You know Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” before
you know that you know it. It is heroic
and elegiac, and it comes pre-distilled.
According to Turner, the frontier created American democracy and indelibly
shaped national culture. The free land
of the frontier was a safety valve: both malcontents and the ambitious could
head west. Their constant emigration
from eastern cities saved the country from permanent classes of
property-holding elites and low-wage workers.
The practical-minded self-reliance of the frontier was a wind from the
West, blowing east demands for voting rights, democratic constitutions, and
libertarian government. The report of
the 1890 Census had found settlement everywhere, erasing the westward line that
was, properly speaking, the frontier, and so, “the frontier has gone, and with
its going has closed the first period of American history.”[1]
Turner, a University of Wisconsin
professor who later taught at Harvard, announced his thesis at a meeting of the
American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893. It was the season of the Columbian
Exposition, the World’s Fair marking four hundred years of European presence in
the Americas and celebrating the cult of progress. The fair grounds were rife with displays of a
future perfected by technology and planning, all centering on the famous White
City, stucco-coated, lighted by electricity, and meticulously designed. It was both a monument to optimism and
growing human powers and an unintended reminder of the fragility of all plans
for the future, from its ephemeral architecture to its closing event, the
shocking assassination of the popular mayor by an angry and delusional
patronage-seeker.
Turner’s thesis had a White
City-like simplification. He might have
been designing an exhibition when he invited his reader to “Stand at Cumberland
Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file – the
buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and
hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer – and the frontier has passed
by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a
century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.”[2] Turner claimed that the whole outline of human
history displayed itself again and again on the open continent, as it had in
the longer and more meandering ascent of older societies. At the same time, there was a shadow in Turner’s
account. It lay in the irony that
American life made sense only at the moment when it ceased to make that kind of
sense. Describing a country shaped by
the frontier, Turner was also describing a people prepared by its history for a
different world from the one that was coming into being in 1893. With the end of abundant and good frontier
land, a nation of individualists faced the interdependence of people stuck with
one another; a culture built on the expectation of effectively limitless
resources confronted scarcity and class conflict; and a democratic community,
accustomed to self-governance, met a world too complicated for ready shared
decisions, a world that only experts and planners could navigate. Americans had lost their nature, and they
would now have to find a way to take responsibility for a planned nature, in
some ways as artificial as the White City.
So, when Turner wrote that
“American democracy … came out of the American forest, and it gained new
strength each time it touched a new frontier,”[3] he
was describing a democracy whose time had passed with the frontier. The country was now “looking with a shock
upon a changed world.”[4] The problem, Turner argued, was no longer how
to cut and burn the Western forests, but how to preserve timber, not how to
encourage settlement, but how to propagate scientific agriculture. The age of conservation and management had
come.
Just as nature now needed to be
managed collectively and by experts, new social conflicts seemed to demand the
same. Turner’s idea of American
democracy was highly individualist; egalitarian individualism and the
democratic spirit seem to have been roughly the same thing for him. Yet, he reflected, as he lectured on the
frontier, the country was torn by labor strife – organized workers gathered
against massed capital. His beloved West
was producing the most radical, which is to the say the most collectivist, of
the American unions, among the miners of Montana and Colorado. Turner wrote in 1903 that American politics
seemed to divide mainly on “the question of Socialism,” the question of how far
economic life should be subject to collective control, and for what purposes.[5] In an address late in 1910, he aligned
himself with Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism,” a program of strong
government that Roosevelt imagined as preserving the virtues of individualism
and civic spirit through intelligent management.[6] Like Roosevelt, Turner contrasted this
management-for-individualism with the simple, laissez-faire individualism of
conservatives like the railroad baron E.H. Harriman, whose simple rejection of
government was a throwback to a lost frontier.[7]
Loss of the frontier, then, was
also a loss of a certain kind of political innocence. As Turner presented it, American democracy
had taken shape in transient freedom from the basic problem of most politics,
especially modern and democratic politics.
