The American Scene; #269

I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. Good morning, this is Howard Vincent viewing the arts for the American Scene for the Illinois Institute of Technology. You heard the subject, the Frontier and American Frontier in fact in fiction, and I can think of few more appropriate places to discuss this subject than Chicago, which was once a very great Frontier town and still may be a Frontier town for whatever the new Frontier is going to be space or what you wish. Anyhow Chicago has been associated with the Frontier literally, I mean actually, factually, and literally in the sense that literally means in books, if it can, letters, because we have one of the distinguished scholars on the

subject of the American Frontier that I've asked to come down here and talk about this important subject, which is much in the air. Here, this is Ray Billington who is a professor of history at Northwestern University and educated at Wisconsin, his PhD, which is an appropriate place since it's done for a man expert on the Frontier to have been educated since the Frontier thesis was first formulated from that university. He has served as a distinguished professor at the Northwestern University for a number of years, and has written such books as a westward movement of the American people, which came out in 59, before then the westward expansion, which came out in 49 and was re -issued in 1960, and the Far West in Frontier, 1830 to 1860, which came out in 1956. Well, Ray, with all these books, you've certainly written about the Frontier. Now, you were saying beforehand, you don't want to talk just about the Frontier, you want to talk about the two Frontiers, what did you mean? Well, I think, Howard, that a distinction must be

made if we were to discuss the Frontier intelligently. Between the Frontier of Fiction or the Frontier of Image, what people thought the Frontier was, and the actual Frontier of Fact. Now, each of those has had a tremendous influence and tremendous impact upon American life for some 300 years, and the impact is still being felt in American life. But I think that we must differentiate between the two, if we would understand them. Now, let me say just a word about, first of all, the Frontier of Image. This is what the American people thought the Frontier was. Yes. And the European people thought the Frontier was. They had a highly romanticized, highly glamorous views of the subject. They felt that the Frontier was an area where hunters of the type of Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett could swing from state to state on a grapevine, where they moved in immaculate and clean fashions through the beautiful scented forests, where they brought down their animals with unearing skill

with their long rifles. They thought of this Frontier of Image as a land, where land itself was free to all of the downtrodden, where those who wished to escape the rigors and turmoil of cities and industrialism could do then life anew. They thought of this Frontier as a land where a clean, shaven, blue -shirted farmers tilled the soil on the harvest in New Orleans. Flexing the muscles through that blue shirt. Oh, yes, yes. Yes. They thought of the Frontier as a land where cowboys rescued blondes and distress, transported themselves in a rowdy saloons or galloped through towns, there are six shooters blazing. They think of this Frontier as a land where miners could harvest unlimited quantities of gold without much effort on their part. It's a very pretty picture. It's a pretty picture. It's one that's been perpetuated. I'm afraid by this medium of which we are not performing. Yes. You have to have. But it's also, you're saying here by implication, lots of literary professors. Professors of American Literature are guilty of this sort of romanticism

and that they don't know enough about the Frontier of Fact. I assume this is what we're beginning to approach here in our discussion. Well, I do not want to accuse any of my colleagues. And most of the professors of literature, I think, are singularly aware of this. Indeed, it is a professor of literature, Henry Nash Smith, whose book Virgin Land, first called attention to the influence of this particular image of the Frontier upon American Literature, at least in other aspects of American literature. Now, didn't he do that at a time which is very useful because the Frontier myth, as a myth, was being so discredited here and here and here. And he pointed out it's discredited as a fact, yes, but a myth is a fact of an abstract thought which is just as potent and perhaps even more potent than the actuality. And this he clearly brought forth in showing the impact of this particular Frontier upon American thought in his various aspects. You've made the Frontier's fact your special study, haven't you? Yes, I have, although certainly you

cannot study the Frontier's fact without recognizing the other and paying the great deal of attention to this. Well, now what are the facts of the Frontier's fact? Well, certainly the individual differs. The romantic hunter. The romantic hunter is an individual we had scarcely wished to entertain in our homes today, I am sure. He was usually a most uncouth, ill -mannered person. The fur trappers of the Rocky Mountain Country, the Mounted Man, for example. They were brutal individuals. They were bloodthirsty men. They had no moral values whatsoever for the most part. Their manners were bad. They, well for example, they never took off their clothes in one year's end of the other, except occasionally when passing an ant hill, they would take them off and put their clothes on the ant hill to allow the ants to eat the vermin out of their clothes, you see. They were not those persons of the sort that you and I would like to know hard, I am sure. A glamorous, though they may have appeared in the image of the Frontier. And similarly, the farmer on the Frontier. He didn't find free

