The seductive idea of America’s frontier was that it was never ending. As historian William Appleman Williams wrote in 1966, American expansion exhilarated because it could be projected to infinity. From George Washington to Barack Obama, the American political class steadily upped the ante pushing global engagement as a moral imperative. Then came Donald Trump. “I want to build a wall,” he said, and America’s racism and extremism had nowhere else to go. Trump was not America’s first racist president. Andrew Jackson drove a slave coffle and oversaw ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. Woodrow Wilson cultivated the Ku Klux Klan in his electoral coalition, while Nixon won the Neo-Confederate vote in 1968 thanks to his “southern strategy”. But the country no longer has a “divine, messianic” crusade to hold it together. America, says Greg Grandin, in his 2020 book of that title, is at The End of the Myth.
Grandin says British North America was conceived in expansion from Europe’s religious wars. Native Americans had to get out of the way or be murdered or enslaved. As Benjamin Franklin said, America’s vastness allowed for endless expansion and markets growing with supply. “We are scouring our planet,” Franklin said, “by clearing America of woods.” Then came the first worldwide war, not of 1914 but of the 1750s when Britain and France fought for control of India, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas. In North America both countries deployed standing armies, settler militias and indigenous allies. British rangers learned to live, dress and kill “like the Indians”.
Britain won the war and inherited an enormous swathe of forest land from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. But it could not reconcile local interests. Britain issued a 1763 proclamation prohibiting European settlement west of the Appalachians, which suited indigenous allies. But settlers like the rangers saw it as a violation of their right to move west. As authorities dithered, settlers moved west anyway, forming militias and terrorising Native Americans in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. The 1776 Declaration of Independence was the settlers’ ultimate rebuke to the crown. Jefferson claimed they were the inheritors of Saxon freemen finding new lands. The 1783 Treaty of Paris laid down the borders of the new nation at the Mississippi River and Americans moved swiftly across the Appalachians.
Jefferson negotiated the right for US ships to moor on the Spanish bank of the Mississippi and demanded access to Florida’s waterways. Southern states claimed their territories ran all the way to the Pacific and settlers and war veterans purchased land west of the Mississippi. They were following James Madison’s 1787 Federalist paper advice on how to avoid an aristocracy. Madison’s solution was “extend the sphere” to dilute the threat of political conflict and factionalism.
South America took a different tack. In the 1820s Spain’s former colonies had won independence setting their borders along the old colonial boundaries, based on the old Roman law uti possidetis, “as you possess”. This self-containment became the guiding principle of 20th century decolonising nations and modern Africa remains mostly aligned on colonial boundaries. In contrast, the US thought it was one of a kind, “the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom,” said Jefferson. Its constitution transformed western lands into territories which in time could become states. America doubled in size thanks to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France (which had obtained the territory from Spain). The new frontier was the Rockies and once again Americans poured into new lands. These lands were not empty, but Jefferson wanted Native Americans to be assimilated into settler life and give up valuable hunting lands. If mass murder was required, then it was Britain’s fault having seduced the tribes “to take up the hatchet against us.” Settlers executed “removal” operations to drive Native Americans further west towards “the frontier”.
Wealthy Tennessee businessman Andrew Jackson flouted laws to enter Indian territory. Jackson believed liberty was the freedom to do whatever he wanted and led a militia to exterminate Tennessee’s Creek Nation, ordering his men to cut noses off corpses to more easily tally the dead, paying off tribal leaders, and concluding a punitive treaty with survivors. He subdued Florida’s Seminoles and Tennessee’s Chickasaws using the same tactics of “terrorise, bribe and legalise.” Jackson became a national hero by defeating the British at the 1815 Battle of New Orleans and now wanted to make all of North America white. In 1829 the aristocratic Founding Fathers lost control of the presidency to the outsider Jackson and his mandate to remove Indians, wage war on Mexico, and extend slavery.
