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America's Endless Frontier: A Myth That Defined a Nation
In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his revolutionary "Frontier Thesis" at the World's Congress of Historians in Chicago. Though initially met with little enthusiasm, Turner's argument that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" would transform America's self-understanding. For over a century, the frontier served as America's defining myth-a belief that expansion across "free land" created a uniquely American form of political equality and individualism. This expansionist imperative has remained constant throughout American history, with presidents repeatedly invoking pioneers advancing across an endless meridian to justify everything from westward expansion to foreign wars.
Greg Grandin's "The End of the Myth" explores how this "fleeing forward" allowed America to avoid confronting its social problems. As Martin Luther King Jr. argued, military expansion abroad quickened domestic polarization while deflecting its worst consequences outward. The United States has now reached the end of its expansionist myth. Mired in endless wars while no longer able to imagine endless growth, an entire generation faces radically diminished expectations. Trump's border wall represents America's new myth-a monument to the final closing of the frontier and a symbol of a nation trapped by history rather than striding atop it.
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The Boundless Continent: America's Origin in Expansion
The British colonies in North America were conceived in expansion. America was simultaneously an aspiration, errand, and obligation, born from Europe's religious and imperial conflicts. From the beginning, Native Americans were obstacles to be removed. Some died from European diseases, clearing "God's way" for settlers. Others were murdered by Puritans who saw them as "agents of Satan." Some were enslaved, like those experimented on by William Claiborne who received the first colonial patent in 1626 for a device to restrain and force Indians to work.
The westward drive fluctuated but erupted passionately during key historical moments. The 1730s Great Awakening revived religious fervor, with settlers pushing into the Shenandoah and Ohio valleys seeing themselves as fulfilling a messianic mission against "heathens." They justified taking Conestoga lands as divine right, believing "it was against the laws of God and nature, that so much land should be idle while Christians wanted it."
Benjamin Franklin's 1751 pamphlet reframed expansion in secular terms of social progress. Unlike Europe's demographic trap, America's abundant land meant population growth multiplied wealth rather than dividing it. Franklin, preferring white settlers, imagined America "scouring our planet" and reflecting "brighter light" visible even from Mars or Venus.
King George's 1763 proclamation prohibiting settlement west of the Alleghenies was intolerable to colonists who defined their sovereignty as the right to move west. As settlers advanced, violence against Native Americans intensified. The Paxton Boys murdered scores of Conestoga in western Pennsylvania. Frederick Stump, known as "Indian Killer," murdered eleven "friend-Indians" in 1768 but escaped justice when a mob freed him from jail. He later became one of Nashville's wealthiest men and a militia captain clearing Creeks and Choctaws from Tennessee.
The Declaration of Independence served as the colonists' counter to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Jefferson traced modern liberty to Saxon Germany, where freemen governed themselves as equals holding land "in absolute right." For Jefferson, migration wasn't merely an exercise of natural rights but their source. Liberty depended on the right to colonize, allowing freemen to move when threatened and carry freedom's torch.
Madison's political theory completed the ideological foundation for westward expansion. While traditional republican theory held that republics must remain small to survive, Madison recognized that America was already vast and growing. His ingenious solution in Federalist No. 10 redefined republican virtue by embracing diversity rather than suppressing it and proposing to "extend the sphere" to dilute factionalism by spreading citizens thin across vast territory.
Expansion became America's universal solution, even for problems caused by expansion itself. As Jefferson put it in his 1800 inaugural address, America needed "room enough" to escape Europe's "exterminating havoc."
3장
The Limitless Republic: Expansion as America's Defining Feature
What defines a republic whose borders constantly move as a fundamental quality of its existence? While Spain's former colonies in the Americas won independence and immediately recognized each other's territorial integrity based on colonial boundaries, the United States was "created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind"-what Jefferson called "the solitary republic of the world."
The Constitution empowered federal authorities to transform territories into states, but there was no outer parameter to this expansion procedure. Jefferson initially spoke of "distant times" when America would expand beyond its limits, but by 1805 couldn't conceive of any limit to U.S. expansion. James Monroe declared in 1824: "There is no object which as a people we can desire which we do not possess or which is not within our reach."
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 added over 800,000 square miles west of the Mississippi. Though the purchase formally moved the U.S. border to roughly the Continental Divide, this boundary was so distant as to be meaningless. The immense, barely charted territory conveyed a sense of limitlessness, leading Jefferson to ask: "Who can limit the extent to which the federative principle may operate effectively?"
