The Future of the American Frontier

The world as an American frontier was a new idea when Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and a few other intellectuals assayed the closing of the continental frontier. Roosevelt was a central figure in this realization. His lament about the closing frontier drew on an essentially racialist notion of how Americans—or Americans of a certain heroic class—subdued the savages and thereby burnished their own virile qualities and moral capacity to lead. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner promoted the more palatable idea that democratic self-reliance was a consequence of the American frontier experience, and that the closing of the frontier (which the Census Bureau proclaimed in 1891) was a threat to American democratic virtue. The frontier had also provided the United States a safety valve for development, unlike Europe, where socialism and class antagonism marred the political landscape. The economic stagnation America was experiencing in the 1890s, after a heady period of economic expansion, was one alarm ringing through all the thinking about the frontier and its legacy.

If the end of the North American frontier was a crisis for democratic and manly virtue, Roosevelt and Turner had an answer: extend the frontier elsewhere. Long before the USS Maine was blown up in Havana harbor, Roosevelt advocated war with Spain, which bestowed the Philippines to the new American empire and provided Roosevelt with the “savage war” and Asian foothold that were meant as an antidote to the frontier’s demise in North America.

Woodrow Wilson was less bombastic but no less committed to the extension of the American idea. “The spaces of their own continent were occupied and reduced to the uses of civilization; they had no frontiers wherewith ‘to satisfy the feet of the young men,’” he wrote in A History of the American People. “These new frontiers in the Indies and on the Far Pacific came to them as if out of the very necessity of the new career before them.” In the White House, from which Roosevelt suppressed the Philippines rebellion and built the Panama Canal, both with a high human toll, Wilson invaded Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti before entering World War I. All of these actions undertaken on behalf of democratic ideals prefaced his attempts to make the world safe for democracy. While he was, in contrast to Roosevelt, increasingly anti-imperialist, he was no less expansionist—in one historian’s words, the “very model of Turner’s crusading democrat.”

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The myth has been remarkably resilient. Not only did it inform American expansion globally during the presidencies of fdr and Truman, but the uncertainties posed by the Cold War (which used cowboys-and-Indians iconography time and again), the nuclear arms race, and subsequent crises of confidence (particularly urban crime, oil price explosions, the 1979 hostage taking in Tehran, and the 9/11 attacks) led to the embrace in popular culture and politics of the comforting narrative of civilization versus savages. The myth remains vibrant, but the frontier itself is disappearing again.

The end of the Cold War was the first sign that the global frontier was closing. The superpower standoff formed much of the United States’ identity in that phase of our global involvement, and its power explains our failure to construct a successor to that form of engagement. The “twilight struggle” with Soviet communism still shapes how we structure foreign relations, institutions, military doctrine, public diplomacy, and our sense of self-worth. It was a colossal, Manichaean contest, much like the one the pioneers experienced as they cleared and settled the continent. The anti-communist campaigns, which began internally as long ago as Wilson’s intervention against the Bolsheviks from 1918 to 1920, resulted in dozens of military interventions, cia covert operations, and lavish support for anti-communist regimes. This pattern was nourished by the depiction of communists as a threat to civilization. The conclusion of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry nearly 20 years ago thereby drained American globalism of a paramount ideology—a way of seeing ourselves in the world—and the supposed vitality that came with the waging of “savage wars” in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. It is with difficulty that we let go. That the war on terrorism closely followed, and invoked this warrior myth—the fight for Western values against barely human and wholly alien “hostiles”—should come as no surprise, since it evinces a purpose built by the Puritans and renewed throughout our history.

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, America instinctively reverted to the old category of a battle for civilization’s soul. Susan Faludi, in The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, incisively applies Slotkin’s framework to this rapid mobilization for a “war on terrorism,” especially the regeneration through violence for the heroic men of America. This battle intoxicated the nation for a time, but the scale, threat, and results look paltry in the shadow of previous warrior epics.

So while the ennobling and rewarding savage wars of the anti-communist frontier are diminishing, that pattern of mobilization and intervention has simply been imitated, with relatively little retooling, in the war against small and scattered gangs of Muslim extremists. This mimicry is likely to fail. The menace of would-be shoe bombers and a few restive Muslims in faraway and desolate places pales before the thousands of nuclear weapons that were aimed at us by the Soviets, the millions killed in Korea and Vietnam, and the totalitarianism of Stalin or Mao. The relentless invocation of every soldier or firefighter as a hero dilutes the essential mythic heroism once reserved for a Boone or a Crockett or a Lindbergh. As in Vietnam, moreover, the “Indians” are not so easily subdued, and the costly setbacks of the anti-terrorism campaigns are stirring a growing distaste for savage wars.

The end of the global frontier is also evident in its diminishing bounty. A primary cause of the imperialistic urge of the 1890s was the perceived need to export American products to sustain or increase production domestically and to relieve labor agitation. Such a boom in exports followed, enabled by natural resources and agricultural production. But the U.S. trade situation turned sour in the 1970s and has continued to deteriorate ever since. The decline is precipitate. In 1992, the trade deficit was $50 billion. In 2007, in constant dollars, it was $730 billion. As a percentage of all economic output, exports did not exceed the levels of 1900 until the 1990s, and by then imports were outpacing exports.

