The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
The destination of this restlessness was furthest removed from Europe; indeed one fabled Kentuckian proclaimed that the country was bounded "on the west [only] by the Day of Judgment." It was there that the archetype of the frontiersman was crystallized and then celebrated in the monograph that Frederick Jackson Turner presented at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The first major academic American historian offered a portrait of those "intellectual traits" that distinguished the American from the European. Turner's frontiersman bears a certain resemblance to the imperial self: "That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism ... and ... that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom . .. these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier." [12] Such masculine individualism of the frontier Turner also identified with the extension of democracy, discerning (as had Tocqueville) the way that a rough and ready egalitarianism is closely intertwined with personal independence from traditional loyalties and stable institutions. Turner was more than an historian; he was a kind of mythmaker. He spun a metaphor in the form of a scholarly essay that had been ignited by the prosaic act of thumbing through census data for 1890, from which this "son of the Middle Border"--the Wisconsin of his upbringing was then only two generations removed from the frontier--inferred that the national experience had reached a terminus, that the frontier had already closed. For the frontier had elicited traits that Turner admired, and its disappearance posed a challenge to the formation of the American character. He exalted the development of an individualism marked by resourcefulness, self-confidence, self-assertiveness, even aggressiveness in the pursuit of private interest.
That pursuit was seen as requiring only opportunity and needing no interference from a distant government in Washington. For the archetypal, authentic American, as Turner portrayed him, the past was hardly a constraint. History, if thought about at all, is the record of how circumstances can be changed by acts of will, rather than the annals of a constant human nature, which is subject to inherited limitations. In honoring the frontiersman, Turner proved a thorough environmentalist who underscored the malleability of human nature and the potentiality of the human will. Americans were shaped by their particular circumstances, and the settlers and the unsettled could--by changing their circumstances--change themselves. They could cease to be Europeans or the Easterners who were the facsimile of Europeans. Under new conditions, subjected to new stimuli, the track of generations could be effaced; and original sin or its secular equivalents of biological and social determinism would not be binding.
Turner's own temperament fits neatly into another characteristic national pattern as well. Repudiation of determinism could be transformed into optimism and into largely unqualified faith in progress, which he traced in the advancing line of civilization. Turner was therefore prohibited from seeing the logical conclusion which would inevitably follow from his monograph, which is that the disappearance of a particular milieu might require the downward revision of the national character. Far from constituting progress, the story of America might have to be told in terms of decline and loss. Turner raised this possibility only to retreat from its somber implications; his own sensibility as well as his complacent historical vision were quite incompatible with pessimism. He could not plumb the depths of the tragic; he failed to see how intertwined good and evil have been in the republic's past, and how such terms might be applicable to an evaluation of the character of the frontiersman. A specialist on the history of the West, Turner largely missed or obscured the ugliness of its violence. His frontiersman was primarily a yeoman farmer, not a hunter or a gunfighter. Nor did Turner dwell on the terrible injustices associated with the conflicts with Indians, Spaniards and Mexicans. He did not incorporate arrogance, cruelty and narrow commercialism into the legacy, the more sinister side of the fortitude and heroism and enterprise which he so richly praised. Later generations could see more clearly than he the considerable ecological cost, the disrespect and destruction with which Westerners treated the gifts of nature. Such carelessness about the future came more easily when the earth is seen as belonging only to the living rather than also to posterity, as a transaction between the generations. The buffalo upon whom the Plains Indians depended so heavily for sustenance were slaughtered so indiscriminately that, of the thirty million estimated to have roamed the West in the middle of the nineteenth century, only 34 were left by 1903. [13] But prodigal wastefulness was outside the range of a celebrant of individual will, of mastery over space.
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University . He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).