America's founders viewed westward expansion as a continuation of their revolution. They justified sovereignty through natural law while simultaneously seeking to dominate nature, creating commandments to "subdue nature," "conquer wilderness," and "overspread" the continent. Peter Onuf argues that expansion allowed the first generation to project their "glorious struggle into the future," creating a "permanent revolution" across the continent.
Jefferson deployed the full power of the federal government against Native Americans, using predatory debt to force land cessions. "We shall push our trading houses," he wrote, and "be glad" when Native Americans fell into debt and had to sell their land. When economic pressure failed, Jefferson threatened force: "We have only to shut our hand to crush them."
As settlement pushed westward, expansion became identified not just as a condition of freedom but as freedom itself. The immensity of American territory created a new relationship between time and space. Having defeated the Old World, Americans resisted history itself, the notion that limits, decline, and death might pertain to them.
Madison's equation of the republic with an ever-inflating sphere symbolized the American Absolute. The argument that republicanism depended on expansion allowed no distinction between inside and outside-the welfare of those inside required incorporating what was outside. As President Monroe declared in 1822, "The greater the expansion, the greater the advantage." America had to take all to be all, to realize what Jefferson called its "final consolidation"-the beginning becoming the end, the Alpha and the Omega.
4장
Jackson's Frontier: White Democracy Through Dispossession
Throughout the 1800s, as the United States executed one "removal" after another of Native Americans, "frontier" came to mean the line separating Indian Country from white settlement. By century's end, with Indian Country reduced to fragmented reservations, "frontier" had transformed to mean not a line but a way of life synonymous with freedom.
The first run of U.S. presidents-Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe-were Tidewater and Piedmont slavers who speculated in western lands and expected indigenous peoples to vanish as America expanded westward. Yet these early presidents were constrained by limited resources and felt compelled to respect what Washington called the "interior frontiers" of indigenous sovereignty.
In 1811, Andrew Jackson, moving a slave coffle along the Natchez Trace through Chickasaw and Choctaw lands, confronted federal agent Silas Dinsmore who requested his papers. Jackson refused, declaring the Constitution his passport, and later campaigned for Dinsmore's removal. This confrontation represented two competing visions of liberty: Jackson's white supremacist freedom from restraint versus minimal federal protection for subjugated peoples.
In October 1812, Tennessee's legislature ordered the "extermination" of the Creek Nation, with Jackson leading the militia. Jackson instructed his men to "pant with vengeance" and become "engines of destruction," laying waste to Creek villages, killing warriors, mutilating their bodies, and enslaving women and children until obtaining surrender. His treaty with the defeated Creeks dispossessed them of over twenty million acres, reducing them to "extreme want" and dependency on government corn.
Andrew Jackson's 1828 defeat of John Quincy Adams marked a pivotal shift in American politics. Despite the era's social upheaval and growing worker activism, Jackson promised to restore "primitive simplicity and purity" through minimal government-a "simple machine" with limited federal power. This vision strategically forestalled northern demands for emancipation while empowering white men and subjugating African Americans. The 1830 Indian Removal Act provided Jackson's answer to restless whites wondering "are we freemen or slaves?" By forcibly relocating 50,000 Native Americans westward and opening 25 million acres to settlement and slavery, Jackson satisfied his "true friends of liberty" without requiring them to carry passports into these newly "free lands."
After Jackson's Removal Act, the meaning of "frontier" evolved from a military front or national border to a way of life-what Frederick Jackson Turner would later call "the outer edge of the wave" separating civilization from savagery. This metaphor perfectly captured the frontier's dual nature: precise like an edge yet fluid like a wave.
Indian removal unleashed what one legal theorist called "an irresistible tide of Caucasian democracy" across the continent. White settlers who acquired Indian lands experienced extraordinary power and popular sovereignty, with more white men considering themselves free than ever before in history. Jacksonian settlers continued defining their liberty in opposition to the people of color they subjugated as they moved across the frontier.
5장
The Safety Valve: How Expansion Defused Social Tensions
Consider the safety valve, invented in France in the late 1600s after a pressure cooker explosion. Within a century, this device became essential for steam engines, boilers, and locomotives-though often unreliable. As steamboats revolutionized the Mississippi River system, carrying passengers, freight, and slaves westward, their boilers frequently exploded. Engineers, lacking theoretical understanding of steam's "expansive power," relied on dangerous intuition.
