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The Future of the American Frontier
The world as an American frontier was a new idea when Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a few other intellectuals assayed the closing of the continental frontier. Roosevelt was a central figure in this realization. His lament about the closing frontier drew on an essentially racialist notion of how Americans—or Americans of a certain heroic class—subdued the savages and thereby burnished their own virile qualities and moral capacity to lead. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner promoted the more palatable idea that democratic self-reliance was a consequence of the American frontier experience, and that the closing of the frontier (which the Census Bureau proclaimed in 1891) was a threat to American democratic virtue. The frontier had also provided the United States a safety valve for development, unlike Europe, where socialism and class antagonism marred the political landscape. The economic stagnation America was experiencing in the 1890s, after a heady period of economic expansion, was one alarm ringing through all the thinking about the frontier and its legacy.
If the end of the North American frontier was a crisis for democratic and manly virtue, Roosevelt and Turner had an answer: extend the frontier elsewhere. Long before the USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbor, Roosevelt advocated war with Spain, which bestowed the Philippines to the new American empire and provided Roosevelt with the “savage war” and Asian foothold that were meant as an antidote to the frontier’s demise in North America.
Woodrow Wilson was less bombastic but no less committed to the extension of the American idea. “The spaces of their own continent were occupied and reduced to the uses of civilization; they had no frontiers wherewith ‘to satisfy the feet of the young men,’” he wrote in A History of the American People. “These new frontiers in the Indies and on the Far Pacific came to them as if out of the very necessity of the new career before them.” In the White House, from which Roosevelt suppressed the Philippines rebellion and built the Panama Canal, both with a high human toll, Wilson invaded Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti before entering World War I. All of these actions undertaken on behalf of democratic ideals prefaced his attempts to make the world safe for democracy. While he was, in contrast to Roosevelt, increasingly anti-imperialist, he was no less expansionist—in one historian’s words, the “very model of Turner’s crusading democrat.”
The myth has been remarkably resilient. Not only did it inform American expansion globally during the presidencies of fdr and Truman, but the uncertainties posed by the Cold War (which used cowboys-and-Indians iconography time and again), the nuclear arms race, and subsequent crises of confidence (particularly urban crime, oil price explosions, the 1979 hostage taking in Tehran, and the 9/11 attacks) led to the embrace in popular culture and politics of the comforting narrative of civilization versus savages. The myth remains vibrant, but the frontier itself is disappearing again.
The end of the Cold War was the first sign that the global frontier was closing. The superpower standoff formed much of the United States’ identity in that phase of our global involvement, and its power explains our failure to construct a successor to that form of engagement. The “twilight struggle” with Soviet communism still shapes how we structure foreign relations, institutions, military doctrine, public diplomacy, and our sense of self-worth. It was a colossal, Manichaean contest, much like the one the pioneers experienced as they cleared and settled the continent. The anti-communist campaigns, which began internally as long ago as Wilson’s intervention against the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1920, resulted in dozens of military interventions, cia covert operations, and lavish support for anti-communist regimes. This pattern was nourished by the depiction of communists as a threat to civilization. The conclusion of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry nearly 20 years ago thereby drained American globalism of a paramount ideology—a way of seeing ourselves in the world—and the supposed vitality that came with the waging of “savage wars” in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It is with difficulty that we let go. That the war on terrorism closely followed, and invoked this warrior myth—the fight for Western values against barely human and wholly alien “hostiles”—should come as no surprise, since it evinces a purpose built by the Puritans and renewed throughout our history.
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, America instinctively reverted to the old category of a battle for civilization’s soul. Susan Faludi, in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, incisively applies Slotkin’s framework to this rapid mobilization for a “war on terrorism,” especially the regeneration through violence for the heroic men of America. This battle intoxicated the nation for a time, but the scale, threat, and results look paltry in the shadow of previous warrior epics.
So while the ennobling and rewarding savage wars of the anti-communist frontier are diminishing, that pattern of mobilization and intervention has simply been imitated, with relatively little retooling, in the war against small and scattered gangs of Muslim extremists. This mimicry is likely to fail. The menace of would-be shoe bombers and a few restive Muslims in faraway and desolate places pales before the thousands of nuclear weapons that were aimed at us by the Soviets, the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam, and the totalitarianism of Stalin or Mao. The relentless invocation of every soldier or firefighter as a hero dilutes the essential mythic heroism once reserved for a Boone or a Crockett or a Lindbergh. As in Vietnam, moreover, the “Indians” are not so easily subdued, and the costly setbacks of the anti-terrorism campaigns are stirring a growing distaste for savage wars.
The end of the global frontier is also evident in its diminishing bounty. A primary cause of the imperialistic urge of the 1890s was the perceived need to export American products to sustain or increase production domestically and to relieve labor agitation. Such a boom in exports followed, enabled by natural resources and agricultural production. But the U.S. trade situation turned sour in the 1970s and has continued to deteriorate ever since. The decline is precipitate. In 1992, the trade deficit was $50 billion. In 2007, in constant dollars, it was $730 billion. As a percentage of all economic output, exports did not exceed the levels of 1900 until the 1990s, and by then imports were outpacing exports.
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