Jackson was a believer in “small government” but ensured his government would enforce enterprise and property rights, including the right to own human property. The Age of Jackson was a radical empowerment of white men at the expense of black men who were denied the vote they had in some northern states since colonial times. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act pushing Native Americans beyond the Mississippi and extinguishing their land rights. Settlers poured into Indian country, demanding military protection and prompting repeated cycles of forced removals. Indians must die out, said New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. “God has given the earth to those who will subdue and cultivate it,” Greeley said. In practice, speculators, railroads, ranchers and corporations claimed the best land for themselves.
By the 1830s attention turned to Texas, the northernmost part of Mexico. Spain founded Texas as a “slaver’s utopia” for Anglo settlers in the hope they would become a loyal buffer against American encroachment. But Mexico abolished slavery when it won independence in 1821 and the Anglo Tejanos revolted. In its time as a short-lived republic, Texas enshrined slavery in perpetuity and Galveston was the largest slave market west of New Orleans. Texans wanted to join the United States but its admittance would tip the balance of power to the slave states. Jackson protege and slaveholder James Polk won the presidency in 1844 promising to annex Texas to secure the frontier. In 1846 Polk declared war on Catholic Mexico, at the same time that “manifest destiny” was coined to described the belief Providence was guiding Anglo-Saxon Protestants across the continent. Migration west was a messianic mission.
In the war that followed, America’s armed superiority was overwhelming. They took Mexico City in 1847 and the following year the two countries signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferring not just Texas but Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, western Colorado and southwest Wyoming to the US, some 100 million people in a half million square miles. The Jacksonian consensus kept together slave and free states as the border moved south and west. Settlers to Oregon, which also joined the union in 1848, didn’t want slavery or free blacks, passing laws to exclude them from the territory. But tensions over slavery could not be resolved and America waged war on itself in the 1860s. Millions of slaves were released in 1865 and Lincoln’s final legacy, his Freedmen’s Bureau, was a repudiation of Jacksonian politics as a federal initiative to resettle refugees, redistribute confiscated lands, levy taxes and regulate labour and the minimum wage. But new president Andrew Johnson hated it and believed ex-slaves should help themselves. Johnson ensured the southern planter class regained power and restored the Jacksonian myth of a minimal state and individualism. Thanks to more Lincoln legislation like the Homestead Act, which promised lots for working the soil, Americans looked west again. Native Americans were pacified in the 30 years following the civil war, and southerners were re-integrated into the federal army while Jim Crow laws were instituted across the south. The frontier, said late-1800s historian Frederick Jackson Turner, “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”
Turner’s thesis held that America’s unique individualism gained strength “each time it touched a new frontier”. The frontier was not a physical border but a way of life. The American west encouraged an idea of political equality that seemed to go on forever, at least for white Anglo-Saxons. Turner ignored the removal of Native Americans and the invasion of Mexico and dismissed slavery as “an incident”. As America stood on the verge of global power, Turner’s ideas were expanded on by historians, economists, novelists and future presidents. Theodore Roosevelt celebrated frontier vigilantism and rough justice as “healthy for the community” while Woodrow Wilson justified the invasions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and Philippines as “a new revolution”. The myth of rugged individualism was used to define socialists and unionists as un-American. But it could only be maintained through ceaseless expansion.
Confederate and union flags flew together as the cotton-growing states enthusiastically supported the invasion of Cuba in search of new tariff-free markets. Grandin said that 1898 war transformed the south’s “Lost Cause” of slavery preservation into humanity’s cause for world freedom. President McKinley, who served the union in the civil war, wore a Confederate badge on his lapel in a victory tour of the south after Spain was defeated. The dormant Ku Klux Klan reemerged led by 1898 veterans who draped themselves in high ideals of reconciled national history. Resurgent racists formed “rifle clubs” which were fronts for white terrorist organisations and got away with lynchings, property confiscation, disenfranchisement, arbitrary prosecutions and chain gangs. Wilson won his second presidency in 1916 on the white southern vote, purging blacks from federal jobs, re-segregating Washington and legitimising the KKK.