By the 1820s, the safety valve became a powerful metaphor for a nation seemingly coming apart. Gordon Wood described this period as one where "everything seemed to be coming apart" with people "almost at war with one another." Violence, alcoholism, and mental illness increased dramatically, with asylum populations doubling between 1808 and 1812.
Americans had an "imagination continually on the stretch," wrote William Gilmore Simms, with religious movements like Mormonism serving as "moral safety-valves" carrying off societal pressures. The metaphor extended to political mechanisms-free press, voting rights, legal systems-all described as "safety valves" releasing democratic pressures.
The safety valve metaphor proved especially useful in reconciling America's fundamental contradiction: unparalleled freedom alongside unmatched unfreedom. As the metaphor evolved, southern expansionists saw western territories as a means to diffuse the enslaved population and gain political leverage. Timothy Flint, though nominally opposed to slavery, advocated acquiring Mexican territory as "the proper escape valve" for "too great an accumulation of blacks in the slave states."
The safety valve metaphor also addressed the "class problem" facing America: how to maintain high wages for urban laborers and prevent propertyless voters from forming a "Labor Party" that might threaten property rights. The solution seemed simple: send them west and give them land.
The radical "Free Soil" movement, organized partly by socialist brothers George Henry and Frederick Evans, initially embraced an egalitarian vision that included demands for farms, freedom of public lands, abolition of debt collection, women's equal rights, and ending both chattel and wage slavery.
In practice, however, "free land" rarely functioned as intended. Speculators, railroads, and corporations claimed the best land, while inflation made migration costs prohibitive for poor families. Still, the frontier served as a "standing threat" that slightly shifted the balance of power between labor and capital, even if workers rarely actually went west during labor disputes.
Others saw westward expansion as preserving minimal government and property rights. Massachusetts congressman Caleb Cushing called the West "the great safety-valve of our population," protecting against the dangers of poverty and social disorder without requiring an expansive federal government. As Cushing put it, "Empire" was a "safety valve for all the pent up passions" of society. Deny Americans that "expansibility," he warned, and "you'll have hell to pay."
6장
War and Expansion: The Cycle of Conquest
John Quincy Adams, in his post-presidency years, recognized the vicious cycle of westward expansion-how it both hastened and stemmed crisis, with each war's effects becoming the cause of the next. He feared either that perpetual frontier war would tear the nation apart into free and slave camps, or that it would bind the country together through shared racist terror against Native Americans and Mexicans.
Adams's House speech prophetically described what today we call "blowback." He used the word "recoil" to argue that Jacksonian settler violence created an addictive cycle of expulsion, expansion, and repression. Indian removal was "the cause of the cause" that led to Texas. The violent displacement of tribes "by fraud or by force" to regions bordering Mexico would inevitably meet resistance, which Adams saw as "retributive justice from heaven."
Recent historians confirm Adams's fears about the Mexican-American War, which Steven Hahn describes as "one of the most costly" and "politically vexing episodes in American history." The conflict required massive military mobilization and inflicted racist atrocities on Mexicans. General Grant later called it "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation."
U.S. troops committed horrific atrocities, including rape, murder, and scalping of civilians, with General Winfield Scott reporting crimes that would "make Heaven weep, & every American, of Christian morals blush for his country." The eastern press fueled war fervor by depicting Mexicans as "degenerate and servile," with the New York Herald assuring quick victory due to Mexican "imbecility and degradation" from "amalgamation of races."
The war finally ended with Mexico ceding about five hundred thousand square miles of territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, establishing a permanent southern border running two thousand miles from Brownsville to San Diego. John Quincy Adams died three weeks later, having voted against commending the generals who led the war.
While European workers in 1848 revolted against economic inequality, building barricades and waving red flags across major cities, America's working class directed their energies outward rather than upward-joining with the gentry to fight Indians and Mexicans. The November 1848 presidential election offered voters a choice between two Indian killers: Lewis Cass and Zachary Taylor, with Taylor (whose troops committed atrocities in Mexico) winning the presidency.
The Jacksonian consensus unleashed market capitalism through Indian dispossession while celebrating a minimal state that nonetheless grew more powerful in pushing the frontier forward. Some reformists, including Christians, labor radicals, and writers, sought a national identity based on something other than radical individualism-what Melville called a "monster of a million minds." Yet the reality of America-with former Mexican citizens, soon-to-be emancipated African Americans, free people of color, Irish-Catholic migrants, and diverse faiths-meant the United States would be populated by something other than Jefferson's vision of "Saxons to the thousandth generation."
