Turner, Billington, and Wister on the American Frontier

The Frontier and the American Psyche

For the settlers coming to the Americas in the 1600s and 1700s, this new country was wide open and offered the opportunity to seek a life free from the constraints of the Old World. However, once the East began to be populated by the refinement of European civilization, it was no longer that rough and wild world where anything and everything was accepted. Thus, in the 1800s, it was time for the adventurous to move again — this time to the Western plains and deserts — to seek their fate. Historians and authors such as Frederick Jackson Turner, Ray Allen Billington, and Owen Wister developed theories and wrote about the impact of this land on the new Americans.

It took a certain breed of people to move westward through the late 1800s, just as it had taken a certain breed of people to board ships to the New World. In fact, many believe that the frontier had a greater impact on what can be considered the American psyche than the original departure from England for vacant lands on the East Coast.

Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier Thesis

According to Frederick Jackson Turner, historian and author of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development" and transformed the American people (Babcock 29).

Turner believed that the distinctiveness of American institutions had arisen from the fact that they had been forced to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people — to the many transitions involved in crossing a huge continent, harnessing a wilderness, and developing communities that grew from rough settlements to cities of complex political and economic life at each step along the way (Babcock 30).

He further hypothesized that democracy influenced the frontier most. The individuality and freedoms of the frontier eradicated the chains of the Old World, found a "safety valve" for its high spirit by assuming ownership of public lands, and expressed its need for individual liberty by extending suffrage and allowing individuals to join together and take control of their government (Babcock 41).

In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner asserted that while in its heyday the frontier symbolized that every American generation returned "to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line" (Chapter 1). Along this frontier, considered "the meeting point between savagery and civilization," new U.S. citizens continually repeated the developmental stages of the blooming industrial order of the 1890s, which:

"begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on with the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader… the pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farm communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally the manufacturing organization with the city and the factory system." (Chapter 1)

Turner also noted in Chapter 9, "Contributions of the West to American Democracy," that the Western movement greatly impacted the democratic ideals on which this country is founded. "From the beginning of the settlement of America, the frontier regions have exercised a steady influence toward democracy." Yet would this democratic spirit continue to exist now that the frontier had been conquered? With hope, it would, stated Turner: "The paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths. Let us see to it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good."

Ray Allen Billington wrote about both the Western frontier and what he called the "Turner Hypothesis." Although he was cautious in his explanations, Billington accepted Turner's idea that the frontier experience of Americans in the late nineteenth century played an essential part in shaping the country's national character and the development of democracy — despite the fact that many people criticized Turner's beliefs (Ridge 6). These critics either challenged specific facts or accused Turner of being inconsistent, too emotional, vague, or guilty of omitting important information.

Ray Allen Billington and the Turner Hypothesis

Billington is also known for his humorous limericks about the West, including one he wrote after reading Robert Dykstra's The Cattle Town:

In story and film old Dodge City / Was a center of sin and tough titty. / But historians have shown / That image was overblown / It was moral and quiet (a pity).

However, as Ridge notes (13), Billington's experiences and attitudes differed considerably from Turner's. Turner, along with Woodrow Wilson, sought ways to conserve the political democracy characteristic of the rural and frontier era, while Billington supported the values of a pluralistic society in a shrinking world. Billington reconciled these positions by becoming a strong advocate for frontier history. With the publication of his Westward Expansion, Billington "had detected the beginning of a return swing of the pendulum in Turner's favor and had been unable to resist adding a push." Despite the problems laid at Turner's door, his ideas were worth resurrecting at the end of World War II because of their emphasis on national character traits and their praise of the relationship between economic and political independence in the American past.

In the preface to Westward Expansion, Billington reasserted this belief: "The history of the American frontier is not only one of the conquest of the continent and an expanding opportunity for the downtrodden; it is the history of the birth of the nation, endowed with characteristics which persisted through its adolescence and influenced people after the West itself was gone." Billington also reinforced Turner's theory that the frontier experience Americanized both individuals and institutions.

At the same time, Billington remained true to his social-democratic interpretation of American history. His final statement in Westward Expansion reads:

"The hardy, self-reliant men and women who through three centuries conquered the continent have played their role in the drama of American development; as they pass from the scene a new generation, freed from the prejudice of an outworn past where the needs of the individual transcended the needs of society, will blaze the trails into the newer world of cooperative democracy that is America's future."

In short, Billington embraced Turner's frontier — with its economic opportunity, democracy, and enduring character — while also envisioning it as the foundation of a society without prejudice that leads to cooperative democracy.

Further, in America's Frontier Heritage (25), Billington defined the frontier in modern terms as "a geographic region adjacent to the unsettled portions of the continent in which a low man-land ratio and unusually abundant, unexploited natural resources provide an opportunity for social and economic improvement to the non- or small-propertied individual." The pioneers of the "frontier" saw this land as the border between the settled and unsettled regions. Billington explained that the frontier moved at a rate of 10 to 40 miles per year, and throughout the 1830s and 1840s, investors were seen 1,000 miles ahead of the frontier towns of the Mississippi Valley, anticipating national growth in the years to come.

Many pioneers moved to the frontier in order to speculate in land — buying large quantities of inexpensive government land with the intention of selling it to others at a sizeable profit, as Billington explains in America's Frontier Heritage (44). The West thus offered not only freedom but the opportunity for wealth and affluence that these individuals had never previously enjoyed.

Conclusion: Enduring Legacies of the Frontier

These three individuals — Turner, Billington, and Wister — provide a rich understanding of how Americans viewed the West and the unique men and women who made it their home. Many of their ideas are as applicable today as they were a hundred years ago.