Would the America fashioned on the frontier survive the caldrons of the city?" he asks. In Turner's mind, Trachtenberg believes, even in the frontier's absence, the "product of the experience" remains. That is the character, the "dominant individualism" that the frontier helped create, remained to guide Americans through the changing times ahead. To Turner the American character that he had described would prove to be ""an emblem of national coherence" capable of shepherding future generations through this new period of "disunity, of economic depression and labor strife, of immigrant workers, and impoverished rural farmers challenging a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant economic and social elite."

Then what of the newly arrived, the immigrants? How were they to assimilate without the environmental experience to draw upon? As Mark Wahlgren Summers suggests in his book Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion; politics could function as a unifier. During the presidential election of 1884 for instance, both parties were in need of more voters. Citizens, specifically Americans, were needed quickly and the faster the better. Perhaps politics was an even faster equalizer than the West itself—a judge in New York bragged that he "was able to naturalize two applicants a minute for eight hours at a stretch."

Could Turner have possibly seen the very elixir Americans thirsted for in the unending variations of the "transplanted?" Were not these waves of European immigrants the very variations that Americans was thirsting for? Probably not in Turner's eyes. His thesis had little room for those who did not belong to the pioneer-class of early settlers. And judging from The Transplanted, John Bodnar's immigrants didn't want to play by Turner's rules anyhow. Bodnar's claims that immigrants' decision to make peace with capitalism on their own terms "was made before coming to America." and his insistence that the immigrants were not so affected by their new surroundings; that they did not necessarily look west towards the future; and that they did not forget where they had come from—that is they did not become savages and then emerge as a new entity, an American—reeks of the European germ theory, Turner's old nemesis. "The frontier," Turner maintained, "promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people." All races and creeds were blended together in his world. At least all Europeans. But according to Bodnar, many races stayed together in ghettoes. "They would creatively construct their own cultural world, which was filled with rich currents of folk thought and strong ties to familial and communal needs." Of course this was after the supposed close of the frontier. Does this make Turner correct in his worry for our lack of a frontier?

While not all institutions were equal-opportunity employers in the 19th century, the effect of a frontier on blacks has been argued as similar to that on whites. "The Africans in America, no less than the English people in America, came to terms with a new physical universe," explains Joel Williamson in his A Rage For Order. This new land was as un-African as the culture that these forced immigrants were rapidly developing for themselves. Interestingly, Williamson claims black culture was also influenced through "perception and imitation of white way" as well as "resentment and rebellion" against the same. Was the European reverting to savage-like ways an imitation of his perception of native American culture? Or was the primitive landscape itself the stronger force?

Like the British saying that "empire makes men," Turner's thesis insists that the challenges of the frontier built great character and strength. So what was to maintain that character once its motivator had vanished? 1893 saw America in the depths of depression, a "crisis of manhood" describes Kristin L. Hoganson in her Fighting For American Manhood. Men were ashamed at not being able to provide for their families. Those who had work complained of loss of vigor in "soft? job." Even worse, the fairer sex, once the moral custodians of American culture, was being transformed into "bicycle-riding, bloomer-wearing, college-educated, job-holding New Women." There was only one thing left for a man to do. The Spanish and Philippine-American Wars were seen as a remedy for this new American effeteness. The closure of the frontier "meant that young men had to search for new tests to replace the challenges of the wild West." And what better challenge than another war with a diminutive enemy?

Another more amiable replacement for the lack of a frontier was the mass popularization of leisure activities. In his Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, David Nasaw claims that the public amusement phenomenon was itself a process of Americanization. Americans, once segregated by "income, ethnicity, gender, and social class," were—with some major exceptions—able to enjoy the massive outpouring of entertainment being made available to them at reasonable costs. Theaters, amusement parks and public parks became meeting places and the locations of impromptu social gatherings. "Public amusement sites," he writes, let Americans share "a common commercial culture. . . where social solidarities were emphasized and distinctions muted." Through stereotyping and parodies, vaudeville players had a go of racial singling out. "They poked fun at old-world 'greenies' in such a way as to permit cosmopolitan, assimilated ethnics to laugh at the figures on the screen?," thusly speeding up the process of assimilation. Though definitely not as heroic a bonding experience as fighting off Indians on the Great Plains, Nasaw is correct in his assumption that some sort of assimilation was taking place in these venues.