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The Civil War's Challenge: Social Reform vs. Western Escape
The Civil War finally broke the Jacksonian coalition and forced the United States to confront questions about citizenship, freedom, and human dignity. Unlike other nations where carnage led to social reforms and expanded state responsibilities, America's unique geography had previously allowed it to avoid such reckonings by pushing problems westward.
In 1748, Montesquieu outlined what good government "owed" citizens: "a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health"-principles that would later reflect radical labor demands in America. The Civil War's unprecedented bloodshed in the heartland forced the state to address "the needs of those who had died in its service." These battle-forged commitments laid the foundation of America's modern welfare system.
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, established in 1865, exemplified how war led the state to attend to social needs. W.E.B. Du Bois called it "the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted." Operating as a branch of the War Department, the bureau distributed necessities, founded schools and hospitals, resettled refugees, administered confiscated properties, regulated labor relations, and levied taxes.
Chattel slavery was a three-hundred-year-old institution that Du Bois called a "school of brutality and human suffering" whose pedagogy was the "darkening of reason," serial rape, and "spiritual death." After its destruction, President Andrew Johnson believed the millions of survivors should help themselves, vetoing a bill to extend the Freedmen's Bureau because he thought any assistance would be "injurious" to freedpeople's "character and prospects."
In 1872, the Freedmen's Bureau chief commissioner General Oliver Otis Howard was reassigned to Arizona, symbolizing the nation turning away from Reconstruction toward frontier expansion. Howard, a Christian abolitionist who called the bureau the "true relief," had embodied Andrew Jackson's nightmare of federal power intervening in local affairs. When sent west, Howard abandoned his principles of justice, taking a hard line against Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce, forcing them from their homeland and pursuing them on a brutal 1,500-mile trek that killed about half of the 800 who began the journey.
The machinery for western expansion was established even before the Civil War ended, with the Department of Agriculture, Morrill Land-Grant Act, Pacific Railroad Act, and Homestead Act creating what seemed like the possibility for "liberty and empire to advance in lock step." Though the Homestead Act promised land to settlers, less than half the distributed acreage went to families, with capitalists and speculators claiming the most valuable portions. The frontier offered an alternative to confronting the Civil War's legacy-as Frederick Jackson Turner put it, a "magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated."
8장
Turner's Thesis: Reframing the Frontier as American Identity
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his revolutionary "Frontier Thesis" at the World's Congress of Historians in Chicago. Despite initially feeling his presentation failed, Turner's argument quickly gained prominence. Unlike earlier historians who followed the "germ theory" that traced American institutions back to ancient Saxon and Teutonic origins, Turner argued that America's democratic character was forged on the frontier itself.
Turner wrested American historical understanding from its Brahmin custodians, rejecting their Saxon origin myths for a materialist interpretation focused on "germs of processes." His core argument was that America's vast western frontier created unprecedented political equality based on the belief in limitless resources. Unlike elitist historians who credited wealthy "gentlemen" for western development, Turner celebrated common settlers and farmers.
Turner portrayed the frontier as a place where individualism naturally emerged before government and big business arrived, with "complex society" being "precipitated by the wilderness." This narrative contradicted historical reality-the West was always dominated by large-scale power and capital. Richard White notes that "settlement tended to follow, rather than precede, connections to national and international markets."
The frontier required a strong federal presence: the Army removed Native Americans and Mexicans, government bonds financed the Louisiana Purchase, federal surveyors plotted land, and engineers built infrastructure. Turner himself knew this truth, writing in private notes that "government came before the settler" providing land and transportation. Yet his published work presented a different sequence: untouched nature, then settler families, then communities and voluntary associations, followed by civil society, trade, and finally government.
Though Turner remained mostly optimistic in his public lectures, he acknowledged dark undercurrents in American development. After the 1890 Census declared there was no longer a frontier line, Turner recognized that capital power was outpacing what remained of the frontier, diminishing its effectiveness as a social safety valve. By 1914, he lamented that "the free lands are gone, the continent is crossed, and all this push and energy is turning into channels of agitation."
Turner's frontier thesis provided an essential cooling of the racist rhetoric that had powered Jacksonian settler colonialism, making it suitable for America's emerging global power. By 1898, explicit Saxonism was becoming a liability as the U.S. encountered diverse populations abroad. Though white supremacy continued through Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and exclusionary policies, Turner's "soothing processional" became the official anthem of American expansion, now framed as universal rather than racial.
