Push the Frontier

his coat and knotted as he rode past. Children and dogs ran along beside him till he passed beyond their meager worlds as well. By afternoon, wide fields of cultivated crops opened up around him, stretching to the horizon. Mines and logging operations popped the hills by dust. He arrived at those ragged flags that marked the Empire's edge, engaged out on a darkening world. Law it's an unconquered home.

To people's alien in language and thought, all manner of death and liberation, so you could team and writhed within the gloaming. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert I assumed that that reading was supposed to evoke a certain feeling. Now, what was that you were going for? I wanted to evoke the feeling of the frontier, of traveling from the center of a civilization to the outer

boundaries of it. Now, specifically, we talked about the literary style of J. M. Kutzi, who wrote the book Waiting for the Barbarians, which we've both read, right, yeah, yeah, one of my favorite books. And uh I was thinking about doing a quote from it to kick this off, but I thought, well, well, I don't know, just kind of cobble something together that that invokes Waiting for the Barbarians and serves our purpose directly. So this is like

synthetic Coatsy by you. Yeah, yeah, and I'm you know, and I Coatsy is one of those guys that dig enough. There's probably a little bit of synthetic Coatsy and a lot of things I write. Uh well, definitely, uh, definitely an influential writer. Well, you could do worse than to have that. But of course today that means we're going to be talking about frontiers, and I guess we should

just explain why this idea came up. So just recently, Robert Christian and I went to the c t E two conference in Chicago, and we're talking about the eighteen

ninety three Chicago World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition. And one of the topics that I was researching that we didn't end up incorporating into our presentation, there was this presentation that was delivered in in Chicago in the eighteen nineties, usually reported as being delivered during the World's Fair in eighteen ninety three by the historian, the American historian Frederick

Jackson Turner, and it's known as the Frontier Thesis. The the essay itself is the significance of the frontier in American history. You And that got us thinking about the idea of frontiers, what what a frontier means, what it represents, uh, what kind of flaws are there in the idea of a frontier. And so that's what we wanted to explore uday.

Eventually we will get to that essay by Turner and talk about it's it's meaning, it's influence, and some criticisms of it, but we also wanted to explore more generally the idea of the frontier, especially also how it fits into what's known as world systems theory. Yeah, we wanted to go deeper than just sort of the the basic

idea frontier. I feel like earlier generations you had Western movies and Western fiction and that was kind of the go to model, and certainly all that stuff still around, but I think more and more younger people probably have that Game of Thrones vision. Right right, there's the wall, that's the frontier on one side, barbarians and white walkers on this side. You know, some semblance of order. Yeah.

I think the frontier is often considered well in in the in the or metaphorical reading and one very straightforward literal reading, you could just say it's the it's the agreed upon boundary of a civilization. But in the more metaphorical reading you could say, well, it is where the idea of civilization ends. It's where the laws cease to apply. Right, Yeah, there is there's a quote here that I had to

pull out from Corman McCarthy's Blood Meridian. He says, here, beyond men's judgments, all covenants were brittle, which uh, which which is telling? And that's certainly a work of a frontier chaos for you. Yeah, and Blood Meridian, I think very well captures a lot of the popular idea of the frontier. And then it's a place where there are few checks on people's will to power and there is little in the way of you know, moral civilization. I mean, part of part of what you might say there is

that that's just Corman McCarthy's influence coming through. But yeah, it's a ace of of betrayal, of individualism, of of struggle for power, of violence. Uh what else would you say? Well, all these things, certainly, but but yeah, I want to make sure we're also hitting on the positive aspects, you know, the idea of freedom, liberation, you know, just going off the grid right, right when everyone probably has at some point in their life fantasized about that, right like all

these modern technologies I need. I'm gonna I'm gonna move to a cabin, I'm gonna have physical books, I'm gonna read them and listen to vine or something. Right. Uh, And that in a sense is is is not that different from the frontier notion. But but what's going on on Twitter, Like you gotta disconnect from all of that, right, that's the you're getting further away from from the the the the center of of modern digital digital civilization. Now,

this is the popular idea of the frontier. The the actual fact of the frontier maybe of very different beasts than how it's conceived in these both dark and positive romantic visions. Yeah, as always you can you can point to examples of either, but it's probably gonna more or less even out depending on whose side you're on, too,

because it's the frontier. Is is an idea that of course has two sides, and you can be an individual that is is born into the civilization side of frontier or into the the wild side of frontier, and it's going to be a very different experience. We'll get into all that as we explain right and now. Of course, one of the funny things might be that you could have different perspectives on which side of the frontier is which.

Right now, the person who's living on the side that has more technology, more economic power, greater wealth, more population density and cities and civic infrastructure, that person probably thinks they live on the civilized side and the other side is wild. But you could very well turn it the other way around and say, you know, here on our side, of the frontier. We have simple, well organized communities that operating cooperation, and the people on the other side have

this kind of technological pandemonium. And whatever side you're on, you can likely look look across the boundary and say, well, those people have totally the wrong religion. I don't know what they're thinking. We have the right one. Uh, they should be more like us, right, So maybe that frontier needs to be pushed forward a little bit. Yeah. Another thing worth stressing before we move forward is, of course that frontiers of of one sort or another have always existed.

