Towards the New Frontier
A Hopeful Postulation
Happy Independence Day to all of my fellow Americans! I thought I’d take the time to offer a more hopeful position rather than the usual doom and gloom that comes with what feels like patriotic commiseration for a nation that has long been subsumed by its more progressive and imperial ambitions. So today we look back, and to the future of the American frontier.
"The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development."
- Frederick Jackson Turner
One of my favorite comments that I like getting from my European audience members is that I am “preachy” or that I am inclined to wax poetically on the spiritual and the metaphysical aspects of our contemporary problems. Yes we are indeed molested by modernity, but that shouldn’t be a reason to give up on beliefs or the foundational promises as planted by our forebears. For as much discussion as there is on the “liberal question” I for one cannot denigrate my ancestors, nor does my faith or sense of honor compel me to as it would fly in the face of both theological and social doctrines.
Those who still adhere to them, rather than just paying bland lip service to an audience so captivated by the material identity rather than anything deeper are thoroughly a minority. It is not just posting quotes or acknowledging what you have every Fourth of July, as it isn’t a grill day or an excuse to get a little tipsy and see how much you really love your hands and fireworks.
However one doesn’t need to look too far at the current situation of the American nation and recognize that things are severely off course. Most Americans, a term I use rather liberally here, cannot trace their lineage back to the frontier, and whose only conceptions of an American identity beforehand comes with the progressive socialization that the Federal Government is the source from which all good things come. After all, if the Federal Government is the source of victory over Dixie, Racism, and Fascism, then of course you want to side with the group that offers you an identity that says you’ve joined team Good Guy. It’s as thin of an identity as their naturalization papers, but today’s post isn’t about that problem if only tangentially.
I look out the digital window to see a myriad of ethnic strife and debate in France, to watching occasionally interesting writer turned lolcow Michael Tracey defend some form of civic idealism as revanchist attitudes along ethnic and racial lines take place within the French cities. Such similar things continue to take place here in America, whether that be inter-minority clashes between Hispanics and Blacks, Blacks and Asians, Jews and Blacks, it’s a tale as old as time in ye olde melting pot.
However in the midst of this, my mind had been brought back to two very separate people, yet at the same time covering a very important subject. Space. Last week I was outside of Memphis at the US Scyldings Conference, wherein I was once again back in the depths of discussion of America’s historical and cultural canon. The one man whom I had probably discussed the most on, both with my friend George Bagby and several others was that of Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner was the historian who had famously presented in 1893 the essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which you can read for free on the Internet Archive, and I highly recommend you do.
Building off the works of Historians, Politicians, and Census Counters, Turner is most known for the Frontier Thesis. Americanization took place on the frontier, the wildness and the unknown that came along the frontier line could make any man and American. Such a notion I think can be found later in the 20th century with writers such as William Faulkner, to quote from one of my favorite books of all time Absalom, Absalom!
"What I learned was that there was a place called the West Indies to which poor men went in ships and became rich, it didn't matter how, so long as that man was clever and courageous."
Such a frontier to the American West, whether it be across the Appalachian Mountains (which American expansion into even while it was still under Imperial Rule was a contributing cause for its War of Independence) to the wild imaginations of the West as imagined by dime novelists, Louis L’Amour, and Cormac McCarthy. When the West was closed, and the frontier line was no more, America like so many other nations in their expansions looked to Empire, a line of thought building off Turner that can be found by someone like William Appleman Williams but I’ll be reviewing Empire as a Way of Life some other time. The American Ethnogenesis can be found in the frontier, the settling of the land, King Phillip’s War, The French and Indian War, and the War for Independence and the subsequent moves Westward during the Articles of Confederation Government.