Search Tips
Wrap search phrases within double quotes ("...")
Current Issue
Just Posted
Point of Departure
Donald Worster urges historians to stop separating culture from nature
Web Exclusives
From Past Issues
Tell Us What You Think
E-mail us at scholar@pbk.org.
The Future of the American Frontier
At the same time, income has stagnated for three decades for all but the wealthy in America—a direct slap at one of the tenets of the frontier myth, that expansion would lessen unequal distribution in the American economy. “The bonanza frontier offers the prospect of immediate and impressive economic benefit for a relatively low capital outlay,” Slotkin writes in Gunfighter Nation (1992), and “bonanza profits derive from the opportunity to acquire or produce at low cost some commodity that has a high commercial value.” In the 19th century, the bonanza was gold and land; in the 20th-century global frontier, it was oil and other minerals, financial products, and cheap goods from abroad.
The dismal performance of the global economic empire is often attributed to the nationalization of oil assets in opec countries, but even when oil prices were low in the 1980s and ’90s, the U.S. trade balance and personal income statistics were deteriorating. The declines have come during the period of insistence on free markets in the developing world (another modern-day equivalent of bonanza economics), a doctrine that proved ineffective if not disastrous for those countries over the last quarter century. The free market is attractive in theory, but when pitting transnational corporations against small developing countries it becomes an arena of economic predation. At the same time, rivals for economic dominance, including the European Union, Japan, China, India, Russia, and others, are crowding out U.S. control of markets and resources, a trend that is accelerating. The expansion on this continent was made possible by pushing out the British, French, Spanish, and Mexicans, and by eliminating the indigenous tribes, but this is no longer feasible in the global frontier.
The 2008 crisis in America’s mastery of global finance signaled another sharp reversal. In the midst of the market turbulence that shook Wall Street and foreign markets, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück proclaimed that “the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system. The global financial system will become multipolar” and use a more diversified basket of currencies, undermining one of the last symbols of America’s economic strength—the dollar. It was a sentiment widely echoed throughout the capitals of the world.
The most important reason for the closing frontier, however, is the limits of the earth itself, the biological capacity that is now diminishing with frightening speed. This is a consequence of the “taming of the wilderness,” which has certainly been tamed and is now wreaking its revenge. The longstanding notion that resources were ours for the taking, and for using promiscuously, is no longer viable. The closing of this frontier not only impedes economic growth built on this attitude (the engines fueled by cheap oil in particular), but has other costs as well—the agricultural, health, and safety challenges of rapid climate change, among many others.
The depletion of earth’s resources and the climate change that results from profligate consumption of those resources are well established now among scientists. The Washington reaction to this is right out of the frontier-myth playbook, however, and indeed is reminiscent of the debate that surrounded the onset of outward expansion of a century ago. Then, as now, the anti-imperialists were condemned as elitists and weak willed, people attempting to impede America’s God-given right to take our mission to the rest of the world. Today, the very modest proposals for arresting carbon emissions, for example, are derided by many proponents of big business as part of the global warming “hoax” that seeks to deprive Americans of economic growth and unbridled consumption. The intemperate quality of the attacks signals that a deep chord has been touched, the belief in the ever-expanding frontier that is pioneered and settled by Americans. The deterioration of the earth’s ecosystem was rarely mentioned in the 2008 campaign.
The war in Iraq illustrates how these three phenomena converge. It was fought in part to fulfill the new imperatives of the war on terrorism, and it was a war, so thought the Bush advisers, that we knew how to fight—armored divisions, air power, command and control, and so on, reflecting Cold War preparations. The mission (apart from the alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons) harkens back to the “civilizing” impulse of Roosevelt and Wilson and displays all the racial typing of the natives, and callousness toward them, that marred U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Latin America. The “bonanza” is the promise of oil, and the control of oil pricing worldwide. With its predecessor, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom signals how American consumption has led directly to large-scale resource wars, this one now 18 years in duration. An air of desperation clings to the war, as the mismatch of expectations and outcomes becomes ever more apparent, and as the inability of the United States to treat the world as its virgin domain is exposed.
Given these odious consequences, what is the future of the frontier and its myth? The reflexive answer is to discard it altogether as a guiding set of values. The frontier metaphor imparts ideas of American exceptionalism and the moral right to resources, cultural superiority, and limitlessness in all things we choose to do. If there are no limits, there is no need for common struggle. If the world is our oyster, there is no need for restrictive rules and regulations, for lowering expectations. Four hundred years of this ideology—fostered and promoted by church and state, the news media, schools, and popular culture generally—has nurtured this exceptionalism that feeds arrogance and wastefulness and war.
But the myth is resilient. The alternative is to reinvent it, to co-opt, in effect, frontier symbolism from its destructive tendencies and transform it into something more vital. Many leaders have attempted to use the frontier metaphor as a way of launching ideas for reform or renewal, invoking, for example, “the war on” campaigns—the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer—which draw on the conflict and moral struggle that played such a central part on the frontier. Some of the discourse about globalization today uses concepts similar to the frontier ideology: both the “clash of civilizations” (from Samuel Huntington) and the more piquant “clash of globalizations” (from Stanley Hoffmann) grapple with American-led cultural, political, and economic change and the conflicts and bonanzas they may be encountering or inducing. Yet very few political or opinion elites recognize the frontier myth—the restless urge to expand and to dominate—as the root and branch of our self-defined global role. Thus very few have tried to alter its course and meaning.
Copyright ©2009 The American Scholar. All rights reserved.