how did the frontier thesis contribute to imperialism

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2 The Making of a National Identity: The Frontier Thesis

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• Published: April 2003
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Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis became a significant force in shaping the national identity of the U.S. The ideologies incorporated into Turner's frontier thesis were not only meant to provide a historical interpretation of how the U.S. came into being but also satisfied the national need for a “usable past.” This frontier thesis was able to transmit a series of symbols that became imbedded in the nation's self‐perception and self‐understanding: Virgin land, wilderness, land and democracy, Manifest Destiny, chosen race. Race must be understood as an important piece of this developing national identity because the idea of “purity” of race was used as a rationalization to colonize, exclude, devalue, and even exterminate the native borderlands people.

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Resources: Discussions and Assignments

Module 4 assignment: frederick turner’s thesis and u.s. imperialism, introduction.

On July 12th, 1893, a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper “ The Significance of the Frontier in American History ” for the first time at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Turner’s thesis asserted that the “closing” of the American Frontier, as demonstrated by the 1890 Census data, was the end of the most important era of American history. The Frontier, both the physical land and the ideological idea of it, Turner said, had infused American society with a unique blend of European refinement and untamed coarseness. This combination in turn encouraged the development of individualism, inventiveness, and an “antipathy to control.” The constant push of settlers into the Frontier resulted in a sort of “perennial rebirth,” the Thesis argued, defining American society as existing “between savagery and civilization.”

“What would happen to American society now that the Frontier had effectively been settled?” Turner wondered. Was the influence of the Frontier so great that American society would begin to decline? Or would this new society find an equally daunting challenge to take on?

In the following assignment, you will first read two claims or arguments based on modern interpretations of Turner’s Thesis (Secondary Sources), then describe which you find more convincing and why. Second, you will read two primary source speeches given soon after the publication of the Turner Thesis and make an assessment of their arguments in relation to the two claims.

To complete this assignment, make a copy of this worksheet . Follow along and fill out your answers as you read through the documents.

Part One: Assessing the Frontier Thesis

Secondary sources.

Step 1 . Carefully read the two claims made by historians about Turner’s thesis. Then answer the corresponding questions within the worksheet.

Claim A  (Author: Andrew Fisher, William & Mary)

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Claim B  (Author: Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College)

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. . . at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.” By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the progenitor of the American practical and innovative character: “that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again.

Part Two: The New Imperial Frontier

Primary sources.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s concern when he wrote the Frontier Thesis in 1893 was that the settling of the West would cause tension and conflict in American society. With no more wilderness to be tamed, the Anglo-Saxon-American Americans who featured in the Thesis would have no mold to form them into rugged, democratic, individualists, Turner claimed. The early Populist movement and its conflict with corporate interests seemed to confirm Turner’s theory. However, with the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it seemed that the U.S. had found another “Frontier” on which to focus its energy: overseas territories.

The scope of American imperial interests soon included the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and then Alaska in 1912. The debate about what the United States would become without a Frontier seemed to have been decided. The question was how this new American society would transition into an Empire in the new century. There were many different opinions on America’s imperial activities, ranging from enthusiastic support to disgusted opposition and everything in between.

The following part of the assignment will demonstrate two of these opinions through speeches given in 1899, one by future-president Theodore Roosevelt and one by Massachusetts Senator George Hoar. These speeches illustrate contemporary opinions of American Imperialism and relate to Turner’s Frontier Thesis.

Step 2 : Read these two excerpts of speeches from America’s Age of Empire. First, answer a few questions about each speech in the space provided on the worksheet.

Excerpt 1 : New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, “Strenuous Life” speech (Chicago, Illinois, 1899), at a meeting of the Hamilton Club, a Republican social and civic club for men.

“In speaking to you. . . men who pre-eminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life. . . that highest form of success which comes. . . to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. . . A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. . . We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. . .

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who. . . live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. . . for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. . . The army and the navy are the sword and the shield which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among the nations of the earth. . .

Many [Filipinos] are utterly unfit for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once firm and beneficent. . . I have even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who cant about “liberty” and the “consent of the governed,” in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men. . .

The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by. . . then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.”

Excerpt 2 : Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, “The Lust for Empire” speech before Congress (Record, 55 Cong., 3 Sess., pp. 493-503, 1899), in response to statements made earlier in the session by Connecticut Senator Orville Platt concerning the constitutionality of American activities in the Philippines.

