The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by
Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012
Population concerns remained robust and intimately connected to foundational policy questions surrounding slavery and westward expansion in the decades before the Civil War. Apprehension of enlargement did not, as is often supposed, develop merely in response to the “closing of the frontier” at the end of the nineteenth century. True, the closing of the frontier led many white Americans to worry that their nation had “filled up”—and, given the era’s mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, filled up with the wrong kinds of people. It also fueled the popular culture’s nostalgia for an imagined untamed West.
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To begin with, population experts and New Dealers thought about migration in terms of the closing of the frontier. Malthusian fears subsided somewhat during the 1930s, given the prospect of population decline, but the sense of having arrived at a new era of diminishing returns prevailed. The difference was simply that instead of fretting about the 102 chapter 3 dangers of overpopulation, population theorists now hailed the coming stable population. And the very idea of moving people around the map of the United States like a chessboard exposed a sense of national maturity. If the closing of the frontier had signaled the end of supposed rugged economic individualism, population redistribution was state action designed to replace the Turnerian safety valve afforded by the frontier.
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Current inattention aside, Americans took part in a robust discussion about the prospect of overpopulation since before the creation of the United States. And indeed, historians have long studied the influence of America’s unique demography—and anxieties about it—on the American fabric. Most famously, University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 that the recent “closing” of the frontier threatened American democracy; recourse to the cheap lands in the lightly populated West had provided an egalitarian safety valve to the teeming populations of the growing nation. But the approach by modern historians has been more piecemeal, with a tendency to address population ideas only to the extent that they intersect with obvious topics of demographic importance, such as immigration.
Capitalism in America: A History
by
Adrian Wooldridge
and
Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018
Teddy Roosevelt regarded the Constitution as a “stubborn obstacle to overcome in the fight for his Progressive political agenda,” in the words of William Bader.29 Woodrow Wilson believed that America could no longer afford to have a presidency fettered by eighteenth-century checks and balances if it was to cope with the world of giant corporations. It needed instead a complete constitutional revolution—a powerful prime minister on the British model supported by vigorous party discipline. THE CLOSING OF THE FRONTIER The development of a European-style elite on the East Coast coincided with the closing of the American frontier in the West. The open frontier had given America its energy and optimism. The world’s first new nation had thrown much of its energy into settling the frontier—and as one frontier was settled another was opened up still further to the west.
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What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever-retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier had gone, and with its going had closed the first period of American history.30 Turner overstated his case. Productivity growth accelerated after the closing of the frontier: indeed the completion of America’s internal market, with the integration of the West Coast, made it easier to conquer new economic frontiers. America remained a country of cheap land and vast open spaces. People continued to move around in huge numbers: southern blacks started to move to northern cities from 1900 onward and “Okies” fled the dust bowl for California.
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People continued to move around in huge numbers: southern blacks started to move to northern cities from 1900 onward and “Okies” fled the dust bowl for California. Turner nevertheless put his finger on something: America had begun its long transformation from a land of infinite possibility to a land of limits and trade-offs. Bryan was the obvious man to give expression to this new America, limited by the closing of the frontier, topped by a new ruling class, and roiling with discontent. Nobody was better at proclaiming, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” But he was too eccentric a figure and too tricky a customer to reach the very pinnacle of national life. The politician who did much more to turn the new spirit of activism into legislation was not a Democrat but a Republican—Teddy Roosevelt.
Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
by
Yoni Appelbaum
Published 17 Feb 2025
And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. He told them that the world as they knew it was over, and hardly anyone noticed. For Turner, the closing of the frontier was more than a curiosity. He argued that “the forces dominating American character” had come from the “fluidity of American life” brought on by the “expansion westward with its new opportunities.” The individualism, confidence, strength, and inventiveness of Americans, even their penchant for democracy, Turner attributed to the frontier.
