THE INTERIOR FRONTIER
CROKE, BILL
THE INTERIOR. FRONTIER The History of Frederick Jackson Turner By Bill Croke In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau declared, "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of...
...When I asked a friend why he was leaving Montana for Alaska this past spring, he answered, "Too many people...
...But the value of Turner's essay is found in rhetorical clarity rather than historical contentions...
...The traditional agricultural, mining, and logging occupations are changing, and envi-ronmentalism is increasingly taking hold...
...Unfortunately for his intended case, his book is badly marred...
...This doesn't stop Bogue, however, from comparing Turner to Francis Parkman and Henry Adams, two historians whose great narrative scope has placed them firmly in the American canon...
...Most of his time seems to have been spent not in scholarship but in pursuit of jobs at Wisconsin, Harvard, and Stanford...
...The country's filling up...
...Occasional pieces popped up in the Atlantic Monthly and American Historical Review, but his wife's fragile health frequently distracted him...
...In the end, Turner seems primarily an academic historian who, though he prided himself on his writing, was concerned mostly with career advancement and the sort of banal researches that are the ruin of most writers—and who, one hot summer day in 1893, happened to have struck a nerve...
...Daniel Boone and Kit Carson were the stuff of dime novels—as was William F Cody, "Buffalo Bill," who (Bogue has discovered) had brought his Wild West Show to Chicago that same sweltering July day...
...Still—with 464 pages of text—it is a thorough life of Turner...
...Of course, even that space and opportunity aren't enough for some...
...The prestige of Turner's scientific turn has been a major influence on the way history has been practiced in American universities during this century, certainly to the denigration of the classics...
...As a historian, Turner still has an apologist in Allan G. Bogue, the aptly titled Frederick Jackson Turner professor of history emeritus at the University of Wisconsin...
...that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends...
...But, closed or not, the Western frontier is still very much with us...
...The West is our national safety valve, attracting everyone from the Freeman-like sur-vivalists to middle-class families seeking a new life to the Hollywood stars who have begun to settle in Montana's Big Sky country...
...that restless, nervous energy...
...And what of the great American West that Turner spent so much time thinking, reading, and writing about, but visited only infrequently...
...And the essay is replete with human color...
...And it was with this as an epigraph that Frederick Jackson Turner began "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the famous essay much reprinted and much disputed since its presentation to the American Historical Association in Chicago on July 12, 1893...
...that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier...
...The delivery of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" was the high point of both the meeting and Turner's career...
...Bogue's claim in Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down that Turner was more "varied" than Parkman and Adams is absurd: What both Parkman and Adams knew that Turner seems never to have grasped is that history is the product of the exer-tion—for good or for evil—of human beings...
...But where Parkman chronicles in Gibbonesque detail the two hundred and fifty years of struggle between France and England in North America, and Adams exhaustively renders the Jefferson and Madison administrations, Turner's small essay on the frontier is his only real claim to literary fame...
...In the paper he proposed that "a great historic movement" had recently ended because of a dearth of land: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development," he declared in the paper's famous thesis...
...The demographics and political paradigms of the past century are slowly giving way, as small cities and towns have reversed their decline...
...Never has the word "frontier" carried so much weight...
...In 1899, the Turners lost two children: Diphtheria took daughter Mae in February, and a ruptured appendix their son Jackson Allen in October...
...Keeping alive Bill Croke is a writer living in Choteau, Montana...
...In the fall of 1878, he entered the University of Wisconsin, winning prizes for both his junior-and senior-class orations and finding his calling, as work with the collections of the Wisconsin State Historical Society led to published pieces in the Wisconsin State Register...
...In the years following his Chicago address, Turner struggled to write while scrambling up the academic ladder...
...that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients...
...It describes endlessly the academic politics and faculty backstabbing that are hardly unique to Turner's career...
...the flame of the "frontier hypothe-sis"—that America grew and mostly prospered throughout the nineteenth century thanks to the promise of free land beyond the slowly moving westward frontier—Bogue tirelessly pleads his predecessor's case in his recent biography, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down...
...Turner's beginnings were typical of the smalltown Midwesterners of his generation who went on to make names for themselves in the wider world: a father involved in public affairs, a mother who was a former schoolteacher, a schoolhouse education, and a free run through the stacks of a local public library...
...In a strict sense, the frontier is gone, yet there remains open space and seemingly boundless opportunity...
...Jefferson, Jackson, and Clay make cameo appearances while Turner traces the multi-generational westward progress of the Boone family, reminding us that Kit Carson's mother was a Boone...
...It is here that Turner's thought falls at last into the realm of myth...
...And when it adds multi-page descriptions of graduate-student seminars, there's less and less for the general reader to like about the book...
...Deserting the University of Wisconsin for Harvard in 1910, Turner took on a heavy teaching schedule that left him even less time to write...
...The Plainsman pranced around the arena on a big white horse, waving his hat and tossing his silvery mane to the delight of the crowd, while Annie Oakley shot silver dollars out of the air and a stagecoach crew fought a mock battle with real Sioux and Cheyenne antagonists, many of whom (like Cody's friend Iron Tail) had fought George Custer at the Little Bighorn seventeen years before...
...He was born in 1861, the son of a Wisconsin newspaperman, and grew up roaming the woods and exploring the ruins of Fort Winnebago, a defunct military post dating from the early nineteenth century...
...Turner subscribed to the theory that history is properly a science— which made him a radical departure from the history-as-biography school of his American predecessors Park-man and Adams (to say nothing of historians from Thucydides and Xenophon to Livy and Tacitus to Gibbon and Macaulay...
...The Rocky Mountains and the high plateaus remain America's interior frontier— geographically, metaphorically, and emotionally...
...The publication of a paper entitled "Problems in American History" earned him an invitation to read another at the American Historical Association's 1893 meeting at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago...
...The prose is as bold as an ancient philippic: [It is] to the frontier [that] the American intellect owes its striking characteristics...
...It appears 130 times in Turner's address, and he devotes a large part of the essay to explaining its meaning in historical terms: "Fur trader, miner, cattle raiser, and farmer . . . on the march . . . in successive waves across the continent...
...He was initially opposed to the entry of the United States into World War I. But, being an ardent Wilson-ian, he warmed to the idea in 1917, and the 1920s saw his frontier thesis give way to a sectional thesis, with Turner publishing a scattering of essays on the subject throughout the decade...
...I tend to think he went for the fishing...
...These were fused into The Significance of Sections in American History, which won him a posthumous Pulitzer prize in 1933...
...That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness...
...A short stint as a journalist was followed by graduate work at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and a teaching position back at the University of Wisconsin...
...FRONTIER The History of Frederick Jackson Turner By Bill Croke In 1890, the superintendent of the Census Bureau declared, "Up to and including 1880, the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line...
...There is some paradox in the fact that Frederick Jackson Turner— though deified by the publish-or-per-ish world of contemporary academic American historians—actually wrote very little: Two books and a small miscellany of essays and reviews are the only legacy of forty-five years of work...
...He seems to have expended as much effort writing to university presidents, publishers, and editors as he did carrying on his life's work...
...The population density—despite recent growth—is still low...
...Allan G. Bogue's biography of Turner is for only those who believe that my friend went to Alaska as part of some ongoing "Historical process...
Vol. 3 • August 1998 • No. 46
