A Frontier Society
The American Mosaic, Chapter 3
Daniel J. Elazar
If students of the American character can agree upon any one
thing, it is that the compulsion to move about has created a
nation of restless wanderers unlike any other in the world.
The people are forever on the go. They cross from place to
place in a room, drive unbelievable distances to consume a
meal that they could have obtained nearer home, travel
interminably by car to country clubs where they transfer to
electric carts from which they emerge occasionally to swat a
golf ball, and seemingly spend half their lives in
automobiles waiting for traffic jams to clear. They squander
their vacations by hurrying to distant points and hurrying
home again. They shift from country to town, from town to
suburb, and from suburb to country. They abandon one home for
another with such predictable frequency that bank statements
and dividend checks include for convenience a change of
address card. When the fever strikes, the American goes,
indifferent to the risks and scornful of that attachment to
place that restrains the European.
Ray Allen Billington,
America's Frontier Heritage
(1966)
Ray Allen Billington, a leading contemporary historian of
America's frontier experience, succinctly describes the American
desire for mobility by touching on aspects of the nomadic culture
familiar to virtually all Americans.1 The continuing American
penchant for migration is well known; its connection with the
continuing American frontier is not.
Immigration to the United States was responsible for the
population and settlement of the country. Emigration from
settled communities to new frontiers has continued the process
initiated by the initial immigration through each frontier stage.
The very fact of migration is a vital element in American life,
affecting the shape of its civil society, the character of its
communities, and the political demands of its population. It
makes possible social mobility through physical movement which
breaks up fixed status patterns and limits the development of
static population groups in particular localities.
Governmentally, migration has turned public attention to national
political institutions as the only ones capable of dealing with
problems that it has pushed across state boundaries.
The generational rhythm of American politics is intimately
connected with the continuing American frontier, which has
provided the context in which Americans can express their
penchant toward perpetual motion, the search for new horizons.
Thus the continuing American frontier is intimately connected
with the flow of generations. Indeed, while the first frontier
emphasized space more than time, each subsequent frontier has
further shifted toward an emphasis on time as the medium within
which space is transformed. It is that shift along the
space-time continuum that has made the continuing frontier
possible in the American experience. This chapter explores the
character and content of the American frontier
through three stages and into a fourth, explaining why change in
America must be seen as a frontier phenomenon and connecting the
frontier movement to the rhythm of the generations.
The settlement of the United States was part of the great
European frontier experience that began with Columbus and
continued until the 20th century and transformed the society and
politics of Western civilization.2The great frontier began with
the discovery of America and spread until Europeans had colonized
every uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land within their reach:
the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, Southern Africa, and
Siberia, to mention only the largest. The American frontier
experience is unique, as is each of the others. The uniqueness of
each was produced by the particular pattern of interaction of
three factors: 1) the environment upon which the frontier process
operated, 2) the character of the peoples who were involved in
the frontier experience, and 3) the particular times in which the
experience unfolded. The interaction of these three factors
continues to provide the ecological basis for political life
within the new societies that were created in each case.
The Frontier and the Generational Rhythm
There is a close connection between the movements of the
American frontier, the generational rhythm of American life, and
the migratory rhythm of the American people. In many respects,
the dynamics of the frontier process played out on the American
landscape over the past 350 years provide the link between the
spatial and temporal dimensions of American civil society. If
each generation has had to respond to challenges confronting it,
the challenges themselves are products of the country's
continuing frontier experience. In American history, the
continuing frontier has been the crucial measure, if not the
decisive factor, in the progression of generations and centuries
and in the constant movement of the American people. At the same
time, it has served as the source of natural renewal that has
kept American society dynamic and open and the stimulus for
changes in the federal system.
The driving force behind American society is the continuing
American frontier, the effort on the part of Americans to come to
grips with untamed elements of nature and, by taming them, to
reorganize their society. The continuing frontier is the source
of renewal which sustains the United States as a "new society."
Each successive frontier stage has opened new vistas and new
avenues of opportunity for the American people in the development
of new economic activities, the creation of new settlement
patterns, and the mastery of new social problems growing out of
the collision of old patterns and demands. Consequently, it has
generated new political concerns revolving around the
accommodation of the challenges and opportunities resulting from
it.
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), the great historian of
the American frontier, put it thus.
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...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 great nation is not the Atlantic
coast, it is the great West...
He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the
expansive character of American lie 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....The
stubborn American environment is there with its imperious
summons to accepts 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.3
How to Identify a Frontier
Application of the frontier concept to contemporary American
life is not simply a dramatic way to describe change in dynamic
society. A frontier is something much more fundamental than that.
It is a multi-dimensional wilderness (or primitive) "area," which
invites human entry for purposes of "taming" it for
"civilization." One major characteristic of the frontier in its
American usage is that it suggests that the primary human
confrontation is between people and nature rather than between
people themselves.
Ten basic conditions appear to be present in every frontier
situation.
The frontier involves extensive new organization of the uses
of the land, uses so new that they are essentially unprecedented
but so much a part of the process in question that they will be
applied across the length and breadth of the continent during the
course of frontier expansion.
Frontier activities are those devoted to the exploration of
that which was previously unknown and the development of that
which was previously "wild" or undeveloped.
There must be an expanding, or growth, economy based on the
application of existing technologies in new communities or new
technologies in existing communities.
The frontier movement, though manifesting itself as a single
"whole," actually coalesces a number of different "frontiers"
both geographic and functional. These exist simultaneously and
successively, each with its own goals, interests, character, and
pioneers, yet all tied together by their common link to the
central goals, interests, and character of the large frontier of
which they are parts.
There must be the opportunity to grow, change, risk, develop
and explore within the framework of the frontier, thereby
increasing freedom from past restraints and demanding courageous
action.
There must be reasonably free access to the frontier sector of
society for all who want it; and migration must be a major factor
in gaining that access.
A frontier situation generates a psychological orientation
toward the frontier on the part of the people engaged in
conquering it, endowing them with the "frontier spirit."
The "feedback" from the frontier leads to the continuous
creation of new opportunities on many levels of society,
including new occupations to be filled by people who have the
skills to do so regardless of such factors as family background,
social class, or personal influence, thus contributing to the
maintenance or extension of equality in the social order.
The frontier feedback must influence the total social
structure to the point where society as a whole is significantly
remade.
The direct manifestation of the frontier can be found in
every section of the country at some time (usually sequentially)
and are visible in a substantial number of localities which
either have, or are themselves, frontier zones.
These ten criteria can be found recurring in every stage of
the American frontier. Because each stage is more complex than
its predecessor, the manifestation of the criteria are also more
complex. Moreover, they obviously have differential impacts at
different times and are never as fully realized as the model
might imply. It is not likely that everyone or even the majority
in a frontier society will be involved in realizing them or even
be committed to their realization. In any society, the frontier
sector is a relatively small one and the frontier men occupying
it are relatively few in number. But a frontier society is a
perennially "emergent society," growing and changing, marked by
the tone set by the frontier sector and its pioneers.
The Classic Land Frontier
The original and classic frontier was, of course, the land
frontier opened by the first British and Northern European
settlers of America in the early 17th century. The land frontier
or, more properly, the rural-land frontier, was the first
frontier in every state and section of the United States as
American moved progressively westward. The rural-land frontier
persisted as a major force (though not the only frontier) on the
American scene until its passing at the close of World War I
(1918), when the extended settlement of virgin land anywhere in
the country virtually ceased. As the classic American frontier,
it has become the model for all subsequent frontier situations.
