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(Good review that would have been better without the gratuitous swipe at
Howard Zinn.)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, March 17, 2019
When America’s Love of the Open Frontier Hit a Wall
By Edward Dolnick
THE END OF THE MYTH
From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
By Greg Grandin
369 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $30.
In a speech in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded a San Francisco
audience of what had always distinguished the United States from other
nations since its earliest days. “At the very worst,” Roosevelt
declared, “there was always the possibility of climbing into a covered
wagon and moving west where the untilled prairies afforded a haven for
men to whom the East did not provide a place.”
Well, yes and no. It is the mission of this fine, elegantly written
history to explore the ever-shifting role of the frontier in the
American story. Just who was welcome in that west-facing “haven,” Greg
Grandin explains, was never as simple as Americans liked to proclaim.
But “The End of the Myth” has a shadow theme. How is it, Grandin wants
to know, that the symbol of America was once a boundless, beckoning
frontier and today is a dark and forbidding wall?
The first person to articulate the frontier thesis was a University of
Wisconsin historian who was little regarded at the time, Frederick
Jackson Turner. In 1893, he read a paper on “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History” to a sleepy audience. No one asked a question.
The world quickly woke up. Turner’s idea was that the United States had
been blessed by geographic good fortune. The seemingly infinite West
would solve the problems that arose whenever too many people were jammed
into too small a space. The frontier, in Grandin’s summary, “would
reduce racism to a remnant and leave it behind as residue. It would
dilute other social problems as well, including poverty, inequality and
extremism, teaching diverse people how to live together in peace.”
It was a pretty picture and a profoundly optimistic one. The frontier,
Turner declared, was “a magic fountain of youth in which America
continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” Grandin deepens and enriches
that picture. Though Turner depicted the frontier as “a place where
individualism sprouted from the land like prairie weeds,” in Grandin’s
summary, that got the story backward. The reality, Grandin argues, was
that “the state preceded the frontier.” Before the settlers arrived, the
government had bought the land and surveyed it and built roads across
it. Above all, the United States Army removed Native Americans and
Mexicans from the settlers’ way, in brutal and deadly fashion.
But this is a measured, careful work, not a “People’s History” polemic.
Grandin is a fine explainer with a knack for pithy summary. Turner’s
frontier was a restrained place, “more James Stewart than John Wayne.”
America was “a nation founded on unparalleled freedom and unmatched
unfreedom.” The appeal of the frontier myth was that it took problems in
the “here and now” and shifted them to the “there and then.”
Grandin keeps his cool — he prefers the stiletto to the club — but he
grows angrier as his history reaches the present day. “The frontier was,
ultimately, a mirage,” he writes, because it promised “a limitless
world” where “all could benefit; all could rise and share in the earth’s
riches.” The wall, on the other hand, is “a monument to disenchantment,”
a deafening shout that “there’s not enough to go around.”
The wall stands as our new emblem, Grandin writes, and “it is a symbol
of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at
least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history.”
Disenchanted and bewildered, we have become, so Grandin contends, “a
country that increasingly defines itself by what it hates.”
Edward Dolnick has written books on the American West and many other
subjects. He is currently working on a book about the Rosetta Stone.
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