So the Wild West was not the first frontier, Uh, no, more than like the frontier of the Roman Empire was the first frontier. Like it, It's as long as you've had civilizations and human communities, you've had these boundary points. Yeah. And one of the things to keep in mind is that a lot of people think of the frontier and they only think of the American frontier. You can barely

come up with another one. But I'm glad you mentioned the Roman frontier was one situation where you had a technologically advanced civilization that had an empire, and they had the boundaries of the empire, and they were constantly trying to push the boundaries and move them around, trying to conquer new people's, conquer new lands, bringing more resources. And so they very much had a frontier that is in a lot of ways analogous to the American Western Frontier.

They all, but you can also think about the sort of more contemporary frontiers to the American Western frontier, like you might have seen in Australia or in South Africa or in other places that where you had the remnants of European imperialism pushing into lands that were already occupied by other people. Right. And then of course, nowadays, with with travel um such as it is, Uh, a frontier is not always going to be as physical space, you know, like you to to to disappear into a realm beyond

the domain of empire. Uh doesn't necessarily mean that you just keep traveling west on foot. You can hop on a plane and go somewhere else and uh, and that factors into into all of this as well. So earlier I mentioned that Robert, you wanted to talk about the idea of frontiers in light of what's known as world systems theory. Yeah, so what's the deal with this? Explain

this concept to me. Okay, so world systems theory is an economically charged, macro sociological attempt to understand the movements of history, you know. Okay, so no, biggie, Well no, I this is the kind of thing that is always very interesting and always bound to be in some sense wrong, you know what I mean? Yeah, critics of this say will often say, oh, well, this is too economic or

it's too reductionists. I mean, anytime you try and create a broad theory or model for human behavior, human culture, it's not gonna fit perfectly. Right. What I what you might call world tote realizing theories. Maybe that's not the West best way to put it, the West way to put it, but the theories that try to explain how everything in some domain of knowledge works. Usually those kind of overreach and over generalized, but at the same time

they can have very interesting insights. So, so, what does world systems theories say about explaining movements in world history? Well? I turned to some of the writings of De Pao University socio anthropologist Thomas city Hall for some additional info. Here he has a two thousand and one UH paper that came out World Systems Frontiers and ethnogenesis, incorporation, and resistance to state expansion. Okay, that's a lot of abstract now,

all right, well let's boil it all down. So, setting aside actual nation states, um world systems theory breaks down the world to three basic components. You have the core, the periphery, and the semi periphery. So the core is the center of production and special is zation and it's made up of strong states. Okay, so production and specialization means that this is your economic center. This is where

your your goods and services mainly come from. But it's where there's like manufacturing maybe, but also specialization would mean it's where people have more specialized job titles. So instead of being somebody who operates a homestead and does everything, you might be somebody who has a very very specific job that you're very good at that can be utilized by or can be made use of by this economic

system to produce more and more goods. Right, and it it basically lines up with our our intro fiction and about the guy riding out from the center of empire. But again this is this is something that that crosses h traditional state boundaries. So from this point of view, like the core would incorporate various nations. So for instance, you look at a world map that's using world systems theory, and the US and Canada are going to one and they're going to be locked in with other Western nations.

So it's less observant of things like national boundaries and more observant of centers of economic production and trade. Maybe they're less hip to the idea of nations and boundaries and they're just trying to figure out how the system works. So if they're just watching stuff flow around, this might be the system they land upon. Right, So that's the core. The periphery specializes in raw materials, and this is composed of weak states, and the semi periphery is the intermediate area. Okay,

so you might think of this as the core. The group we just talked about sort of exploiting the resources of these other of the periphery states, and then the semi periphery states are somewhere in between. So Hall and others have also added additional rules to this world systems. They argued Day back to at least Neolithic times. Core periphery structures are a major locust point of social change, and all of the systems evolved and have several dynamics

cycles involved in them. Okay, but if we said that this is less observant of national boundaries and is thinking more about economics, how do frontiers play into it? All? Right, well, this is where frontiers coming to play. So various dynamics cycles dictate the expansion and contraction of world systems. According

to Hall, these systems pulsate. Core states rise and fall, and there's a typical process typical but not universal, in which a semi peripheral marcher state displaces or conquests after a dominant core state. So you've got up and comers. Yeah, yeah, So we see this cycle over time of like, uh, you know, here the Dutcher in power, then the British or empower, the u s or empower you know, the colonial flow of of of wreaths of modern history. And

I want to quote Hall here. He says thinking of a frontier as a membrane is helpful from a global perspective. A frontier is relatively narrow and sharp, but from nearby it is a broad zone with considerable internal spatial and temporal differentiation. It's a permeability varies with the direction of flow. And the things moving through it, types of goods, groups, and individuals. A frontier is the results of an often long,

complex and highly political process of negotiation. Okay, I think that's a good point to make, because when you think of a boundary line, to think of a line, a line is something of what infinitely small width, uh, ideally and in geometrical terms. But that's not really what a frontier is. A frontier is more of a zone. Uh. It's an intermediate state between different between different areas where different principles apply. And in this zone you have a

kind of uh. Well, for one thing, he says, it's permeable, so things move back and forth between it. But you also have a mingling of the application of different principles. It might be a place where in some sense the wild principles apply and some other sense the civilization principles apply, or the principle of different people's might mix. Yeah, and again, it's just it's not that Game of Thrones idea of the wall and just two distinct things on either side.

