Frederick Turner Response Turner\'s Work

Frederick Turner Response

Turner's work on the significance of the frontier in American history is perhaps one of the most complex anthropological attempts to define and analyze the American people. The center of his theory focuses on the way that the frontier and the Westward expansions have defined the way that the American people has developed. In his organized essay, his thesis is pointed out from the very beginning: the American exceptionalism is based on the Westward expansion and on the frontier because it allowed the people travelling west to experience absolute democracy and to develop themselves as individuals in order to survive the challenges they were facing in this harsh environment: beyond anything "lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions"

. It will be interesting to analyze to what degree this is true.

The book can be briefly described by dividing it into two parts. The first eight chapters describe the movement towards the West of the pioneers, starting with the early settlements on the Atlantic coast. As they move out towards the Pacific coast, the American nation is actually formed, beyond its initial creation on the coast of the Atlantic. In these chapters, Turner is keen to point out arguments in favor of his thesis according to which the American society positively evolved because of the frontier experience.

The second part of his book, formed with the remaining chapters, point out to how this expansion process impacted the institutions of the United States, most importantly its democracy, but also social conditions, social relations between individuals, economic flows etc. From this perspective as well, the Western America shows a more pure form of Americanism.

Despite some of the limitations of Turner's theory that will be addressed further below, many of his critics are simply picking errors in his text simply because they may not agree with the way this theory seems to encompass from so many perspective the entire development of the American society (relying on one sole theory to describe the development of a people could be frightening). One such example is Elliott West, who has difficulties understanding whether this line goes north-south or east-west and, at the same time, what this line actually was and what it looked like (either that or what was beyond it, as he specifies "Still, we cannot see it. The nether rim of civilization, the receding gift of free land, nature's savage edge: What in the world did that look like?"

), as well as getting into a linguistic discussion over the nature of the word tail.

The approach is incorrect. Turner's historical theory is in need of symbols to support it, just as are all anthropological theories. From that point-of-view, the trial was indeed a component of the frontier history, perhaps not to the degree to which Turner exacerbates its meaning, but still, quite important. The objections should not be around the metaphors that Turner uses or how this borderline actually looked like, since these are all form related issues. The discussion should focus on the substance of things, on the objective analysis of the impact of Westward expansion on the evolution of the American people and society.

Other critics, Patricia Limerick in particular, point out to the limited approach that Turner has in the way he evaluates the society of Western America and to the fact that the evolution of that society is a process that continues today just as much. This argument is particularly interesting and pertinent. Indeed, the West should not be seen from a limited special or temporal perspective (she points out that "1890 was no deadline. Homesteading persisted into the twentieth century; rushes to pump oil or to mine coal or uranium punctuated in the 1900s"

), but rather as an active urban and rural area where the individual communities continue to develop themselves and to bring new values to the world.

From Patricia Limerick's approach, this paper can derive its own thesis as to how the frontier phenomenon truly influenced the development and values of the American society. In my opinion, the truth is that the United States is such a large country that a phenomenon such as the frontier and Westward expansion could not have influenced to the degree to which Turner believes it had the development of the American society. There are several reasons for this, all discussed below.

First, many of the values, especially the institutional and democratic values, have, in fact, been unchanged for the best 250 years. The Constitution itself has barely been modified, with the exception of a limited number of amendments. The main institutional powers, the executive, the legislative and the judicial powers are all based on the same principles and format from 1776 and the first years thereafter. The political system, with minor consolidations during the 19th century, has also remained the same, focused on a bipolar party system. None of these basic elements of the American society has changed in any way because of the influence of the frontier phenomenon.

Second, the intrinsic characteristics of the American people that came about with the ideas of democracy, most notably the free market economy, had also been a fundamental element in the construction of the American society, much as the others had. This, again, happened without any influence from the frontier phenomenon. The fact that the American society had been forged on the idea of challenges that had to be met was valid even before the Westward expansion. The spirit and values of the economic free market, including competition, were there before the end of the 19th century and were in no way influenced by the frontier. The challenges that the initial settlers had faced forged the values that the new challenges could not change later on.