Unlearning the American Myth, Part 2
Frontier Fantasies
Frontier Fantasies
This is the second post in my Unlearning the American Myth series. I offered a full introduction in the first post, and this one picks up where that one left off, so it would probably be helpful to read/reread it, which you can do here.
As for general and academic inspiration, I again want to credit Greg Grandin and his illuminating book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
All That Space
At its most simple, Joseph Campbell defined a myth as a dreamlike “symbol that evokes and directs psychological energy.” It’s that energy, in turn, that animates human activity — that builds societies, creates cultures, etc.
If the sweep of the American experience has a single symbol it would be the frontier. From the beginning, the frontier was the primary character, stage, and backdrop in the development of American mind and its creations, and a big part of its shadow as well.
Right off the bat in part one of this series, I tried to show how the frontier shaped the practical thinking—political, social, and economic—of three of the founding fathers (as examples). But much more fundamental than that, the sheer amount of territory and resources, of wilderness and wildlife, danger and freedom, was intoxicating and enlivened the birth, infancy, and adolescence of the new nation.
Perhaps it takes the sensibilities of a poet to begin to capture the essence of that intoxication, and in his very first chapter entitled All That Space, Grandin includes this passage from Octavio Paz:
America was, if anything, geography, pure space, open to human action. Since it lacked historical substance—ancient social classes, established institutions, religions, and hereditary laws—reality presented no obstacles other than natural ones. Men struggled not against history but against nature. And wherever there was an historical obstacle—indigenous societies, say—it was erased from history, reduced to a mere fact, and dispensed with accordingly….Evil is outside, part of the natural world, like Indians, rivers, mountains, and other obstacles that must be domesticated or destroyed.
That’s a lot to grapple with! The implicit racism alone—its origins, historical and continuing ripple effects, added in with the fresh harm caused today—is difficult to fathom. But we can’t begin to comprehend the American story without attempting it and that attempt will be a recurring theme throughout this series of articles.
Forming some understanding of Old World violence, poverty, religious fanaticism, and racism, including the brutal legacy of British colonialism, helps us understand the trauma and racism the American colonists brought with them (1). It wasn’t anything new. War, racism, white supremacy, huge disparities between rich and poor, and “othering” in general was the norm. And here on this continent, it wasn’t self-reflection that mattered, it was "all that space” and the heady possibilities it represented.
A Growing Greatness
As Grandin presents it, the thirteen original states were each jockeying for control of the land to their west. With the signing of the Constitution, states agreed to cede their western land claims to the federal government to be administered as “territories.” This would help guide what Alexander Hamilton called, America’s “growing greatness.”
The constitution included no limits to expansion, no acknowledgement of indigenous rights or British and Spanish land claims. Seen as “free land,” Iargely uninhabited, and where inhabited, not by fully human beings, there were no limits — and so it began.
As the Native Americans were slaughtered and forcibly removed, if the country didn’t grow in greatness, it certainly grew in size and that was the point. But remember, as highlighted with those three founding fathers, it was not growth for growth’s sake, but part of a strategy for diluting the social problems that were already becoming evident. But even more than that, the government was simply not able to control the westward spread of the land speculators and the pioneers; there was no stopping it. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Neither royal nor provincial proclamations, nor the dread and horrors of a savage war, were sufficient to prevent the settlement of the lands over the mountains.”
The theme of greatness is obviously foundational to the story and the amazing ability of the country to justify its violence because, of course, it was a moral, civilizing mission from the beginning. In the 1809 words of Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. was the “solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom.”
The rhetoric of greatness is an unbroken thread in the weaving of the American mind and we hear it today in the desperate shouting to “Make America Great Again!” And even if we have very different ideas of what might constitute greatness—and despite everything else that seems to divide us—it’s a major ingredient in the kool-aid we’ve all drunk.
Frontier Mind
The decades following Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trails of Tears (2) saw an evolution in the meaning of the word frontier. Along with being all that space, practically speaking it was a military front and national border. But it was to become more of a national identity and way of being.
The “Frontier Thesis,” first formulated by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, held that western expansion and settlement “created a uniquely American form of political equality, a vibrant, forward-looking individualism.” According to Turner, the frontier was “a field of opportunity,” “the outer edge of a wave — the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”
It was “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past” that “promoted democracy and the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.” For Turner, the frontier was “a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.” And there was the sense that it could go on forever.
In Greg Grandin’s words, the frontier from Turner onward was extraordinarily complex in its simplicity. It was a cultural zone, a state of mind, a type of society, an adjective, a noun, a national myth, an abstraction, and an aspiration. In short, it explained the development of the United States and the American mind.
There’s much that can be celebrated in the character of so many of those early settlers, and the frontier was their proving grounds. The courage, resourcefulness, and grit of the pioneers is standard fare. The vastness and romance of the setting made it all the easier to embrace the idea of American greatness, and lacking collective self-reflection and humility, from there it was a small step to the mentality of rugged individualism and exceptionalism that grew out of wilderness roots and has come to define such a big part of the American mind and its shadow.
We’ll see where the enduring power of the frontier and other themes lead us in next installment. Among other things, we’ll get more context in the form of the extremism of Andrew Jackson, the former president Donald Trump seems to praise above all others (3).
None of this reflection would be relevant today if the myth weren’t still operative. The frontier was the stuff of fantasies and all that land, all that wildness, all that potential penetrated deeply into the collective consciousness and the frontier is still the symbolic bedrock of the American Myth.
In 1822, President James Monroe said, “The greater the expansion, the greater the advantage.” He admitted there might be some “practical limits,” but he couldn’t think of any. Here in 2025, even before taking office, Trump has talked about buying Greenland, suggested Canada as the 51st state, and wants to take control of the Panama Canal (4). Back in the 1800s it seemed the American frontier and all it represented could go on forever. Maybe it still does?
I hope you’ll stay tuned and continue the journey with me.
Endnotes
1. By linking Old World trauma and violence with American trauma, violence, and racism, Resmaa Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands contributed a lot to my understanding of the origins of American racism.
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Book Review, The Guardian, 3/13/22.
2. Trails of Tears, Plural: What We Don’t Know About Indian Removal, Humanities, Summer 2024.
3. Donald Trump's Hero is Andrew Jackson, YouTube video.
4. Why Trump is targeting Panama, Greenland, Canada, The Hill, 12/28/24.