This is the problem of conflicting interests and values, made acute by
scarcity. There is not enough of the all
the good things in the world – land, wealth, leisure – and conflict over those
things determines whose wishes come true, and whose lives end up as the
compromised instruments of others’ comfort.
Because one of the best ways to live comfortably is to exploit others,
one of the basic political problems is what Turner identified as the theme of
his time, the relation between capital labor, or, put in less stark language,
the terms of work and cooperation. The
frontier relaxed the pressure of both these problems. It made expansion an alternative to political
conflict, exit an alternative to exploitation.
When Americans pressed each others’ interests too hard, they could leave
for open land, returning themselves to what Turner imagined as an early stage
of social development. The frontier was
a safety valve for inequality and social conflict, and by reducing the force of
these, as much as by cultivating self-reliance on settlers’ farms, it helped to
give American politics the individualist stamp that Turner called democratic.
No doubt one reason for the
influence of the Frontier Thesis was that Turner’s claim about the frontier and
democracy was not at all original. He
was casting in (barely) academic language the tenets of a civic religion. Thomas Jefferson had promised in his first
inaugural address that frontier land would enable Americans to live a rural,
egalitarian life for a thousand generations.
Two years before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln argued that open land
created unique social mobility in American life, so that the class structure of
labor and capital did not apply here as it might in Europe. William Gilpin, Colorado’s first governor and
a great rhetorician of Manifest Destiny, announced that geography formed
America’s destiny – a destiny of a continental empire of liberty. These were only some of the most prominent
expressions of a whole world of American rhetoric.
Turner was less typical in his
claim that the frontier had closed, and in closing changed the terms of
American life. Not that this idea was
new, either: early in the nineteenth century, G.W.F. Hegel had argued that an
open continent enabled Euro-Americans to escape the conflicts of politics, and
that the United States would not come to grips with a genuine political
identity until it ran out of land, and Americans had to turn and face one
another. Until then, its politics would
be a gloss on escapist expansion, with few resources to answer the problems of
scarcity, exploitation, and conflicting goals.
Five years before Turner announced the Frontier Thesis, Theodore
Roosevelt founded the Boone and Crockett Club, an elite sportsmen’s
organization devoted to conserving North American big game in the face of
commercial hunting and development pressure on wild lands – concerns that would
attract Roosevelt, nostalgic western novelist Owen Wister, and other members of
the club to Turner’s thought, as Turner would later be drawn to Roosevelt’s
program.
Turner’s thesis hewed close to what
many had already said, although he was early in announcing the frontier
“closed” at a time when many were prepared to accept this as a diagnosis of the
time. It has also been subject to so
much criticism that it is, itself, more an object of historiographic interest
than a contender in theories of American political development. [Insert summary of the discussion.]
Turner was right that American
political culture, and culture at large, were formed in constant engagement
with, and reflection upon, a rich continent, new to its settlers, which they
turned into an advancing wave of frontiers.
This much is hardly deniable. It
is why, for all the limitations that sophisticated hindsight shows in Turner’s
argument, it is hard to deny that, in some broad sense, he could not have been
wrong. Rather than assess Turner’s
face-value claim, it is more interesting to consider him as an instance,
another symptom, of the very condition he diagnosed. Turner argued, following Hegel, that
Americans had been able to stay oblivious to the basic problems of politics,
enjoying a kind of national adolescence in which energy and individuality
seemed enough to organize the world.
With special assistance from nature, they had evaded politics until his
time, when Roosevelt and other Progressive reformers squarely faced the
problems of social and political order.
Turner himself, though, was not the
Owl of Minerva; he was a juncture within a larger story. The American use of nature to avoid politics
did not end with Roosevelt’s reforms, nor was the ideology of the frontier its
only earlier version. Every major form
of American environmental imagination has called on the natural world to
underwrite, to “naturalize,” one version of politics, pressing others outside
of serious debate. Each version has in
some ways powered political imagination and mobilization, by enlisting nature
in support of political agendas; at the same time, each version has evaded
politics, tried to shut down imagination and mobilization, by claiming that
certain would-be political questions must be decided by nature, not by human
judgment.