The dominant characteristics of the rural-land frontier were
the preoccupations of a predominantly rural America with the
settlement, development, and political organization of the land
itself through the establishment of a civil society based on
agricultural pursuits. The cities which emerged in that period
were, from the first, important institutions in American society
developed to serve this rural-land frontier. Their primary
function was to engage in "agribusiness," serving as commercial,
social, intellectual, and political centers for agricultural
regions; and, secondarily, to serve as workshops supplying the
increasing number of manufactured "necessities" required by the
farmer.4 During the 300-year epoch of the rural-land frontier,
the basic social and political institutions, as well as the basic
political culture of the United States and of its subdivisions
were formed, shaped by the frontier experience itself.
All then frontier criteria were substantially fulfilled on
the classic rural-land frontier. In the first place, there was
obviously the land, a wilderness to be settled, and tamed for a
wide variety of new uses. Exploration of unknown territories and
their subsequent settlement was the essence of the frontier
process. The people who came to explore or tame the land were
conscious of their involvement in a great task, no matter how
they defined it; they had the "frontier spirit."
During the history of the rural-land frontier, excepting only
temporary periods of depression and recession, the American
economy was an expanding one, growing at what would be considered
a phenomenal rate. The overall land frontier combined several
very specific frontiers, e.g., the agricultural frontier, the
mining frontier, the cattlemen's frontier, the transportation
frontier, as well as the various regional frontiers from the
Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific slope. It is hardly necessary to
delineate the role that various forms of risk played in the
conquest of the land frontier, whether the risk of the eastern
capitalist building a railroad or the risk of a sodbuster trying
to create a farm on the prairie.
Action was, of course, the basic requirement and the major
emphasis of the frontier "way of life." Courage was required,
usually in the sheer physical sense of the term. And freedom and
equality were concommitants of risk, action, and courage since
the courage to take risks by acting invariably led to freedom
and, on the whole, promoted social equality as well. There was a
freedom to do all this out at the end of settlement, or at the
limits of previous human activity, where greater equality of
condition was the general rule. Indeed, society's greatest
rewards went to those who made use of that freedom (though
obviously only to a few of them) in any number of ways.
Generally speaking, access to the frontier was unlimited,
except insofar as government imposed limits equally on everyone.
It simply involved a willingness to migrate westward. Though this
was not entirely true in practice, one of the major tasks of
politics in the days of the land frontier was to keep making the
adjustments necessary to insure a reasonable degree of equal
access.
Of course, not everyone "made it" on the rural-land frontier.
There were failures, both individual and communal as reflected in
the many ghost towns that still dot the American landscape --
though some made people rich in their heyday. Just as the
frontier was open to the virtuous, so also was it open to the
unscrupulous who saw it as an opportunity to "make a killing,"
often in quite literal ways.5 Frontier conditions of change,
movement and loose social restraints can give rise to rapacious
attitudes and violent practices toward humans and nature. Thus,
among the many casualties of the frontier, the most notable, and
tragic were the Indians (or Native Americans). In 1492 it is
estimated that there were approximately 1,000,000 Indians in what
is now the United States. By 1900 they were being referred to as
"the vanishing Americans" because warfare, disease and
starvation had reduced their population to about 250,000. (Since
that time, the Indian population has increased rapidly, reaching
1,789,000 identified Native Americans by 1989.) In 1984, nearly
800,000 were enrolled in their respective tribal reservations.6
Likewise, buffalo were slaughtered in huge numbers, trees
were indiscriminately felled, and lands were worn out by improper
cultivation. However, the necessarily seamy side of the frontier
should not be overly dramatized, just as the virtuous side should
not be overly romanticized. Both are part of the bundle of
frontier images as well as tensions which have affected the
course of American life.
Turner described the epoch of the land frontier as the period
when settlement of the land was the most important factor shaping
American life and democracy. He associated both the form of
American civilization and its social and political functions with
the peculiar set of challenges produced by the existence of the
frontier. Accordingly, he viewed American institutions as
adaptations to the changes experienced by a growing people whose
expansion took place in an apparently open-ended arena.
Contrasting the blessings of open-ended expansion with the
problem of trying to expand in clearly limited space, like
Europe, Turner concluded that democratic institutions are born
and are able to take root in an open-ended frontier where the
same "pie" need not be divided and redivided through internecine
struggle, but continues to grow so that it can potentially
provide enough for all comers.7
The openness, moreover, meant the absence of a need to battle
an entrenched feudal class with controlling interests in existing
lands, wealth and political arrangements. The "elbow room"
available on the frontier presented opportunities for individual
and social advancement, wealth-getting and political
experimentation. The establishment of new communities and new
enterprises tended to involve larger numbers of ordinary people
in the decision-making and management aspects of politics and
economics, thereby reinforcing grass-roots political action as
well as individual self-reliance and self-confidence.8 The
rural-land frontier also gave distinctive groups of people like
the Mormons opportunities to establish new and more secure
communities fashioned in accord with their own beliefs and ways
of life.
Furthermore, the images of the frontier -- partly factual and
partly fanciful -- held by Americans had a substantial
psychological impact on American feelings of progress, mobility,
optimism, and freedom. The grand images of the frontier and the
eternal lure of a "second change" had become so compelling that
the closing of the rural-land frontier was, for a time, greeted
with dismay and not a little fear that the dynamism of America
would also run down. As Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked in 1932:
"Our last frontier has long since been reached and there is
practically no more free land....There is no safety valve in the
form of a western prairie to which those thrown out of work by
the eastern machines can go for a new start." Many believed that
the Great Depression was a natural consequence of the closing of
the rural-land frontier.
Even though many of Turner's specific hypotheses about the
influence of the frontier on American life have since been
revised to take into account new evidence provided by more
detailed research (including his own and that of his students),
the main thrust of his conceptualizing remains a valid and useful
tool for understanding American life.9 What Turner apparently
did not foresee was that the rural-land frontier initiated a
chain reaction which, even in his time, had led to the opening of
a new frontier as the old one was fading, which, in turn, has
since generated still another frontier. Turner's frontier was but
one manifestation of a greater frontier which transcends the
300-year settlement of the lands of North America.
The phenomena that made the land frontier a distinctive human
experience have recurred in essentially similar, if progressively
more complex, forms in that the American experience experience to
lead to the opening of new frontiers. The striking and patterned
reappearance of certain elements originally associated with the
classic land frontier at every stage of American development,
including the present one, strongly suggests that the continuing
frontier is a major force promoting and directing American social
development, economic change, and the political responses to
both.
The rural-land frontier profoundly affected the development
of American society, both in the frontier zone and in the
hinterland, by keeping American society in flux, rendering
certain categories of privilege obsolete, providing the means
whereby American society could continue to grow and change, and
offering the promise of progress and a "second chance." The land
frontier stimulated the creation of new opportunities for people
to begin "on their own" and to succeed on their own merit.
Perhaps its greatest success in this regard is the manner in
which it gave rise to the urban-industrial frontier out of its
own accomplishments, setting of off the chain reaction that the
enabled one frontier to breed another.