We see this more and more, I think, uh, with contemporary events as powers try to see how a border wall between the US and Mexico would work. Realizing well, this is not Game of Thrones. The Again, a border of frontier is a membrane um and when you try and apply just a you know, a wall scenario to it,

various problems began to emerge. Yeah. Well, I think it usually comes from an oversimplified understanding of what that border means and the lack of understanding of how important it is that that border is not actually a physical barrier, because you know, wildlife moves back and forth, People move back and forth for totally legitimate reasons. Uh. You know

that that in physical reality is just a landscape. Yeah. Now, he he talks a little bit about the frontiers in US history and defines them as areas with population densities less than two persons per square mile. And then he also and he's paraphrasing a couple of other writers here, but he's also refers to them as quote zones of historical interaction where no one has an enduring monopoly on violence. So you know, very blood meridian uh esque. Uh. Summation there.

But also in keeping with what you might say is the history of political science, because how do you define a government? What is a government? A government is often defined as the thing that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. For zone, the people who can use violence without anybody stopping them in an area that that is the governing body the law side. It's you know, it's like, hey, well, violence is kind of our thing.

Violence is at the tail end of any um, any commandment, any law, like the laws, is eventually going to be enforced with violence, at least it has the potential to be if it must be right. But yeah, so here at this border zone, you you see two overlapping areas where and that doesn't always work so well because if two different people are claiming to have a monopoly on violence, then neither one actually has a monopoly, right, you have a competition of violence or a free market of violence either.

So he points out that one of the American West was an internal and contested frontier. Uh, there are other sorts of frontiers as well, neutral frontiers, for example, and he brings up Southeast Asia as an example of a neutral frontier historically between the major cultures of China and India. He says, quote it was both shaped by and shaped the patterns of interaction of cores of these erstwhile separate

world systems. Okay, yeah, And if you think to to East Asian cultures and you think of of the influences of India and China, um, you know, intermingling. And certainly it's it's not even as simple as that, because Buddhism emerges from India and it becomes a major component of Chinese civilization. But still, in a rough sense, you can you can see these these two major cultures coming together and as their waters meet, uh, it's kind of like a brackish area of salt and fresh and taking on

all these uh these diverse uh and and fascinating culture. Right. But of course the springs up another important aspect of frontiers which often might get overlooked, which is the people who have less power, who dwell within the frontier zone, who often are not treated very well by the idea of a frontier overlapping with where they live. Oh yeah,

to to say to say the least, uh yeah. Hall points out that at this point in history, most indigenous groups have experienced several waves of what he refers to as incorporation, uh, incorporation into this this new culture and incorporation that's that's sort of like when you fall under the shadow of the monopoly of violence right and incorporation itself UH can lead to several different possibilities, and they range from genocide and cultural side to assimilation transformation into

a minority group. But at the same time, UH incorporation itself is changing, so there are virtually no non state societies left to incorporate in the world. So, in other words, there are virtually no more frontiers, no new territories, no new people, repeated incorporations of deluded human cultural diversity, and the very frontiers that are vanishing were long the zones of of ethnogenesis, of creativity, of new ideas emerging from

repeated interactions and often hostile conditions. So I refer to this a little bit talking about UH. You know that example of East Asian cultures and civilizations. Another great example I think is when you look at Caribbean cultures, where you see this this hostile coming together of all these different elements, you know, colonialism, slavery, the eradication of indigenous people's, all of this is horrible, and yet at the same time,

out of it you do see rich cultures emerge. I mean, just just looking at Jamaica alone, you see all of these these fantastic ideas and models and art forms, reggae music, dub music, Rastafari cuisine, all the all the all the all the attributes of any culture, but with each Caribbean

aisle it takes on a slightly different um, a different form. Now, the idea of how frontiers work changing throughout history is something I probably, I guess I haven't considered much before, but that is really interesting because you can think about multiple waves of this. For example, I think about the first wave of human colonization of the planet. It's kind of mind boggling to think of the fact that there were times when humans were colonizing large swaths of land

that no had no humans in them already. That you would arrive at a new place and it would be populated by plants and animals, and that was what you had to compete with. And so you could think about there being a frontier of a kind there where you're

forging a true frontier into the wilderness. And when people talked about the frontier of the American West, a lot of a lot of the you know, the racist way to formulate it would be we're just settling a wild land, But in fact, the land was occupied by people, and there was yeah, and there was a time when you could settle much land that was not occupied by people, and so that was a totally different frontier, uh world system there where you're you're settling places that have no

human competition. It's literally primeval. Then you've got this other system where where we think about this sort of sort of the ideas of colonialism, where you might have a society with a strong central government and a lot of economic and technological power forging frontiers into lands that are are already settled by people but who don't necessarily have strong central governments and uh, you know, a lot of economic and technological exchange, and and those two phases I

guess you might be able to say have brought us mostly up to modernity. So one wonders if the idea of the frontier makes any sense moving forward now that we live in a world mostly with nation states that have central governments. Well, it's Hall points out, you have, Yeah,

you have fewer and fewer external frontiers. Yeah, I mean, certainly you can make the case for the space the final frontier, etcetera, which is more like that original primeval frontier hopefully, Yeah, or you know, you could also make cases for like for the the the exploration and the establishment of underwater habitats, etcetera. They're very sci fi answers. But he he points out that internal frontiers are now more common than external, especially frontiers between zones of the

world system itself. Um, where it's where the core meets the periphery or the semi periphery along For example, the US Mexico border is one of the examples he brings to mind. So we're constantly getting new divisions in society, new frontiers forming more and more every day. UM. So, yeah, you can just look at this this sort of fracturing. I don't want to say that in a cataclysmic sense,