So Turner’s Frontier Thesis both
memorialized and put to rest – or claimed to put to rest – one American version
of nature’s politics, the idea of a republican, agricultural frontier, all but
indefinitely expanding, which Thomas Jefferson shared in with Colorado governor
William Gilpin. Nature bespoke God’s
Providence, in this view, and Providence had made possible a new form of
widespread political freedom and equality, intertwined with the dignity of
labor, especially agricultural labor. Nature,
in this view, was made to fulfill human needs richly, but only on the condition
that we worked on it, filled up its undeveloped vastness with clearing,
planting, and settlement. Because nature
had this purpose, the land belonged to those who made it bloom – to colonists
over the king who tried to restrict their westward expansion, and even more to
settlers over the indigenous people of the land they claimed. Providence thus helped the settlers to put
aside questions of justice and legality as they streamed across the
continent. This version of nature also gave
a plain agenda to the federal government: to create private property by deeding
land by sale or in exchange for clearing, planting, mining, irrigating,
draining – whatever it took to make more of North America the landscape it was
made to be.
This was environmental imagination
as political imagination, defining the purpose of politics – to create private
property and a culture of settlement – and setting its boundaries – little time
for Native American claims or non-productive uses of land. This version of environmental imagination
also presented an ideal of the individual mind, the mind of an alert,
practical, self-reliant citizen, the citizen of Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s
republics, whose character Turner described as if it had been molded from
frontier soil and fired in the heat of burning Midwestern forests. It gave Americans who adhered to it a basis
of dignity, the dignity of being that kind of admirable person, whose ability
and effort were turned toward nature’s providential plan. This version of nature was also training in a
way of seeing the non-human world: as a storehouse of potential wealth,
awaiting an ordering hand to make it flourish.
It trained the eye of the surveyor, the eye that would make the
Jeffersonian grid, a scheme of uniform development thrown across a rough and
diverse continent.
And what about the new politics,
and the conservationist approach to nature, that Turner shared with Roosevelt
and other Progressives? It was not an
escape from non-politics into political rationality. It was, like the providential settler view, another
version of political imgination, founded on its own version of nature, with its
own political and legal agenda, its own version of the American mind, and its
own way of seeing the non-human world.
Each version had its own kind of rationality, but it was rational
relative to an idea of nature and the human place in it, not rational in and of
itself.
Progressive
reformers like Roosevelt also saw nature as existing to serve human purposes,
though not all would have insisted that it was created with that end in mind.
Some did take this providential view, while others emphasized a more
utilitarian approach: human interests were the key thing, and it just made
sense to regard nature as a reserve of resources to be used for those
interests. For them, the key thing about
nature was that, contrary to the providential settler view, it was not arranged
to support the small-scale clearing and settlement of frontier culture, not
programmed for harmony with the Homestead Act and the Jeffersonian grid. Instead, many natural systems worked on
scales that were too large, and in ways that were too complex, for Jeffersonian
settlers to manage them well. Moreover,
the self-interest of individual settlers would not always lead to good
management of nature, as the providential view tended to suppose. Instead, pioneers had cleared forests too
quickly, exhausted their fields, and sent eroded soil downstream to clog
waterways. The country was using its
natural wealth poorly, and too quickly.
What was needed was management at the scale of the complex and
interdependent resources themselves – forests, rivers – over nature’s
time-scale, and in the interest of the whole political community, not just some
lucky members of the present generation.
Only government could do that, and it had to be a government staffed by
people with scientific training. Where
the providential version of nature called out for clearing and settlement, the
Progressive version demanded management.
Early in the nineteenth century, the continent had seemed to call forth
a homesteading, agrarian empire of liberty; now it invited a strong national
state, the administrative state of the twentieth century.