The Urban-Industrial Frontier and Its Impact
The second American frontier was the urban-industrial
frontier, which opened along the Atlantic coast after the War of
1812 and predominated in the greater Northeast after 1830, as the
rural-land frontier moved westward. The urban-industrial frontier
was to spread across the continent by the end of the century,
directly manifesting itself in the still dominant greater
Northeastern industrial heartland stretching from southern New
Hampshire to beyond Lake Michigan were already clear. The
essential characteristics of the urban-industrial frontier were
to be most intensely expressed in this northeastern-midwestern
belt. From the early to mid-twentieth century, these same
characteristics were to find modified expression in specific
cities and subregions of the great South and greater West.10
The primary characteristic of the urban-industrial frontier
was the development of the industrial city as the major form of
organized land use. New cities were established and old ones
expanded, not merely as service centers for rural areas, but as
independent centers of manufacturing, opportunity, capital and
wealth accumulation, and social innovation. This new industrial
frontier stimulated the development of intensive urban
concentrations in the latter two-thirds of the 19th century and
first third of the 20th, as it transformed the United States into
an industrialized nation.
The urban frontier began the urbanization of American society
before it became recognizable as a major frontier manifestation
in its own right. There has been a growing migration to urban
areas at least since the eighteenth century. Since 1790, the year
of the first census, the rate in only one decade, between 1810
and 1820, before the emergence of the urban frontier as a force
to be reckoned with. After 1820, the rate of urban growth
accelerated while the rate of rural growth began to decline. When
the urban frontier came into its own, the city became the center
of American life even when city dwellers still represented a
small minority of the total population. Virtually every city was
taken in hand by its "boosters," who fervently desired to enlarge
its size and position as a metropolitan center, to make it a
bigger and supposedly grander metropolis than any other city
ever, and, in the process, to glamorize urban living.11
By 1850, the urban frontier had become the dominant frontier
in the East and the city had become the vanguard of the land
frontier in the West. In general, the period between 1816 and
1876 was the "heroic age" for the foundation, incorporation, and
growth of what are now the nation's largest cities, just as it
was the heroic age for the conquest of the last land frontier.
Indeed, the two phenomena went hand in hand. This overlapping of
frontiers occurred at a time when the shape of the United States
was being crystallized. It is significant that the bulk of
the nation's population growth in the past two generations has
taken place in the metropolitan areas surrounding the cities
created in that era.
During this period when the distinctive American urban pattern
took root, the largest cities in the United States were, with one
or two exceptions, no bigger in population than the middle size
cities of today. These cities grew really large only after 1890
when the land frontier had become secondary to the urban frontier
which had become the primary source of individual opportunity and
social development. In the years between the Civil War and the
turn of the century, the combined influence of the two frontiers
stimulated a process of "natural selection" which transformed
some of those cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco
into national and world centers while limiting others equally as
old to lesser frontiers.
As in the case of the land frontier, the opening and progress
of the urban frontier led to great changes in American life in a
manner which substantially met the ten conditions of the frontier
thesis. It involved extensive new organization in the uses of the
land through the development of industrial cities with
concentrated urban populations as the dominant from of social and
economic organization in American life. The assault upon nature
was transformed from a relatively simple matter of turning
wilderness into productive land, usually agricultural, into a
continuous innovative effort to exploit natural phenomena (steam,
electricity) or extract and re-form raw materials (coal, iron) in
unprecedented way. In place of the land explorer, the scientific
innovator, so well typified by Thomas Edison (1847-1931), became
the source of new discoveries and the trailblazer into the
unknown, while the industrial entrepreneur and the factory worker
replaced the commercial entrepreneur and the agriculturalist as
the pioneers in the development of the discoveries of the
inventor-explorer.
This, of course, had its price. Some of the successful
entrepreneurs were justifiably referred to as "robber barons."
The accumulation of vast fortunes meant that relatively small
groups of individuals could have disproportionate effects on
economic and political affairs. Aristotle's ancient warnings
about the ill-effects of wealth getting were fully evident by the
turn of the 20th century. Meanwhile, cities teemed with poor
immigrants crowded into squalid tenements and sweatshops working
long hours at low wages. Even before the Civil War, for example,
the New York City house occupied by George Washington during his
first years as President has been reduced to a crowded tenement.
The urban-industrial frontier also saw the rise of urban
political bosses -- men like George Washington Plunkitt of New
York who "seen" their "opportunities" and "took 'em." the
notorious Republican Gas Ring of Philadelphia earned that city
the title of "City of Brotherly Loot." Labor-management violence
replaced Indian-settler violence on the urban-industrial frontier
while class, ethnic and racial conflicts became serious factors
in American politics.
This was also the period of the emergence of the
organizational society in the United States as people sought to
create new bonds of association to replace older, organic bonds
of family and community to serve a more mobile and complex
society. This was reflected in the organization of labor unions,
political parties, professional associations, large and small
corporations, free public school systems and libraries, self-help
organizations and philanthropic foundations, conservationist and
other "do-gooder" associations, civic and ethnic clubs, not to
speak of Protestant churches, Catholic parishes and Jewish
synagogues. It was also reflected in the emergence of a civil
service system accompanied by growing government bureaucracies.
This organizational activity was primarily a consequence of the
strife and flux of the urban-industrial frontier. It was
necessary to develop organizational strength during this period
in order to take advantage of the urban-industrial revolution.
but organization was also necessary to defend oneself against its
exploitative tendencies or to reform its more rapacious aspects.
Despite frequent corruption and periodic depressions, the
nation's economy continued to expand at an even more rapid rate,
past the "take-off" period described by W. W. Rostow and through
the period of rapid industrialization with its corresponding
increase in national wealth.12 A new technology fostered in great
part by the demands of the land frontier, emerged to become a
major force in the promotion of urbanization, industrialization,
and economic growth, creating new secondary frontiers of its own.
Cities grew up not only to produce ever more sophisticated
agricultural implements but also the machine tools needed to make
the former. The railroad, itself a revolutionary instrument in
transportation technology, created over revolutions in the
patterns of settlement on both frontiers. These, in turn, led to
the emergence of new specialized functional frontiers (textiles,
steel, food processing) or reorientations of old ones
(transportation, mining, merchandising), plus new geographic ones.
The urban frontier provided new opportunities for making
fortunes, for getting away from home, for taking financial and
personal risks, and for achievements based on the willingness to
act. There also existed the same kind of freedom to engage in
these enterprises previously associated with the land frontier,
both for the entrepreneur interested in the development of a new
product and a new market and for the "man in the street"
interested in new forms of earning a livelihood. The same "boom
or bust" spirit, sense of boosterism, and feeling of pioneering
found among the pioneers of the land frontier could be found
among the developers of the industrial cities on the urban
frontier. The popular literature of the day reflects this quite
clearly.13
As on the classic land frontier, talent remained more
important than either family background or inherited money, so
access to the challenges and benefits of the urban frontier
remained reasonably free. This access was extended broadly as new
occupations developed at a rapid rate with openings for people on
all social levels. The new occupations couple with the
professionalization of old ones served to break down developing
inequalities in the agricultural sector. What was required was
migration to the city, whether from the American countryside or
from the Old World. As in the case of the land frontier, where
the promise of the frontier did not appear to be materializing as
a matter of course, seekers of the promise took political action
to rectify matters. Despite the tendencies of the new
industrialism to promote large fortunes (almost invariably made
by entrepreneurs from humble backgrounds), the forces of the
urban frontier still operated to promote a rough equality of
condition for the majority by destroying many of the established
inequalities of the past.
