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p Among the concepts that directly gave shape to the ideology of expansionism, the ‘frontier’ thesis is unquestionably the most important. It was first enunciated by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) in the essay ’The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ read before the American Historical Association of Chicago in July 1893. This essay has been called ‘provocative’, for in reading it Turner’s aim was to spark a discussion of the role of ‘free’ territories.  [69•1  A dispute did indeed break out not only among historians but also among statesmen, especially after Turner re-stated his thesis in 1896 in The Atlantic Monthly, a journal with a large circulation.  [69•2  Turner soon became a popular figure in the nation.

p The central idea of Turner’s ‘frontier’  [69•3  thesis was that ’up to our day American history has been to a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, .explain American development’.  [69•4  The colonisation of the West was seen by Turner as the main motive force of US history. These 70 were not entirely new ideas, rather, as contemporaries put it, they virtually ’hung in the air’. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Turner in 1894: ’I think you ... have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.’  [70•1  Many years later Charles A. Beard denned their character, calling Turner the spokesman of the ’agrarian traditions’ in American history.  [70•2 

p The question of the ’agrarian tradition’, i.e., of the ideological mainsprings of Turner’s concept, is so important that it must be considered in some detail. The USA is a country where the features of capitalist development manifested themselves on vast expanses of territory under conditions of internal colonisation. Capitalist development proceeded in the East alongside the colonisation of the West. The first process, Lenin wrote, expressed the further development of established capitalist relations; the second expressed the formation of new capitalist relations on new territory. The former process signified capitalism’s development in depth, and the latter its development in breadth.  [70•3  Lenin dialectically examined the interaction of those two tendencies of capitalist development: ’The development of capitalism in depth in the old, long-inhabited territories is retarded because of the colonisation of the outer regions. The solution of the contradictions inherent in, and produced by, capitalism is temporarily postponed because of the fact that capitalism can easily develop in breadth.’  [70•4  He also emphasised that the ’sharpening of contradictions and the displacement of small-scale production are not removed but are transferred to a larger arena. The’ capitalist fire appears to be “damped down"—but at the price of an even greater accumulation of new and more inflammable material’.  [70•5 

p These points are important for understanding the impact of the ‘free’ lands on various aspects of the USA’s socioeconomic and ideological development. Under conditions of capitalist relations not yet fully developed these ‘free’ 71 lands slowed down the ’tendency towards expropriation” enabling a segment of the farmers and individual groups of workers to settle in the West and, for a short time, maintain their former social level. For a time capitalist development in breadth held up the aggravation of the contradictions between labour and capital, contradictions which frequently grew acute but did not acquire lasting, accomplished organisational forms.

p The contradiction between the two trends of capitalist development, in breadth and in depth, made a strong imprint on the social consciousness of Americans and generated many Utopian theories on non-capitalist development in the USA.

p At the dawn of American history it was suggested that the ‘free’ lands could deliver the New World from wage slavery or, at least, from the darker sides of capitalism. For a long time there seemed to be no end to these ‘free’ lands. The ideological spokesmen of the farmers were convinced that in the USA each person could realise the ’natural right’ to land, that property would be distributed equitably, and that general welfare would be ensured for many centuries to come.

p These ideas were not alien to Benjamin Franklin and were vividly embodied in the writings of St. John de Crevecoeur, who saw the American republic as a Rousseauesque Utopia translated into life; this belief was shared by the young Thomas Jefferson. The sufferings of the urban lower classes of Paris and London had depressed Jefferson. But even before his travels in Europe he felt that if the ‘free’ lands were given to the working people America would be saved from the rise of big cities with their oppressed wage workers. He visualised the future America as a democratic farmers’ republic with lofty civil virtues.

p The Westward movement bred petty-bourgeois illusions and aspirations among the American working class (’a farm for each worker’), and fostered the spread of various agrarian Utopias, in particular, plans for the equitable distribution of land proposed by Thomas Skidmore, George H. Evans, and other leaders of the working-class movement.