How was
this embrace of governance an evasion of politics? The key lies in a famous remark about Theodore
Roosevelt, that he loved government but did not care for democracy. It is not, of course, a matter of Roosevelt’s
personal temperament, but in this case his attitude captures a whole tendency
in the politics of his time. Roosevelt
said that his entire program of domestic reform was nothing but an extension of
the principle of conservation, and the analogy to other areas of progressive
policy is straightforward. From
antitrust to labor law to city planning to public-health regulation, social and
economic life was encountering the same problems that Progressives found in
nature: the systems were so large and complex that leaving them up to
individual decisions dis-served the public good. Like rivers and forests, the streams of
commerce and even the lives of citizens had to be managed for the long-term
good of the whole population. This
management was a public-minded project, but not a democratic one. It did not take its standards from popular
will, but from expert knowledge. It is
not strange, then, that some of the strongest conservationists, including
Roosevelt and his great supporter, Senator Albert Beveridge, were adamant
imperialists, confident that the US could govern the Philippines and other
far-off places for the benefit of their people, since the touchstone of good
government was not democracy, but, as Beveridge argued in support of
Roosevelt’s foreign policy, administration.
The key to
the evasion of politics was the conviction many Progressive reformers shared
that there was one right definition of the public good, a utilitarian calculus
that would tell the expert manager just where the national interest lay. When Roosevelt and his key allies treated
natural resources conservation as the model of all social and economic
regulation, they implied that the social benefit of a policy could be
calculated objectively and without controversy, without the need to answer to
competing values and incompatible goals.
Managing a forest for timber and erosion control allowed a
straightforward calculus of public costs and benefits that a manager could use
to schedule and locate logging over decades.
There was no room for disputes about just what the value of a tree was,
or whether trees, or ecosystems, might have their own interests – ideas that
Romantics like Sierra Club leader John Muir had begun to sound in public, but
which Roosevelt’s circle mostly scorned.
Taking forest management as a general model meant acting as if the
competing demands of labor and management, laissez-faire capitalists and
socialists, were open to the same objective accounting. It implied that there was no irresolvable
clash of values between antirust advocates such as Louis Brandeis, who wanted
to protect an economy of smallholders, and others, like Roosevelt, who wanted
to embrace big business, then regulate it.
Conservation,
then, was pivotal in the rise of cost-benefit analysis, which today is a
touchstone language of American policy and lawmaking. Since the 1980s, when it became central to
environmental policy, critics of cost-benefit analysis have argued that a
technical, would-be objective technique cannot identify whether laws are good, let
alone legitimate. Historians of economic
and social policy recognize that those debates are special instances of broader
problems that came into view when American policymakers after World War Two
began pursuing overall consumer welfare rather than engage in openly distributive
politics or other traditional concerns of political economy, such as the
quality of work that people do. That
policy, in turn, has its roots in the technocratic, managerial approach to
social policy that the Progressive conservationists pursued, which itself
rested on their understanding of nature and the human place in it. In a sense it was the American landscape, the
vast tracts of interdependent forests, waterways, and soil systems, many of
them still under public management and ownership when Roosevelt’s reforms got
underway, that made plausible a managerial, welfare-maximizing approach to
social policy generally. This approach
is the leading way, today, of making policy non-political, even anti-political,
in the name of an objective and technical conception of the common good.
Standard
histories of US environmental politics tell the story of Hetch Hetchy, the
dramatic Sierra Nevada valley near Yosemite, which San Francisco dammed as a
municipal water reservoir around the time of World War One. One of the protagonists in the usual story is
Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s chief conservation adviser and the leading
theorist and publicist of the conservationist approach to public policy. The other is John Muir, founder and longtime
president of the Sierra Club, a group that did much to bring a new approach to
nature into politics and lawmaking. The
Sierra Club perspective was the Romantic one.
In this view, nature’s most spectacular places, such as mountain peaks,
sheer cliffs, and crashing waterfalls, had power to free and sustain the human
mind. Visitors to these places found
themselves clearer, more alive, less burdened by habits and conventions,
anxieties and trivial distractions. This
experience was at once emotional, aesthetic, and religiously in a loosely
pantheistic way. Sierra Club members
reported that they left the high country with renewed connection to their own
true selves and to real powers of the universe.
Romantic
activists such as Muir insisted that the landscapes they treasured should be
preserved as something like secular cathedrals.