The coming of urbanization transformed the social structure
of American life, moving first the most energetic and ultimately
the majority of the nation's population into the cities where
they had to modify aspects of the agrarian outlook in an effort
to meet the problems of high density living in a complex, highly
organized society. It also changed the nation's demographic base
by adding a polyglot population of Catholics and Jews from all
over Europe to a previously overwhelmingly Protestant Anglo-Saxon
base. Industrialization, with its introduction of recurring
technological obsolescence, introduced a level of continuing
change unheard of in any earlier society.
The Opening of the Metropolitan Frontier
The history of the urban frontier in the United States
appears to envelope two contradictory trends. On one hand, the
urban frontier brought about the urbanization of American
society. On the other hand, even as the rate of urbanization
began to accelerate, a counter, almost anti-urban, trend began to
develop as well, a trend that would not become dominant until
four generations later, in the 1920s when the physical setting
of American society had become thoroughly urbanized.
Americans moved to the cities with seeming reluctance. Only
in 1890, when the urban frontier was entering its highest stage
of development, did the numbers of urban places in the United
States exceed 1,000 and the urban population exceed one third of
the total population). Not until after 1900 was one
quarter of the nation's total population living in cities of over
50,000.
The urban population did not exceed the rural population
until 1920, when the urban frontier was already passing the
peak of its influence. That same year, the total population in
cities of 100,000 and over came to exceed the total population in
all smaller urban places. The age of the big city had seemingly
arrived. However, no sooner did the big city become the apparent
embodiment of the American style of life than it began to be
replaced by a less citified style. The
upward trend in the growth of big cities ended during the
Depression, giving way to the development of medium size and
smaller cities within large and medium metropolitan areas as a
new embodiment of American urban life and a major aspect of the
Third American frontier.
By 1950, the trend toward big city living had been reversed
and the number of people living in cities of over 100,000 had
declined to less than the number of people living in smaller
urban places. By 1990, only 25 percent of the total population
in the United States lived in urban places of more than 100,000
population, the lowest figure since 1910 and less than the
percentage living in rural areas. The percentage of population
living in cities of over one million, which had peaked in 1930,
had declined sharply since then and was below the 1920 level by
1970. By 1980 the new trend was even sharper, with the percentage
dropping below that of 1900.
All this occurred despite the increasing metropolitanization of
the nation's population. By 1970, 6 percent of the nation's total
population lived in the 243 Census Bureau-defined Standard
Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Although these SMSAs occupy only about
11 percent of the nation's land area, their population increased by
23.5 percent between 1960 and 1970, in contrast to the overall
national growth of 13.3 percent. By 1980, fully 74.8 percent of all
Americans lived in SMSAs which covered 16 percent of total U.S. land
area, and by 1990 this number had grown to 77.5 percent.14
The positive yet reluctant response of most Americans to
urbanize reflects a basic desire on their part to have their cake
and eat it too. They want to have the economic and social
advantages of urbanization, which they value for essentially
hedonistic reasons, while preserving the erstwhile "rural"
amenities of life -- both physical and social -- which they value
for essentially moral and aesthetic reasons.15
The expansion of cities continued as long as city life was
able to offer most of the amenities of "rural" living, as well as
the economic, social, and cultural advantages of urban life, to
those who were in a position to determine the city's growth.
Throughout the 19th century, many newly settled suburbs and
smaller cities were annexed to already large cities because their
residents, or those holding power locally, felt reasonably
confident that loss of their suburbs' independent political
status would not mean an end to their suburban style of life. Not
only did large cities continue to grow larger but small cities
still aspired to become great metropolitan centers. City leaders
were infected with the idea that "bigger is better" and that
large organizations were more efficient and businesslike.
The full impact of big city life in its less attractive
aspects -- crowding, apartment living, tenement slums,
governmental remoteness, and lack of such natural amenities as
clean air, grass, and trees -- had not become sufficiently
apparent to the majority of the residents in their cities, so had
evoked no negative response to the idea of indefinite city
growth. thus, in 1854, Philadelphia grew from 2 to 129 square
miles through a gigantic consolidation of city and county which
absorbed the formerly independent suburbs of Northern Liberties,
Spring Garden, Kensington, Southwark and Moyamensing. In 1898 the
population of New York City increased by some two million and its
land area jumped from 40 to 300 square miles when Manhattan (the
original New York City) was joined with Brooklyn -- then the
fourth largest city in the U.S. -- Staten Island, much of Queens,
and a portion of Westchester County which became known as the
Bronx to from a single city of five boroughs -- essentially the
New York City of today.
The truth of the matter was that, before 1890, big cities in
the United States had not yet become big enough to evoke these
negative reactions, except in a few isolated cases along the
eastern seaboard. This is not to say that many industrial cities
did not have extensive tenement sections before 1890, but even
in them, the majority of the socially and politically articulate
population could still live in private or semi-private homes
along tree-lined streets. Tenement living remained the preserve
of newly arrived immigrants who as yet had little or no voice in
civic affairs and little means to escape the tenements to which
they were, in effect, confined.
There came a point in the development of most of the larger
cities, however, when even the politically articulate
city-dwellers found it difficult to maintain their semi-urban
style of life. Even enlargement of the city limits came to mean
the enlargement of the city's problems without any reasonable
recompense. At the same time, several other factors coalesced to
encourage metropolitanization in place of simple urbanization.
As maintenance of even the simpler rural-style amenities
began to cost more money within the large cities, the wealthier
city-dwellers began to seek new residences outside the city
limits. The cities themselves began to run up against increased
difficulties in their attempts to annex new areas, coming up
against already existing cities which, while being suburbanized
socially and economically, desired to retain their political
independence in order to better maintain their distinctive
character. It had become apparent that annexation to the great
cities was tantamount to absorption into a citified environment
with little or no possibility to control the extent of
citification. Hence neither old residents nor new settlers
fleeing the big city were willing to be brought into its embrace.
Annexation, which had been relatively easy under the law in most
cases, was made more difficult as the small cities on the fringes
of the giants went to the legislatures with their demands for
self-preservation. In fact, as these fringe area cities began to
attract settlers from the central city, they frequently began to
annex vacant land themselves, often in small and even medium size
cities within the larger metropolitan regions that were in the
process of formation.
Simultaneously, improved transportation technology made it
possible for more people to move out of the great cities into
surrounding area, while retaining jobs within the cities they
left. This movement, begun in the days of the railroads and
streetcars, was intensified with the development of the
automobile and the construction of road suitable for heavy motor
traffic. At the same time, the previously deprived groups living
in the substandard areas of the large cities prospered
sufficiently to seek alternatives to their relatively poor living
conditions, while their offspring acquired the American taste for
a semi-urban environment. Following the "old tenement trial"16 to
the suburbs, they began to move out to a new metropolitan
frontier where it became possible to live in the same style that
earlier prestigious groups had endowed with considerable status.
Moreover, as the movement to the metropolis accelerated in the
country as a whole, many rural residents moved directly into the
suburban fringes of the major cities, preferring them over city
living from the first.
"Permanent" metropolitanization (as distinct from the
"temporary" suburbanization of earlier years) began in the east
in the last third of the 19th century in response to the urban
frontier and spread to the larger cities in the middle and far
west by the turn of the century, just as the urban frontier had
begun in the heyday of the land frontier as a response to the
needs of the land frontier and spread in the same manner.