like the fracturing of culture. Basically, as as uh, all these divisions in society continue to make themselves known, you kind of have individual frontiers that weave themselves throughout that system. That's interesting. I guess I hadn't thought of it like that. All right, Well, we're gonna do a quick break and when we come back, we will take a look at the frontier thesis. All right, we're back. So if you listen to our live episode that was recorded at C

two e two. Then the you know what we were talking about. We were talking about the Columbian Exposition. Um, all these wonderful ideas and technologies coming together on a tide of cultural change. And as we were putting this together, uh, we had some wonderful ideas that didn't make final cut because we're very limited for time, really, uh. And one of these great ideas was the Frontier thesis. And that's the reason that we ended up putting this episode together. Yeah.

So the Frontier Thesis is first articulated in the essay or lecture The Significance of the Frontier in American History by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Now. Turner was born in Wisconsin in eighteen sixty one. He went to the University of Wisconsin and then JOHNS. Hopkins, and he became a historian. By most accounts, I should note that

I've seen some discrepancy here. Most accounts say that this lecture was first delivered during the World's Fair eighteen ninety three in Chicago, uh, to a meeting of fellow historians. But I have encountered one source at least claiming it was first delivered in eighteen ninety four. I'm not sure if that's an outlier or it's going on there, but I believe the cases this was first delivered during the World's Fair and the Frontier thesis as it came to

be known. We should start by saying is not accepted uncritically by the historians of today, that this is not gospel truth about how to interpret American history. However, I think it is worth a look because of how influential it was on American historical thinking, how how it proved to be one of the most influential ideas in the study of American history, and how it shaped how a lot of people thought about the national character of the

United States up until today. It still is an influential idea, even if most historians don't just accept it uncritically and say he got everything right. I mean that it's kind of like the idea of manifest destiny, right right, Like nobody today is arguing to manifest destiny is a legitimate reason to do anything. But looking back historically, we can we can look at it as a as part of the motivation and rationale for for the for the expansion,

for the Western expansion. Yeah, even if manifest destiny was not a correct interpretation of how the world worked. It certainly determined how people thought about how the world worked, and it's worth understanding just for that. So let's get

into Turner's thesis, as he explains in this lecture. Now, Turner's main idea here is that the character of the United States, that American culture, is largely determined by the presence of an expanding frontier, and that that is what gives us the America we know today, American democracy, American culture, what you think of as particular to the American consciousness.

Now you you go back to colonial times, and one of the things you notice, or at least as Turner points out, is that the authorities in earlier America always always wanted to contain the impulse toward westward expansion. They, like the English lord's, feared losing control of the colonies. I was talking to my wife Rachel about this, and she she gave the metaphor of the parents saying, now stay where I can see you, which is pretty much

right as far as I can tell. That the European authorities didn't want the colonies getting out of hand, so they wanted to keep them kind of close to where their centers of access to the colonies were and an explanation of this, Turner has this large quote from Burke that is just I just love it, so I want to read this quote. Uh, stay with me for a second.

Here Burke says, quote, if you stopped your grants, and he's talking about grants of frontier land, if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence the people would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the

Act settlements are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich level meadow, a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would

wander without a possibility of restraint. They would change their manners with their habits of life, would soon forget a government by which they were disowned, would become hordes of English tartars and pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers of fierce and irresistible cavalry become masters of your governors and your counselors, your collectors and comptrollers, and all of the

slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence increase and multiply. Such would be the happy result of an endeavor to keep as a layer of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express charter has given to the children of men.

So Burke has a rather convincing literary style. But I think, going back to our Game of Thrones analogy, one thing I noticed here is what what's he saying exactly in Game of Thrones terms, he's saying, be careful if you try to tell people not to go north, they're going to turn into wild lings. Yeah, he's predicting a wild ling invasion of the United States. And of course it's raises, you know, questions of how does any how does any culture maintain itself? What is the what is the skeletal

system that's holding it together? Anyway? Yeah? Uh, yes, absolutely, I mean it is it is definitely a question to keep in mind that the future of of America being one nation was not set at that time. It was not even sure of course that it would achieve independence, which I'm sure the English authorities did not want. But yeah, there are a lot of ways The European colonization of the North American continent could have gone went one way,

but it could have gone another. And some United States leaders in the European tradition, for example, President John Quincy Adams, wanted to also keep society pretty close to to the shore. He wanted to use the public lands out west as a source of renewable wealth and to to use that land to enrich and invest in compact settlements in the east. So in a sense, he was saying, hey, this is the core, that's the periphery and the semi periphery. We're not going to turn that into the core too, exactly

firm and established. The core is on the east, and we've got this vast periphery out there, and we want to explore exploit its natural resources to invest in the core and make make the core very livable and very wealthy and very well developed. If we build more house in the backyard, where where will we pay play croquet? Where we plan are to mat it? Where where will our you know, our mining and our other you know, ranching resources come from. Now, religious authorities also feared loss

of influence over the west. Turner makes this point interestingly. He says, the East was, of course the urban center of Orthodox preaching for whatever religious sect do you belong to, And to separate yourself from the center of Orthodox preaching was to open yourself up to spiritual error. So a lot of the religious authorities were mighty concerned about people going west out of the place where the Orthodox preaching would reach them. Who knows what kind of heresies they

