1 October 1993
2
3 The Destiny of the West was Social Rather
4 than Individual -- The American Frontier
5 Experience as Described by Frederick Jackson
6 Turner
7
8 ..........edited by Marijan Salopek
9
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11 EXTRACT
12
13 Frederick Jackson Turner, .
14
15 The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is
16 the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the
17 new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people
18 have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations.
19 The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at
20 Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode
21 Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses
22 Cleveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large
23 as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England
24 stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the
25 combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
26 Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and little
27 towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of
28 the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their
29 former experiences. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great
30 Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri,
31 furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of
32 this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to
33 cooperation and to governmental activity. Even in the earlier
34 days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had
35 been made upon the government for support in internal
36 improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call
37 to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the
38 period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been
39 donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to
40 railroads for the construction of transportation lines.
41 Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen
42 years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have
43 presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency
44 of Western democracy. The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln
45 could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness,
46 cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the
47 achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on
48 the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar
49 independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a
50 serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his
51 individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral
52 resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible
53 by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation
54 works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in
55 the utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of
56 the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic
57 province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier
58 should be social rather than individual.
59 Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the
60 democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the
61 marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are
62 the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the
63 production of captains of industry. The old democratic
64 admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights
65 of competitive individual development, together with the
66 stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the
67 keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as
68 enabled the development of the large corporate industries which
69 in our own decade have marked the West.
70 Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the
71 development of Western democracy in the different areas which it
72 has conquered. There has been a steady development of the
73 industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency,
74 in this later movement of Western democracy. While the
75 individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days
76 of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and
77 more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing
78 with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems,
79 have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the
80 strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those
81 preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated
82 capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If
83 now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the
84 influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the
85 factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we
86 shall have to mention at least the following:--
87 Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free
88 land has continually lain on the western border of the settled
89 area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to
90 crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon
91 labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass,
92 there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the
93 frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic
94 equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept
95 inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination
96 when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for
97 the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative
98 conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land
99 wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and
100 free States on the lines of his own ideal? In a word, then, free
101 lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has
102 differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which
103 have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the
104 form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in
105 the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by
106 action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.
107 In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of
108 industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they
109 have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and
110 power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the
111 democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to
112 which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it
113 has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It
114 would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this
115 training upon democracy. Never before in the history o the world
116 has democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in
117 the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and
118 such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy has
119 learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the
120 problems of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but
121 little states with primitive economic conditions....
122 Western democracy has been from the time of its birth
123 idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a
124 fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of
125 man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds,
126 from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free
127 gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the
128 peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of
129 social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the
130 West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being
131 among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that
132 demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for
133 indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance. "To each she
134 offered gifts after his will". Never again can such an
135 opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the
136 thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not
137 even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this
138 land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from
139 the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the
140 pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands
141 as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably
142 present....
143
144 Source:
145 Frederick Jackson Turner,
146 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt,
147 Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.
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