However, it was not until the close of World War II that the
metropolitan frontier came into its own when the pressures to
leave the great cities which had been building up through the
Depression and war years burst their bounds. Thus, between 1960
and 1970 the population of central cities in metropolitan areas
grew by 6.4 percent while their suburban areas grew at the rate
of 26.8 percent.
The great migration to the suburbs was simply one aspect of
the new metropolitan frontier. The urban-industrial frontier lost
its primacy in the Great Depression. With the completion of the
nation's basic urbanization and industrialization, the complex of
opportunities needed for frontier-style development temporarily
disappeared. Urbanizing and industrializing trends did persist in
regions until then on the peripheries of the urban-industrial
frontier, just as pioneering on the land frontier has continued
in isolated areas. However, the opportunity to foster the
continuous reconstruction of the social order associated with the
frontier was no longer available through simple urbanization and
industrialization.
So, after a brief hiatus due to the Depression and World War
II, the third great manifestation of the American frontier began
to unfold. Its reappearance as the metropolitan-technological
frontier of science, suburbia, and synthetics led to the
emergence of new versions of old frontier situations. As in the
case of the land and urban frontiers, the metropolitan frontier
is most immediately a local phenomenon that has spread within and
across these sections in a generally east-west direction to become
manifest nationwide. Movement on this new frontier, however, is
not tied to national geography alone. While it has been moving
across the continent, almost every one of the nation's urban
center has responded to the new frontier locally be developing a
metropolitan frontier of its own.
Thus frontier areas of new growth have emerged around the
fringes of the great majority of the nation's urban centers.
Within those urban centers areas of decline have developed
because of an inability to respond positively to the new
frontier's demands. They have come to resemble the "backwash"
regions left in the wake of the earlier frontiers with all the
problems of areas returning to "wilderness."
On the metropolitan frontier, land is once again a crucial
factor. The "metropolitan fringe" -- the area of expanding
urbanization and the non-urban area into which it expands -- is
the locus of frontier expansion. Within the metropolitan area, it
is even possible to delineate a frontier line (where settlement
falls below a density of 500 people per square mile) which marks
the limit of metropolitanization and to watch that line move as
settlement expands. The metropolitan frontier has organized the
use of land in a new way, combining densities that would be
considered rural in much of the Old World with urban social and
economic organization to create quasi- (or sub-) urban,
metropolitan complexes encompassing cities of all sizes, towns,
and villages, and rural dwellings.17
By the standards of the urban frontier era (which are all too
often still applied in discussions of contemporary
metropolitanization), the land uses of the metropolitan frontier
are considered "urban sprawl." But, in view of the goals of
deconcentration implicit in the development of these variegated
metropolitan land use patterns, this so-called "sprawl" is what
makes urban living tolerable to many (if not most) Americans.
Even with the spreading of metropolitan forms of land use, as of
1987, 16.2 percent of the land area of the United States was
within Standard Metropolitan Statistical Areas and only about
four percent of land outside the federal public domain (which
represents approximately one-third of the total U.S. land area)
was viewed as actually urbanized. More accurate survey techniques
actually led to a decline in the latter figure in 1982, to three
percent18 -- leaving what is, in effect, near-limitless area for
future expansion of metropolitan settlement in this country, a
key manifestation of its frontier character. Though land is no
longer "free" or unoccupied and there is no longer the
once-prevalent feeling that it is limitless, the facts of
availability of new land for metropolitanization do not differ
substantially from similar facts regarding the land frontier.
Though the physical world of the metropolitan frontier
appears highly tamed, it is likely that humanity has never before
confronted the "wilds" of nature to the extent that it does today
with the new ability to explore under the oceans and outer space,
the increased mastery of the physical, chemical, and biological
structure of the universe, and the new technology. Of course,
these wilds (or the wilderness they add up to) whether they be
of this earth, below or beyond it, must be approached through the
techniques of science rather than through the simple exertion of
brute physical force (not that science did not supplement brute
force on the land frontier or that physical power is no longer
needed). This shift to the primacy of intellectual effort, with
all its consequences for society as a whole, is itself one of the
most profound impacts of the contemporary frontier.
The metropolitan land boom and the growth of "brain"
industries are but two manifestations of the twenty year economic
boom which began with the opening of the new frontier and, though
occasionally slowed down by recessions, has continued as the
feedbacks of the frontier (ranging from the demands of space
exploration to the needs of newborn babies) have exerted
increasing influence on the economy. The results of scientific
exploration on the new frontier have stimulated the pioneering of
many new technologies, so important that technological change has
become the equivalent of land and industrialization as the motive
force of the metropolitan frontier.
Case Study: The Automobile and the Metropolitan Frontier
As in the case of earlier frontiers, changes in
transportation and communication technology were crucial in
opening the metropolitan technological frontier. On this new
frontier, the key to the expansion of settlement was the
automobile, whose development is illustrative of the frontier
impact of science and technology. From certain theoretical
principles of physics, "discovered" by the first scientific
explorers a century or more ago, the inventor-pioneers of the
urban industrial frontier were able to create the internal
combustion engine and, ultimately, the automobile. The new
vehicle and the technology it represented rapidly revolutionized
society, creating a myriad of new industries -- automobile
manufacturing, the oil industry, an expanded military industry,
and many others -- and providing a wide range of opportunities
for those willing and able to take advantage of them. By 1963, at
the height of the metropolitan frontier, over seven million jobs
were directly dependent on the automobile, none of which had
existed two generations earlier.
American society became automobile-oriented which, in turn,
led to a revolution in its physical organization, its social
structure, and its moral sense. The automobile, like the railroad
before it, made possible the opening of new geographic frontiers.
Whereas pre-automobile communities could only develop along rail
lines, new ones could develop wherever roads could be built. This
fact was of particular importance around the nation's cities.
Suburbs, previously few in number and the preserves of the rich
because they had to be located along railroad lines, now became
accessible to the vast majority of the people, offering them
better housing, lands and open space, and greater feeling of
community. This, in turn, radically changed the uses of land in
potentially suburban areas, the social structure of urban
populations, and the political organization of metropolitan
regions.
The automobile also extended freedom of travel to people who
were unable to travel before, transforming isolated villagers
into participants in wider regional communities. It changed the
pattern of rural settlement no less than urban, turning villages
into ghost towns, towns into small cities, while farm equipment
using the internal combustion engine increased the size of
economic farms many-fold.
The impact of the automotive frontier had some important (and
often unforeseen) byproducts as well. The new automative society
enriched numerous automobile manufacturers and dealers as well as
manufacturers and dealers in subsidiary products, creating a
whole new class of millionaires with interests and values
reflecting the culture that made them. Thomas H. McDonald, for 34
years had of the federal Bureau of Public Roads, put the matter
succinctly: "The roads themselves helped us create a new wealth,
in business and industry and land values....So it was not our
wealth that made our highways possible." It transformed the
socio-economic structures of whole states, creating among other
things, modern Michigan, contemporary Texas, and twentieth
century California (the very acme of the new frontier). The
automotive frontier also contributed to the new five dollar day,
making it possible for black as well as other Americans to earn a
living wage for the first time in their history on those shores
and promoting their migration northward. In this and other ways,
it broadened both the opportunities and horizons of a people
previously restricted in every way with ease and contributed
mightily to stimulating the present drive for black equality.