might develop. Indeed, and we we touch on this in the c T E two presentation, of course, when we talk about the the the Parliament of World Religions and the new religious movements, many of which sprang up in the United States, uh, and most particularly the Church of Latter day Saints, which was very much a a new religious movement that was was a frontier religion, Yeah, and

very fundamentally American, you might say, in its character. Even the Missouri Senator Thomas Benton gets quoted by by Turner here, And this is funny because Benton was actually well known for being pro westward expansion He was a he was a pro frontier guy. But even he wrote that along the edge of the Rocky Mountains quote, the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should be raised upon its highest peak,

never to be thrown down. So this is a westward expansionist, but he's saying, no, put the Roman god Terminus on the Rocky mountains. Don't let anybody go beyond. Now. Of course, Terminus was this Roman god, the god of borders in frontiers, who you might have an altar to right at the border, saying this is where, yeah, this is where civilization end. Membrand. That's great, this is where civilization ends. But it might also be where the power and influence of your god's end.

But according to Turner, the people of this mindset, the people who are saying, okay, there should be some limit to how far you can go west. We've got to draw the line somewhere and keep people to the east. These authorities were not able to control people's lust for land. People did not necessarily want to live in some compact department in Philadelphia with nearby access to well paved roads and clean city water pumps that were paid for by

the Bounty of Western Lands. They wanted land of their own, and so in many cases they just claimed it. And there were a lot of leaders who were on their side. For example, Andrew Jackson, he was a westward expansionist, and through this process, Turner says, westward expansion created the idea of the frontier. It was this westward moving, continually moving boundary line that shaped the development of American culture and

uniquely guided the progress of American history. Now, what happens along the frontier, it's it's you might think about, Okay, we think of Oregon Trail, maybe pioneers moving, But how do you actually make a living if you're trying to settle westward lands away from the cities that you came um. The way Turner explains it is he thinks that frontier life represents quote a return to primitive conditions where you

always have to recapitulate the evolution of civilization from primeval society. So, because the frontier is always moving, you have to keep doing this recapitulation of the evolution of civilization over and

over a little bit further and further west. So first you might have traders and hunters and trappers, and then you might have ranchers, and then you might have people setting up farmsteads, and then you might have people setting up very small basic communities to support the farmsteads, which in turn turn into cities. Then there's technological development. Finally there's connection via via higher higher tech transportation like railroads

and steamships and all that. And each time you move west, you have to keep doing this over and over again. Now you can imagine that if this is in fact what happens along a frontier, this would certainly have some kind of effect on the culture of the people living there, right, Yeah, yeah, because you're it's almost like their time traveling, right yea, the civilizational time traveling um event every time uh, somebody moves out a little further into the frontier. Yeah, It's

it's almost perfectly what he's imagining. He's like, every time you you go another ten miles, you go back in time, however, a hundred years or something. Um. And so he says that this also means that the cities that rise up along the moving American frontier, and eventually there are cities are influenced less and less by the culture of Europe and more and more by the harsh necessities of surviving

in the landscape. Now, he says that the frontier tends to have a unifying effect on the colonists, because one thing you've got is a common hardship. And what they thought of they had this perceived threat from the native inhabitants of the continent. Uh. Now, of course you might say that the real threat was going probably more the other direction, but it also kept this spirit of violence.

Turner says that functioned as an unofficial military training school because they were they were constantly expanding into Native American lands, and because this lad to violent conflict, it's sort of militarized American life. Turner says, it trained people living along the frontier for war, even during peacetime, even when there's no war going on. You've got this culture that's constantly training for violent, armed conflict, and that this informs the

American culture at large. Yeah. I mean, even to this day, the the the icon of the cowboy still carries a fair amount of weight, even not just the the literal cowboy, of course, not just one who maintains a herd of cattle, but like the frontiersman. Uh is still this this this very American concept that that resonates in our culture. I mean, think about your image of the frontiersman in your mind. Whether or not this is correct. I think this is

probably mostly correct. You picture it. What's he holding? He's holding a rifle. Yeah, and he might be if he's if he's less of a desert type frontiers and he's

probably draped in furs as well. Right, they're always armed and to some degree or at least Turner's ideas that this is correct, that it's a very it's a very gun focused, military focused, violence focused society, and that this leads to an inherent underlying thread of violence that's woven into the American character and still has effects when Turner was writing in the eighteen nineties. So that's one effect. But he also says, you know, the Frontier created what

he would call a composite nationality of American people. It led less to the European American people being primarily just English people, and said that the American character was the people along the frontier who were Scott's Irish who were Germans who are Pennsylvania Dutch. There were many settlers of the colonial frontier who came from other populations of Europeans, and it also included these people who he refers to

as redemption ers, who were freed indentured servants. Now, he also says the advance of the frontier decreased the United States dependence on England. As settlements retreated further away from the coast, it became a lot harder for England to trade directly with them, so England had a lot less power over them. As we know today, economic relationships do equal influence and power. At the same time, he also

says the frontier encouraged nationalization. Now, I think this is going to be an interesting one, especially in light of something we get to in a minute, which is his ideas about the frontier and individualism. But he says it encouraged nationalization because the frontier fraterneries the reason the United States is a unified country rather than just a loosely

associated collection of states. The need to get good to the pioneers led to the development of transportation, infrastructure, and the expansion of civilization followed the needs of these pioneers who were living on the edge, and thus people living on the frontier tended to favor these nationalizing policies like lots of connection via rail and transportation, but also nationalizing policies like tariffs, because that would help bring the factories

and centers of production to the border instead of allowing them to be you know, foreign and importing goods. Turner also says that the Frontier mitigated against the sectionalism of the Civil War era. Now, if you're talking about influences on American culture, what informs what the American character is today, A lot of people would probably look to the Civil War, right, because we're talking about the schism of of the of the nation and then the reunion that followed. Yeah, uh yeah.

