Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

Lehrstuhl für Amerikanistik

The Frontier in American

Ideology

Term paper for the seminar

Cross-Cultural Impressions: Americans in Germany - Germans in America

Uwe Hausmann

Summer term 2012

Alexander Axmann

Matrikelnummer 1720079

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Contents

Page

1 Introduction 3

2 When America was colonized 5

3 Manifest Destiny and the treatment of the Indians 6

4 The Frontier and the construction of race 7

5 The Myth in every story 9

6 Conclusion 11

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Albert Bierstadt: The Oregon Trail (1863) Source: ZEIT Geschichte 2011(3). S. 8-9.

1 Introduction

America has a mission in the world. America stretches out its antennas far

beyond its borders into countries without freedom, to places where democracy

has not yet found its predestined way. And along it brings its way of thinking

and its ideology about what is right or wrong. When we talk about ideology,

we are already on the right track concerning this paper. From what has been

going on in the last decade, one can pretty well deduct that America is not a

nation which lacks self-confidence – a fact which can not be overlooked in

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Hollywood movies from the younger past. America loves to save and protect

the whole rest of the earth’s inhabitants (not its environment, though) as

spectacular as Bruce Willis in “Armageddon”.

America is a country with a history – really? Yes, apart from Great

Britain’s history, which extended far into the American, there is a part which is

specifically American, not British. A point when something new emerged, a

task only for Americans: The border between those people considering

themselves civilised and superior and those who were actually the real

Americans – Indians, as they were called. The moving of that border

westwards, the civilisation of a savage land, that is what gave Americans a

common task and forged their identity and ideology. This notion is topical as it

might be one of the reasons why the American military is involved into many

conflicts up to the present day. Historically, American ideology could have

arisen partly from the so-called Frontier-Experience.

The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote The Significance

of the Frontier in American History in 1893 in which he describes the influence of

the border line moving between „savagery and civilization“ during the time of

western expansion. He argues that the „American character“ had been shaped

by the experiences made during the exploration of „new land“.1

This paper presents the parts of the history which seem to have shaped

American ideals to a certain degree. It starts with the arrival of the first settlers

on the American continent and tries to spotlight vital events which point to an

emerging American self-image. Secondly, the paper focusses on the origin of

the concept of Manifest Destiny and the consequences this had for the contact

with Indian peoples. In the third section it will focus on the Frontier, that

borderline between civilisation and wilderness and the significance which was

attributed to it. This will be the main part, as my considerations concerning

American ideology are mainly based on it.

1 Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 1996, Available: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/home.html, September 21, 2012.

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A hodgepodge of stories and fairy tales twine around with the history of

colonialization. The last part is about one of the myths which have emerged

around the actually different reality of colonialization.

2 When America was Colonized

The first Settlers arrive

From the first days of settlement the people that came to America believed that

it was God‘s will that they populated the continent. Much later, these

convictions were formulated in the concept of Manifest Destiny which was first

used by the journalist John O‘Sullivan in 1839. But it already existed in the

ideology of politics, religious leaders and withun the broad population. The

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1835 that Americans consider

themselves exceptional among all nations.2

One of the first permanent colonies of European settlers in North

America by European settlers, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was lead by the

British Puritan John Winthrop. In the promising New World, life was hard: The

cultivation of the land was harder than in Europe and not all Indian tribes were

well-meaning towards the pioneers. In his famous 1630 sermon Model of

Christian Charity, John Winthrop on board of the Arabella tried to comfort the

settlers and urged them to trust in God and expect to get rewarded. This

sermon is often seen as “the confident first assertion of New England's special

place in a divine plan for American success”3. Winthrop talks about “a city

upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon [the settlers]”4. Winthrop‘s words

hold the opinion that the settlers of the colony stood in the centre where

2 Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Reeve, Democracy in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1835). 3 John T. O'Keefe, New England, 2012, Web, Hopkins University Press, Available: http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=307, August 29, 2012. 4 John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity, 1630, Available: http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html, August 30, 2012.

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everyone could see them. They had the important tasks to set on American

colonialization and serve as a good example for all the other colonies.

3 Manifest Destiny and the treatment of the

Indians

The first person who labelled it “Manifest Destiny” that “U.S. expansion

westward and southward was inevitable, just, and divinely ordained”5 was

John L. O‘Sullivan in his essay The Great Nation of Futurity in 1839. From the

very first beginnings of the colonization of North America, this set of ideas

evolved in the minds of the pioneers and frontiersmen as well as in the minds

of politicians and company leaders later. It stemmed partly from attitudes the

Europeans brought with them to „redeem the old world“6 and let it reflourish

on the new continent. There is a famous picture by John Gast: Der Fortschritt

Amerikas. It shows Columbia, a personification of the United States, hovering

westwards together with the settlers, followed by primitive wagons and the

most advanced locomotive. They saw in themselves the ones with the mission

to rebuild the Old World without its imperfections. The land claimed from the

Indians was necessary to fulfil that mission. Manifest destiny is basically a

compressed theory of all the different thoughts and ideas that accompanied and

justified the events of colonialization.