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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Although he was thirty-one: Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1971), 166–72. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “The exhaustion of the public”: Worthington C. Ford, “Regulating Immigration,” Epoch, April 15, 1887, 229–30, quoted in David Carl Shetler, “Immigration Restriction and the Closing of the Frontier: A Conjunction of Fears, 1882–1897” (master’s thesis, University of Montana, 1974), 54. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT His claim that the frontier: I am indebted to the historian Benjamin Schmidt for first pointing out to me the shifting color schemes of these maps, the mysterious reappearance of the frontier line, and Robert Porter’s xenophobia.
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by
Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013
And why, indeed, did Thomas Jefferson believe so keenly in the idea that America should and could and in time would extend herself from sea to shining sea, and accordingly dispatch Lewis and Clark to see if and how this could be achieved? Was all of this, as Frederick Jackson Turner would later argue, rooted in that same peculiar experience, shared by all, born in the process of the steady closing of the frontier? Some may consider it injudicious to conflate, on the one hand, John Winthrop’s inspirational city-on-a-hill sermon of 1630 and the tenets of the frontier thesis with, on the other, the notion of conducting Manifest Destiny at home and so many interfering adventures abroad. And yet viewed from some perspectives it does seem right and proper to ask, particularly here in Missouri: why does America still believe, as the slogan of Whiteman Air Force Base has it—why did it ever believe, in fact—that it has a right and a duty to be able to deliver “massive firepower, in a short time, anywhere on the globe”?
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Why America? And if such a belief is somehow rooted in a deep-seated conviction that it should, that it needs to, and if called upon, that it must—then was not this all born, as Frederick Jackson Turner and his supporters would also argue, from the experiences gained by early Americans in their closing of the frontier? Isn’t this determination to extend itself across the planet simply a reflection of the strength and crudity and informal decisiveness of the pioneer Americans, brought up to date, made global, and now writ large for all the world to see? Does the mission of the huge atomic firebase, sited so close to where William Clark first heard of the snake that gobbles like a turkey, have its intellectual origins in this very same tiny, brave expedition that first crossed the frontier and in the consequent development of the huge city now lying just a short drive away to the east, which once so vividly encapsulated the notion of the frontier, two centuries before?
Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
by
Clark Blaise
Published 27 Oct 2000
He would stretch out in the mud, take out his glass, and declare that nothing is more deceptive than an obvious fact. He would have declared it a fraud, not the missing link. 12 Time, Morals, and Locomotion, 1889 Time travels differently when you’re on a train! —Advertisement for Amtrak, 1999 WE THINK OF the closing of the frontier as a North American phenomenon, but Europe had an eastern frontier no less formidable than anything in the American West. In 1883, with “time in the air” and American railroads adopting standardization on the Sunday of Two Noons, selected members of the European press, mainly the society columnists, were assembled for the jaunt of a lifetime, the first run of the Paris-to-Constantinople Orient Express.
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by
Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020
For Gwendolyn, Eleanor, Nicholas… and Plum The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Antonio Gramsci pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease… —e. e. cummings INTRODUCTION The Closing of the Frontier The peak of human accomplishment and daring, the greatest single triumph of modern science and government and industry, the most extraordinary endeavor of the American age in modern history, occurred in late July in the year 1969, when a trio of human beings were catapulted up from the earth’s surface, where their fragile, sinful species had spent all its long millennia of conscious history, to stand and walk and leap upon the moon.
The Last Ride of the Pony Express: My 2,000-Mile Horseback Journey Into the Old West
by
Will Grant
Published 14 Oct 2023
The first sentence of the introduction opens the book with its place-time parameters: For the purpose of this volume, I have regarded the American West as beginning geographically west of the Mississippi River and ending chronologically at the turn of the last century, approximately with the closing of the frontier.7 The chronological beginning of the West is not as clear as its ending. The current environment began to take shape when the last ice age ended ten thousand years ago. Indigenous peoples developed nomadic and seminomadic lifeways that followed the seasons, the wildlife, the water. A network of trade routes connected parts of the West with the rest of the Americas, and complex civilizations arose on the Great Plains and throughout the Southwest and wherever there were sufficient resources to support settlement.
