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
In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial
resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of
democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution.
Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in
the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast
achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of
politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this
training upon democracy. Never before in the history of the world has a
democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross
with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon
the means of execution. In short, democracy has learned in the West of
the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old
historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic
conditions.
But the very task of dealing with vast resources, over vast areas, under
the conditions of free competition furnished by the West, has produced
the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating
economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under
such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western
leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry
Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill,
John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie.
The question is imperative, then, What ideals persist from this
democratic experience of the West; and have they acquired sufficient
momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike
those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at
the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of
the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration
of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as
may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The
free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western
democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the
domain of ideals and legislation, that we must look for Western
influence upon democracy in our own days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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