land for the most part, as people thought that he did. He had to buy his land for one of the individual's most present all Frontiers was the land speculated. He got raw, of course. And he got royally rocked for the most part. Recent studies are pretty well demonstrated, for example, at the Homestead Act, which has been glamorized beyond all reason in American history. And it's still well known publicized today. This was publicized partly for political reason issues. Well, actually, about one out of every nine persons went west, west after 1862, obtained land under the Homestead Act. Eight out of nine had to buy land. The good land, you see, the speculators got all the good land. That was near the railroads, that on good rivers, on good town sites. The speculators got all this. And the Homesteader had to take the poorer lands off to one side that nobody else wanted. So there wasn't the free land. There wasn't the escape to the Frontier that was possible in the image picture that we have. And the cowboy, the poor abuse cowboy, of course. He never carried two guns. Why should he go around with an extra

weight? He dressed in a semblance of the clothes that we picture him today in the cinema and films. But for the most part, he was a very hard -working, ordinary individual who spent his life in the most monotonous of all pursuits, riding line, just riding back and forth along the edges of this ranch, which had imaginary boundary lines before the development of fencing, of course, who seldom saw a blonde from one year's end of the next and never had a chance to rescue one. Of course, he was a very prosaic, ordinary, unromantic individual. You're going to ruin the TV industry if you carry off this way very long. I would like to reform the TV industry as far as the Western is concerned. But this is the fact. This is the fact, yes. And now let's find these two together. Let's get to the Frontier thesis. Well, here again, I would think there would have to be two Frontier Theses. You'll pardon this correction. One stemming from the Frontier of Image. This has had a great effect upon American history, and still has a great effect upon American thought down

to the present time, because it was believed, as part of this Frontier myth, that the Frontier was to use the terminology of that day, and since a safety valve, an escape hatch, that any individual, any working man who was dissatisfied with his job in the factory, could move west, find free land, begin life anew, and emerge as a landholder. Now, this, of course, has pretty well been established. It was not the case that individuals did not have the inclinations, the skills, the capital, to make this transition from urban worker to farmer. And so, the Frontier did not actually serve as an actual immediate safety valve to allow people to move west in this way. But the important thing, as you see, that people felt all through the 19th century, the 18th century, even, that the Frontier was a safety valve. And whenever we had a depression, we had Horace Greeley's saying, go west young man, go out to the Frontier, begin life anew. And as long as America felt this, as long as the American people felt this, you see,

we did not have any class feeling developing in this country. There was no need for any classes, no need for any division between capital and labor, because labor never had to be labor. Labor could go west and become capital by taking out a fire. And so, I think this has had a very important effect upon our whole political and social philosophy, this image of the Frontier that existed. Now, shall I go on with the actual Frontier? This is fine, I don't want to give a lecture, however. No, but this is fine. This is a wonderful corrective to what people get. They get the image more than they get the fact. They get to know that. They get the image all the time. Even such a book as the Henry Nash Smith, the Virgin Land, which is being read now quite widely, still is talking about the image. And people are studying the image, but the fact isn't in there very much. It's a concern with the image naturally. That's right. Well, the theory, the factual theory of the Frontier is a much dollar, of course. This account, I

suppose, is less than a popularity. But I think it is far more important. This Frontier theory, so -called, I might say, was originated by a man named Frederick Jackson Turner, and first enunciated in 1893. On a very important paper, read here in Chicago, in connection with the Colombian Exposition, a paper entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, which is still reprinted, still read very widely today, and should be, because it is one of the most important and significant interpretations of our history. Oh, it's set off in an explosion. Well, not a slow moving issue. Sorry, slow moving, but it has been utilized as a framework of ordering materials by more teachers than anything I can enjoy. That's right. It has been. Now, Turner maintained that the uniqueness of our civilization was due partly to the fact that we had had a Frontier background, while other peoples in Europe had not. That for 300 years, between 1607 and the first Anglo -American settlement was established at Jamestown, and the end of the 19th century, when