This universalism emerged precisely when class conflict was intensifying, with strikes, labor activism, and socialist organizing threatening industrial capitalism. The 1893 World's Fair where Turner first presented his thesis coincided with massive labor actions, while the 1893 financial crash triggered widespread unrest. Progressive presidents like Wilson used federal power to violently suppress radical labor unions and left-wing parties, especially after America entered World War I.
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Imperial Reconciliation: The Pact of 1898
The Confederate flag, often discussed solely in terms of domestic racial politics, actually played a crucial role in national unification through imperial expansion. Beginning around 1898, the flag served for half a century not as a symbol of division but of reconciliation through empire-building. After the Civil War, northerners and southerners found "rare common ground" in westward expansion and the military subjugation of Native Americans.
Post-Civil War America witnessed a strategic redeployment of military resources from Reconstruction to frontier pacification. While distinguished Northern officers like Custer and Sheridan initially led most campaigns against Native Americans, Southern veterans and their sons gradually used western expansion as a path to rehabilitation.
The Spanish-American War of 1898 marked a turning point in Confederate reintegration, as tens of thousands of troops were sent to seize Spain's remaining colonies. Where Southerners had once coveted Cuba as a potential slave state, now conquering the island offered them an opportunity to prove their patriotism and reconcile with the North.
The Spanish-American War catalyzed national reconciliation as Southerners eagerly embraced the conflict. Patriotic fervor swept both regions-Georgia's governor offered to lead his state militia, while Northern and Southern newspapers exchanged poetic tributes to unity. Southern ports became staging grounds for invasions, with former Confederate generals like Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler receiving appointments from President McKinley as symbols of reunification.
The Spanish-American War didn't truly reconcile America's fundamental paradox of political freedom versus racial subjugation. Instead, as southerners increasingly led U.S. military campaigns abroad, the violence and hatred generated by these imperial adventures "poured back within the frame of the South itself," as W.J. Cash observed. Overseas conflicts in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, Nicaragua, and Haiti functioned as a prism, refracting foreign racial subjugation back into domestic racism.
War continued to bring goodwill to white southerners and more displays of the Confederate flag. In June 1916, as Woodrow Wilson pushed militarization through Congress, Confederate veterans descended on Washington, D.C., to show support for the coming war in Europe. Tens of thousands "wearing the gray" marched down Pennsylvania Avenue with the Stars and Bars proudly displayed, offering their services to Wilson: "We will go to France or anywhere you want to send us!"
The War of 1898 represented a pact that allowed southerners to atone for their sedition while still carrying their Confederate banner "to the farthest corners of the earth." This updated the Jacksonian consensus for the twentieth century, unifying the country through overseas war. The military expanded the frontier while also serving as its own frontier, providing social mobility, education, healthcare, and decent pay for both whites and, increasingly after 1898, blacks.
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The Border as Anti-Frontier: From Boundary to Wall
Borders represent both domination and the panic of power-what Freud described as "a fortress on the frontier," implying that the society being defended is as unstable as an individual's ego. On the U.S.-Mexico border, obsession with external fortification reveals internal troubles.
The U.S.-Mexico border was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican-American War. The line runs from the Gulf of Mexico westward along winding rivers whose banks shift with time and whose waters are diverted to serve towns, ranches, mines, and factories, before crossing arid lands and finally reaching the Pacific. In its path, the border divides dozens of indigenous communities including the Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, and Apache, along with farms, ranches, wildlife habitats, archaeological sites, bird and butterfly reserves, towns, streams, canals, canyons, roads, paths, cemeteries, and city streets.
The border began with just stone markers in the 1850s, with no fence. People, animals, goods, and water crossed freely, creating an integrated ecology. The U.S. surveyors largely ignored the region's inhabitants, dismissing the land as "a sterile waste" good only as "a barrier or natural line of demarcation between two neighboring nations."
Mexico barely survived the 19th century intact. After breaking from Spain in the 1820s, Mexico suffered coups, civil wars, lost Central America, Texas, and its northern territories to the U.S. In 1862, France invaded and installed Maximilian as emperor, though Mexican liberals eventually drove out the French and executed him.
