But beyond these real effects of the frontier, there were the imagined ones. These for a time co-existed with the real ones so that even when the frontier remained still very much a reality, it was also important as an idea. In words, for a while both myth and reality co-existed.
Slotkin, who although not as well known as Frederick Jackson Turner is one of the preeminent scholars of the American frontier, calls the ôMyth of the Frontierö (i.e. the doctrine that all Americans were always and are still somehow shaped by the idea of the Western frontier) ôarguably the longest-lived of American myths, with origins in the colonial period and a powerful continuing presence in contemporary cultureö.1
Slotkin describes this Myth of the Frontier as being underpinned by a number of separate ideologies: the ôlawsö of free market competition (especially the idea of matched supply and demand); the Social Darwinist concept of survival of the fittest as a proper component of the social order; and Manifest Destiny.2 One can see these basic philosophies still at work today: It is hard to imagine either Donald Trump or Bill Gates having turned out quite the way they have if they had not been Americans, or if there had been no frontier.
Slotkin believes that the ideological underpinnings of frontier myth had their own specific historical sources stemming from the traditions prevalent in European agrarian communities that were relatively homogenous in ethnicity, language and religion. Such communities granted to the United States, among other aspects of American culture, a bent in politics that was and is often extremely localist and just as often tentative about nationalism.3 This contradiction was to run throughout American history, resurfacing whenever the issue of statesÆ rights is raised or whenever local school boards protest against the possible imposition of national teaching standards.
Although it is common practice to talk abou...