America’s move across the Mexican frontier took a new form. Capital replaced settlers as American investors took over the Mexican economy dominating oil production, railroads, agriculture and ports. Thousands of Mexicans were deported from their homelands and forced to work on large plantations. American courts sanctioned vigilantes like the Texas Rangers who killed thousands more in mass executions in border regions. When the First World War came, the Rangers, now an official branch of law enforcement, defined anti-war activity as anything from organising a union to trying to vote, and rounded up and deported thousands of strikers. After the war the rejuvenated KKK fixated on many threats besides African Americans, including jazz, immorality, high taxes, and increasingly Mexicans. Border clans infiltrated church groups, school boards, police and national guards and suppressed the Mexican vote to reinforce minority rule. The New York Times worried it was “open season for shooting Mexicans” along the Rio Grande. America’s growing xenophobia was encoded in the 1924 Immigration Act which favoured Anglo-Saxon migrants. Though Mexico was exempted due to the need for its cheap labour force, white supremacists took control of the new US Border Patrol and turned it into a “vanguard of race vigilantism.”
Not everyone was intoxicated by America’s limitless power. Socialist editor of the New Republic, Walter Weyl, blamed the frontier for American ills such as racism, class domination and corruption. American individualism was doomed to defeat itself, said Weyl, “as the boundless opportunism which gave it birth became at last circumscribed.” The Great Depression seemed to do exactly that and Franklin Roosevelt said in 1932 that America had reached “its last frontier”. It was facing an economic and ecological disaster with intensive strip mining farming practices leading to dust storms, forcing many to leave the land. Roosevelt’s New Deal was the government’s biggest intervention since the Freedmen’s Bureau, resettling families, offering work, planting forests and expanding national parks. Roosevelt’s secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace said what was needed was “not a new continent but a new state of heart”. But Roosevelt appeased southern planters by ensuring that rural workers, mostly black or Mexican, were excluded from laws allowing workers to unionise so agriculturalists would keep their supply of low wage farmworkers. Mexicans who weren’t illegal and subject to imprisonment were unprotected by labour laws. As one sugar planter said, “We used to own slaves, now we just rent them.”
With the coming of the Cold War, leaders moved the frontier to new geographies. Life magazine said the frontier was on the Elbe between East and West Germany. It was also between the two Koreas, the two Chinas and increasingly, up the Persian Gulf. Defence budgets soared as did profits for US capital. Truman integrated the military and the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation. Libertarians worried about expanding government bureaucracy and harked back to the Jacksonian “frontiersmen” who broke loose from the economic controls “that restricted their energies.” Nobel winning economist James Buchanan hailed the role of the frontier in breaking up collective identities of “the nanny state”.
Martin Luther King had different concerns. He believed rugged individualism was a faulty foundation for national identity and America was indeed socialist, only its wealth redistribution was upwards. “There is,” King said, “an individualism that destroys the individual.” He said the Vietnam War would exacerbate America’s worst sentiments including racism while diverting funds from progressive legislation. Sure enough, the war strengthened the position of southern segregationists in Congress who threatened to withhold military funding to veto civil rights laws. In 1967 King looked “beyond Vietnam” to see America’s “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” and a political culture where profit and property were more important than people. The LA Times attacked King for “linking these hard, complex problems” which would lead not to solutions, but “a deeper confusion”. Angry soldiers displayed Confederate symbols at every opportunity in South East Asia while at home pro-war demonstrations marched on Pittsburgh with a large Rebel flag, now the banner of those that felt “stabbed in the back” as America tried to wind back white supremacy. When Floridian William Calley was convicted for his role in the My Lai massacre, Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign transformed him from a war criminal to a cultural wedge to weaponise southern grievances. Even in the 21st century Iraqi war, the Rebel flag remained a banner of “free-floating resentment” as Grandin calls it, hanging in the tent of Bagram torturers.
