The Turner Thesis

Frontier and Section: Selected Essays

Frederick Jackson Turner, 1961

This is a collection of Turner’s essays which is of course dominated by the one in which he first expressed what is now known as the Turner Thesis, touted by the back-cover copy as “not one, but the explanation of American history.” If we scrape away all of the hype and approach it without expecting too much, it’s a thoughtful essay that contains a lot of good ideas that can be debated and expanded almost indefinitely, as the historiography has proven.

“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” was an address given by Turner to a special meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), held at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893.  Turner was not the president of the AHA at this time (Henry Adams was. Turner was president in 1910) and the talk was regarded as interesting but not earth-shattering. Turner’s thesis is contained in the first paragraph: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

In a way, if you ignore the fact the land wasn’t really “free” or unoccupied, Turner’s point is obvious and irrefutable. But that doesn’t mean that all the ways he and other people have elaborated on it are equally true. Or in fact, that it was all inevitable; since America’s acquisition of the continent was contingent and the ways we acquired the various parts of it certainly influenced the histories of those parts and of the whole. Turner included a quote from John C. Calhoun, who in 1817 said America was “rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing,” suggesting perhaps that the way it all happened so quickly was not entirely unproblematic, even for Turner.

The idea that “American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier,” has been a particularly contentious element of Turner’s argument. Turner’s claim that American character has been formed by this “continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society” sounds a little too much like Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulation theory, which was popular among contemporary biologists. Haeckel said that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, that the evolutionary progress of the species could be seen in the developing embryo. But as it turns out, as poetic as this idea is, it isn’t true. Even so, it’s possible to agree with Turner that there’s something different about American culture because it was not determined solely by aristocrats in the Northern metropolises and on Southern plantations. American frontiersmen, farmers, miners, as well as immigrants who went into all these professions left their marks; and none of that would have been possible without the western frontier.

Turner has also been criticized for ignoring the Indians, which he actually doesn’t do despite the “Free Land” statement I criticized above. Although we may not like what he says about Native Americans, they are present in the essay and Turner claimed their role in American history is important. I think one of the the main flaws of the argument, really, is that Turner failed to distinguish any change in the nature of the frontier over time, or any difference in the people who went to it. We can agree that the frontier experience was powerful enough to wash away some of the eastern or old-country culture that people brought to the west; but if it didn’t remake them completely, then what they brought mattered. And clearly, people traveling to a logging camp in northern Michigan were going to experience a different frontier from sod farmers in Minnesota or miners in Virginia City, Nevada.

But let’s be fair. This was a speech delivered at the White City on a summer evening in 1893. Turner returned to these themes a generation later, in “The Significance of the Section.” In this 1925 essay, he said, “The West was a migrating region, a stage of society rather than a place.” I think the idea worked better in this mythic western sense, rather than as a concrete economic or social theory. True, the West was generally a debtor section, under the thumb of eastern bankers (especially after 1864, as my dissertation argued). So maybe to some extent we can agree that “frontier regions stressed the rights of man, while the statesmen who voiced the interests of the East stressed the rights of property.” I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to think of the “economic society” of the frontier as inherently separate from the East. Or to think of western “pioneer traditions” as a return to an embryonic stage of human society. But even so, there’s still a lot to think about in these essays.