the Frontier was so -called officially closed, in that 300 years, life began over and over again in America. In this process of rebirth, certain things were left behind, certain cultural baggage, as Turner put it, was discarded. Individuals going to the Frontier found in an environment where the past practices and past institutions and past thought no longer could be applied. They found a primitive society where a complex governmental structure, such as we have in a city of today, was singularly out of place, you see. They found a social situation in which the complex past times that we indulge could no longer be indulged. They found a situation where a division of labor was impossible, where each individual had to perform the primal tasks necessary to maintain himself and his family. They found a situation in which cultural activities were unimportant because of the vast emphasis upon the material tasks that had to be performed. The hardest work in the world, of course, was frontier, was subduing a wilderness or a plains. And so

their life changed, their life altered. And then gradually, of course, they climbed back to civilization as more people came in. But in this process of rebirth, things have been changed somewhat, things have been altered. And as a result of this, according to Frontier theory, a certain of our institutions, certain of our traits, that are peculiarly American, were either originated or accentuated and largely the latter, through this Frontiering experience. And as a result, we are, for example, a wasteful people. The Frontierism was a wasteful person all around him with the boundaries of nature, a so vast, so multitudinous that he couldn't think of there being exhausted. So he chopped down the fine hardwoods indiscriminately. We're still a wasteful people, you know how our economy is built upon. But there's the image, there's our image of ourselves, and that's the fact. That's the fact. That's the fact. And an image at the same time. And for instance, this production for obsolescent production. Quite. Building obsolescence. This part goes back to the Frontier. This part, and he goes back

to the Frontier. It doesn't strange where he is. But all right, that's one thing. That's one, well take another one. Our social mobility, which I mentioned before. Yes, yes. This was actual. That's the actual. After all, our ancestors did move. I mean, my grandfather moved from Lee, Massachusetts. Well now we're talking about physical mobility. All right, physical mobility. Physical mobility is another point. It moves into, if you have physical mobility, you're going to have some social mobility. Yes, that's right. They go together. And certainly the physical mobility is a very important. Today, two out of five of us move every year. Yes. This is something in comprehensive. I've asked European audiences in England and Austria and France. How often do you move? Were you born in the house in which your father was born? Your grandfather was born? And the majority will say yes. You asked an American audience this? No. I did it this summer. At your school in Northwestern, I said to this class, how many of you live in the house from which you were born in the fact? Only one out of 30. Yes. And that was a high percentage. I said a French class would have been 90%. Yes. Yes. Except where a war has this right now. That's the only case of

the war. Yes. I have a French son -in -law whose family has lived in one house for 400 years in the town of Alsace. Now this is more or less typical. Yes. And now mobility is a second time. Mobility is a second time. Our individualism. Yes. Our dislike of governmental or social interference in our affairs. Now, we're not an individualistic people as far as certain pressures are concerned. In styles, for example, we're sheep compared with the French. All right, but the French are individualists too. Now, what's the difference between American individualism and French? The difference is that the American dislikes particularly governmental interference in his affairs. The Frenchman does too to a certain degree. Yes, he doesn't do. But as we compare us with the English, it's a much better example because our civilization is basically English. And certainly, don't let me imply hard that the frontier is the sole force in America. No, no, no. The racial background is equally important. That's right. Immigration, industrialization, there are various other things as to earn a record. No, a tremendously complex thing. Yes. Well, another

facet of this whole situation is our materialism. Yes. The contrast between the emphasis on the arts in America and in other countries of the world is indeed tremendous, I find. And I think this is partly due, again, to this atmosphere on the frontier where material tasks were so all -consuming, so all -important. But, now here's the paradox of all of this. I insist on this, Mary McCarthy made this point years ago. We are the most idealistic people probably in the world, and the most unmaterial in a certain sense, in that the end is not the material. We material, we have it, we do a lot with it, but we discard it so fast. We don't preserve it and hoard it like a miser the way the Frenchman will keep a refrigerator for 400 years. Yes, we don't. Well, now that's a curious paradox. And don't you think that this also is typical of the frontier? Yes. The frontierism was a materialist in the immediate tasks, but he dreamed all of it. Now, our optimism is, again, a trait, which is partly a part of the frontier background. The frontierism lived under miserable conditions after

