Book Review: Greg Grandin's "The End of the Myth"

If there's anything as American as apple pie and baseball and the Fourth of July, it is the frontier. Today, we don't live in the age of Manifest Destiny, cowboys and outlaws racing ahead of the streams of wagons headed West to the Pacific coast. So politicians have to get more creative nowadays in evoking the cultural memory of the ever-expanding frontier, whether it be international markets or the stars, when trying to pass major policy initiatives. But what happens when politics takes a more insular turn, from the optimism of the seemingly infinite expanse to the pessimistic fortress-mindset represented by the Trumpian Wall? How did we get here? Historian Greg Grandin sheds light on our present moment in his 2019 exploration of the frontier's role in American history, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.

The frontier has always held a special place in American hearts and minds, serving as a basis for what we term today "American exceptionalism." Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner first invoked this idea in his "Frontier Thesis," wherein he argued that America's ability to settle such vast swaths of "free land"--not officially claimed by other recognized nation-states--allowed for the genesis of the "uniquely American form of political equality," premised on a fiercely "vibrant, forward-looking individualism" skeptical of centralized power that we've all come to know and love (Grandin, 2019, p. 1). Pioneers at the border needed to be hardy and adaptive when it came to settling in an unfriendly wilderness, encountering justifiably angry and dispossessed Native Americans--the latter pushed ever-westward by the U.S. government--harsh weather, and unfriendly wildlife, forming collective alliances when possible and thus creating outposts of freedom as bulwarks against an uncivilized frontier.

As Americans would come to establish themselves, from "sea to shining sea" and then move out into the world, whether by acquiring territories, opening new international markets, and fighting a long-line of world wars, the thinking went that America could serve as a sort of universal model for democracy done right, where the unceasing onward march would serve as a way to ameliorate social problems like racism or income inequality that plagued other crowded, border-bound nation-states. Why? Because those extremists, racists, and other problem elements and discontents were pushed ever farther away with the expanding frontier line. The best part was that the frontier was self-renewing, as a new frontier beckoned all the time, even after the mainland was thoroughly settled, keeping populational pressures low and divisions minimal, or minimized. Thus, a country could be knit together and political polarization kept at bay by promises of endless growth, an expansion of our universalist ideas, economic and political systems into the world short of imperialistic command and control.

Not surprisingly, there are problems with this Turnerian ethos. One, the world's resources are not infinite. National policy and our current model of troubled capitalism have not historically recognized this and are just starting to recognize our ecological and economic limits (at least on some fronts). (More liberal humanist perspectives, upon recognizing this, thus posit a more equitable societal arrangement to better share our finite resources, a model of social democracy. Others see limitations as an invitation to double down on an isolationist and racist mindset of domination and exclusion of non-whites from sharing in these benefits. The more dog-eat-dog model, if you will.) Secondly, this brand of American exceptionalism was founded in an era of contradictions, where unprecedented individual freedom (absolute freedom from restrictions in a world that does demand some restrictions on this freedom) only extended to whites and not African-American slaves, dispossessed Native Americans, or later immigrant peoples of color. Additionally, the government and not the rugged individual working collectively were able to open the doors wide for an unprecedented settlement and prosperity, pushing Native Americans and people of color out of the way of white settlers. Thus, these contradictions have remained, and have festered.

With the Great Recession of 2008 and draining Middle East campaigns under our national belt and income inequality rising (corporations have exploited the frontier mindset to the detriment of the commons raised on the unfettered idealism of the American Dream), pessimism has set in, with Donald Trump's election and Wall declaring the frontier closed and for America to start digging in the trenches. The safety valve of expansion seems to have failed, leaving no place for the fringe extremists and nativist elements to vent aside from internally directed violence against immigrants and people of color and a ramping up of polarization, starkly revealing the unavoidable social problems of modern life. More importantly, the realization is slowly setting in that the United States is like other nations, obligated to reckon with the latter problems just like everyone else.

We seem to have come down from the clouds, faced with the destructive impulses of a Trumpism that refuses limits, even when recognizing that the world is limited, an uneasy, destabilizing contradiction detrimental to the stability of our polity. While Grandin pulls no punches in his troubling assessment of our present and possible future of ever-greater polarization, he concludes with the cautiously optimistic hope that America still has time to recognize its limits in the Global Age and learn to thrive in a more balanced social democracy. This moment of reckoning will come, and we need to be ready for it.


Works Cited:

Grandin, Greg. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.