The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

357 Pages·2019·4.64 MB·English

by  Greg Grandin

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To the memories of Michael, Marilyn, Joel, Tani, Jean, Tom, and Emilia. And
for Eleanor and her friends.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
—Anne Carson
INTRODUCTION
Fleeing Forward
Poetry was the language of the frontier, and the historian Frederick Jackson
Turner was among its greatest laureates. “The United States lies like a huge page
in the history of society,” he wrote in 1893. “Line by line as we read this
continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution.”1
Expansion across the continent, Turner said, made Europeans into something
new, into a people both coarse and curious, self-disciplined and spontaneous,
practical and inventive, filled with a “restless, nervous energy” and lifted by
“that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom.” Turner’s scholarly
career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during the
height of Jim Crow and the consolidation of anti-miscegenation and nativist
exclusion laws, with the KKK resurgent. Mexican workers were being lynched
in Texas, and the U.S. military was engaged in deadly counterinsurgencies in the
Caribbean and Pacific. But what became known as Turner’s Frontier Thesis—
which argued that the expansion of settlement across a frontier of “free land”
created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-
looking individualism—placed a wager on the future.
The kind of Americanism Turner represented took all the unbounded
optimism that went into the founding of the United States and bet that the
country’s progress, moving forward on the frontier and into the world, would
reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. It would dilute other
social problems as well, including poverty, inequality, and extremism, teaching
diverse people how to live together in peace. Frank Norris, in 1902, hoped that
territorial expansion would lead to a new kind of universalism, to the
“brotherhood of man” when Americans would realize that “the whole world is
our nation and simple humanity our countrymen.”2
Facing west meant facing the Promised Land, an Edenic utopia where the
American as the new Adam could imagine himself free from nature’s limits,
society’s burdens, and history’s ambiguities. No myth in American history has
been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers
advancing across an endless meridian. Onward, and then onward again. There
were lulls, doubts, dissents, and counter-movements, notably in the 1930s and
1970s. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or
another, for centuries. As Woodrow Wilson said in the 1890s, “a frontier people
always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national
history.” “There was no thought,” Wilson said, “of drawing back.”3
So far. The poetry stopped on June 16, 2015, when Donald J. Trump
announced his presidential campaign by standing Frederick Jackson Turner on
his head. “I will build a great wall,” Trump said.
Trump most likely had never heard of Turner, or his outsized influence on
American thought. But there, in the lobby of his tower on Fifth Avenue in
Manhattan, he offered his own judgment on history. Referring specifically to the
North American Free Trade Agreement and broadly to the country’s
commitment to free trade, he said, “We have to stop, and it has to stop now.”
All nations have borders, and many today even have walls. But only the United
States has had a frontier, or at least a frontier that has served as a proxy for
liberation, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life itself
and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.4
Decades before its founders won their independence, America was thought of
as a process of endless becoming and ceaseless unfurling. In 1651, Thomas
Hobbes described British colonialism in America as driven by an “insatiable
appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging dominion.”5 Thomas Jefferson, in a political
manifesto he wrote two years before the Declaration of Independence, identified
the right “of departing from the country in which chance, not choice” had placed
settlers, “of going in quest of new habitations” as an element of universal law.6
True religion moved east to west with the sun, believed early American
theologians, and if man could keep pace with its light, perhaps historical time
itself could be overcome and decline avoided.7 The West, said one frontier
writer, was “the land of mankind’s second chance.”8 It was, said Turner, a place
of “perennial rebirth.” Are there new frontiers? The historian Walter Prescott
Webb, writing in the early 1950s, said that what that perennial question revealed
was nothing less than a rejection of the death instinct. You might as well ask,
Webb said, is there a human soul?9 Faith in the regenerative power of the
frontier resided in the fact that the West did offer, for many, a chance to shake
off their circumstances. More than a few even got rich. The United States was
great, in ambition as well as dimension.
The concept of the frontier served as both diagnosis (to explain the power and
wealth of the United States) and prescription (to recommend what policy makers
should do to maintain and extend that power and wealth). And when the physical
frontier was closed, its imagery could easily be applied to other arenas of
expansion, to markets, war, culture, technology, science, the psyche, and
politics. In the years after World War II, the “frontier” became a central
metaphor to capture a vision of a new kind of world order. Past empires
established their dominance in an environment where resources were thought to
be finite, extending their supremacy to capture as much of the world’s wealth as
possible, to the detriment of their rivals. Now, though, the United States made a
credible claim to be a different sort of global power, presiding over a world
economy premised on endless growth. Washington, its leaders said, didn’t so
much rule as help organize and stabilize an international community understood
as liberal, universal, and multilateral. The promise of a limitless frontier meant
that wealth wasn’t a zero-sum proposition. It could be shared by all. Borrowing
frontier language used by Andrew Jackson and his followers in the 1830s and
1840s, postwar planners said the United States would extend the world’s “area
of freedom” and enlarge its “circle of free institutions.”10
The ideal of the frontier contained within itself the terms of its own criticism,
which is another reason why it serves as so powerful a national metaphor. Martin
Luther King, Jr., argued that the ideal fed into multiple reinforcing pathologies:
into racism, a violent masculinity, and moralism that celebrates the rich and
punishes the poor. For over a year, from early 1967 until his murder in April
1968—as the United States escalated its war in Vietnam—King put forth, in a
series of sermons and press conferences, a damning analysis. Military expansion
abroad, he argued, quickened domestic polarization. The “flame throwers in
Vietnam fan the flames in our cities,” he said; “the bombs in Vietnam explode at
home.” At the same time, constant war served to deflect the worst consequences
of that polarization outward.11
King’s point is as simple as it is profound: A constant fleeing forward
allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems,
such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence. Other
critics at the time were coming to similar conclusions. Some scholars argued that
imperial expansion let the United States “buy off” its domestic white skilled
working class, either through social welfare or higher wages made possible by
third world exploitation. Others stressed the political benefits of expansion,
which allowed the reconciliation of competing interests.12 Still others
emphasized more Freudian, even Jungian, motives: deep-seated violent
fantasies, formed in long-ago wars against people of color on the frontier,
projected outward; soldiers sublimating their “own guilty desires,” their own
complicity in wartime atrocities, with ever more grotesque sadism.13
There is a lot to unpack in the argument that over the long course of U.S.
history, endless expansion, either over land or through markets and militarism,
deflects domestic extremism. How, for example, might historical traumas and
resentments, myths and symbols, be passed down the centuries from one
generation to another? Did the United States objectively need to expand in order
to secure foreign resources and open markets for domestic production? Or did
the country’s leaders just believe they had to expand? Whatever the answers to
those questions, the United States, since its founding, pushed outward and
justified that push in moral terms, as beneficial equally for the people within and
beyond the frontier. The idea of expansion, the historian William Appleman
Williams wrote in 1966, was “exhilarating in a psychological and philosophical
sense” since it could be “projected to infinity.”14
Not, as it turns out, to infinity.
The United States is now into the eighteenth year of a war that it will never win.
Soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s are now seeing
their children enlist. A retired Marine general recently said the United States will
be in Afghanistan for yet another sixteen years, at least. By that point, the
grandchildren of the first generation of veterans will be enlisting. Senator
Lindsey Graham believes that the United States is fighting “an endless war
without boundaries, no limitation on time or geography.”15 Another former
officer (referring to the expansion of military operations into African countries
like Niger) said the war “will never end.”16 And grandchildren down the line will