Their position was not exactly that these places should be outside the
utilitarian calculus of public benefit – the Sierra Club made an early peace
with cost-benefit analysis – but that aesthetic, recreational, and emotional
satisfaction should be central to the meaning of public benefit. “Not by bread alone” was a frequent refrain
of Sierra Club arguments that aesthetics should figure in public decisions. By the early 1920s, the Romantic vocabulary
had become the standard way to justify and explain the national parks, which
were officially described as natural cathedrals. The highest legal and political achievement
for the Romantic approach was almost certainly the Wilderness Act of 1964,
product of an alliance between the Sierra Club and the hard-core wilderness
advocates of the Wilderness Society, which dedicates large tracts of public
land (more than 107 million acres at the time of writing) to primitive
recreation, with effectively no development or exploitation allowed.
In one way,
the Romantics expressed the twentieth century’s most important political
challenge to the dominance of the conservationists’ utilitarian approach. The campaign for wilderness, in particular,
brought into public language a way of valuing the natural world apart from
aggregate human benefit, an anti-utilitarian argument that developed under the
pressure of finding public, democratic ways to engage the dominant utilitarian
arguments. At the same time, however,
the Romantics had their own ways of evading politics. On the one hand, they claimed to reach
outside of democratic disagreement to call on the real meaning, value, and
purposes of nature. On the other hand,
they rapidly made their peace with a consumerist relationship to nature, whose
paradigm was the vacation. This approach
to nature was transcendentalist and supra-political in its first posture,
consumerist and sub-political in its second.
The effective compromise between these two chords in Romantic politics
was to focus political effort on defending high-country sanctums while ignoring
the environmental politics of everyday life, which Romantics consigned to the
fallen world of the lowlands. The
Romantics claimed to rise above politics in protecting the places they valued
most, while ducking it for every other question that their core concerns,
consistently pursued, might have raised.
This meant that no political agenda ever emerged to rethink all
dimensions of the human relation to nature in light of the Romantic concern
with the quality of consciousness and experience.
The fourth
major version of American nature, the ecological, has now been at the center of
environmental politics, lawmaking, and imagination for roughly fifty
years. It took energy from the growing
visibility and sophistication of ecological science; from the massive increase
in the American and Western European resource footprints in the
consumer-industrial economies that grew up after World War Two, which pressed
many natural systems harder than they had been pressed before; from a new
cultural emphasis on security and cleanliness in the prosperous suburbs of the
era; and from growing doubts that technological mastery of nature always meant
progress, doubts spurred by, among other things, the atomic threat and the
failure of US technology and planning in Vietnam. The heart of ecological nature is
interconnection so deep and extensive that boundaries among organisms, places,
and systems are neither stable nor secure.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
crystallized what this meant for an industrial society: toxins released into
air and water ended up in soil, in flesh, in DNA. The suburbs were unsafe; even the body was
not secure. From the beginning, the
ecological image of the world brought a threat, the apocalyptic specter of a
“poisoned world.”[8] It also brought a comforting, pastoral
promise: being a part of the non-human world, continuous with it, could be
redress for alienation and discontent, a version of the restorative unity with
nature that the Romantics had sought, but with a basis that was humbler, more
widespread than the “cathedrals” of the high country, and based as much in
science as in feeling and intuition.
Ecological
nature required new forms of regulation, pitched at the level of systems, such
as the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, or protecting “critical habitat”
wherever it occurs, as the Endangered Species Act permits. Most earlier lawmaking around the non-human
world had amounted to zoning on a continental scale, with regions of private
property implicitly dedicated to economic use, public lands explicitly
committed to a mix of managed production, as in the national forests, and
recreation, all the way to the wilderness areas that law protected from all development. The zoning-style approach could no longer
seem adequate, once it became apparent that natural systems respect large-scale
jurisdictional boundaries hardly more than they do private property lines. In a way, the ecological insight did to the conservationist,
zoning-based approach what the conservationists had done to the providential,
property-oriented lawmaking that came before it: showed that its artificial
boundaries were too narrow for a deeply interconnected natural world.