Not the least of the automobile's effects was the change it
induced in family life, giving children greater freedom from
parental control than at any given time in history. These
changes, in turn, forced a variety of adjustments in traditional
American social institutions. In the governmental realm, they
profoundly influenced the structure and scope of government --
local, state, and national -- raising new problems of police,
changing the span of political control and pressure, and making
new demands on government in the social realm as well.
The automobile also produced new environmental, economic and
social problems for America. Auto emissions raised levels of air
pollution, especially in highly congested cities -- though the
automobile was initially greeted by urbanites as relief from the
pollution and odor created by hundreds of tons of horse manure
along with dead horses lying about city streets. New legislation,
like the various clean air acts, and new technologies have been
required to try to reduce auto pollution. Although street,
highway and parking spaces occupy no more than about two percent
of the land area of the United States, auto critics have charged
that highways are devouring the land. The increase in the number
of automobiles and their travel speeds also produced a new source
of death along with charges that automobiles are "unsafe at any
speed." During the early 1970s the automobile, which consumed
about 30 percent of all the oil used in the U.S. (with another 10
percent being used by trucks), was also linked to the "energy
crisis."
More serious social problems arose with the construction of
inner city freeways which, in many cases, destroyed pleasant
neighborhoods and displaced people, especially the poor, whose
homes stood in the way of automotive "progress." By facilitating
the movement of people and jobs to the suburbs, freeways
contributed to the erosion of tax bases in some big cities and to
the increase in the proportions of poor and unemployed persons
living within the big cities. In turn, urban renewal programs
designed to attract suburbanites back to center city displaced
still more low income people as their homes gave way to office
buildings, shopping areas and upper income housing developments.
On a national scale, the interstate highway system, coupled with
air travel and refrigeration, facilitated the migration of people
and jobs from the "frostbelt" to the "sunbelt" cities which
became especially evident during the 1970s.
Nevertheless, despite the problems created or facilitated by
the automobile, social criticism and mass transit schemes have not
yet been able to lure Americans from their benefits still
outweigh the costs, and many of these costs can be appreciably
reduced without significant reductions in automobile usage.19
Like its predecessors, the metropolitan frontier was also a
composite of many specialized geographic and functional
frontiers. The automative and suburban frontiers have already
been mentioned. The recreation and consumer frontiers are yet
others, not to mention the particular frontiers of the eastern
megalopolis or southern California. Each of these specialized
frontiers offered many opportunities for exploration, growth and
development, all requiring the taking of risks and active pursuit
of frontier-style goals while offering great material and moral
rewards. The builders of subdivisions, the creators of franchised
"chains," the researchers in the laboratories, and perhaps even
the promoters of psychedelic art and psychic renewal all
potentially shared this aspect of the frontier experience insofar
as their courageous application of effort brings them the rewards
that comes from exploring or pioneering.
The very complexity of the metropolitan frontier and variety
of specialized frontiers within it heightened the freedom of
access to the frontier zone in one form or another. In
particular, the existence of a standard body of scientific and
technical knowledge formally (if not actually) available to all
on the basis of ability alone whose mastery offered access to the
frontier is simply a more complex variation of the kind of
equality of access that prevailed in the days of the land
frontier. Then the "standard body of techniques" grew out of
physical prowess rather than intellectual ability but it served
the same general purpose. Moreover, the use of intelligence as a
prime means of access to the frontier is not confined to the
realms of science and technology. Migration as a factor in
promoting access not only involves movement from central cities
to suburbs but from suburb to suburb and metropolitan area to
metropolitan area.
If the publications and pronouncements of the press and mass
media and the orientation of recent political campaigns were at
all indicative of public attitudes, popular awareness of the
frontier-like opportunities present in American society during
the metropolitan frontier was very high and public response to the
challenges of that frontier were no less impressive than in
earlier periods in American history. All in all, the repeated
references to "new frontiers" were not simply a matter of
rhetoric. This frontier psychology existed despite the strong
tendency in American society to view the problems of each era as
unique, an outlook that in itself, reflects the thinking of
people engaged on a frontier.
Frontier-based economic change brought even greater social
fluidity. Rapid technological change stimulated the creation of
new industries, creating new occupations on all levels of society
which demand talents not transmitted by heredity and which
consequently had to be open to those who qualified regardless of
their social backgrounds. It has been reliably estimated that
some 80 percent of the jobs that exist in the United States today
were not in existence two generations ago, when the
urban-industrial frontier was at its peak. Moreover, there has
been a shift in the character of American occupational structure
from production to service comparable to the shift from
agriculture to industry produced by the advance of the urban
frontier.20
At the same time, the social "feedback" from the advancing
frontier continued to have strong pro-democratic effects on
American social structure and civil society, promoting both
freedom and equality through its continued fostering of social
mobility and its expanding conception of the rights of all to
participate equally in social and political life. The civil
rights revolution, the war on poverty, and the emergence of
radically new forms of individual freedom and self-expression
were all in response to the frontier-related developments in
postwar American society.
The greatest social contribution of the metropolitan frontier
was the impetus it has given to the breakdown of major social and
economic differences among population groups. As a result, the
older institutions of the Republic and its subdivisions which had
more or less excluded those non white, Protestant, and Northern
European had to readjust to include the rest of the country's
population in the system of politics and power, public and
private, through which decisions are made.
That readjustment included desegregation of blacks and the
election of the first Roman Catholic president, new access to the
corporate world for Jews and the revival of ethnicity for the
children of southern and easter European immigrants. All these
changes were secured in a manner consonant with the American
mystique and the basic institutions and tradition through which
that mystique is expressed. As the very designation of the
new frontier indicates, most of these adaptations had to be made
in the community arena. Indeed, the best expression of the
socio-political consequences of the new frontier has been in
urban America as it has become transformed into metropolitan
America. The key to the adaptation lie in that very
transformation as the contemporary extension of the continuing
American frontier.21
The Rurban-Cybernetic Frontier
In 1976, the post-World War II generation came to an end.
Nothing symbolized this better than the election of Jimmy Carter,
the first American president to have come of age since World War
II, a man who ran on a platform that suggested that the issues of
the post-World War II generation were no longer central in
American life. As the new generation began, the third stage of
the American frontier no longer seemed to be compelling. At the
same time, despite the "limits of growth" rhetoric, there was
every sign that a fourth stage was beginning -- a rurban or
citybelt-cybernetic frontier generated by the
metropolitan-technological frontier just as the latter had been
generated by its predecessor.
The rurban-cybernetic frontier first emerged in the
Northeast, as did its predecessors, as the Atlantic coast
metropolitan regions merged into one another to form a 600-mile
long megalopolis (the usage is Jean Gottman's) -- a matrix of
urban and suburban settlements in which the older central cities
came to share importance if not prominence with smaller places.22
It was a sign of the times that the computer was conceived at MIT
in Cambridge first built in the University of Illinois and
Champaign-Urbana, and developed at IBM in White Plains, three
medium size communities -- two cities in the megalopolis that
have become special centers in their own right and the other two
forming a freestanding small metropolitan area. This in itself
is a reflection of the two primary characteristics of the new
frontier. The new locus of settlement is in medium size and
small cities and in the rural interstices of the megalopolis.