p All Utopias of this kind that sprouted on American soil were objectively linked with the struggle for a progressive, 72 ‘American’ way of development of capitalism in agriculture, which meant ’the most rapid development of productive forces under conditions which are more favourable for the mass of the people than any others under capitalism’.  [72•1 

p Utopian illusions were most assiduosly spread by George Evans, Herman Kriege, and other national-reformers of the 1840s. They urged unhampered access to the ‘free’ lands, their gratuitous distribution to all who were in need of them. Evans believed this was a panacea for all the evils of capitalism. An agrarian reform would deliver the workers from capitalist oppression. Some of them would become farmers on the free lands, while those who remained in the East would have to be paid higher wages in order to hold them back from resettlement. An end would gradually be put to the old social system under which the workers toiled in torment and poverty at the heartless machines. There would be a new society of peace, prosperity, and security. Evans drew up a schedule of the events that would follow an agrarian reform (presumably in 1851): ’1855—General prosperity such as was never known before by civilization...; 1870—No man or woman in the United States begs “leave to toil"...; 1890—Almost every family in the Union is now in possession of a Home, and there is no want of employment.... Machinery now works for the laborer? not against them...; 1900—Men wonder why their fathers tolerated Land Monopoly ... and debating whether the Millennium has arrived.’  [72•2 

p The land reform, long-awaited by the Western farmers, was put into effect in 1862: under the Homestead Act anybody wishing to possess land could have a plot of 160 acres for a nominal payment. But the agrarian Utopia went up in smoke: it did not prove possible to perpetuate small-scale farming in the West, much less open the gates for industrial workers.

p Following the Civil War of 1861–1865 capitalism developed by leaps and bounds, both in industry and in agriculture. Development in breadth was clearly superseded by development in depth. The turning point was seen clearly during the closing decades of the nineteenth century with American 73 capitalism’s transition to its imperialist stage. During that period the actual class antagonisms of American society were no longer alleviated by Western colonisation. The intensity of capitalist development in agriculture was indicated by the extent wage labour was used. In only the twenty years from 1860 to 1880 the number of farm labourers grew fourfold. Land monopolisation proceeded rapidly. According to the 1800 census, tenant farms in the main agricultural states comprised between 20 and 30 per cent of the total number of farming households. In the period of 1860–1890 the nation’s population increased by nearly 45 million, but only about 400,000 families got free land from the government and kept it for themselves.  [73•1 

p During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century American capitalism bound the bulk of the workers firmly to the factory machine. In this context striking facts were cited during the debate over the so-called safety valve doctrine among American researchers at the close of the 1930s and early 1940s (Carter Goodrich, Sol Davison, Fred’A. Shannon). As a result of this debate it was widely acknowledged that the difficulties involved in resettlement from the industrial cities of the Northeast to the Western territories, to the free lands had deprived the factory workers of the possibility of moving to the West en masse. It has been estimated that it cost at least a thousand dollars to start a farm in the West in the 1850s-1860s. This included the cost of clearing and fencing a plot of 40 acres, building a house and maintaining a family until sufficient food could be grown, the cost of seeds, farm implements, draught animals, and so forth (but it did not include the expense of transportation, which Fred Shannon estimates as the equivalent of half a year’s wages for a family of five  [73•2 ). In that period average wages did not exceed a dollar a day for labourers, and two dollars a day for skilled workers. Needless to say, it was exceedingly difficult for a worker to save enough money for a farm. In reply to the question why unemployed workers were not going to the West, the newspaper Workingman’s Advocate wrote in July 1870: ’In the first place, many 74 of them have not the means to take them there, and in the second place they have nothing with which to till the land when they get there.... If they could cultivate the soil, without oxen, or horses, or implements of agriculture or could live on grass, and shrubs, and wild fruits while their first year’s crop were growing, going West might be a valid question worth considering.’  [74•1 

p The agrarian Utopia ended in failure, but the Utopian ideas springing from the struggle for the Homestead Act persisted. From Utopias they turned into apologias. It was still believed that the USA was a land of ’unlimited opportunities’, that there was social equality on the ’last frontier’, that poverty-free existence was assured on the Western farm, and so on.