And so that idea of sectionalism, having people who are Northern partisans in the southern part of sens As as an important part of their national character and identity, that that sectionalism, he says, is actually mitigated by the Frontier.

The Frontier helped us get over that um and he says it's because number one, the Frontier mainly grew from the middle region of the country, which was between the Puritan New England and the English aristocratic system of the Tidewater South, most of the people moving westward were much more likely to come from the people in the middle,

like Pennsylvania, New York. That that middle area there and uh so, he says, the frontier mitigated against sectionalism also because it created this climate of continuous movement and migration and commerce back and forth. And of course the mobility of the population is death to localism. I like this point, which, if true, I think is also a good argument for the beneficial nature of travel. I know that's a common saying, Robert.

I don't know how much you buy into that, but I think people often say that the more you get away from wherever you come from, as much as you're able, the more broad minded you tend to be, the less beholden you are to to your local customs as being the true right way. Yeah. I agree when I look back in my own life, very early on, my family moved to Canada, and we were in Newfoundland, Canada, and my my dad was working in this hospital so and

and so. Not only what were we around, um the local news, but we were also around all these different international um medical professionals. So there was there was there was you know, a Chinese doctor, there was an Indian doctor. There, all these additional nationalities crammed into this this small environment. So I often look back on that and think, well, that that clearly had an impact on me early on, and then subsequent travels that I that I got to

make in life only reinforced that. Robert, I must say, if I can pay you a compliment, you you do not seem like a person very beholden to localism. No, I do well. I do like local produce, don't get

me wrong. And you know, when you I feel like there's kind of the You see this a lot with chefs, like famous chefs, they all seem to have a similar trajectory, right, They start off being super interested in in other uh like nationalities, cuisines, and then they come back around and find the beauty of their their own, like local family history. I've never thought about that, but you know what, I think you're right. That is a very common story. Is like the chef tries to get away from where they

came up. They go to work in the restaurants or culinary school somewhere else. They work in other kinds of restaurants, different kinds of cuisine, than they grew up with, and then they open their own restaurant and it's what they grew up with. Yeah, So I find myself engaging in some of that too, you know, like I'm fascinated by other other cultures and other countries and in other ways

of life. But then I often will come back around and then in a way, you end up using using the tools that you developed to understand other people, and then you turn them inward and you try and understand the you know, the other it is yourself. The other that is uh, you know, the place you came from,

Robert Lamb, the secret hardcore Tennessee. And yeah, I mean in a sense, yeah, I I certainly came back around and and and did a lot of thinking about what it what it means to grow up in Tennessee, what it means what it means to be a Tennessee, and well, to get back to the idea of sectionalism, one of the things that I think is interesting and worth pointing out.

Of course Turner points it out himself, is that when you think about sectionalism being this big influence in American culture North versus South, and and the idea of union being a frontier idea Abraham Lincoln was a creature of the frontier. I mean, you think of Abraham Lincoln, the log cabin lawyer. Yeah, that's right, Uh, and so very

much for Turner. That frontier mentality comes through in Lincoln, and Lincoln of course being the great Unionist, the great unifier of north and South, who who fought sectionalism more than anything else. Maybe now we should take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll look at a couple of the most important of Turner's ideas on influence of the frontier on the American culture. All right, we're back now.

I don't know about you, Joe. When I but when I think of iconic frontiersman, I can't help but look back on Tokens, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, because both of them had a rugged individual frontiersman of a sort. Oh, in the Hobbit, there's beyond the character that can change into animals, or at least can change into a bear, multiple animals, but definitely into a bear. And hey, I mean that's a great metaphor for the pioneer.

The frontier mentality is that you're sort of like part animals, scraping along in the wild Yeah, and then we had Tom bomba Deal and Lord of the Rings. A man, it's so individual and so just kind of so independently, uh powerful that they even discussed possibly giving him the Ring of Power to hold onto until us decided it will he'll probably lose it. Tom Bombadale never made it into the movies. Yeah, but I would not be prize that Peter Jackson has a trilogy plan just for just

for the bound Adil stuff. Well, yeah, of course individualism, and this is one of the core parts of Turner's thesis. He says that the Frontier created a very very strong sense of individualism in the American character. Uh, that that life is about me. I depend on myself. I might only trust myself. And I want to read a long quote because I think it's great and it really gets to the core of what he's talking about. So this is what Turner has to say. As has been indicated,

the Frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The

tax gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Professor osgood and an Enable article has pointed out that the frontier condition is prevalent in the colonies, are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. Like that um, the same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the Confederacy.

The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy, and there he's talking about small d democracy, the idea of control of the government being delegated to the individual, very much away from any kind of aristocratic idea or influence in the government. And he also points out that it was the western frontier regions of states like New York and Virginia that pushed the most for extension of suffrage, then led to greater democratic participation in those states early on.