In Industrialism and the American Worker 1865-1920, Melvyn Dubofsky argues that "the 'bread and butter' trade unions served as an effective substitute for Frederick Jackson Turner's vanishing frontier in maintaining interclass harmony, social stability, and democratic order." What does he mean by this? First let us examine Turner's hypothesis with regards to these three points. The presence of a frontier, Turner claimed, elicited a sense of democracy and even Jeffersonian equality for those who dared to brave it. "Out there," minor differences between nationalities, and persuasions faded as men banded together to tame the savagery of the West. As has been pointed out however, this type of optimism probably wasn't the case for most inhabitants of the region. The native Americans, for instance, were trod upon heavily, and if they were not killed outright they were decimated by disease and by the deprivation of their land and livelihood. Ditto for Mexicans and South American and Asian immigrants who found impedances such as the Foreign Miners Tax as well as outright hostility levied against them. While it may be true that labor organizations attempted to correct some of these wrongs, most of the groups were themselves segregated.

One answer many had to the question of the end of the frontier was expansionism. If democracy and Americanism relied on free (or at least conquerable) land and our own contiguous frontier was officially closed, then the logical move was to expand outward, beyond the natural borders of North America. Americans in Hawaii overthrew its monarchy in 1898. China, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Manila all felt the push of our "westering" during this period. Roosevelt fiddled with Panama and we got our canal. "It is the Anglo-Saxon's manifest destiny to go forth as a world conqueror," railed Progressive writer William Allen White in 1899. While often cloaked in the disguise of benevolence, or even self-protection, this type of mentality quite possibly stemmed from our sensation of being "boxed-in" at the end of our continent. It is interesting to note here that it was the Progressives, known for their strident domestic reforms, who were often the most vocal in the fight for our "national destiny abroad" or "the democratic mission of America." "Progressivism," wrote William E. Leuchtenburg, "was not nearly so liberal, democratic, and anti-corporate as (was) believed." Poor William Jennings Bryan was labeled an "anti-nationalist" for burying his head on this continent.

If there was ever a president that lived up to Turner's credo then it was Theodore Roosevelt. In his 1889 work The Winning of The West he described the progress of American values and institutions. "In obedience to the instincts working half blindly within their breasts, spurred ever onward by the fierce desires of their eager hearts, they made in the wilderness homes for their children, and by doing so wrought out the destinies of a continental nation." Turner himself, reviewing Roosevelt's book, agreed with this sentimentality, arguing that what America needed historically speaking was "a connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent," something he himself would devote his career to.

To Turner's trader's frontier, rancher's frontier, and miner's frontier, perhaps we should add the soldier's frontier and in turn the capitalist's frontier. No doubt our entry into WW1 was about proving our ""manhood" (just as Hoganson suggested we had done in the Philippines), but it would seem that "manhood" was really what Turner's theory was all about in the first place. American traits like coarseness and strength, the ability to be "powerful to effect great ends" all seem very masculine. Ditto for big business, whose captains were seen as he-men dictating massive operations and global markets. In Frank Norris's 1902 novel The Pit, heroine Laura Dearborn is torn between two courters, the wealthy industrialist Curtis Jadwin and the sensitive artist Sheldon Corthell. Laura, a "daughter of the frontier" from the woods of Massachusetts, chooses Jadwin because of the inherit masculinity of his profession.

The searching for solutions was prevalent amongst the intelligent set as well. The census report of 1920 shows more American s living in cities than outside them. In her book Setting A Course, Dorothy M. Brown pegs the literary and art crowd as truth seekers traipsing across the world for what America had lost. "From Paris the journey wound through New York and. . . on to the Southwest to Taos or Hollywood." The "new" or "lost generation" was stunned by WW1, "the erosion of traditions, and the commercialism of Collidge prosperity." "The economy of abundance. . . challenged the old. . . formula of thrift, hard work, and sobriety as the American way to success." The 1920s were a sped-up frontier. Sociologists saw the era as "an escalation careening madly in several directions at a bewildering variety of speeds." So confusing was this acceleration that one observer was afraid of Americans "suddenly finding one day they are no longer themselves." In an interesting counterpoint to Manhood, Brown points out that it was women who "anchored the network of American artists in their salons," suggesting that it was not they who had created their demise but they who were figuring out ways to circumvent it.

The fiction of the day often mimicked the struggle between Industry and Art. "A ragged picture does emerge," Trachchtenberg writes in Incorporation, "of lost hopes, hypocrisy, narrowed and constricted lives, grinding frustrations of poverty and isolation." Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt seeks respite from the fast-moving city-life of modern America in "frontier town(s);gamblers; (and) sleep(ing) under the stars." He yearns to be "a grim and wordless caveman" "plunging through the forest" like Davey Crockett, "a regular man, with he-men" clad in moccasins and burdened with only six-guns and buckskin. Perhaps Trachtenberg was right about Turner and his frontier. Perhaps it was a symbol that kept Americans moving forward cohesively, even if it was just a symbol of nostalgia.