p There was another side to the bourgeois apologia for the saving role of the free lands. The sharp aggravation of the economic and political contradictions in the USA at the close of the nineteenth century was due not to the growth of monopoly capitalism but to the ebb of the colonisation tide in the Western lands, the near exhaustion of the fund of public land. The clergyman Josiah Strong, too, had seen this as the growth of social tension. James Bryce, a leading English political scientist, wrote that when the Americans had occupied all their Western lands ’it will be a time of trial for democratic institutions’.  [74•2 

p These were the theories and doctrines that Turner drew upon for his frontier thesis. The ideological traditions underlying his doctrine were linked in origin with ’the progressive struggle for an American way of capitalist development in agriculture. At the close of the nineteenth century these traditions had lost their foundation and evolved into a widespread bourgeois apologia, which Txirner included in his historical pattern and thereby assured it of long recognition in American social thought.

p A new look at US history, an’assessment of Western colonisation as a central factor of historical development demanded a methodological approach differing from that of 75 the racist historians. Turner got his training as a scholar at the University of Wisconsin and then at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he studied under Herbert B. Adams. His first works clearly bore the marks of his interest in ’comparative polities’. He subscribed to the views of the Anglo-Saxon school on the origin of American political institutions. However, as early as the beginning of the 1890s he departed from the one-sided identification of the historical process with political history. In an article headed ’The Significance of History’ (1891), he wrote: ’Today the questions that are uppermost, and that will become increasingly important, are not so much political as economic questions.’  [75•1  In the spirit of positivist methodology he regarded society as a social organism passing through several stages of development. Turner himself noted that his ideas about the significance of history were based on the ideas of Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, and other exponents of the historical school in political economy. The latest studies indicate that Turner was influenced mainly by Friedrich List and Achille Loria. List, one of the founders of the historical school in political economy, held that every nation goes through five stages of economic development: hunting, pastural, agricultural, agricultural-industrial, and industrial-commercial. The Italian economist Achille Loria suggested that historical stages already passed in Europe were being reproduced in the colonies on account of the free lands.

p Turner began studying the American West largely under the influence of his background. He was born, grew up and spent most of his life in the State of Wisconsin (from 1891 to 1910 he taught at the University of Wisconsin). For a long time this relatively backward state preserved the way of life of the American frontier with its frontiersmen and Indians.

p Turner concretised the theory of stages, using American material (he studied the settlement censuses of the North American continent), and linked it with the myth about the salutary mission of the free lands in the American 76 West. He believed that the American West was demonstrating the social evolution that had ended in Europe long ago, that it was visibly recreating the stages of development passed by mankind.

p Algie M. Simons, who studied under Turner, repeated and vulgarised this concept but did not alter its logic when he summed up: ’Biology has taught us that the embryo reproduces in syncopated form the various steps in the evolution of living organisms.... In the same manner the successive stages of settlement in the march of America’s army of pioneers tells again the story of social evolution.... While the frontier existed, this was the only country in the world that for many generations permitted its inhabitants to choose in which of the historic stages of social evolution they would live.’  [76•1  As the Soviet historian A. V. Yefimov noted regarding the theory of social stages, ’the Time Machine was created not by American reality but by the fantasy of H. G. Wells. It was not time machines with masters endowed with fantastic qualities but the most ordinary people who moved across North America from East to West and from West to East, and their resettlement was not a movement from one epoch to another but a process of the development of European-American capitalism’.

p The idea that the free lands of the West had a mission of salvation was the pivot of Turner’s concept. In his description the frontier sometimes acquired an extended, vague interpretation, coming forward in the image of ‘nature’ as the antithesis of ‘civilisation’, as a symbol of rejuvenation. Against this background the American pioneer is seen as a man torn away from social relations. There are no barriers between him and nature, society has disintegrated, and the pioneer wages a hand-to-hand war upon the forest.  [76•2  But Turner, as a rule, gives a definite social characteristic of the frontier. The free lands, he wrote, ’promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East. Where everybody could 77 have a farm, almost for taking it, economic equality easily resulted, and this involved political equality’.  [77•1 

p American historical reality was far removed from Turner’s assertions about the equality of Western settlers. Social differentiation among the farmers was characteristic not only of the nineteenth century. In the early history of the American colonies there was considerable property stratification among the Western settlers.

