Frederick Jackson Turner Frontierism

Since its inception, America has been characterized as a unique country created through immigrants adopting similar values and traits, a process known as Americanization. However, America cannot be fully understood unless one identifies the foundations of this assimilation process. Both Frederick Jackson Turner and Ralph Waldo Emerson attribute Americanization to the effect of the individual’s relationship with nature, but Jane Addams argues that true Americanization is a product of the unification of people through charity.
Frederick Jackson Turner bases his understanding of America on its relation to the expanding frontier, the definition of which is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Unlike the established borders

of Europe, the American frontier is virtually limitless and continuously calls for a “return to primitive conditions” as it gradually expands and creates new frontier lines. Each frontier line “strips off the garments of civilization and arrays [the European] in the hunting shirt and the moccasin,” thus deconstructing European life and molding it with “the simplicity of primitive conditions” to create a distinct American persona. As the frontier expands westward, it sheds more of its European roots through its construction of societies based on ones established along the previous frontier; each frontier incorporates its own characteristics with the many other frontiers and European influence becomes scarcer as the frontier moves westward. Thus, the frontier line “produces the most rapid and effective Americanization.”
In fact, frontierism was the driving force behind the largest and most significant display of Americanization: the American Revolution.

In order to establish a trading system throughout the country, many individuals bonded together to protect trade routes against the Native Americans, who were perceived as a large threat. This cooperation both founded “the unifying tendencies of the Revolution” and fostered “the power of resistance to aggression,” the two key components of America’s victory over Great Britain. Furthermore, developing trade and commerce enabled America to produce industry, which significantly reduced the country’s reliance on Great Britain and placed them in a position where they could become financially independent. Therefore, the “frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people” and gave those people the means to defend and expand this sense of

nationality.
The American Revolution also exemplifies the frontiers’ tendency to produce highly individualistic societies.

In the revolution, Americans fought for the right to create a sovereign, democratic country that would protect their individual rights. After the country won its independence, all other states that joined the national government did so largely through the “extension of suffrage” that granted “the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy.” In other words, the individual frontier settlements gradually gained political influence until they possessed almost as much power as the eastern cities. Thus, American democracy is “born of free land, [and is] strong in selfishness and individualism,” and has thereby “rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit.” This lack of civic spirit inhibits America from organizing administrative and educational systems, and it pushes “individual liberty beyond its proper bounds,” but it is also the driving force behind expansion and the establishment of frontiers. Therefore, individualism and frontierism become inextricably linked and subsequently shape

Americanization.
As youth become more active within society, they will grow tired of having no means of harmonizing their ideals with society and will thus create a new, more charitable America. The youth will first appeal to the older generations to let them “consult all of humanity…[and] find out what the people want and how they want it,” thereby perpetuating democracy and binding it more tightly with charity. This attitude seeks a return to the humanitarianism of early Christianity and works towards the “solidarity of the human race.” Young Americans have rejected “the assumption that Christianity is a set of ideas which belong to the religious consciousness” and are restoring it to a “simple and natural expression of the social organism itself.” Within this restoration, one must scrutinize the individualism present in every citizen as a byproduct of industrialism and realize that charity stems from overcoming this individualism and forming neighborly relations. Once these relations become fundamentally Christian, communities will “devote themselves to the duties of good citizenship and to the arousing of…social energies,” which will further unify the country.
Both Turner and Emerson argue that Americanization stems from one’s individual relation to American land; Turner believes the frontier lines created distinct American values and Emerson emphasizes the values derived from working on the land as being wholly American. While both Emerson and Addams believe that Americanization will be determined by the country’s youth, Emerson thinks youth need to become more individualistic, and Addams establishes Americanization as deriving from human interaction and acts of voluntary charity.