The spreading use of computer technology in everything from
direct dialing of telephone calls throughout the world to
microwave ovens is the most direct manifestation of the
cybernetic tools which make such citybelts possible. In 1979,
the newspapers in the Northeast published the first reports of
the revival of the small cities of the first industrial
revolution, particularly in New England, as the new frontier
engulfed them. A decade later, such places were booming -- in
New England, in the Southern Piedmont, in the Colorado Rockies,
and along the West Coast.23 Countrywide, population growth
shifted into rural areas.24 Both phenomena are as much a product
of direct dialing as they are of the older American longing for
small town or country living. Both reflect the urbanization of
the American way of life no matter what lifestyle is practiced,
or where.
In 1983, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget recognized
this phenomena by changing its definition of standard
metropolitan statistical area (SMA) to metropolitan statistical
area (MSA).25
Like the early definitions, an MSA is defined as including at
least one city with 50,000 or more population. What is new is the
addition of a Census Bureau-defined urbanized area of at least
50,000 inhabitants and a total MSA population of at least new
standards provide that an MSA can be based upon "central
counties," that is to say, where there is no clearcut central
city -- a reflection of the new rurban settlement patterns.
Although a larger city in each MSA is designated a "central
city," there are often situations such as that of the Benton
Harbor metropolitan area in Michigan which has a total population
of 75,000, of whom only 12,000 live in Benton Harbor, a depressed
older city that actually is the area's backwater but has been
designated the "central city."
While the Northeast was first, like its predecessors, the new
frontier is finding its true form in the South and West where
these citybelt matrices are not being built on the collapse of
earlier forms but are developing as an original form. The
present sunbelt frontier -- strung out along the Gulf coast, the
southwestern desert and the fringes of the California mountains
-- is classically megalopolitan in citybelt form and cybernetic
with its aerospace-related industries and sunbelt living made
possible by air conditioning and the new telecommunications.
It is still too early to delineate with surety all the
imperatives or even the propensities of the rurban-cybernetic
frontier, but some are already visible. Perhaps first and
foremost is the new sectionalism, the reemergence of an older
basis of American politics in new form. The urban-industrial
frontier brought in its wake a politics of class, reflected at
its height in the New Deal and the political realignment of which
it was a part. This politics of class attacked the division of
urban America into "two cities," the "Protestant" and privileged
versus the "ethnic" and denied. It persisted through the
metropolitan frontier years in no small measure because even
after affluence and influence came to Protestants and ethnic
alike, it was reinforced by the transformed politics of race. As
blacks moved from the Southern backwaters remaining from the old
rural-land frontier to the world of the metropolitan frontier,
their problems took on an economic dimension previously submerged
by the legally enforced caste system.
The politics of class divided the country into liberals and
conservatives, a division which most concede has become very
blurred in recent years. The blurring of what were once
relatively clear-cut differences is a reflection of the emergence
of the new frontier with its new problems and politics revolving
once again around "have" and "have not" sections whose economic
interests are often diametrically opposed. Significantly, the
emergence of this renewed sectionalism is tied to the end of the
economic dominance of the Northeast. The "sunbelt-frostbelt"
division is only one aspect of this new sectionalism;
presidential contests have revealed how sharp are East-West
divisions as well. The reallocation of House seats in the wake
of the 1990 census will further sharpen these divisions as they
are translated into new power balances in Congress and the
Electoral College. These sectional divisions are reflected in
lifestyle differences as well.26
The issues associated with what current idiom denominates
"lifestyle" for the moment have contributed to a great weakening
of the political party system and single issue politics. While
these particular manifestations may be less long-lived than the
conventional wisdom suggests, it is very likely that a continued
concern with lifestyle issues will be a major propensity of the
rurban-cybernetic frontier and at least some resolution of the
conflicts associated with those issues will become a major
imperative. This problem is intensified as the citybelt
dimension, with its emphasis on smaller communities, will
encourage recrudescence of the kind of territorial democracy that
potentially allows different lifestyles to flourish without
clashing, while the cybernetic dimension, with its propensity to
foster a global village tied together by telecommunications, will
work in the opposite direction.
Summary
The United States is a "new society" founded by immigrants
from old societies who came to this once relatively open
territory to establish new lives and communities. In the New
World the settlers underwent a frontier experience which has
continued to shape American political life. The American frontier
has had four successive stages, each of which has generated sets
of political, social and economic challenges, problems and
opportunities. 1) The rural-land frontier saw the initial
opening, settling and cultivating of the continent. 2) The
urban-industrial frontier witnessed a rapid growth in the number
and size of cities and of great centers of industry and capital.
3) The metropolitan-technological frontier has seen a second
industrial revolution accompanied by a reverse in the trend
toward big-city living. Instead, suburbs and free-standing towns
in the small and medium-size range have experienced the greatest
growth during the third frontier. 4) The rurban-cybernetic
frontier is now in its early stages. It rests on a global
revolution in communications and information technology which, in
turn, is further dispersing urban life. This frontier has also
involved the exploration of new space like the undersea and outer
space, and the development of wholly new and exotic technologies.
The global village is the key to the latest frontier stage
which, even as it follows the tried and true paths of spatial
diffusion of earlier frontiers, has a global, indeed an
extraterrestrial, reach. In the last analysis, the frontier is
the driving force for the reshaping of time and space in the
United States. In the forthcoming chapters we shall see how it is
also the driving force for the transformation of American culture
and politics.
Notes
1. Ray Allen Billington, America's Frontier Heritage (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
2. See also Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
3. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in
American History (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1920).
4. See also Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: Urban
Life in America, 1625-1742 (New York: Capricorn, 1964), and
Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743-1776 (New York:
Capricorn, 1964); Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
5. See also Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The
Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1973).
6. U.S. Census Bureau; Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Department
of Interior, 1984. Since thousands of Native Americans have
intermarried with other Americans and assimilated into the larger
society over the years, it is impossible to give an accurate
figure for their number. How is one defined as a Native
American? Full descent? Partial descent -- in which case how
much? Self-identification? See also C. Matthew Snipp, American
Indians: The First of This Land (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1989).
7. Turner, Significance of the Frontier. For a sampling of the
literature on Turner's theories, see the bibliography in Ray
Allen Billington, Westward Expansion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
8. See Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "A Meaning for
Turner's Frontier," Political Science Quarterly, 69 (September
1954): 321-353 and (December 1954): 565-602; and the Amherst
pamphlet series, The Turner Thesis Concerning the Frontier in
American History (Amherst, 1949).
9. While the Turner thesis was widely accepted by American
historians after 1893 and soon became the regnant explanatory
theory in American studies, by the 1930s it was being challenged
by a new generation of historians who pointed out what they took
to be empirical flaws in Turner's evidence (e.g., Henry Nash
Smith, Virgin Land [New York: Vintage, 1957]) and criticized the
essentially romantic nature of Turner's presentation. By and
large, Turner's students met those challenges and, even when
conceding specific points, were able to defend the thesis itself.