“I am speaking today only of the theory of constitutional interpretation propounded by [Senator Platt]. [The Founding Fathers] did not disdain to study ancient history. They learned from [Greek history] the doctrine that while there is little else that a democracy can not accomplish it can not rule over vassal states or subject peoples without bringing in the elements of death into its own constitution. . .

The question is this: have we the right, as doubtless we have the physical power, to enter upon the government of ten or twelve million subject people without constitutional restraint? I affirm that every constitutional power. . . is limited to the one supreme and controlling purpose declared as that for which the Constitution itself was framed: ‘In order to form a more perfect union. . .’ But when [Senator Platt] undertakes to declare that we may do such things not for the perfect union. . . but for any fancied or real obligation to take care of distant peoples beyond our boundaries, not people of the United States, then I deny his proposition and tell him he can find nothing either in the text of the Constitution or the exposition of the fathers. . . to warrant or support his doctrine. . .

But the question with which we now have to deal is whether Congress may conquer and may govern, without their consent and against their will, a foreign nation, a separate, distinct, and numerous people, a territory not hereafter to be populated by Americans. . . whether [Congress] may conquer, control, and govern this people, not for the general welfare. . . but for some real or fancied benefit to be conferred against their desire upon the people so governed or in discharge of some fancied obligation to them. . . I declare not only that this is not among the express powers conferred upon the sovereignty [the Founders] created, that it is not among the powers. . . implied for the sake of carrying into effect the purposes of that instrument. . . [it is] a power that our fathers and their descendants have ever loathed and abhorred – and that they believed that no sovereign on earth could rightfully exercise it and that no people on earth could rightfully confer it. They not only did not mean to confer it but they would have cut off their right hands. . . sooner than set them to an instrument which should confer it. . . . the persons who favor the ratification of [the Treaty of Paris] differ among themselves certainly in their views, purposes, and opinions. . .

If you ask them what they want, you are answered with a shout: . . .‘The United States is strong enough to do what it likes. The Declaration of Independence and the counsel of Washington and the Constitution of the United States have grown rusty and musty. They are for little countries and not for great ones. There is no moral law for strong nations. America has outgrown Americanism.’”

Step 3 : Fill in the chart in the worksheet using the information you learned from both the primary source speeches and the secondary source claims.

Assignment Grading Rubric

Candela citations.

• Module 4 Assignment: Frederick Turners Thesis and U.S. Imperialism. Authored by : Lillian Wills for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
• Was Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?. Provided by : OpenStax. Located at : https://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]:nmz1YGZA@5/9-18-%F0%9F%92%AC-Was-Frederick-Jackson-Turner-s-Frontier-Thesis-Myth-or-Reality . Project : Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. License : CC BY: Attribution . License Terms : Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/[email protected]
• Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, u201cThe Lust for Empireu201d speech before Congress . Provided by : GovInfo. Located at : https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-CRECB-1899-pt1-v32/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• Teddy Roosevelt, u201cStrenuous Lifeu201d speech. Located at : https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/roosevelt-strenuous-life-1899-speech-text/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright

The American Yawp Reader

Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

How Did an Expanding Frontier Shape American Culture?

During the summer of 1893, a young historian presented a paper to the American Historical Society on the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pointedly noted an announcement by the Census Bureau in 1890 that a western frontier as such no longer existed in the United States, since the entire continent had now been settled. Turner went on to explore what the fact of an expanding frontier had meant in the first century of the republic’s development, drawing large conclusions about the frontier’s effect in shaping a distinctly American individualism. Turner argued that the virtually free land of the west had provided opportunity and diffused social discontent; that in traveling west, Americans had shed many European cultural traits and shaped new ones, partly borrowed from native Americans;  and that the necessary self-sufficiency of westward-moving settlers inclined them to devalue central governmental authority. He left open the question of how the nation would adapt to the closing of this frontier.

Turner’s essay—published in the Report of the American Historical Association for 1893 and later incorporated in his 1920 book, the Frontier in American History —profoundly influenced American historiography in the early 20 th century.  Many of Turner’s claims are currently disputed (for example, his claim that the long struggle to resolve the problem of slavery did less to shape the nation than did the frontier). Nevertheless, the essay still provides an informative summary of the process of western settlement, while raising interesting questions about American self-understanding.