p Turner’s theory about the frontier origin of American democracy springs from the same myth about the salutary role of the West. American democracy, he wrote, ’came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier’.  [77•2  This interpretation had its logical roots in the historical facts of the struggle of the masses for the democratic development of agrarian relations and for political freedoms. However, seen through the prism of the apologetic frontier doctrine, these real facts acquired a mystified form of the birth of democracy in frontier settlements.

p American bourgeois democracy took shape in acute class conflicts, including conflicts started by the struggle for free lands. Turner deduced democracy ’from the forest’, from the fragile and shortlived equality on the frontier, and isolated it from the class struggle. He went so far as to assert that American democracy was in sharp contrast ’with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation.’  [77•3 

p He maintained that a democratic order was established through social and political equality on the frontier and was then spread to all the elements of a ’developed society’, rejuvenating and restoring democracy in the East. The frontier acts in two dimensions. On the one hand, political ideas about democracy appear on the frontier under the impact of the environment, of social and geographic conditions; on the other, the old political ideas brought from the East wither away and get ‘transformed’. ’Decade after decade,’ he wrote, ’West after West, this rebirth of American 78 society has gone on, has left its traces behind it, and has reacted on the East.’  [78•1 

p The conditions for the rise of democracy were the free lands and primitive social relations. However, the social relations on the frontier gradually grew more complex as ‘civilisation’ drew ever nearer from the East. The development of capitalism undermines social equality on the frontier, cuts down the virgin forests, destroys the primitive economic life, and thereby erodes the foundations of democracy. But the frontier does not die. It moves farther West, to new, uninhabited free lands, restoring social equilibrium. Turner traced the Westward movement of the frontier to the Pacific and believed that it ceased to exist in 1890.

p According to Turner, the frontier was the magic stone curing the USA from economic, social, and political ills. The frontier, he said, had a determining influence on all areas of American society and was instrumental in creating a specific, American way of life.  [78•2 

p The basic flaw of Turner’s concept is that he took his departure^ from the geographical environment, from the external conditions of life, from the environment in which the settlers found themselves in the West.

p Also a methodological inaccuracy of Turner’s approach to American history was the artificial severance of two tendencies in the development of capitalism in the United States, its development in breadth and in depth, and the absolutisation of the former tendency. Turner depicted capitalism’s development in breadth, linked with the settlement and development of new territories, as the principal, determining process in the history of the USA.

p Carried away by the idea that the free lands spelled out social and political equality, Turner ignored the link of the long-existing plantation slavery with these lands. With the extensive character of American plantation slavery, the Westward movement of the planters and the seizure by them of fertile virgin lands were vital to the continued existence of slavery.

p Turner was a historian, but historiography was only one 79 of the fields influenced by his concepts. No less important was the direct political implication of the frontier thesis. A reason for its popularity was that it responded to the most acute problems of the USA on the threshold of the twentieth century. Turner tried to answer the question of what was happening to America, and hindsight was needed in order to ascertain what had to be done now.

p In describing the social collisions in the USA in the 1880s-1890s, many American writers sought to explain them as being due to the disappearance of the frontier, but none of them put it so clearly as Turner: ’And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.’  [79•1  The disappearance of the frontier of settlement, he said, was the reason behind the convulsions of the 1890s. He attributed the aggravation of the social contradictions in the USA to the disappearance of free lands. (The untenability of this argument is demonstrated by the fact that in 1890–1900, i.e., after the Census Bureau had declared that there was no longer a frontier, 1,100,000 new farms were settled, or half a million more than in the preceding decade.  [79•2  Possibly, the land granted under the Homestead Act was poorer than before and required additional investment. Nevertheless, homesteaders received 226,000 plots or 16,000 more than in the previous ten years.)