Instead of military conquest, debt leverage opened Mexico to foreign investment. American capital-led by J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, Hearst, and others-transformed Mexico's economy, gaining control of oil, railroads, utilities, livestock, agriculture, and ports. North of the border, corporations dispossessed Mexicans and indigenous communities of millions of acres through "litigation, chicanery, robbery, fraud, and threat," while south of the border, tens of thousands of Yaqui were violently expelled from their lands in Sonora to make way for export plantations owned by American companies.
In 1910, Mexico erupted in revolution-what historian John Mason Hart calls "the first great third world uprising against American economic, cultural, and political expansion." Peasants fought planters, secularists battled Catholics, and workers rose against owners. Fields were burned, factories sacked, mines flooded, and oil rigs and plantations nationalized.
Border policing evolved gradually but also in bursts, typically during wars and economic crises. Before World War I, the border remained relatively open. As historian Mae Ngai notes, the U.S. "had virtually open borders" except for Chinese exclusion laws. No passports, visas, or green cards were required. Simple health and intelligence tests were the only barriers at entry points like Ellis Island.
Everything changed when the U.S. entered WWI in April 1917. Wilson signed sweeping immigration restrictions including literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quotas. Mexican workers, needed for southwestern agriculture and mining, were exempt from quotas but required to pass through checkpoints for health inspections and delousing.
The U.S. Border Patrol operated with absolute impunity against migrants who had no rights. Former Texas Rangers turned patrollers were accused of tying migrants' feet together and dragging them in and out of rivers until they confessed to illegal entry. Many patrollers were active Ku Klux Klan members throughout border towns from Texas to California, with one military officer noting that "practically every other member" of El Paso's National Guard belonged to the Klan.
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The End of the Myth: America's Reckoning with Limits
While Turner conceived his Frontier Thesis as a sociology of vastness explaining how infinite free land created unique political equality, critics in the early twentieth century began turning this theory against itself. Where Turner and his followers used "the frontier" to explain what America had avoided (despotism, militarism, class conflict), critics now used it to explain why America couldn't have social rights, responsive government, or sophisticated culture.
Walter Weyl, a New Republic editor, argued in 1912 that the westward pioneer movement gave Americans "a psychological twist" that hindered socialized democracy. The open continent "intoxicated" Americans, creating a self-confident, short-sighted individualism "doomed in the end to defeat itself."
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had studied briefly under Frederick Jackson Turner at Harvard in 1904 and later read Turner's essays in his uncle Theodore Roosevelt's library. FDR drew heavily from the Frontier Thesis to explain the Great Depression crisis in accessible language.
In his September 1932 Commonwealth Club speech, shortly after Turner's death, Roosevelt channeled the historian's ideas while inverting them. He described America's frontier period as "long and splendid," when depressions were temporary because men could always "retreat to their farms" or climb "into a covered wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven." But industrialization, advances in communication, transportation, and farm machinery changed everything. Capitalism began to outrun the pioneer, and economic power consolidated.
The New Deal's socialization of the Frontier Thesis allowed reformers to challenge racism and white supremacy. While Turner's followers had mythologized Anglo-Saxon plowmen advancing toward greatness, New Dealers reframed the frontier as pathology-a social disorder manifesting as insistence on national uniqueness.
By 1944, as America approached victory in what FDR called "the world's greatest war against human slavery," the New Deal still advanced a broadly social-democratic conception of citizenship. Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union proposed a second "Bill of Rights" guaranteeing social rights like healthcare, education, and living wages-similar to Mexico's 1917 constitution.
As World War II ended, the concept of "frontier" shed its negative associations and returned to its meaning as a line to cross, a challenge and opportunity. With unprecedented economic power and restored confidence, America embraced the frontier metaphor across scholarly disciplines-from economics to psychology.
With fascism defeated, Cold War leaders readily applied frontier ideology to anti-communist expansion. John Knox Jessup, editor at Life magazine and advisor to Henry Luce (who coined "American Century"), wrote that "America's frontier was now on the Elbe," separating Western from Eastern Europe. Jessup envisioned the frontier not as a defensive perimeter but as a civilizational boundary between freedom and "Soviet slavery."
By the late 1950s, America's security frontier extended far beyond the Elbe, encompassing a global radius from Alaska through Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and back to Europe-territories also open to profitable U.S. capital investment.
Despite these tensions, postwar technological advances were spectacular. The Green Revolution dramatically improved crop yields worldwide, seemingly fulfilling Walt Whitman's prediction that America would "feed the world." However, American resource consumption remained vastly disproportionate, requiring considerable violence to maintain-all while maintaining the pretense of "universalism."
