The American frontier was officially closed, according to the U.S.
Census Bureau, in 1890. Yet more homesteads were settled in the
first few decades of the twentieth century than in the entire
nineteenth century.
"Frontier anxiety," then, really was caused not by the closing
of the frontier, but by the perception that the frontier was
closing, argues David Wrobel. As early as the 1870s and through the
1930s, many Americans believed an important era had ended and
worried about how this closure would affect society and
democracy.
The perceived expiration of a uniquely American way of life had
an impact not only on the literature of the day but on public
policy as well. While Frederick Jackson Turner and other
intellectuals lamented nostalgically about the end of an era
dominated by the rugged individualist and westward expansion, Zane
Grey and other novelists brought to life cowboys and pioneers from
bygone days who were more myth than reality. Presidents from Teddy
Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt focused on the vanishing western
frontier and its influence on the frontiers of the future.
"In The End of American Exceptionalism," Wrobel illustrates more
than just how the perceived demise of the frontier brought about a
longing for wilderness and the pioneer spirit. He emphasizes how it
influenced debate on public land and immigration policy,
expansionism, and the merits of individualistic and cooperative
political systems. In addition, he relates how it affected and was
affected by such diverse social and political issues as racism,
industrialization, irrigation, tenant farming, class struggle,
government intervention, and the naturalist movement.
Wrobel doesn't focus rigidly on Turner or question the
originality of Turner's thesis--that the frontier molded the
nation's character--as historians have done in the past. Instead he
suggests that the writings of Turner and other intellectuals were
symptomatic of a frontier anxiety that began to take hold in the
1870s. Concentrating on the notions of these intellectuals over
several decades, Wrobel shows how their reactions to the perceived
ending of American exceptionalism--created by a unique frontier
experience--helped shape the nation's cultural and political
future.
"I do not know of anyone who has brought together so much
material on the popular foreboding over the frontier's demise.
Wrobel uses articles and commentaries from periodicals in the 1870s
and 1880s to show both an awareness of the frontier's significance
to a distinctive national character and an uneasiness that this
molding influence was about to end. Unlike a lot of writing in
intellectual history, his style is accessible to the general reader
as well as the specialist."--Elliott West, author of "Growing Up
with the Country: Childhood on the Far-Western Frontier."
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