But there's another side to this. He also says that the frontier leads to contempt for education and elites. It leads to a kind of anti intellectualism, and in one piece of evidence he he gives here he's talking about the idea of the frontier politician. And he gives a statement from a representative in the Virginia Convention debates of

eighteen thirty and I got to read this quote. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators, the ablest metaphysicians in policy, men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But a Pennsylvania, a New York and Ohio, or a Western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an Old Virginia statesman, has this advantage that when he returns home, he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow.

This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his Republican principles pure and uncontaminated. Yeah. I like this. It reminds me, of course, of of of the cowboy again, and that the cowboy is just, you know, the polar opposite of of everything you would find, say in New York City, especially when it comes to the creation of a proper salsa. Remember from commercials uh. But there there is an anti establishment, anti academic, antium, anti urban uh

sentiment that is just boiled into the idea. Yeah, very very much against elites, very much against the idea of education, training and experience. Uh. It's related to this idea outside of experience that you get of course on the frontier right, against the idea of relevant experience. More to the idea that what really makes somebody good at anything is being authentic in character. And to be authentic in character you need to work with your hands and be and be

independent and sort of be a self made man. This I I can't help but think of the propaganda photos in Russia of of Ladimir Putin, Like everyone's seen it, riding the horse shirtless, right, so you think he's embodying the frontier mentality of the United States. Um, I think up front more of a universal frontier quality, Like clearly he's the images like that, or say, you know him wrestling with a bear, and I bring I bring up

Vladimir Putin. But you see this in politics all over, right, a politician going out and uh, rolling their sleeves on the sleeves of getting some photographs. Maybe maybe it's something more like building a house. Maybe it's hunting, maybe it's fishing. Maybe you know, whatever it is, it's sending that that idea that yeah, I I learned with my hands. I'm good at route at governing because I got out here and I got sweaty, right, I know, I'm sawing some lumber. Yeah,

this is why you should vote for me. Now, this mindset, Turner says, has its drawbacks. Turner. Turner is somewhat triumphalist, you might say about his idea here. He's somewhat celebrating the influence of the frontier, but he also, to his credit, does acknowledge some drawbacks, at least as far as he sees them. One thing is that he says the individualism and the disrespect for government leads to a laxity in government. So he says, these people they've got contempt for government.

But of course they themselves do sometimes become politicians because you've got to have representatives from these areas. And when they get into government, because they have contempt for government, they treat their government offices with contempt and abuse them.

And he says this has led to corruption and to the spoils system, you know, the system of like rewarding your friends and contributors and all that with political appointments that they might not actually be the best for yes, uh so this is and funny enough, this is the

very spoils system which you might say got President Garfield assassinated. Now, when President Garfield was shot, he was shot by an unstable man who thought he was owed some kind of office in the federal government due to the spoils system, and he got this idea in his head and he

shot President Garfield. Weirdly enough to bring it back to the World's Columbian Exposition, the same thing happened in an almost identical event to end the Chicago World's Fair, when Mayor Carter Harrison of Chicago was assassinated by an unstable office seeker who thought that he was owed some kind of appointment through the spoil system. Kind of odd coincidence there.

But also Turner points out that this leads to in the Western lands through being uh, the frontier being a great source of paper money, agitation and quote wildcat banking. Wildcat banking. That's something that we really need a like a bobcat or as a sound effect. Every time it is it is it is uttered wildcat banking. Now but here here it brings us up to the present. Now he has combined all these things. He says, it leads to,

you might a a kind of counterintuitive combination. It leads to nationalizing tendencies from a federal government point of view, but it also leads to strong individualism, UH contempt for government, a a sort of uh contempt for elites and education. It leads to a sort of character of violence and militarization, a sort of simple, simple, get or done attitude. And if this is true, one thing we have to consider is that in the eighteen nineties the frontier was officially

declared gone. The Turner actually starts his essay by saying, you know, in the eighteen eighties census, the country still did have what might be considered a frontier. But by the eighteen nineties census, the the superintendent I believe of the census, said, you know what, there is so little unsettled land left that it no longer makes any sense to designate any section of the United States of frontier.

So there really isn't a frontier anymore. So to whatever extent Turner's thesis is correct, and we can certainly talk about some ways in which is probably not correct, But to whatever extent it is correct, what happens when the frontier is gone it. This reminds me of a quote from Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle. He said, Americans are forever searching for love and forms. It never takes in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier. That's great. Now. I think

that's invoked with some irony by Vonnegut. I think Vonnegut is probably actually referring ironically to this very idea, the romanticizing of the frontier and its role in forming the American character. And that is something we should definitely acknowledge, is that this idea, as influential as it has been in American historical thought, there are definitely romantic elements to it, and there are there are also some elements that are that are not so nice that we should acknowledge now.