The other side of the medal of settlement-ideology, however, was coined by

tremendous cruelty against the native peoples for whom these lands were not

the „savage, undiscovered West“. The Indians had all reasons to feel deprived

of their ancestral territories, culture and their reality of life and many colonists

did not think it was right to take the Indian land. Daniel Boone for example, the

5 Brian Black, Manifest Destiny - Encyclopedia of American Studies, 2012, Online Encyclopedia, Johns Hopkins University Press, Available: http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=302 September 2, 2012. 6 Frederick Merk and Lois Bannister Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History : A Reinterpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).

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legendary frontiersman, said later in his life that he was „very sorry to say that

[he] ever killed any [Indians], for they have always been kinder to me than the

whites“ and that he would „certainly prefer a state of nature to a state of

civilization“.7 European settlers had a heart – it was probably not the work of

single people to dislodge Indian tribes, but when the machinery of politics and

economy more and more lead to their displacement, the belief in Manifest

Destiny could soothe consciences a bit.

Authorized by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the forced relocation of

the five Indian tribes Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, Chickasaw and Cherokee

between 1831 and 1838 freed an area of 25 million acres for white settlers. Alone

4.000 of the 16.000 removed Cherokees died during their march on the Trail of

Tears, as it was coined later by the Indians.

4 The Frontier and the construction of race

After Columbus was in America in 1492, the succeeding explorers of the

continent were Spaniards who reached Puerto Rico on November 19, 1493.

Along with them, people from the Netherlands, France and Great Britain came

to the New Land. The first colonies in America were settled by people from

many different countries in Europe. In addition to the native ethnics, Japanese

and Mexican immigrants and other individuals e.g. gold seekers who tried to

make their personal lucks and adventures came; the New Land was a melting

pot. Accordingly, the so-called „Americans“ have ancestors whose roots reach

far beyond the continent.

The 26th President of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt, tried to define

an „American race“ within this multi-ethnic population. In his argumentation

he was influenced by Turner who wrote in his Frontier Thesis:

7 Elaine Lewinnek, The Deep History of the Marlboro Man, 2010, Online Class, Available: http://amst101.blogspot.de/2010/05/1b-deep-history-of-marlboro-man_26.html, September 2, 2012.

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“American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line,

but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line.

American social development has been continually beginning over again on

the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this expansion westward with its new

opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,

furnish the forces dominating American character.”

Roosevelt was of the opinion that the American character needed a kind

of frontier experience in order to gain his manliness. He wrote an essay, The

Winning of the West, in which he declares that ‘the American race’ created itself

on the frontier during experiences in uncivilized foreign lands and

environments. Following Elaine Lewinnek’s words, Teddy Roosevelt was

convinced that „virile frontiersmen descended into savagery in order to defeat

Indians and then rise up again to civilization, evolving a higher American

civilization because of their experiences on the manly, savage frontier“

(Lewinnek: Teddy Roosevelt’s Frontiers). A construction of race out of a shared

experience, not out of origins.

Approaching the end of the 19th century, almost all unsettled areas or

those parts of the country previously held by Indian tribes had been colonized

and added to the United States of America. Turner writes in the first paragraph

of his „Frontier-essay“ that the census of 1890 declares the frontier to have

vanished. Willing to give a new generation of „manly men“ a frontier

experience to evolve their inwardly snoozing „American forces“, Roosevelt had

to find new areas of expansion into which he could send these young

Americans (Lewinnek: Teddy Roosevelt’s Frontiers). Elaine Lewinnek thinks that

Roosevelt found a new frontier in a „splendid little war“ he pushed forward in

Cuba: In 1889, the battleship Maine exploded in the Havana harbour, which

might as well have been caused by an improper way of storing the gun-powder.

However, the newspapers tried to make it a work of the enemy: The Spanish

colonial masters of Cuba. This was just what Roosevelt was waiting for. It

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ended up in a 100-days war, a war that arguably „launched US imperialism“.

(ib.)

Let us clarify the lines of thought and events: The first settlers arrived on

the American continent with nothing but their hopes that this land could

become their new, better home. These hopes were fortified into a kind of

ideology by leaders like John Winthrop who underpinned the people’s simple

hopes with beliefs about the god-givenness of their plans and destiny – a

manifested destiny. The border to the west became a symbol for progress and

the conquering of new land became part of the American self-conception.

Turner wrote in his essay that the border had shaped the American character

and Roosevelt therefore wanted his men to make a real frontier experience. He

sent his men to Cuba (and to the Philippines later) with the official reason of

revenge for the destroyed “Maine”.

