The Frontier Thesis offers a triumphalist vision of America’s coming-to-be with which it’s easy to take issue, and since Turner first presented it, almost every single one of its ideas and assumptions has been contested. Most obviously, was there ever really such a thing as a frontier of free land, a virgin territory against which pioneer America measured itself? What, then, of the conquered and even annihilated Native American tribes—even before the coming of political correctness, I found it odd to speak, in the American context, of “Indians”—who were there long before the frontier’s inexorable line began to step across their land?
*33
Turner concedes that what the settlers found at the frontier was “not tabula rasa,” but his evident contempt for the displaced “savages” colors, and damages, his argument, or rather gives it a darker meaning he did not intend. “The American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise.” This optimistic formulation sounds almost imperialist now. If the original inhabitants of America were trampled over and brushed aside as the frontier snaked west, then should the rest of the world, that “wider field,” now feel apprehensive of America’s intentions?
Historians have further reasoned that the great differences between the East of the Puritans, the slavery-tainted South, and the West of gold rushes and railroads make it impossible to sustain any unified theory of frontier development—each of these is better understood as a discrete region, with its own historical dynamics. The frontier’s supposed formative effect on the American self is also disputed. The land swallowed by the frontier was by no means handed out in democratically equal parcels to the early pioneers; and as regards the formation of the American character, it was a sense of community, not of rugged individualism, that enabled much of the West to thrive, and develop toward statehood. A contemporary account suggests that
most migrant wagon trains, for example, were composed of extended kinship networks. Moreover, as the nineteenth century wore on, the role of the federal government and large corporations grew increasingly important. Corporate investors headquartered in New York laid the railroads; government troops defeated Indian nations who refused to get out of the way of manifest destiny; even the cowboys, enshrined in popular mythology as rugged loners, were generally low-level employees of sometimes foreign-owned cattle corporations. The West has not been the land of freedom and opportunity that both Turnerian history and popular mythology would have us believe. For many women, Asians, Mexicans who suddenly found themselves residents of the United States, and, of course, Indians, the West was no promised land.
*34
So it seems that poor old Turner was a dozen ways wrong. And yet he may, like Freud, have been wrong in the right way. Medievalist historians, applying Turnerian frontier theory to the development of Europe in the Middle Ages, have found his ideas useful. The medieval European frontier, pushing outward from England into Wales and Ireland; and across central Europe; and clearing the great forests of Russia; and finally in the conflicts with Islam in the Crusader East and the Spanish Reconquista can be seen, to quote one specialist in the period, Professor C. J. Bishko of the University of Virginia, as being clearly “one frontier, a unity not in geographical contiguity but in its expression of the same deep forces of medieval dynamics and basic similarities of aims, techniques, and accomplishments.
“The frontier,” Professor Bishko argues,
created for history not only new lands of European culture, but new peoples—the Portuguese, the Castilians, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Great Russians, peoples who move swiftly to dominate the modern history of their respective countries. It produced a frontier literature in . . . heroic works like the
Lay of Igor’s Campaign
or the
Poema del Cid.
It created in abundance new types of medieval men and women—the frontier noble, whether he be called bogatyr, caballero, lord marcher, or knight; it produced the Military Orders which were so prominent in frontier warfare and colonization; the frontier churchman, the colonizing bishop or abbot, the missionary, the priest of the lonely frontier parish; the frontier merchant and the frontier townsman; the land speculator and colonial promoter; above all, the frontier farmer, axe-swinging, plow-guiding, or stock-trailing. These are the frontiersmen who pushed forward the edges of medieval civilization, with or without the support of their rulers; these are the men whose warlike or peaceful dealings with non-Europeans first raise for medieval thinkers the great questions of the rights of native peoples and the legitimacy of just war against them—the beginning of the controversies that in the sixteenth century were enlarged to include the Indians of the New World and led medieval-minded Spanish theologians and jurists to lay the foundations of international law and the rights of non-European man. For many medieval men, who never saw the rising royal capitals, the bustling mercantile cities, the ancient feudal domains, or the new books and universities of the medieval renaissance, the medieval frontier represented the chief best hope of life, the call to robust adventure and to the risks and rewards of courage and enterprise. And like so many things medieval, the frontier did not end in 1453, or 1492, or 1500, but passed on into the making of modern civilization.
*35
It is one of the great characteristics of frontiers to be disputed. Give me a line drawn across the world and I’ll give you an argument. We can concede the point of almost all of F. J. Turner’s adversaries’ criticisms—can agree that the frontier was differently formed and meant different things in different parts of America; that much of what went on in frontier society was more oligarchic than democratic; that the country into which it moved was “free” only in the sense that the white settlers refused to accept the previous inhabitants’ rights over the land; and that community values, corporatism, and federalism were far more important than Turner allowed—in short, we can reduce great swathes of the thesis to ashes, and still, in the midst of the smoking ruins, something substantial remains standing. The image persists of a line snaking westward across a continent, changing everything as it goes, making up a world. That line acts upon our imaginations as it acted upon the imaginations of those engaged in pushing it onward, and indeed the imaginations of those engaged in resisting its advance. In American literature from Twain to Bellow we recognize the workings of that frontier intellect whose characteristics Turner so eloquently set down, and in the dark side of modern America, in its government-hating militias and Unabombers, we recognize that dominant individualism, working for evil, whose existence he so perfectly understood. Take away the triumphalist note, and Turner’s thesis seems to foreshadow much of American history since the closing of the frontier: a history of fluctuations, in which there are periods of energetic engagement with the world, a pushing out of frontiers, an expansion of America’s sphere of influence, and then periods of retreat behind the fortress walls of a frontier that no longer possesses the power of movement.