Of course, the theory has had a number of critics and supporters over the years, and I think there are historical and modern lenses. We can see a few obvious flaws in it. One is merely that it was constrained by its place and time. Right, He couldn't see into the future, He couldn't see how the American character would continue to develop over the next century, and a quarter. But another, of course, is that this is very much a view of the development of the American character as

it would be expressed by men of European heritage. Basically, so women, African Americans, Native Americans, and other groups don't seem to play a big role in Turner's view of the American character, of what that character is and how it's shaped. Yeah, I mean you mentioned earlier the role of various immigrant groups in pushing the frontier, and certainly um African African Americans as as slaves, and then later

as as freedman played a huge role. Chinese immigrants played a huge role in the expansion of the railroad that pushed the frontier total and and and helped you know, eradicate it and bring in been bringing the two sides

of the country together. Um. But these these are players that are not going to be a core to the argument here in the court of the thesis, right, and that and it doesn't in fact mean that he's necessarily wrong when he's talking about the sort of the culture of the of the white male elite as it ruled the country for a long time, But it does mean that it's probably not giving you a full picture of the people living in the United States of America, what

their character is, and how it came to be that way. Um. Another point that we should just stress again, though I think we made this point earlier, but it's just worth reminding. He's constantly talking in the essay about the idea of free land, that there's free land as you're moving west. Um. So it's worth remembering that the land being settled by US pioneers on the frontier was not in fact simply

free land. In most cases, it was already settled or occupied by various groups of indigenous peoples, or if people weren't living on it, they were at least depending on it for resources in some way. Now, on the other hand, there could still be ways in which Turner's thesis does have some truth to it, even uh, even with these

very big shortcomings. For example, it could be that the traits Turner describes do in fact end up manifesting themselves to some degree in Americans of all kinds, men and women, people of all different kinds of racial and ethnic heritage. And it's not hard to see how this could happen. How there there could be certain cultural elements that would be diffused throughout the culture. If frontier attitudes can make it from the West back to the East, they can

probably also make it between groups within society. Yeah, I think that that holds true. Now, another thing we can look at is that he's he's saying that this is the most important defining thing in the character of the American consciousness, what it's, what makes American democracy what it is. Lots of historians could pick different things to fill that role. Now, of course, just trying to reduce everything to one explaining event is probably going to be highly flawed in itself.

You know, what about mass immigration. If if you were to ask me what defines American character more than anything, I'd probably think of I'd probably think of slavery in the Civil War. I'd think about the particular nature of the U. S. Constitution. I would think about immigration, mass immigration throughout the nation's history. But the frontier might also

be an important thing to list there. Yeah, And I mean you even look to things like the national park system as kind of a continuation of a of a a frontier element. So it's like, clearly the national parks are not frontiers. You can't go in there and settle parts of national parks, or at least you can't yet,

but but still they stand. There is as as examples of of of the wild that are open to everyone to visit and take part in and uh and and in some way that kind of scratches the itch of the frontier spirit, the idea that well, I on some level we all think that we could drop everything, go off the grid and move off into the country, often to those some imagine frontier and we we probably maybe we can to some degree, but we can certainly go to a national park or state park and uh and

spend the weekend camping. Yeah. At the risk of being cheesy, I would say one of the greatest things you can do if you want to invest in travel within the United States is, of course travel to our great cities, but also travel to our national parks. Uh. And don't just don't just go to Yosemite. Look up the other ones there. There are probably some nearer to you that are truly amazing national treasures. I hope I'm not cheesing

you out here, but no, no, no, I agree. There's some wonderful national parks out there, and there's some wonderful state parks. But I guess here we get to the final question, Robert, I wonder what you think. Do you think there's anything to what Turners saying. Do you think that the frontier is this really important influence on what makes the United States what it is on our national character, or or do you think Turner was wrong? Yeah, I

think there's something to it. But I also wonder, like how much of that is frontiersm how much of that is just the the immigrant spirit, the idea that whatever I was somewhere else, whatever the limitations on who I could be, but whatever those limitations were, I can come here, and I can I can redefine who I am, and

I can I can earn myself a better place. Yeah. Now, I wonder, when I've been thinking about it, if the frontier thesis is not necessarily a good explanation of the American character as a whole, but it is a very good explanation of certain strains of thinking and subcultures within the American culture. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah.

So it's kind of comes back to like we've said with this and like we said with the world systems theory, is that any time you try and come up with a definite answer and a definite model for the movements of history. Even if it's just US history, you're going to run into some problems. But broadly speaking or or strategically employed, it does it does seem to have some truth in it. Yeah. What do you think about the

idea of new frontiers after the physical land frontier went away? Well, yeah, there's certainly a strong argument to me made for for the digital frontier, for in the same way that we're talking about, like find scratching the itch of frontiersm in national parks. I think at least for a while, you could do that with the digital realm. And I guess you still scientific advancements that is often cited as a as a new frontier. You like, you're forging new ground.

And the benefit of the scientific advancement as a frontier is you don't have to literally displace real people right right, And and I think science fiction plays into that area as well, like imaginary frontiers. Yeah, it's kind of the imaginary frontier fed by the scientific frontier. Of course, space is another one people often talk about, the final frontier. One might say that's true until we discover interdimensional travel. Yeah, and certainly when a sign its fiction tries to imagine, uh,

interplanetary frontiers. We we draw back on our experience with often the American frontier. And so if it's certainly if it's an American science fiction author. Yeah, if you look at a lot of that mid century science fiction, a lot of times the starship Captain is very colonial or is a cowboy. Yeah, that's true. Kirk was kind of a cowboy, wouldn't it kinda? Yeah? All right, Robert, you got anything else? Let's see, we mentioned Kirk, we mentioned Tom Bomba dell. Uh So, I think we're good. Okay,

I think we fully explained it. All right, So hey, if you missed that C two e two episode, go back and listen to it because it ties indirectly with a lot of with the spirit of what we're talking about here. And hey, in the meantime, head on over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where you'll find the Mothership. That's where we find all of our podcast episodes. Ever, you'll find blog post videos, links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etcetera.

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