p Turner keenly felt the growth of social tension in the USA. In 1896 he noted anxiously that the ’nation seems like a witch’s kettle’.  [79•3  In 1903 he said that America was experiencing a revolution: capital was being concentrated on a huge scale (1,500 million dollars in the hands of the Steel Trust alone); ’lines of cleavage’ had begun to appear between capital and labour; and the political parties were now tending to divide on issues involving the question of socialism.  [79•4  In 1910 he wrote: ’A new national development is 80 before us without the former safety valve, of abundant resources open to him who would take. Classes are becoming alarmingly distinct.’  [80•1 

p Where, it was asked, was a new safety valve to be found? As Walter LaFeber noted, a twofold conclusion could be drawn from the frontier thesis relative to the ways of resolving social problems: ’Perhaps most important, the frontier thesis not only defined the dilemma, but did so in tangible, concrete terms. It offered hope that Americans could do something about their problems. Given the assumption that expansion across the Westernjirontier explained past American successes, the solution for the present crisis now, became apparent: either radically readjust the political institutions to a non-expanding society or find new areas for expansion. When Americans seized the second alternative, the meaning for foreign policy became apparent—and immense.’  [80•2 

p Turner partly turned to the recipes of bourgeois reformism: ’When the words “capitalistic classes" and “the proletariat" can be used and understood in America it is surely time to develop such men ... who may help to break the force of these collisions, to find common grounds between the contestants.’  [80•3  He saw the new safety valve in science and education. From article to article he called upon the universities to mediate in the class conflicts. He sometimes even spoke of the need for a measure of government control of the nation’s economic life.  [80•4 

p However, reformist ideas became central in Turner’s later writings, while the political significance of the frontier thesis was chiefly that it justified expansion. This justification was given in the main formulation of the frontier thesis: the nation’s territorial expansion was the determining factor of its history. Since territorial expansion had resolved the USA’s economic and social problems in the past, and provided the foundation for the uninterrupted functioning of democratic institutions, the natural conclusion was that it was needed for the development of the 81 American republic. To quote William A. Williams, the frontier thesis explained America’s democracy and prosperity in the past as the result of expansion: ’Either implicitly or explicitly, depending on the form in which it was presented, the idea pointed to the practical conclusion that expansion was the way to stifle unrest, preserve democracy, and restore prosperity.’  [81•1  As Turner saw it, the new period of American history would likewise differ from the old in that ’never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves’,  [81•2  there would be no frontier, no free land and, consequently, new territory would have to be found.

p Conquest was placed on the order of the day not only by the political conclusions to be drawn from the frontier thesis. It was indicated by various elements of Turner’s concept. In his thesis the mainsprings of Westward colonisation sometimes have no concrete historical and social features. In his quest for a suitable word to describe them, he usually used ’restless, nervous energy’ and sometimes spoke of the ’buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom’. The romanticised figure of the frontiersman was given the aura of a conqueror of the continent. Conquest, he wrote, was the prime ideal of the pioneer. He extolled the aggressive restlessness of the pioneer, the axe, and the Winchester.

p Turner evolved the frontier thesis as a counterbalance to the principles propounded by historians of the racist school. But in some of its key elements the antithesis was formal. Fiske and Burgess had maintained that political democracy had come from the German forests. Turner preserved the notion of the birth of democracy in forests. But instead of the German forests of the days of Julius Caesar he offered the virgin thickets of the American West. Democracy, he believed, acquired an accentuated original, national character: ’...it was not carried in the Sarah Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier.’  [81•3 

