The Inevitable Patterns of American History, Part 1

Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

American history has always, on some level, involved pushing the borders. The Founding Fathers talked a good game of liberty and republic, but fomented the Revolution to overrule the king’s refusal to permit homesteading west of the Alleghenies. When White Americans used up the Smoky Mountains and Ohio Valley, they kept pressing west. The continent seemed limitless… right up until giddy expansionism met its limits.

NYU and Yale historian Greg Grandin has long specialized in the parts of American history where optimistic rhetoric runs crosswise against realistic limits. Whether it’s capitalism’s inability to establish private overseas empires, in Fordlandia, or the perverse social forces aboard slave ships, in The Empire of Necessity, he’s translated obscure corners of history into plain vernacular English. This, his most sweeping book yet, examines not an event, but a theme.

The word “frontier” traditionally described a borderland, especially an armed and fortified borderland; ordinary civilians once avoided frontiers. Americans redefined the frontier as a place of opportunity. Before the current America even existed, James Madison created high-minded moral justifications for why perpetual settlement west expanded the potential of democracy. Washington and Jefferson elided moral language; they just pursued illegal land grabs on Native American territory.

But this perpetual migration had a dark side. Once White Americans secured their claims beyond the Alleghenies, and again after Jefferson finalized the Louisiana Purchase, the government used its unquestioned military supremacy to chase Indians off ancestral lands. Somehow, Whites always thought they’d gone as far west as they ever intended, and they’d never need lands they’d just given to Indians in treaty. Somehow, that never happened.

Greg Grandin

Grandin’s early chapters feature an interesting dualism. America’s twin impulses are embodied in two people: Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. Even when these individuals aren’t present, their rhetoric defines the direction of history. Jackson advocated complete libertarian expansion and rejection of limits… for rich White people. Adams predicted this expansion would create new conflicts later; he accurately foresaw Indian wars, the Mexican-American War, even the Civil War, decades ahead.

America’s perpetual westward urge served East-Coast interests perfectly well. While clearing land for Northern industry, and Southern slavery, the western frontier provided an outlet, a “safety valve” they called it, for violent racist tendencies. When circumstances got too heated Back East, they sent poor Whites to fight frontier wars further west, especially the Mexican-American War. Eventually, however, those Whites always came home, suffused in racist propaganda and experienced in war.

Throughout the Nineteenth Century this pattern repeats itself: use racist lingo to justify driving Natives and Mexicans off their land, then resettle that land, often with slave plantations. The impulse means to push violence outside settled White land. But it always comes home; from race riots in eastern cities, to the Civil War itself, America’s race-baiting rhetoric always created new violence in the home territories, which justified further westward expansion.

Then, abruptly, America hit the Pacific.

Inevitably, America’s myth of limitlessness ran into geography’s limits. Diplomats drew an enforceable border with Mexico, and discovered they had to enforce it. So the aggression had to travel outside America. Beginning with the Spanish-American War (which Grandin calls the War of 1898), America became a world power, engaged in affairs outside its nominal borders. The theatres of conflict changed; results remained the same.

Frederick Jackson Turner floated his “Frontier Hypothesis” in 1893, defining that American history only makes sense when considered through the frontier. Turner believed frontier living tested Whites’ fortitude, gave Americans boundless optimism, and explained American industriousness. Grandin notes, however, that Turner consciously ignored how Whites only settled the frontier after the military had courteously cleared Indians off the land. This blinkered vision carried into the Twentieth Century.

When the frontier closed, it became a metaphor. Capitalists and socialists alike claimed their philosophy had genuine cowboy heritage. Eventually, as capitalism survived World War II, socialists lost the Cold War PR war. Presidents from LBJ to Ronald Reagan asserted their frontier qualities. Meanwhile, Dr. King anticipated that every bomb dropped in North Vietnam would eventually explode in America. Like John Quincy Adams, King proved right.

Grandin closes with consideration of today’s border conflicts. Vigilante groups, many comprised of veterans, “patrol” the border in cowboy hats and Confederate flags, and have for a century. Now, a critical mass of Americans, once enamored of the frontier, want to build a wall. America’s problems, Grandin says, remain unexamined, for largely continuous reasons. We’ve always postponed the inevitable, and paid for it later. And now we’re doing it again.