Push the Frontier

You’ve seen enough Westerns and Game of Throne episodes to know a frontier when you see it, but what exactly is this boundary between the laws of your world and the promise or threat of another? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the membranous nature of frontier in world-systems theory, as well as Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential thesis on the American frontier.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind From Housetopworks dot Com.
In the morning, the emissary mounted his horse and rode west.
He left the towers and the markets behind him, trading
cramped streets and oppressive oculence for the world outside the

(00:24):
city walls. He passed beneath the gates barbed portcullis, crossed
the moat, and passed the morning amid the varied towns
that composed the empire. The people noted the insignias upon
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

(00:48):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:30):
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,

(01:51):
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

(02:11):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:56):
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

(03:16):
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

(03:39):
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

(03:59):
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,

(04:20):
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

(04:42):
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

(05:03):
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

(05:25):
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,

(05:46):
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

(06:08):
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

(06:30):
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

(06:53):
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,

(07:15):
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,

(07:38):
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

(08:02):
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.

(08:22):
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

(08:44):
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

(09:05):
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

(09:31):
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,

(09:55):
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

(10:17):
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

(10:37):
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

(11:00):
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,

(11:23):
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

(11:45):
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

(12:06):
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,

(12:31):
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

(12:52):
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

(13:14):
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,

(13:35):
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

(13:56):
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

(14:18):
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

(14:38):
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,

(14:59):
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

(15:19):
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

(15:41):
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

(16:02):
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.

(16:25):
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,

(16:47):
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

(17:09):
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

(17:32):
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

(17:52):
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

(18:14):
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,

(18:36):
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

(18:58):
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

(19:19):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:03):
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,

(20:24):
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,

(20:46):
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

(21:09):
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,

(21:33):
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

(21:55):
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

(22:19):
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

(22:42):
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

(23:04):
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.

(23:26):
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

(23:46):
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

(24:08):
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

(24:31):
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.

(24:53):
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

(25:14):
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,

(25:38):
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,

(26:00):
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

(26:23):
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

(26:46):
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

(27:09):
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.

(27:32):
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

(27:53):
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

(28:16):
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

(28:37):
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

(28:58):
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

(29:20):
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

(29:40):
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,

(30:00):
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.

(30:25):
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

(30:45):
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.

(31:06):
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

(31:27):
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

(31:51):
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

(32:11):
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,

(32:32):
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

(32:53):
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

(33:15):
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

(33:38):
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.

(34:01):
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

(34:21):
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

(34:43):
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,

(35:05):
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

(35:26):
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

(35:47):
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

(36:07):
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

(36:28):
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,

(36:48):
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

(37:09):
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

(37:33):
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

(37:55):
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

(38:17):
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

(38:38):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:21):
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,

(39:44):
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

(40:04):
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

(40:25):
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,

(40:48):
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

(41:09):
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

(41:33):
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

(41:53):
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

(42:15):
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

(42:37):
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

(42:58):
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

(43:20):
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

(43:42):
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.

(44:07):
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.

(44:30):
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

(44:51):
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

(45:14):
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

(45:38):
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

(45:59):
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.

(46:19):
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

(46:40):
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

(47:04):
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

(47:26):
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.

(47:48):
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

(48:09):
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

(48:33):
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

(48:55):
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

(49:17):
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

(49:37):
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

(49:58):
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

(50:20):
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,

(50:45):
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

(51:07):
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.

(51:28):
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

(51:53):
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.

(52:16):
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,

(52:36):
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.

(52:57):
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

(53:17):
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

(53:38):
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

(54:00):
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

(54:20):
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

(54:44):
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

(55:04):
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

(55:25):
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.

(55:45):
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

(56:06):
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

(56:28):
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.

(56:52):
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

(57:16):
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

(57:37):
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

(57:57):
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,

(58:20):
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

(58:41):
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

(59:03):
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

(59:26):
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,

(59:47):
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,

(01:00:12):
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.

(01:00:34):
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.

(01:00:55):
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

(01:01:15):
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,

(01:01:36):
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.

(01:01:58):
And of course you can find a podcasts virtually anywhere
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email us as always that blow the mind. At how
stuff work dot com for more on this and thousands

(01:02:20):
of other topics because at how stuff works dot com