Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands

FOR MUCH OF THIS CENTURY, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis has been regarded as a most useful, if not the most useful, concept for understanding the distinctive features of American civilization. existence of a frontier, Turner argued, explained much of the difference between Europe and the New World. As he put it in the famous paper that he delivered the American Historical Association in 1893, The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled adapt themselves the changes of an expanding peopleto the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing ... the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life.' Turner suggested that circumstances peculiar the American frontier, such as free land, opportunity, and common danger from Indians, shaped American character and institutions in specific ways: the frontier quickened assimilation of immigrants, had a consolidating and nationalizing effect on young America, and promoted democracy.2 Moreover, Turner wrote, to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics: inventiveness, practicality, inquisitiveness, restlessness, optimism, and individualism.3 This overarching explanation of American history rejected the conventional wisdom that American institutions and character had been transplanted unchanged from Europe. As Ray Allen Billington, the foremost explicator of Turner's ideas, once wrote, Turner shook the academic world its foundations.4 Radical as it was, Turner's frontier thesis came enjoy widespread acceptance, spawning a remarkable series of books and articles before coming under attack in the 1930s and 1940s. Much of the criticism was well-founded.