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Frontier Hypothesis
http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/west/frontiermyth.htm
Turner defined the frontier as "the meeting point between savagery and
civilization." The area of constantly receding free land beyond the frontier
increased democracy insofar as it relieved poverty outside the West (as a
"safety-valve" for the East), and fostered economic equality on the frontier itself.
Democracy was a trait of agricultural communities, Turner maintained, and
therefore small landholdings were necessary to establish yeomanry. His
economic analysis of the frontier borrows from myth in its claim that American
democracy came out of the American forest, a recurring rejuvenation of man
and society along the frontier. Turner's metaphors often attempt to stand in for
discursive reasoning, as in his account of democracy's Antaean birth and his
portrait, in an essay for the Atlantic in 1903, of a beneficent maternal nature
creating an agrarian utopia in the West. It might be argued that Turner's frontier
democracy is Jefferson's original agrarian ideal dressed up as historical
analysis.
Later in his life, Turner placed his faith not in nature or civilization but in the
common people of the United States. In so doing, however, he admitted that the
theoretical apparatus of the agrarian tradition--from Franklin through Jefferson
all the way up to his own "Significance of the Frontier in American History"
essay--was of no help in understanding an industrial, urban America. Indeed,
ignorance toward the industrial revolution and isolationist distrust of foreign
influences--from the city or overseas--had impeded cooperation between
farmers and factory workers in numerous crises of American history. The
frontier hypothesis' interpretation of the West in terms of nature isolated the
region from both the urban East and Europe, while the idea of civilization as a
reproduction of the cultural accomplishments of Europe imposed on the West a
social and cultural inferiority which hindered any acknowledgement of its own
novelty in world history.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS2/c22.html
From Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land . See the hypertext at:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS2/contents.html