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From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp114-7

Many of the scholars at the [1893] Chicago conference thought of history writing as mostly a compendium of facts, dates, and names. [Frederick Jackson] Turner, in contrast, was part of a new generation that was beginning to make and revise arguments about the past – trying to “explain,” as Turner wrote, the relationship between economics, migration, ideas, science, culture and politics. There was, though, one influential historical argument prior to the Turner thesis, popular among New England Protestant historians: the “germ theory,” which had nothing to do with literal bacteria or infections.

The germ theory held that what was good and strong about American institutions germinated in Europe, in ancient Saxon and Teutonic villages filled with “freemen” not yet subordinated to feudal lords. Applied to Germany and England, this theory was one of romantic decline, of a once-free people weighted down by the sediments of history, bureaucracy, ecclesiastical strictures, and aristocratic caste. “Untrammeled in the liberty which he enjoyed,” the “primitive Aryan” came to represent “what the world had once possessed, but which it possessed no longer.” In North America, it was a theory of ascent, of Saxon freedom spreading first to medieval England, then to New England. The “old Anglo-Saxon race” is “destined to plant amid the wilds of the New World the germs of free institutions . . . extending over a vast continent,” read one succinct statement of the theory.

The germ principle was straightforwardly racist, a celebration of the “blood gene,” or the “great Teutonic race,” as one of its most prominent practitioners, Herbert Baxter Adams, put it, and a confirmation of the continuity and superiority of Britain and North America’s Saxon lineages (such as the Adamses, including John, Samuel, and John Quincy, down to Herbert himself). If the study of history is the study of change, these early historians of the United States were decidedly ahistorical. Their germs were something like physicists’ Big Bang, sudden and pristine. When the Puritans landed, “their institutions were already perfected,” George Bancroft, among the country’s most influential historians prior to Turner, wrote Woodrow Wilson, who studied with Turner under Adams at Johns Hopkins, argued in 1899 that early Christian settlers “were inventing nothing”; ideas that would later result in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were already fully formed upon their arrival in the New World. Americans, Wilson said, were “simply letting their race habits and instincts” – as developed in Europe – “have natural play.” Another historian wrote that the origins of the independent spirit of the American West was “found to be in the forests of Germany,” and that American frontiersmen were but replicas of Saxon, Teutonic, and Aryan “independent freemen.“

Turner, in contrast, flipped the focus. He said that what was good in America was made in America, by settlers transforming frontier wilderness: “Free land,” he wrote, and “an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America.” America’s unique democratic individualism, Turner held, was a “new product that is American.” American democracy “came out of the American forest and it gained strength each time it touched a new frontier.”

The use of the word “frontier” had evolved as the United States grew. Whereas in the late 1700s the term, as discussed earlier nearly exclusively referred to a boundary, border, or military front, by the time of Turner’s Chicago presentation it had come to mean much more. What exactly it meant was subject to debate. Over the course of its existence, the United States’ political boundary moved forward rather steadily, from the crest of the Alleghenies to the Mississippi River to the Sabine and Red Rivers to, finally, its current limit at Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. But its line of white settlers, along with the line of military force used to protect those settlers, moved forward in fits and starts, zigs and zags, sometimes east of the political boundary, sometimes west of it. Anglo society moved forward not as a uniform front against Native Americans but more fluidly, as if it were poured into the interstices separating Indian nations and communities. As it did, the meaning of the word “frontier” diverged from that of “border,” which continued, more or less, to indicate a fixed line. “Frontier” became fuzzier. It came to suggest a cultural zone or a civilizational struggle, a way of life: a semantic change electrified by the terror and bloodshed that went along with settler expansion.

Turner’s genius was to embrace the unsettledness of the concept, to not try to fix the “frontier” as any one thing. “The term is an elastic one,” he wrote, and “for our purposes does not need sharp definition.” He then went on, in his 1893 thesis, to define “frontier” in at least thirteen different ways, to indicate, among other things, “a form of society rather than an area”; “a return to primitive conditions”; a “field of opportunity”; “the outer edge of the wave -the meeting point between savagery and civilization”; something that lies “at the hither edge of free land”; the “line of most rapid and effective Americanization” for European migrants (especially those who started arriving in the 1880s in increasing numbers from central and southern Europe); a harsh “environment” that is almost “too strong for the man”; and “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” There was a “trader’s frontier,” a “rancher’s frontier,” a “miner’s frontier,” and a “farmer’s frontier.”

These many different frontiers had many different functions. In this sense, the power of Turner’s thesis, or theory, was not that it was refutable or provable, from a scientific or logical standard, but that it wasn’t. The frontier could be posited as numerous things and speculated as the cause of multiple effects. It cultivated a “love of wilderness freedom”; nurtured “the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” which in turn led to the “evolution of American political institutions”; “promoted democracy”; combined “coarseness and strength” with “acuteness and inquisitiveness” to create an archetype personality uniquely American, at once “practical” and “inventive,” fast “to find expedients,” displaying a “masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends.”

Such multifunctional complexity! The frontier, here and henceforth, was a state of mind, a cultural zone, a sociological term of comparison, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, a disciplining mechanism, an abstraction, and an aspiration. At the same time, though, such explanatory simplicity: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

Within a decade of the 1893 paper, it became difficult to grapple with any of the main themes of American history without passing through Turner. By 1922, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., in his popular survey of U.S. history, said that so many books applied Turner’s arguments that it would be impossible to list them all, and, anyway, there was no point to summing up the Frontier Thesis, since it was “too well known.” Not just historians, but economists, sociologists, philosophers, literature professors, psychoanalysts, politicians, and novelists, both dime-store and highbrow, adopted Turnerian ideas. Two of Turner’s fellow historians of the West, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, became president. Having moved from the department of history at the University of Wisconsin to Harvard, Turner tutored the country’s ruling class, its intellectuals, policy makers, businessmen, and career foreign-service officers. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of his students.