The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by
Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020
He set out his vision in “Education for a Classless Society,” an address he delivered at the University of California and published in The Atlantic in 1940. Conant wanted to reclaim for American society the principle of equality of opportunity, now threatened by “the development of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” He cited Frederick Jackson Turner, the Harvard historian who had argued that the closing of the frontier cut off the traditional avenue of American opportunity—the ability to move west, to cultivate land, and to rise through effort and ingenuity unshackled by class-bound hierarchy. “The most distinctive fact” of the early period of American democracy, Turner had written, “was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility.” 7 Turner, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, was perhaps the first to use the term “social mobility.” 8 Conant called this concept “the heart of my argument” and used it to define his ideal of a classless society.
The Meritocracy Myth
by
Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013
The self-made man started and grew his business or farm through intelligence and hard work, not by getting more education than his competitors. The expansion of schooling was the result of major changes in the structure of occupational opportunities. With continuing industrialization, technological change, the rise of large corporations, and the closing of the frontier, by the end of the nineteenth century opportunities for becoming a self-made man had declined precipitously (see chapter 7). America was no longer a nation of small-scale entrepreneurs, farmers, and shopkeepers. More people were becoming employees in increasingly large, bureaucratically structured work organizations.
The Abandonment of the West
by
Michael Kimmage
Published 21 Apr 2020
Famous over time, the remembered Columbus was transformed into a symbol of America, a center of industrial power, art and democracy. At the World’s Fair, Columbus and Columbia were also inchoate symbols of American foreign policy. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner indicated this obliquely in the lecture he gave in Chicago during the fair. He noted the closing of the frontier: “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, the frontier was gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” (In this same lecture, Turner dissociated the United States from Europe, contending that “the growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent upon the advance of the frontier.”)
The End of Work
by
Jeremy Rifkin
Published 28 Dec 1994
The first of those currents focused on the heavens and eternal redemption, the second on the forces of nature and the pull of the market. From the first century of American nationhood, these two powerful philosophical orientations worked hand-in-hand to conquer a continent. With the official closing of the frontier in 1890, the millennial and utilitarian energies that had so distinguished the frontier character were redirected to a new frontier-modem science and technology. The new focus coincided with the vast economic changes after the Civil War that were turning America from a rural to an urban society and from an agricultural to an industrial economy.
Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by
Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018
Much the same conclusion was drawn by ‘the new stagnation’ theorists. They were impressed by the fact that the upswing of 1958–60 had soon petered out. Secular stagnation was an old American obsession. The stagnationists claimed that what had made American capitalism so dynamic was its expanding frontier. With the ‘closing of the frontier’ at home, and the exclusion of American exports from communist China, this dynamism was exhausted: a new frontier had to be created by state spending. Statistical series showed a widening 151 T h e R i s e , T r i u m p h a n d Fa l l of K e y n e s gap between actual and potential output after 1955.
Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by
Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012
The overwhelming majority of Frenchmen had no direct interest in the matter; yet, it ought not to be forgotten that adherence to a tech nical decision is always a matter of personal interest. As for the technicians, it may be asked why they made the judgment they did. Clearly because they were applying their technical instru ment, in which generous or sentimental motives had no place. The technicians as technicians told us that the closing of the frontier was disastrous; as men, they might have approved of the action for ideological reasons. It is not at all certain that technicians are still capable of making humane judgments; that, however, is an other question. The transformation of the state and the consequent predomi nance of technicians involves two elements.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by
Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016
But historical statistics place the median size of the American farm as less than half that size—153 acres in 1870, 147 acres in 1900, and 157 acres in 1930, still substantial from Bryce’s European perspective.69 In light of Frederick Jackson Turner’s much-discussed 1893 hypothesis of the closing of the frontier, it is somewhat surprising to note, as shown in table 4–2, that substantially more than two-thirds of American farm dwellings in existence in 1940 were built after 1900. Many of the newly constructed farmhouses were replacements for the sod huts and log cabins that immigrant farmers initially built to shelter their families from winter in the northern and western plains.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by
Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012
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