At the same time, income has stagnated for three decades for all but the wealthy in America—a direct slap at one of the tenets of the frontier myth, that expansion would lessen unequal distribution in the American economy. “The bonanza frontier offers the prospect of immediate and impressive economic benefit for a relatively low capital outlay,” Slotkin writes in Gunfighter Nation (1992), and “bonanza profits derive from the opportunity to acquire or produce at low cost some commodity that has a high commercial value.” In the 19th century, the bonanza was gold and land; in the 20th-century global frontier, it was oil and other minerals, financial products, and cheap goods from abroad.

The dismal performance of the global economic empire is often attributed to the nationalization of oil assets in opec countries, but even when oil prices were low in the 1980s and ’90s, the U.S. trade balance and personal income statistics were deteriorating. The declines have come during the period of insistence on free markets in the developing world (another modern-day equivalent of bonanza economics), a doctrine that proved ineffective if not disastrous for those countries over the last quarter century. The free market is attractive in theory, but when pitting transnational corporations against small developing countries it becomes an arena of economic predation. At the same time, rivals for economic dominance, including the European Union, Japan, China, India, Russia, and others, are crowding out U.S. control of markets and resources, a trend that is accelerating. The expansion on this continent was made possible by pushing out the British, French, Spanish, and Mexicans, and by eliminating the indigenous tribes, but this is no longer feasible in the global frontier.

The 2008 crisis in America’s mastery of global finance signaled another sharp reversal. In the midst of the market turbulence that shook Wall Street and foreign markets, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück proclaimed that “the United States will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system. The global financial system will become multipolar” and use a more diversified basket of currencies, undermining one of the last symbols of America’s economic strength—the dollar. It was a sentiment widely echoed throughout the capitals of the world.

The most important reason for the closing frontier, however, is the limits of the earth itself, the biological capacity that is now diminishing with frightening speed. This is a consequence of the “taming of the wilderness,” which has certainly been tamed and is now wreaking its revenge. The longstanding notion that resources were ours for the taking, and for using promiscuously, is no longer viable. The closing of this frontier not only impedes economic growth built on this attitude (the engines fueled by cheap oil in particular), but has other costs as well—the agricultural, health, and safety challenges of rapid climate change, among many others.

The depletion of earth’s resources and the climate change that results from profligate consumption of those resources are well established now among scientists. The Washington reaction to this is right out of the frontier-myth playbook, however, and indeed is reminiscent of the debate that surrounded the onset of outward expansion of a century ago. Then, as now, the anti-imperialists were condemned as elitists and weak willed, people attempting to impede America’s God-given right to take our mission to the rest of the world. Today, the very modest proposals for arresting carbon emissions, for example, are derided by many proponents of big business as part of the global warming “hoax” that seeks to deprive Americans of economic growth and unbridled consumption. The intemperate quality of the attacks signals that a deep chord has been touched, the belief in the ever-expanding frontier that is pioneered and settled by Americans. The deterioration of the earth’s ecosystem was rarely mentioned in the 2008 campaign.

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The war in Iraq illustrates how these three phenomena converge. It was fought in part to fulfill the new imperatives of the war on terrorism, and it was a war, so thought the Bush advisers, that we knew how to fight—armored divisions, air power, command and control, and so on, reflecting Cold War preparations. The mission (apart from the alleged nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons) harkens back to the “civilizing” impulse of Roosevelt and Wilson and displays all the racial typing of the natives, and callousness toward them, that marred U.S. interventions in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Latin America. The “bonanza” is the promise of oil, and the control of oil pricing worldwide. With its predecessor, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Iraqi Freedom signals how American consumption has led directly to large-scale resource wars, this one now 18 years in duration. An air of desperation clings to the war, as the mismatch of expectations and outcomes becomes ever more apparent, and as the inability of the United States to treat the world as its virgin domain is exposed.

Given these odious consequences, what is the future of the frontier and its myth? The reflexive answer is to discard it altogether as a guiding set of values. The frontier metaphor imparts ideas of American exceptionalism and the moral right to resources, cultural superiority, and limitlessness in all things we choose to do. If there are no limits, there is no need for common struggle. If the world is our oyster, there is no need for restrictive rules and regulations, for lowering expectations. Four hundred years of this ideology—fostered and promoted by church and state, the news media, schools, and popular culture generally—has nurtured this exceptionalism that feeds arrogance and wastefulness and war.