It is interesting to compare Turner’s retrospective view of westward expansion with the prospective view of Jefferson, an early and active proponent of western settlement. In 1783, two decades before pushing through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson had broached the idea of an exploratory party into the west with George Rogers Clark. He would eventually recruit Clark’s younger brother William to make the trek with Meriwether Lewis, secretly requesting funding from Congress for the expedition in January 1803–three months before he would learn that the ambassadors he had sent to France (James Monroe and Robert Livingston) had been able to negotiate purchase of the entire Louisiana territory.

Seeing in America “an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman,” Jefferson rejoiced in Query 19 of Notes on the State of Virginia that the majority of American citizens could live for generations as small yeoman farmers, not as artisans crowded into cities. Jefferson thought the “manners and spirit” of the small farmer best suited to “preserve a republic in vigour.” The speed with which the continent was peopled surely would have surprised him. But Jefferson correctly anticipated the hunger of Americans for western lands, as well as the importance of the trans-Mississippi lands for American strength and security, as seen in his letter to John Breckinridge on August 12, 1803, where he describes his aims in purchasing the Louisiana territory.

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That actually explain what's on your next test, frontier thesis, from class:.

The Frontier Thesis, also known as the Turner Thesis, is a theory proposed by the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. It suggests that the American frontier, defined as the advancing edge of settlement, played a crucial role in shaping the unique character and development of the United States.

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5 Must Know Facts For Your Next Test

• The Frontier Thesis argues that the frontier experience was a key factor in shaping American democracy, individualism, and the national character.
• Turner believed that the existence of an open frontier allowed for the continuous reinvention of American society, as settlers adapted to the challenges of the wilderness.
• The Frontier Thesis emphasizes the role of the frontier in promoting social and economic mobility, as well as the development of American institutions and values.
• Turner's thesis was influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, shaping the way historians and the public understood the significance of the frontier in American history.
• The Frontier Thesis has been criticized for its Eurocentric perspective and for overlooking the experiences of Native Americans and other marginalized groups affected by westward expansion.

Review Questions

• The Frontier Thesis and the concept of Manifest Destiny are closely linked, as they both emphasize the importance of the frontier and the belief in America's divine right to expand across the continent. The Frontier Thesis suggests that the existence of the frontier and the challenges it presented shaped the unique character of the American people, while Manifest Destiny provided the ideological justification for the country's westward expansion. The process of Westward Expansion, in turn, was fueled by the belief in the Frontier Thesis and the perceived benefits of the frontier experience, such as social and economic mobility, as well as the development of American institutions and values.
• The Frontier Thesis has been closely linked to the concept of American exceptionalism, the belief that the United States is unique and exceptional compared to other nations. By emphasizing the frontier experience as a key factor in shaping the American character, the Frontier Thesis helped to reinforce the idea of the United States as a unique and exceptional nation. This sense of American exceptionalism has had a significant impact on the country's foreign policy, as it has contributed to the belief that the United States has a special role to play on the global stage. The Frontier Thesis has been used to justify and promote expansionist policies, such as Manifest Destiny, and has influenced the way the United States has approached its international relations and its perceived position in the world.
• The Frontier Thesis has been criticized for its Eurocentric perspective, which often overlooked the experiences of Native Americans and other marginalized groups affected by westward expansion. By focusing primarily on the experiences of white settlers and the challenges they faced in the wilderness, the Frontier Thesis failed to acknowledge the devastating impact of westward expansion on indigenous populations and the ways in which their land and resources were exploited. Additionally, the Frontier Thesis has been criticized for its failure to account for the experiences of other marginalized groups, such as African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, who were also affected by the processes of westward expansion and the development of the American frontier. These criticisms have led to a re-evaluation of the Frontier Thesis and a greater emphasis on understanding the diverse experiences and perspectives that have shaped the history of the United States.

Related terms

The belief that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.

The historical process of American settlement and development of the western United States, from the original Thirteen Colonies to the Pacific Ocean.

American Exceptionalism : The belief that the United States is unique and exceptional compared to other nations, often attributed to its frontier experience and democratic values.

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Subjects ( 2 ).

• Growth of the American Economy
• Political Geography

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