Turner's Frontier Thesis and American Democracy's Origins

Introduction: External Factors and Political Development

External factors — including socio-economic and demographic ones — shape political systems and institutions. Political institutions are flexible enough to adapt to changes in external factors and to the pressures those factors exert, often in violent ways that translate into revolutions such as the French Revolution. From this broader perspective, Frederick Jackson Turner focuses on the external factors that have shaped American democracy and U.S. political institutions.

For Turner, the key element in the evolution of America as a democratic state is the frontier and the frontier regions. Turner looks back even before the Declaration of Independence, drawing on examples of frontier regions in Virginia. The key characteristic of the frontier region — with its profound impact on the development of democratic institutions — appears to be the absolute freedom enjoyed by small landholders, who were dominated by an entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit and driven to discover, own, and develop. This was true both for existing settlers and for new immigrant arrivals.

The Frontier as the Foundation of American Democracy

Primarily, the demand of settlers in the frontier regions was for self-government and, as Turner points out, for "the right to establish their own political institutions in an area which they have won from the wilderness." The underlying relationship between the frontier regions and American democracy appears here. It is a reflection of the laissez-faire spirit that dominated the first colonists of the frontier regions. Those colonists required that they be allowed to govern themselves, form their own institutions, and belong to a federation that was loosely governed from the center.

It is only natural that this translated into the objectives of the American Revolution, with the United States itself functioning as a frontier region relative to England. With what authority would London govern territories that were thousands of miles away and that had grown, over more than 150 years, into separate cultural and economic entities — entities that would inevitably require political independence as well?

Another argument Turner uses in favor of his thesis that democracy came from the West — from the frontier regions — is that many U.S. leaders during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the human product of those regions. People like Andrew Jackson, born in the frontier regions, brought to Washington the ideals and perceptions of those areas and helped shape American democracy with that background. Such values and ideals included the spirit of independence and adventure that dominated the frontier people's outlook.

Frontier Leadership and the Spread of Democratic Values

The Far West provides further examples of how American democracy was shaped by frontier regions. As Turner shows, the Far West was a geographic space of difficult physical conditions. As a consequence, associations became necessary, as people pooled their resources in order to achieve agricultural and industrial performance. The initial individualistic spirit that had led settlers to the Far West was gradually replaced by a social and community spirit, which proved necessary for survival and productivity in the region.