The Frontier in American HistoryTurner, Frederick Jackson
History
The Frontier in American History
Turner, Frederick Jackson
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Frontier thesis; United States -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion
increasing the scope of their ambitions as the largeness of the
resources and the extent of the fields of activity revealed themselves,
they were forced to accept the natural conditions of a province vast in
area but simple in structure. Competition grew into consolidation. On
the Pittsburgh border of the Middle West the completion of the process
is most clearly seen. On the prairies of Kansas stands the Populist, a
survival of the pioneer, striving to adjust present conditions to his
old ideals.
The ideals of equality, freedom of opportunity, faith in the common man
are deep rooted in all the Middle West. The frontier stage, through
which each portion passed, left abiding traces on the older, as well as
on the newer, areas of the province. Nor were these ideals limited to
the native American settlers: Germans and Scandinavians who poured into
the Middle West sought the country with like hopes and like faith. These
facts must be remembered in estimating the effects of the economic
transformation of the province upon its democracy. The peculiar
democracy of the frontier has passed away with the conditions that
produced it; but the democratic aspirations remain. They are held with
passionate determination.
The task of the Middle West is that of adapting democracy to the vast
economic organization of the present. This region which has so often
needed the reminder that bigness is not greatness, may yet show that its
training has produced the power to reconcile popular government and
culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world. The
democracies of the past have been small communities, under simple and
primitive economic conditions. At bottom the problem is how to reconcile
real greatness with bigness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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