all the frontier of reality. He had to be an optimist, nor had to tell us to throw. He had come from an unpleasant background, or he wouldn't have been at the frontier. That's right. He had an unpleasant present, carving this civilization out of a wilderness. The only thing he had to look forward to was the future. And one of the things that's most striking about the frontier, as you... I've been reading recently, Traveler's accounts. I've read several hundred accounts of travelers who travel in frontier areas. One of the things they always emphasize is this eagerness for culture. The frontierism didn't have it, but he was willing to subscribe to any cultural activity that came along immediately. The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... The most powerful... the

most powerful... of the most powerful... From the cinema to nature... who were literate were avid readers, and readers not of popular literature, but of the best of literature. Jedediah Strong Smith, for example, who was too little known in American history, he was a far greater frontiersman than Daniel Boone or David Crockett, or most of those who received the claim. Jedediah Smith was an avid reader who had a library consisting of the Bible, the works who Shakespeare, various commentaries upon the Bible, who read widely throughout his lifetime. And even the more illiterate, even the complete believer, Jim Bridger, was never happier than when someone was reading Shakespeare to him. In other words, this bread -hard story is not so much just an imaginative thing, it has some basis in reality where they're

gathered around the campfire and they talk about ash hills, the killies, and so on, they're really interested in these in the cultural. They used to have the mountain men used to gather in winter camp when the trapping season had ended. And one of them called this the Rocky Mountain College, because he learned so much talking with his fellow trappers, just sitting around all around a campfire all winter long in the Rocky Mountain. Would you like that a tape recorder and one of those sessions? Wouldn't this be a value of all my, for every purpose in the world? Now really, we're talking about the two frontiers, the frontier of image and the frontier of fact, and yet there is some kind of dialectic going on here, I mean that the one is different from the other, but the other is in the one somehow. They merge together and it's impossible to separate them in a popular mind or in the mind of scholarship. It seems to me. It is one of those difficult ones in which I'm struggling for the next three or four years because I'm writing a book on frontier theory, it's going to be one that's going to be very difficult to do in being able to think so, as a matter of the greatest tack here. Well, what line are you going to,

how do you go ahead now, you've done so much factual research, what is your research doing, you're reading these travers accounts for one thing and so on. There's much more factual research to be done. Yeah, that's fine. Yes, yes, yes. Oh, what got you interested in the frontier, was it working at Wisconsin? It was working at Wisconsin with Frederick Logan Paxson, who followed Turner in Professor of History there. He was working at Harvard with Frederick Merck, who continued this tradition and with various friends. I don't know. Why do you get interested in anything? I don't know. You seem to be born with a particular authority. That's right. I'm interested also, I think, because the frontier is a very important force in our lives. And one that's too little understood, and I feel a certain missionary zeal. I'm glad you say this, because I've had the impression that the factual front terrorists put this use a bad phrase where slightly contemptuous of the literary people or the image people who regard it as sentimentally and without the

careful checking as a force, but even the fact it's a force. As a fact it's a force. And this brings, of course, to the closing of the frontier. And the effect that this has had upon us since this time, the frontier was dramatically closed. The director of the census announced in 1890 that an unbroken frontier and all longer existed. You can no longer draw a line across a map and say, here is settlement, here is wilderness. This was not the case, of course. Here we come into the image picture again. Oh, it wasn't the case. More land was settled after 1890, under the Homestead Act, than it had been settled to 1890. Really? Yes. Yes. So the frontier did not suddenly come to an end at that time by any means. But American people thought that it did. And we had a period of your panic, mildly expressed, but individuals like Theodore Roosevelt, like James Hill, the President of the Great Northern, prophesied that within 25 years we would face starvation, a singularly ironic

statement and view of the agricultural surpluses of today, but that we would face starvation, you see, because no more land would be available to grow the crops necessary for our expanding population. Then as the conservation movement was a product of this, of course, to begin to conserve our natural resources. And a product of this also was Theodore Roosevelt's new nationalism, to attempt to allow the government to move in and provide some of the security that a frontier had provided in the past. And this was continued, of course, by Wilson and by Franklin Galino Roosevelt. This whole frontier philosophy, again, partly growing out of the image of the frontier, but has affected our governmental thinking greatly in the present century. And I feel too that this is important, Howard, because I think that some of our difficulties in dealing with our overseas allies today is due to the fact that we do not recognize and they do not recognize that we're in different people than they are, that we have had a different background, this frontier background, in fact, in fiction. And they expect us to behave as they