82

p Turner, too, accepted the ideas of social Darwinism, but unlike the exponents of the genetic theory he accentuated not heredity but changeability: ’The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is a history of the evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the origin of new political species.’  [82•1 

p Lastly, Anglo-Saxon racism is not at all alien to Turner’s views. The entire frontier thesis tacitly sprang from the postulate that the American Indians were an inferior race doomed to extermination and extinction, that this was an inevitable process accompanying the growth of civilisation.  [82•2  Relative to non-Anglo-Saxon immigration Turner adopted a stand similar to that of the historians of the AngloSaxon school. In a series of articles published in Chicago Record-Herald he argued that immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was pushing up the crime-rate in the USA.  [82•3  In one of his first essays he wrote that socialism had been brought to America by immigrants from Europe.  [82•4  He held to this view to the end of his life. In 1924 he noted the spread of syndicalism in the ranks of organised labour and linked it with the influence of immigrants from Eastern Europe and with people ’who interpret America in terms of Russia’.  [82•5 

p Turner was not a politician, but he did not conceal his approval of the USA’s first steps towards imperialist conquest. It is symbolic that his Frontier in American History was read in July 1893, when a new devastating economic crisis had commenced and there was confusion and despondency in the nation. R. A. Billington, a contemporary adherent of the frontier thesis, underscored the immediate 83 political ring of the pronouncement, writing that ’for the man in the street, there was a direct connection between the Census Bureau’s announcement of 1890 [on the end of free lands.—/. D.] and the need for overseas possessions. With opportunity drawing to a close within the nation’s border, he reasoned, the government’s duty was to provide areas for exploitation elsewhere’.  [83•1  Turner himself observed: ’He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.  [83•2 

p The orientation of US imperialist expansion was still not clearly defined in the early 1890s. But in 1896 Turner already noted with satisfaction: ’For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion. With the settlement of the Pacific coast and the occupation of the free lands, this movement has come to a check ... and the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an interoceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining counries, are indications that the movement will continue.’  [83•3 

p Fourteen years later addressing the American Association of Historians as its president, Turner said that the USA’s expansion in the Far East ’was, indeed, in some respects the logical outcome of the nation’s march to the Pacific, the sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of the West’.  [83•4 

p While explaining the past, Turner charted an action programme for the present, laying the ideological foundation for expansion. The frontier thesis was widely dealt with in literature, made the rounds of the universities, and found support among businessmen, clergymen, and 84 politicians of different hues. An important reason for this success was that Turner’s thesis had a national appeal. Another reason was that it was based on the democratic mythology of the early period. Turner hypcrtrophicd individual aspects of American social development, justifying the USA’s aggressive foreign policy of the turn of the century on historical grounds. Soldiers of the imperialist epoch were depicted as the successors to the pioneer settlers of the American West. Turner interpreted imperialist expansion as an ’ expansion of freedom’ vital to the maintenance of democracy and its spread to other countries.

p On the economic level, the thesis was addressed not only to businessmen, who explained the economic crisis in the USA as being due to the market’s limitations on account of the diminishing area of free lands and demanded new markets. Turner appealed also to democratic elements propounding the principles of laissez faire in opposition to the powerful trusts. As Turner saw it, since the existence of undeveloped territory was the foundation of free competition and since the disappearance of such territory was leading to the decline of free enterprise and the growth of trusts, there was only one conclusion to be drawn: there had to be further territorial expansion.

p This theory, too, received the support of a segment of farmers.  [84•1  The leading Populist William H. Harvey wrote that the condition of the working people in the USA was deteriorating on account of the disappearance of frontiers. The ’escape valves for the poorer people’ had vanished, he wrote in 1894, and the ’damming up of the stream has now come. There is no unexplored part of the world left suitable for men to inhabit’.  [84•2  Another Populist, Jerry Simpson, wrote that the time had gone when the USA had had a ’great and boundless West’, where ’surplus labor ... could find an outlet’, now that the frontier had closed ’and the great tide of population is turned back again upon the East’. However, he expressed the hope that the loss of the frontier would be compensated by America’s economic 85 might challenging the world for competition in its markets.  [85•1 

Note must be made of Turner’s influence on two leading statesmen and ideologues of those days—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both accepted the frontier thesis. Its impact is felt in Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, which extols the civilising mission of the AngloSaxons in the North American continent. Woodrow Wilson, who was a close friend of Turner, propounded similar ideas in his writings on political science.  [85•2