But the myth is resilient. The alternative is to reinvent it, to co-opt, in effect, frontier symbolism from its destructive tendencies and transform it into something more vital. Many leaders have attempted to use the frontier metaphor as a way of launching ideas for reform or renewal, invoking, for example, “the war on” campaigns—the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer—which draw on the conflict and moral struggle that played such a central part on the frontier. Some of the discourse about globalization today uses concepts similar to the frontier ideology: both the “clash of civilizations” (from Samuel Huntington) and the more piquant “clash of globalizations” (from Stanley Hoffmann) grapple with American-led cultural, political, and economic change and the conflicts and bonanzas they may be encountering or inducing. Yet very few political or opinion elites recognize the frontier myth—the restless urge to expand and to dominate—as the root and branch of our self-defined global role. Thus very few have tried to alter its course and meaning.

The most intriguing attempt to harness the myth in recent memory was John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, which was the core concept in his acceptance speech as the Democratic Party’s nominee and throughout his 1960 campaign. He recalled the past in the conventional way—the pioneers who settled the American West “were not the captives of their own doubts, nor the prisoners of their own price tags,” he told the convention. “They were determined to make the new world strong and free—an example to the world, to overcome its hazards and its hardships, to conquer the enemies that threatened from within and without.” But then he went on with a more interesting twist:

Some would say that those struggles are all over, that all the horizons have been explored, that all the battles have been won, that there is no longer an American frontier. . . . Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. It would be easier to shrink from that new frontier, to look to the safe mediocrity of the past, to be lulled by good intentions and high rhetoric. . . . I believe that the times require imagination and courage and perseverance. I’m asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier.

Kennedy still used the older mythic call as a “race for mastery of the sky . . . , the ocean . . . , the far side of space, and the inside of men’s minds,” but the notion that the frontier was not geographical or spatial, but one of applied knowledge and of human relations, was an innovation and one that has not been surpassed. That Kennedy and his cohort did not live up to this new inflection of the frontier myth scarcely needs noting, but the rhetorical framing of a new kind of frontier, a half century later, might have finally met its moment.

Using the metaphor as a way of galvanizing both the public and our political leaders to adopt new challenges—challenges to be explored and tamed, from which public good can be extracted—may be more plausible given what we now can see about global limits. The need to arrest climate change with sustainable development is just such a challenge, one that must broadly mobilize society. How to reshape our politics to confront this challenge is not a problem with an obvious solution. The frontiers of science or knowledge are hoary notions, but as a counterpoint to the decaying frontier myth, they possess renewed vibrancy—and are especially potent if linked to the new mission as a heroic feat. The hero is the human exponent of the frontier myth, and all heroes embody qualities that speak to the anxieties of the age. Self-sacrifice, an innate sense of purpose, physical or intellectual prowess, and a willingness to confront the dangers of the frontier—all are qualities of the hero.
Meeting the environmental challenge requires more than colossal investments in science and intensive diplomacy; it mandates a shift in the way we think about U.S. goals, our range of action, and our commitment to values beyond self-enrichment. It requires collective, heroic action, the kind that can move a society in times of peril. And it requires a new lens on the world, one that sees in developing countries not bounty but common needs and aspirations. The environmental crisis binds us globally in ways that no previous cataclysm ever has—not war, not epidemics, not other natural disasters. If the oil addiction of the industrial countries is not reversed soon, the resource wars we have suffered already will intensify along with the choking effects on air and oceans. If China and India do not reduce their rate of growth in carbon emissions, the earth’s ecosystem will be dangerously degraded. If Brazilian rainforests continue to be mowed down, we lose precious and possibly irreplaceable sources of oxygen to refresh the atmosphere. If sustainable development cannot be fostered in Mexico and Africa and the Middle East, the migrations to the industrial world will induce intolerable social and economic stress. These are collective problems by dint of their inexorably collective outcomes. And in this, the world now differs radically from the one that was merely a frontier for exploitation.

When we look to the three signals of how the frontier has closed—the warrior ethos, bonanza economics, and environmental limits—it is apparent that all three are equally culpable and equally important to a transformative politics. Fortunately, the dominant myth of the frontier is not the only distinctly American modus vivendi, as leaders as far apart in time as John Winthrop and John Kennedy demonstrate. Our political and cultural leaders today, however, have rarely hinted at the imperative to reconstruct our mental architecture of the world and our place in it. If the world is essentially regarded as a font of anti-American terrorism or rivalry, as a social, political, and physical wilderness to be tamed, then we will be battling in the diminishing space our old habits have forced us into. That frontier is closing. The daunting but necessary task of redefining our horizons is upon us.

Where to start? Perhaps at the beginning. Winthrop’s line from his 1630 sermon, “we shall be as a City upon a Hill,” is frequently intoned to suggest that America is uniquely gifted and providential. Countless politicians have sermonized with this gratifying image and used it, erroneously, to celebrate belligerence, individualism, and aggrandizement. Looking at Win­throp’s whole text presents a different sense of what the meaning of that phrase might be. He implored the Puritans to

do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God, for this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor, and suffer together, always having before our eyes our Commission and Community in the work, our Community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

There was more, of course, and not all of it gentle and meek, but it is remarkable how humble and communitarian and ascetic his vision was, a vision reflecting the ethos of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. More remarkable still is how suited such an ethos could be again. So the answer to the question “What frontier now?” may be to return to the humility of the first frontier.