Science and Symbol in the Turner Frontier Hypothesis

HISTORICAL understanding and national mythology have been generously enriched by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis. Turner's thesis permitted him to explain the formation of national character, ever an evanescent quality, and to attribute that which was peculiarly American to curious frontier conditions. In studying American history, Turner urged, we have no longer to do with a narrative of events and personalities, but must henceforth deal with the formation and expansion of the American people, the composition of the population, their institutions, their economic life, and their fundamental assumptions-what we may call the American spirit.....I The frontier, we have assumed, including many of us remote from professional concern with American history, virtually created the American nation. Here was a state, one characterized by a distinctive and very probably unique form of society. The frontier had made the famed melting pot boil and produced from widely disparate incoming peoples a people, one speakinig English but not of the British nation. It was a nationalizing force, compelling American traders and manufacturers to look less to Europe and more to the needs of the unusual civilization arising in their western hinterland. Turner's frontier dissolved older forms of society and generated from their ruins institutions more appropriate to those liberty-loving individuals called Americans. The American, ample testimony confirmed, was a new man. He had conquered a land at once beautiful and wild and rich beyond compare. His temperament was strong and his nature inquisitive; he was practical and uncommonly energetic; fierce devotion to the defense of liberty and to the cause of democracy was essential to his character.2 No