Nixon opened the floodgates to polarise the electorate, and following presidents would help create a permanent state of disequilibrium. None expressed the right to American limitlessness better than Ronald Reagan. His energy policy was “more, more, more” when it came to oil and gas, but the sunny sheriff of Washington also removed Jimmy Carter’s solar panels from the White House roof. His state department eschewed human rights in favour of individual rights which could be deployed on behalf of people trampled by tyranny but also act as a racist dog whistle. Reagan pushed through deregulation, privatisation and tax cuts, and granted free speech rights to corporations. His Cold War revival and support for anti-Communist insurgents kept his base happy while his libertarian government chipped away at welfare, public education and weakened unions. “There are no limits to growth,” Reagan said. “Nothing is impossible.”
So it seemed to a triumphant America as the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Democrat Bill Clinton beat Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush in 1992 by channelling Reagan’s folksy optimism and outdoing the Republicans. Clinton supported free trade agreements, kept Wall Street unfenced, and increased military presence in the Gulf. While NAFTA destroyed Mexican small farms, American agribusiness kept their subsidies. Mexico’s vibrant dairy industry was destroyed as the country was overrun by American junk food, increasing obesity and malnutrition in tandem. Refugees eked out a living in the drug trade or migrated illegally across the border. They were joined by Central Americans whose economies were destroyed by American mining and biofuel corporations. NAFTA didn’t allow for freedom of movement of people and Clinton beefed up border operations with punitive immigration measures. Border patrol became the second largest law enforcement agency behind the FBI. Alarmed Republicans swung even further right spurred on by the growing power of Fox News, worried about undocumented migrants and “anchor babies”.
After 9/11 George W. Bush pledged to “extend the frontiers of freedom”. But Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were disasters leaving America with huge military spending at a time of deep tax cuts. The long years of individualism led to increased racism and poverty, and war revanchism led to increasing fears around America’s borders. Violence against Latinos surged as vigilante groups like the Minutemen hunted for illegal immigrants in New York and other northern cities. “The border is no longer in the desert,” one Minuteman said, “It is all over America.” Backed by Fox News, they demanded a wall across the entire length of the border.
The rage of Nativists increased with the GFC followed by Barack Obama’s election. While the first black president packed “an emotional wallop”, his policies were moderate and he refused to think beyond 1990s-style Free Trade. Even that was too much for the growing Tea Party movement which merged with Minutemen in contempt for the political establishment while maintaining dominance over immigrants. The overseas wars raged on, and were mirrored at home by escalating massacres, school shootings and white supremacist rampages. The collapse of America’s military authority and the moral bankruptcy of the free trade growth model left Obama no outlet to rise above the polarisation. Nativists combined a “psychotropic hatred” of Obama with grievances over health care, taxes, war and especially migrants. As one border protest put it in 2014, “We can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of ourselves.” Two years later this community would vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump.
Trump won in 2016 by running a Jacksonian outsider campaign against the entire legacy of the postwar order. His border wall became a stick with which to demonise migrants. The wall offers the illusion of simultaneously recognising and refusing limits. Trumpism feeds resentment that America has been too generous while encouraging a petulant hedonism expressed in the right to own guns or “rolling coal” where truck engines are modified to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel as “a brazen show of American freedom” targetted against enemies like walkers, joggers, cyclists, and hybrid and Asian cars. America was becoming defined by what it hated.
According to Grandin, Trump’s point was not to build the wall, but to constantly announce it. The frontier is closed and Madison’s sphere can no longer be extended. America is at the end of its myth, but instead of a critical, resilient and progressive citizenry, it has ended up with conspiratorial nihilism, rejection of reason and dread of change. Life expectancy is declining while infant mortality is increasing. Only the super-rich are emancipated from the rules and still dream of new frontiers, with billionaires creating floating villages beyond government control and plans to industrialise space. Grandin says nothing will change until America accepts there are limits to growth. The choice he says, is between barbarism and social democracy. As Trump remains a good chance to win back power in 2024, it’s far from clear which way America will go.
The
Woolly Days 