1920 Turner's Frontier Thesis
Frederick Jackson Turner
The Frontier in American History
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by
Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.
The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is
the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the
new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people
have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations.
The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at
Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode
Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses
Cleveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large
as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England
stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed
the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode
Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and
little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless
spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as
dwarfed their former experiences. The Great Lakes, the Prairies,
the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the
Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the
achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to
give way to cooperation and to governmental activity.
Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the
wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for
support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a
growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of
national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast
public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to
States for education, to railroads for the construction of
transportation lines. Moreover, with the advent of democracy in
the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical
conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the
social tendency of Western democracy.
The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his
family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his
clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement
of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western
prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent
destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious
and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his
individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral
resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible
by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation
works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in
the utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of
the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic
province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier
should be social rather than individual.
Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the
democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the
marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are
the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the
production of captains of industry. The old democratic
admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the
rights of competitive individual development, together with the
stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the
keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as
enabled the development of the large corporate industries which
in our own decade have marked the West.
Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the
development of Western democracy in the different areas which it
has conquered. There has been a steady development of the
industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency,
in this later movement of Western democracy. While the
individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days
of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and
more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing
with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems,
have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the
strongest.
This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent
captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to
control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the
way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences
that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors
which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have
to mention at least the following:--
Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free
land has continually lain on the western border of the settled
area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to
crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon
labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass,
there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the
frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic
equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept
inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination
when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for
the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative
conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land
wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and
free States on the lines of his own ideal?
In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their
existence has differentiated the American democracy from the
democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy
in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated
industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive
conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have
shaped our history.
In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of
industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that
they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of
design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted
with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the
tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements
which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of
politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance
of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history o
the world has democracy existed on so vast an area and handled
things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of
design, and such grasp upon the means of execution.
In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United
States how to deal with the problems of magnitude. The old
historic democracies were but little states with primitive
economic conditions.... Western democracy has been from the time
of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness
appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new
chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of
society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific,
constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out
before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old
World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and
as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life
and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the
midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave
in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of
social advance.
"To each she offered gifts after his will".
Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men.
It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of
our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full
significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made
America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim
Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this
idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for
a new order of things is unmistakably present....
