Edward Dolnick, The New York Times, March 15, 2019
Image from article: W.H. Jackson’s “Barlow Cutoff” in Oregon. CreditCreditMPI/Getty Images
THE END OF THE MYTH
From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
By Greg Grandin
In a speech in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded a San Francisco audience of what had always distinguished the United States from other nations since its earliest days. “At the very worst,” Roosevelt declared, “there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven for men to whom the East did not provide a place.”
Well, yes and no. It is the mission of this fine, elegantly written history to explore the ever-shifting role of the frontier in the American story. Just who was welcome in that west-facing “haven,” Greg Grandin explains, was never as simple as Americans liked to proclaim. But “The End of the Myth” has a shadow theme. How is it, Grandin wants to know, that the symbol of America was once a boundless, beckoning frontier and today is a dark and forbidding wall?
The first person to articulate the frontier thesis was a University of Wisconsin historian who was little regarded at the time, Frederick Jackson Turner. In 1893, he read a paper on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” to a sleepy audience. No one asked a question.
The world quickly woke up. Turner’s idea was that the United States had been blessed by geographic good fortune. The seemingly infinite West would solve the problems that arose whenever too many people were jammed into too small a space. The frontier, in Grandin’s summary, “would reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. It would dilute other social problems as well, including poverty, inequality and extremism, teaching diverse people how to live together in peace.”
It was a pretty picture and a profoundly optimistic one. The frontier, Turner declared, was “a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” Grandin deepens and enriches that picture. Though Turner depicted the frontier as “a place where individualism sprouted from the land like prairie weeds,” in Grandin’s summary, that got the story backward. The reality, Grandin argues, was that “the state preceded the frontier.” Before the settlers arrived, the government had bought the land and surveyed it and built roads across it. Above all, the United States Army removed Native Americans and Mexicans from the settlers’ way, in brutal and deadly fashion.
But this is a measured, careful work, not a “People’s History” polemic. Grandin is a fine explainer with a knack for pithy summary. Turner’s frontier was a restrained place, “more James Stewart than John Wayne.” America was “a nation founded on unparalleled freedom and unmatched unfreedom.” The appeal of the frontier myth was that it took problems in the “here and now” and shifted them to the “there and then.”
Grandin keeps his cool — he prefers the stiletto to the club — but he grows angrier as his history reaches the present day. “The frontier was, ultimately, a mirage,” he writes, because it promised “a limitless world” where “all could benefit; all could rise and share in the earth’s riches.” The wall, on the other hand, is “a monument to disenchantment,” a deafening shout that “there’s not enough to go around.”
The wall stands as our new emblem, Grandin writes, and “it is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history.” Disenchanted and bewildered, we have become, so Grandin contends, “a country that increasingly defines itself by what it hates.”
Edward Dolnick has written books on the American West and many other subjects. He is currently working on a book about the Rosetta Stone.
THE END OF THE MYTH
From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
By Greg Grandin
369 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $30
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