The old imperial powers, such as the British, have found it hard to adapt to their new, diminished status in the post-colonial world. For the British, their empire was a kind of transcendence, a way not only of overwhelming nations, subsuming their frontiers within the larger frontier of the pax Britannica, but also of breaking out of the frontiers of the self, casting off the reticence of England and becoming an unbuttoned, operatic people, hot and large, striding across the great stage of the world instead of the cramped boards of home. In empire’s aftermath, they have been pushed back into their box, their frontier has closed in on them like a prison, and the new opening of political and financial borders in the European Union is still viewed by them with suspicion. America, the closest thing we have to a new imperial power, is experiencing this problem in reverse; as its influence spreads across the planet, America is still battling to understand its new, post-frontier self. Beneath the surface of the American century, with its many triumphs, we may discern something unsettled, a disquiet about identity, a recurring uncertainty about the role that America should play in the world, and how it should play it.
Time, perhaps, to propose a new thesis of the post-frontier: to assert that the emergence, in the age of mass migration, mass displacement, globalized finances and industries, of this new, permeable post-frontier is the distinguishing feature of our times, and, to use Turner’s phrase, explains our development as nothing else can. For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines.
Part Two
Uncertainty is not only America’s curse. All of us now face the future with varying degrees of foreboding. To a large degree, I want to suggest, this is because of the change in the nature of the frontier that has taken place in our globalized world. From the most intimate of frontiers, that of the home, to the largest, pan-global scale, the new permeability of the frontier has become the overriding issue. Terrorism is the most appalling consequence of the permeable frontier, but terrorism, after all, is only one of the forces in the modern world that expressly reject frontiers in the way of the empires of the last century and the century before. The twin worlds of business and finance do the same thing, and the concerns of many people about the consequences of the globalized economy don’t need to be rehearsed here. Other groups—artists, scientists—have always scorned the limitations that frontiers represent, drawing freely from whatever wells they please, upholding the principle of the free exchange of knowledge. The open frontier, created by the bringing down of walls, has been and remains a symbol of other opennesses. But, if I may quote a passage I wrote a couple of years ago in an article about, of all things, rock and roll music,
The music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. As long as Orpheus could raise his voice in song, the Maenads could not kill him. Then they screamed, and their shrill cacophony drowned his music, and then their weapons found their mark, and he fell, and they tore him limb from limb.
Screaming against Orpheus, we too become capable of murder. The collapse of Communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the Wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the post–Cold War world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, ever more fanatical definitions of ourselves—religious, regional, ethnic—and readied ourselves for war.
*36
The most precious book I possess is my passport. Like most such bald assertions, this will come across as something of an overstatement. A passport, after all, is a commonplace object. You probably don’t give a lot of thought to yours most of the time. Important travel document, try not to lose it, terrible photograph, expiry date coming up soonish: in general, a passport requires a relatively modest level of attention and concern. And when, at each end of a journey, you do have to produce it, you expect it to do its stuff without much trouble.
Yes, Officer, that’s me, you’re right, I do look a bit different with a beard, thank you, Officer, you have a nice day too.
A passport is no big deal. It’s low-maintenance. It’s just ID.
I’ve been a British citizen since I was seventeen, so my passport has indeed done its stuff efficiently and unobtrusively for a long time now, but I have never forgotten that all passports do not work in this way. My first—Indian—passport, for example, was a paltry thing. Instead of offering the bearer a general open-sesame to anywhere in the world, it stated in grouchy bureaucratic language that it was valid only for travel to a specified—and distressingly short—list of countries. On inspection, one quickly discovered that this list excluded almost any country to which one might actually want to go. Bulgaria? Romania? Uganda? North Korea? No problem. The USA? England? Italy? Japan?
Sorry, sahib. This document does not entitle you to pass those ports.
Permission to visit attractive countries had to be specially applied for and, it was made clear, would not easily be granted. Foreign exchange was one problem. India was chronically short of it, and reluctant to get any shorter. A bigger problem was that many of the world’s more attractive countries seemed unattracted by the idea of allowing us in. They had apparently formed the puzzling conviction that once we arrived we might not wish to leave. “Travel,” in the happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking, interest-pursuing, vacationing Western sense, was a luxury we in India were not allowed. We could, if we were lucky, be granted permission to make trips that were absolutely necessary. Or, if unlucky, denied such permission, which was just our tough luck.
In
Among the Believers,
V. S. Naipaul’s book about his travels in the Muslim world, a young man who has been driving the author around in Pakistan admits that he doesn’t have a passport and, keen to go abroad and see the world, expresses a yearning for one. Naipaul reflects, more than a little caustically, that it’s a shame that the only freedom in which this young fellow appears to be interested is the freedom to leave the country. When I first read this passage, years ago, I had a strong urge to defend that young man against the celebrated writer’s celebrated contempt. In the first place, the desire to get out of Pakistan, even temporarily, is one with which many people will sympathize. In the second and more important place, the thing that the young man wants—freedom of movement across frontiers—is, after all, a thing that Naipaul himself takes for granted, the very thing, in fact, that enables him to write the book in which the criticism is made.
I once spent a day at the immigration barriers at London’s Heathrow Airport, watching the treatment of arriving passengers by immigration personnel. It did not amaze me to discover that most of the passengers who had some trouble getting past the control point were not white but black or Arab-looking. What was surprising is that there was one factor that overrode blackness or Arab looks. That factor was the possession of an American passport. Produce an American passport, and immigration officers at once become color-blind and wave you quickly on your way, however suspiciously non-Caucasian your features. To those to whom the world is closed, such openness is greatly to be desired. Those who assume that openness to be theirs by right perhaps value it less. When you have enough air to breathe, you don’t yearn for air. But when breathable air gets to be in short supply, you quickly start noticing how important it is. (Freedom’s like that, too.)