The Frontier in American History
by . New York: Henry Holt and Co. 1920. 8vo, vi-+-375 pp. $2.50.
PROFESSOR TURNER modestly calls the papers in this volume ‘reconnaissances’; but they are a cumulative series of studies presenting the leading influences that have made the United States. The frontier, to him, means the edge of settlement, and not, as in Europe, a political boundary. As it has moved westward, from military or economic causes, it has recorded the expansive energies of the people behind it and carried on the pioneer ideals. The fruitful results of this survey give a new reading to American history. By obliterating state lines and by considering movements of the people, the rise of large areas, like the ‘old West’ and the ‘Middle West,’ and the special effect of foreign immigra tion, the story of the western country is brought into close connection with the ‘East.’ and the development in its many processes becomes ’ inevitable.'
The distinction between the community type of settlement of New England and the quit-rents, head-rights, and homestead grants of Virginia; the clash of interest between the people of tidewater and upland regions, between pioneer forester and farmer and absentee owner; the reason for the contest between slavery and freedom, for the national homestead law, tariffs, and internal improvements, for liberal suffrage, political ideas and parties distinctively Western; the sharp outbreaks between labor and capital — such are a few of the subjects considered and explained, with a wealth of detail that defies summary. The West is but ‘a form of society rather than an area’; at the close of the eighteenth century it ‘compelled the men of the East to think in American terms instead of European’; before the railroads, it was ‘potentially the basis for an independent empire’; and it has exerted a persistent pressure on the East as a ‘region of revolt,’until to-day it controls the policies of the country. With all his great material prosperity the Westerner has retained faith in man, hope for democracy, belief in America’s destiny, and unbounded confidence in his ability to make his dreams come true — all based on an apparently unlimited supply of free land. The land is exhausted, and Western influence upon democracy may change, but Mr. Turner has recorded the past in a masterly manner.
His volume is the nearest approach we have to an estimate of the pioneer spirit in American history’, and it is by far the best work we have on the subject — broad in its sweep, balanced in its proportions, and just in its conclusions. Altogether it is a great achievement, and the greater because it embodies the work of twenty-five years.
W. C. F.