There is
also no keeping human beings out of ecological nature. Wilderness was the apex of the Romantic view
– a nature without people, without production or extraction, set aside for
leave-no-trace pilgrims. Agriculture
would be a fair candidate for the touchstone of ecological nature: it is one of
the most basic ties between the human body and the rest of the world, a
relationship of sustenance and survival.
It shapes landscapes, soil systems, and the human culture of labor and
technology that surrounds it, and its practices, from plant breeding to
pesticide and antibiotics, define the chemistry and bacterial ecosystem of the
human body. Another candidate is energy. The energy economy transforms the chemistry
of the global atmosphere through its emissions and drives change in global
climate. It forms landscapes directly
through mining, drilling, or windmills and solar panels. Energy sources also
shape human habitation: today suburbs and exurbs have grown up around cheap
fuel, as towns and villages once clustered around waterways that could drive
their mills and carry their goods.
In these
ways, ecology has deepened the problems and raised the stakes of environmental
law and politics. In fact, the
intensification may be so great that referring to “environmental” questions is
artificially narrow; in a real sense, we are talking about everything. To shape the human relation to the natural
world, we have to take account of most of what we do and how we live. In fact, we will shape the human relation to
the natural world regardless of whether we take account of it. The question is whether we will do so in a
deliberate and self-aware way, or obliviously, remaking the world, as it were,
behind our own backs.
The need
for a deepened and broadened environmental politics has never been
greater. That need comes at a most
inopportune time. Considering what it
would take to be intentional about the human shaping of the atmosphere, for
instance, only highlights the inadequacy of existing politics. Even the largest countries are small enough
that any measures they take to fight climate change have the economic structure
of foreign aid – all the costs at home, most of the benefits abroad. Election cycles are tragi-comically shorter
than the time scale of climate change, meaning that politicians’ self-interest
generally lies in making reassuring noises (either that something is being done
about the problem or that no action is necessary) while doing no to burden
their constituents during their own time in office. Efforts to achieve meaningful global
agreements have so far been studies in how hard it is to overcome these
barriers, exercises in selling out the future for the convenience of the
present. More exactly, these efforts
have ended up embracing tremendous future uncertainty and loss of control in
return for a margin of comfort and false security today, the
immediate-gratification payoff of concluding that there is nothing that needs
to happen, or, at least, nothing to be done.
The problem
is not just a matter of the scale – in time and space – of existing
governments. It is also that the world’s
democracies are in malaise, even around their established functions. Effective democratic government has been hard
enough to come by in the United States and Europe that one hears murmurs, and
more than murmurs, wishing for the strength and decisiveness that some
Westerners associate with Chinese authoritarian rule.[9] In other words, concluding that a deepened
democratic politics of nature is what the world needs now is not at all an
upbeat or exhorting judgment. On the
contrary, it may well be the crux of a tragedy, that humans can see the shore
we need to reach, but, for reasons we understand but cannot overcome, have no
way to get there.
It may be
partly because this prospective tragedy is so unsettling that ecological nature
has inspired its own evasions of politics.
The recent center-left fantasies that it would be refreshing to live
under Chinese efficiency are second-time-as-farce replays of 1970s fantasies
that a Green authoritarian state might be the key to the ecological
crisis. As a desperate response to
democratic failures, this is certainly instructive, but more as a diagnosis of
how deep disaffection with stumbling democracies runs than of what might be a
solution. Quite apart from the moral
priority of democracy, which I hold very high, the hope for benign and
sustained authoritarianism is absurd in practice and a mark of intellectual
desperation.
[1]
Significance of the Frontier in American History (last lines).
[2]
Id. [earlier]
[3]
FJT, The West and American Ideals
[4]
Id.
[5]
FJT, Contributions of the West to American Ideals (1903, Atlantic)
[6]
FJT, Social Forces in American History.
[7]
Id.
[8]
[Cite for popular use of this phrase.]
[9]
Kristof, Friedman, and anecdotes of high-powered murmurers.