In the 1950s, counter-theories were suggested encompassing
the frontier thesis but broadening it in different directions
(e.g., David Potter, People of Plenty [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1954]). They continue to enjoy a certain
popularity. Then, beginning in the mid-1970s and continuing to
the early 1990s, yet another generation of historians challenged
the whole idea of the winning of the West or of European
settlement in the Americas as progress, applying the
anti-colonialist political ideas developed in or for the Third
World in the postwar generation or the new environmentalist
sensibility. The myth of the West itself is challenged from this
perspective. Among the contemporary revisionists are Patricia
Nelson Limerick, who in her writings claims, in McMurtry's words,
"that America's westward expansion was a mosaic of failure,
financial and personal, but also, in the largest sense, moral,"
and Kirkpatrick Sale, who in The Conquest of Paradise (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) attacks Columbus as a committer of
genocide. For an overview of this challenge and a reply to it,
see Larry McMurtry, "The Winning of the West in Retrospect," New
Republic (1990). Also responding to these revisionsists are
William H. Goetzmann in New Lands, New Men: America in the Second
Great Age of Discovery (New York: Viking, 1986), and The West of
the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986); and Robert Athearn, The
Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1986).
As McMurtry puts it, the major problem with "historical
revisionism about the west is its post-ness." None of the
information presented by the revisionists is new. True students
of the frontier experience, not to mention those involved in
directly, were well aware of the difficult and tragic elements of
the frontier, but today that information has an audience willing
to draw negative conclusions about the whole enterprise,
something it did not have in the past.
In this writer's opinion, the revisionists are also morally
wrong. The settlement of the West did change the Western
environment and its ecology but the settled West is at least as
pleasant a place for all as the harsh landscape and climate of
the primordial West and is useful to people as well. Unless we
are species self-haters, which so many of the revisionsists seem
to be, one can be rather thankful for that.
The theory presented in this book may be described as
neo-Turnerian. It encompasses all the criticisms, empirical and
normative, and still argues that while everything has its price,
the frontier challenge is itself the engine of liberty and
equality.
10. See also Constance McLaughlin Green, The Rise of Urban
America (New York: Harper and Row, 1965); Charles N. Slaab and A.
Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (New York: Macmillan,
1967); Howard P. Chudacoff, The Evolution of American Urban
Society (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975); Arthur M.
Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (New York:
Macmillan, 1933), and Prisoners of Progress: American Industrial
Cities, 1850-1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1976).
11. For a discussion of urban "boosters," see Daniel J.
Boorstein, The Americans: The National Experience (New York:
Vintage, 1965), pp. 113-168. See also Anselm L. Strauss, Images
of the American City (Glencoe, IL.: Free Press, 1962);
Christopher Tunnard and Henry H. Reed, American Skyline (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
12. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist
Manifesto (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1960);
Brigitte Berger, The Culture of Entrepreneurship (San Francisco:
ICS Press, 1991).
13. See R. Richard Wohl, "The 'Rags to Riches' Story: An Episode
of Secular Idealism," in Reingard Bendix and Seymour Martin
Lipset, eds., Class, Status and Power, 2nd ed. (New York: Free
Press, 1966), pp. 501-506.
14. The United States Census Bureau reports five types of ubran
concentrations.
Urban is defined as any incorporated or unincorporated
place having 2,500 or more people.
An Urbanized Area is defined as a central city and all
contiguous territory having population densities of 2,000
per square mile or more.
The general concept of a metropolitan statistical area,
according to the Office of Management and Budget which
establishes the definition of MSA's, is one of "a large
population nucleus, together with adjacent communities
which have a high degree of economic and social
integration with that nucleus." (Statistical Abstract of
the United States 1988) The current standards, which were
adopted in 1980 for what were then called standard
metropolitan statistical areas (the OMB changed the name
from SMSA to MSA in 1983) provide that each MSA must
include at least "(a) One city with 50,000 or more
inhabitants, or (b) A Census Bureau-defined urbanized area
of at least 50,000 inhabitants and a total MSA population
of at least 100,000 (75,000 in New England). The MSA must
also include as "central counties" the county in which the
central city is located and any adjacent counties which
have at least 50 percent of their population in the
urbanized area. Other "outlying counties" to be included
in the MSA must meet specified requirements of commuting
to the central counties and of metropolitan character.
While the SMSA (now MSA) concept was not developed until
1940, if we were to project these criteria backward, we
would have found 44 MSA's in 1910. In 1950 there were 169
MSA's, 265 in 1974, and 281 as of 1987.
By the 1980 standards, metropolitan complexes of 1 million
or more population contain separate component areas if
specified criteria are met. "Such areas are designated
primary metropolitan statistical areas (PMSA's); and any
area containing PMSA's is designated a consolidated
metropolitan statistical area (CSMA)." (Statistical
Abstract of the United States 1988). As of 1980 there were
21 CSMA's, most of which were previously known as Standard
Consolidated Areas. These areas contain contiguous MSA's
that are somewhat interdependent such as New
York-Northeastern New Jersey and Chicago-Northwestern
Indiana.
While the term "city" is sometimes used to describe any
urban concentration of people, in the United States a city
(like a state or the nation itself) is also defined
politically. It is a municipal corporation, a body politic
created by the state for purposes of local government.
Thus in any metropolitan area, there are many cities, each
with a separate local government of its own.
15. Daniel J. Elazar, Building Cities in America (Lanham, Md.:
Hamilton Press, 1987), and "Are We a Nation of Cities?" The
Public Interest, No. 4 (Summer 1966): 42-58.
16. See Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 65; Kenneth J. Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985).
17. See Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969); Robert Wood, Suburbia (Boston:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1959); John J. Harrigan, Political Change in
the Metropolis, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1985);
Jean Gottman, Megalopolis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1961).
18. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Resources Inventory Division,
1982 National Resources Inventory (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1984).
19. On automobiles and their political/social impact, see Robert
E. Passwell, Problems of the Careless (New York: Praeger, 1978);
David L. Lewis and Lawrence Goldstein, eds., The Automobile and
American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983);
Garth Mangum, ed., The Manpower Revolution (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1965); Daniel J. Elazar, Cities of the Prairies
(New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 41-42.
20. See Mangum, ed., The Manpower Revolution; Kenneth E.
Boulding, The Meaning of the 20th Century (New York: Harper and
Row, 1964).
21. For further discussion of these frontier themes, see Elazar,
Cities of the Prairie.
22. See Gottman, Megalopolis.
23. Just a generation earlier it had changed the definition from
standard metropolitan area (SMA) to SMSA. The history of these
definitions is itself a reflection of the metropolitan frontier.
The standard metropolitan area was established as a category by
the Bureau of the Budget, in 1949 just as the metropolitan
frontier was becoming dominant. The term was changed to SMSA in
1959 while that frontier was in its heyday. The criteria for the
establishment and definition of SMSA's were modified in 1958,
1971, and 1975, in each case in the direction of deemphasizing
the central city and in recognizing that metropolitanization was
increasingly a form of noncentralized low-density urbanization.
Another modification was made in January 1980 and the term itself
was changed in 1983 to metropolitan statistical area. Further
revisions of MSA definitions were made in 1984, 1986, and 1987.
They were principally designed to add newly-qualified MSA's or
central cities, alway in the direction of less population and
less density for each.
24. On the small town, see John Herbers, The New Heartland (New
York: Times Books, 1986).
25. On the shift of population growth to rural areas, see
Herbers, The New Heartland. See also "Final Court will Shift
Seats to Far West, Southeast," Congressional Quarterly 48 (35):
2793-2794; "Census Data Shows Sharp Rural Losses," New York Times
(August 30, 1990); "West Coast, Sun Belt States Show Big Gain in
Census," Wall Street Journal (August 30, 1990).
26. Applying the theory presented here, this writer forecast many
of the trends in "Megalopolis and the New Sectionalism," The
Public Interest 11 (Spring 1968): 62-85.