Turner‘s Frontier thesis, however, has been debated on from the day of

its publication until today. It is not only one of the most influential essays on

American history, it is also the one which has been polarizing historians for

generations. In the 1990‘s, historians have started to seriously argue against the

significance and importance which Turner‘s thesis possessed in the

interpretation of American history. New western historians „have sought to

excise Turner‘s influence and banish the word frontier from their vocabulary“.8

5 The Myth in Every Story

What Leatherstocking tells us

The so-called Leatherstocking-tales are a series of novels by the American writer

James Fenimore Cooper and were published between 1826 and 1841. They tell

stories about the „young and genteel explorer“ Leatherstocking who had the

distinguishing attribute of being ambivalent towards civilization and

8 Stephen Aron, "The Making of the First American West" A Companion to the American West, ed. William Deverell (Boston: Blackwell, 2004).6.

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expansion. He lived on the border of civilization partly together with the

Indians and is „a figure who became more civilized by living close to what was

then called savages“ (Lewinnek: The Deep History of the Marlboro Man). The

success of Cooper‘s first book induced him to write four more although he had

not intended to author a series in the first place. Leatherstocking is a hero in his

novels and an idealistic figure of whom people wanted to read, the topic

seemed to have met the nerve of the time. Maybe that was because in the

history of colonization, the reality of pioneers had not been idealistic at all. Life

was dangerous, settling new land often implied cruel battles against the natives

- a fact which hardly arises in the fairy tales about western expansion.

Leatherstocking is just one of the stories which entail a peculiar feature: It

does not show reality, or even more: It mediates a distorted image of history.

We have a very good example in the life and afterlife of Daniel Boone. He was a

pioneer who settled the Kentucky frontier and became legendary. His myth

lives on until today: American boy scouts found their idol in him. In an image

painted by George Caleb in 1851, long after Daniel Boone had died, he is

depicted as the prototype of the noble settler and pioneer, escorting a group of

white men and women through the gloomy and dark forest at Cumberland Gap

(ib.). It looks like Boone is the one who brings the light of civilization into the

dark, unsettled, savage country. He remained heroized whereas his own

statements were ignored. The actual Daniel Boone stated that, as mentioned in

the last chapter, he was actually sorry for what he had done. Lewinnek says

that he, after settling the Kentucky frontier, “tried to sell real-estate to others,

and then ended up dispossessed and poor”. He therewith destroys, although

unnoticed, the myth that had formed around his person.

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6 Conclusion

It is not easy to sum up the results of these topics as a whole. Concerning Teddy

Roosevelt’s politics, one feels reminded of recent interventions of the US-

military in the middle east. The seemingly assured suspicion that the Iraq held

weapons of mass destruction led to a destructive war, but no weapons of mass

destruction of any kind could be found. Without the weapons, the official

reason and argument why the war was necessary had vanished and another

possible explanation came into view: Different voices held up the assumption

that the actual reason for the Iraq war were its extensive oil depots. Roosevelt

needed an excuse for his wars as well and in case of the invasion of Cuba, he

found a suiting one in the explosion of the battleship Maine, while the actual

reasons remained unspoken.

The painting by Albert Bierstadt on page 3 shows something which

maybe or probably never happened – at least not the way it is depicted.

Romantic landscape paintings like this often have the peculiar feature to show

something which, even at the time of their creation, never existed. In later times,

then, people get a misleading idea of earlier times. But it makes not only us feel

romantically enamoured towards idyllic, sun-warmed evenings in the prairie.

When we think back to Cooper’s great success with Leatherstocking, we noticed

that the people of the 19th century loved to indulge themselves in stories that

were somewhat unrealistic and idealized as well. Literary fiction is just like

visual fiction in paintings: comforting, somehow, against reality. If we go on,

we might say that Teddy Roosevelt was romantic in his conception of the

present. Not facts determined his acting, but romantic fiction about the frontier

experience.

The Frontier: fact or fiction? Construction or reality? Until somebody

puts into words that something exists, it might even go unnoticed. Turner

formulated the conception of a frontier, but it could as well have been a

continuum, not a definable line. It could be an area of exchange between

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different cultures, not a separation between savagery and civilisation. Elaine

Lewinnek thinks that Roosevelt took “Turner’s frontier thesis as a guide to

living life” (Lewinnek: Teddy Roosevelt’s Frontiers). This makes me think about

what would have happened if Turner’s thesis had mediated a different, more

humanistic approach. Or more general, how influential role models can be.

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Works cited

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American West. Ed. Deverell, William. Boston: Blackwell, 2004. 5-24. Print.

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Online Encyclopedia. Ed. Bronner, Simon J.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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<http://amst101.blogspot.de/2010/05/1b-deep-history-of-marlboro-

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<http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/home.html>.

Winthrop, John. "A Model of Christian Charity". 1630. August 30, 2012.

<http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/charity.html>.