American Frontier and American Political Culture: What

¶ … American Frontier and American Political Culture: What if anything has the frontier contributed to creating a distinctive American political culture?

The notion of a vast and limitless space known as the 'frontier' is a particularly unique aspect of our national political culture, a luxury of space and ideology enjoyed by America alone. Unlike the nations of Europe, only America has had a notion of an expansive, ever-stretching and vast territory with virtually elastic boundaries connected to its civilized, original core of thirteen colonies. The historian Frederick Turner once wrote: "Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development."(Turner, Chapter 1) America may have began as colonies, but its enrichment and spirit of capitalism is founded on a notion of colonizing a great and unsettled, uncivilized frontier.

True, the Native peoples of the Americans may have possessed the original and legitimate claim over such territory in retrospect. But at the time in the American political mind frame they did not -- unfairly, of course, but the notion of the frontier was ideological more than it was actual. And in the ideology of the American frontier, the West existed as a vast expanse, to which all Americans could flee to uncharted and unlawful places and make their fortunes. "Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnishes the forces dominating American character." (Turner, Chapter 1) Primitive and pristine, the frontier in the American imagination was a place of masculine proving ground, where men could live, free from the civilizing constraints of laws and marriage.

This notion of the frontier reinforced the notion that government, any government or restriction by law was bad, and that all men could make their fortune in some corner of the frontier's outreach through rough capitalism, by searching for gold or by farming territory with the sweat and toil of their back. This stress upon economic and political freedom at all costs, and a kind of hostile sense of alienation from even the legitimate institutions American government itself, as antithetical to the true 'American spirit' is peculiar to the ideology of the American frontier.

This spirit lives on today, in such examples as the resistance of the National Rifle Association's to any limitation upon firearms, to the presence of renegade political militia groups such as the 'minutemen,' and to the hostility in American political rhetoric to the threat of 'big government' making incursions into any sphere of American life. There is, even in the anti-environmentalist movement, a sense of the frontier's hostility to government limitation on human use, even though one might think that environmentalism is essential to protecting what is left of the frontier. The ideology of the American frontier was for humanity, and more often than not supported the exploitation of the environment for capitalist purposes. The idea that America is limitless and expansive, a luxury never enjoyed by virtually any other modern nation, further created resistance to the idea of environmentalism via the ideology of the frontier.