do, we expect them to behave as we do, and this is impossible, because of these different backgrounds. The very way we walk is different from where Frenchmen or Englishmen walk. In general, this is a strong generalization, but it's true, isn't it? I never could understand this, Howard. I live for a year in England, teaching at Oxford University. And by the end of that year, I was completely clothed in English clothes. I had an English car. I would drive to the railroad station at Oxford by a ticket, where the ticket color could just hear my accent, and of course that is a giveaway. But I would get on a train, settle myself in a compartment, thoroughly dressed in English, add to English shoes, open an English detective story. And the person next to me would say, yeah, ain't, couldn't you? Now, how they know, I do not know, but they must have had this experience. Yes, oh yes, yes. I was in Paris just the other day, and sure enough, I thought I was acting in offense, not saying anything, my accent gives me a way, yes. But somebody came up and tried to sell me some pictures, and so on, the usual thing they do to an

American. Change, Franks. Change, Franks, exactly. And what is it? My clothes are, in fact, the suit I was wearing, as you say, has been made in Paris. Yes, yes. They, maybe it is the way we walk. Well, it's a minor point, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, something deeper. We are, we are different people than we are. And if we can understand this and translate this into our foreign policies and our dealings with people throughout the world, which we must in a shrinking world. All right, well, this difference, let's take one or two important differences that do affect our foreign policy. For instance, our openness, and let's, let's use a word, which is a little bit delicate, a generosity, because I think there is a real generosity. After all, generosity has its always its drawbacks, but we are. And people don't understand generosity. And we are puzzled if they don't understand. That is a very good point. That's a very good point. Although, how would put a point do here? I think the only pros, the only thing you do is a process of education. So that we can recognize differences. So we can convince them that we are being generous. We are being generous. Without all kind of folks and so on. That's right. Without strings attached. Yes. Another, another problem that we face today, I think is our

idea of mission, our sense of mission. So the history of the United States, we have been the country that was reforming the world, because the world was moving in our direction toward democracy. And we developed a tremendous sense of mission, which was partly frontier -rooted, because the frontier was an area where democratic impulses were stimulated. And so we could go to Hungary, as we did, in the 1850s, and stimulate a revolt there, and applaud this revolt, because this was a democratic revolt. We had the peoples of the world upon our side. Now, I'm not so sure that they want this mission performed anymore. The times are changing. Now, I'm afraid that many of the peoples of the world and all along are on our side. Well, many of the governments are. It's been a reverse, you see. It's hard to say just why, too. It's hard to say just why. It's, I hope, temporary, because I do think that we have a system frontier -based in part that is beneficial to peoples everywhere. But we must recognize that our brand of democracy is an American

brand of democracy, and not an English or a French or a German or any other brand of democracy. The total, of course, recognized. The total, of course, recognized. And the more acute travelers, Lord Bryce recognized, the more acute travelers throughout our history have come here, recognized this contrast, and have always said the frontier was partly responsible. Lord Bryce said the west is the most American part of America. Yes. Well, I'm convinced of a dead and disboken belief this. Dennis Brogan believes this also, yes, yes, and he says the same thing, and he's a very effective writer, and one that American should be encouraged to read, because Max Lerner says this in his recent analysis of American civilization. Max Lerner diverts a great deal of that book to the frontier background of American thought, as did Dennis Brogan, and his big west of noon was it this? Yes. I believe that was a title. Well, then it's an educational problem, we've got to educate the world. You're arguing for U .S .I .S. here, and so on. I am arguing for U .S .I .S. I think that our State Department is doing a magnificent job with us, America

Houses, and other means of education abroad. And I know the America House in Cologne happens to be presided over by a former student of mine who knows the frontier theory very well, and I'm sure he's infecting the Cologne people with this. I'll put in a private word here. I was trying to put a library in Paris, U .S .I .S. library in Paris, and the job that was done in that library, just by having it there, being there, not pushing and hammering them on the head, but letting them have was incredible. And Americans don't appreciate what's being done that way, I think they're very blind on this. I agree. And among the things that was fun to introduce as a frontier, well, we've only scratched, we haven't even spelled out the word. We haven't even spelled out the word yet. But Ray Billinger, it's very good of you to come down and talk about this, and I hope that now that we've at least cracked the ice slightly, you'll come in again, and we'll talk a little bit further. I'll be happy to. I'll be happy to. This has been Ray Billington, the Northwestern University, talking about the frontier, American frontier, in fact, and fiction. Thank you.