The United States began as a group of
colonies launched by people from a series of countries – England, of course,
but also Ireland the central European region of Germany, which until 1870
lacked political or geographic continuity even as it had a cohesive regional culture. The U.S. became a nation with the
Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was formally recognized as a state in
1783, when its territorial boundaries were drawn as part of the Treaty of
Paris. We think of the “nation” part of this equation as stable, largely
because the U.S. has been a republic governed by a Constitution since 1789.
(Before that it was more a federation of states.) But even that was tenuous;
until the Civil War, people spoke of the U.S. as plural – “these United States”
– rather than singular. Many foreigners, perhaps reflecting their own
experiences, still do, referring to the U.S. as “the states.”
For a long time, the most obvious
feature of the United States was its shifting frontier boundary. Indeed, a
century ago a lot of people thought this was the most significant thing about
it. A big part of the reason why was a gifted historian by the name of
Frederick Jackson Turner, who in an 1893 delivered a speech at an American
Historical Association conference in Chicago that distilled his (and a lot of
other people’s) thinking into a single sentence: "The
existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of
American settlement westward, explain American development."
Here
in the 21st century, it may be hard to appreciate just how unusual
an assertion this really was. Turner, born in 1861 was a native of Wisconsin –
which is to say he was from the edge of the American world – got his doctorate
(among the first people to ever get one) at Johns Hopkins, where he was taught the
then-dominant "germ" theory, which argued that western civilization
owed its origins to the forests of Germany, out of which emerged a Teutonic
seed that brought down the Roman empire, spread across western Europe, jumped
to America, and now dominated the world. Like so much academic thought of the
time, this approach to history was modeled on science, both in its emphasis on primary
source research and its use of a biological model—more specifically a (Social)
Darwinian model—to explain historical change.
Turner embraced a process-driven
approach to History—colleagues and students remember him as an obsessive
collector of data and maps—and he too embraced scientific ideas. But when it
came to evolution, Turner was decidedly on the environmental side of the
Darwinian equation: he was fascinated not by the fixed, but rather the
adaptable. The frontier was a place that did
something to people, he said: it made them Americans. Which is to say it turned
them into something new. And that's because they had lots of room to evolve
through a renewable cycle. First would come the scouts, who explored a new
region, wrangling with the natives as necessary. They would be followed traders (think furs), and then
farmers, and tradesmen. Once an area got settled, a new wave of scouts would
push west, and the whole process would repeat in a new location. The process
continued until 1890, Turner said, by which point the frontier as Americans had
known it had disappeared. (They would have to come up with new frontiers, like
a space program.)
Over
the course the next fifty years or so, the Turner Thesis became common sense. Textbooks
at the time gave more space to western expansion than they do today, describing
the settlement of places like Tennessee and Arkansas. Even a historian like
Charles Beard, who in fact was skeptical of Turner’s ideas and had his own
about that nature of American history (one rooted in class conflict) still gave
a chapter to the rise of new states in his classic 1927 book The Rise of American Civilization. These
days, when textbooks do talk about
western expansion, they almost always mention that the addition of new states,
whose voting rules opened them up to mass participation (at least for white
men) pressured older states to follow suit.
But
in the second half of the century the Turner thesis came under increasing
attack. Some scholars questioned Turner's data, others his findings, especially
his assertions that the frontier was the engine of U.S. democracy. The most
serious challenge came from those historians, notably the modern historian Patricia
Limerick, who rejected the assumptions underlying the very idea of the frontier
and Turner’s tendency to describe land as "empty" when he really
meant it didn’t have white people on it. To Limerick, Turnerism was little more
than a racist fantasy, at one point joking that for her and like-minded
scholars the frontier had become “the f-word.”
Besides, there were other things –
immigration, industrialization, efforts for social reform in ways that ranged
from votes for women to rights for workers – that seemed more obvious in terms
of determining the real boundaries of
the United States. Whatever considerable regional or political differences
remained in the nation in the decades following the Civil War, it still seemed
to be inexorably stitching together. Nothing did a better job of this than the
World Wars, which promoted mass migration (especially black people to Northern
cities), the growth of industry in previously remote areas (like Los Angeles,
but also places like Nevada and New Mexico), and a sense of national identity
in combating the challengers like Communists or Nazis across the globe. Never
before or since was the federal – which is to say, national, or central –
government stronger.
But I want you to pay attention to that
word “federal,” which I’m actually using for the first time in this
conversation. It’s a word that has a lot of different meanings, but at the
heart of all of them is some kind of alliance or partnership among a set of
entities. In the U.S., as in many nations, there are subdivisions in the form
of provinces, or in our case, fifty states, each of which has a measure of
political autonomy. Those states, in turn, are subdivided into counties,
cities, villages.
But there is another kind of geographic
unit in the United States that doesn’t often make it onto maps, even though it
might help explain ourselves to ourselves better than most maps do. This unit
is closer to the concept of country than it is nation or state, because it
reflects a set of attitudes and practices of large sets of people independent
of whatever political system happens to be in place, or wherever state or
municipal boundaries that happen to be drawn. Unlike some places where
country/nation/state may once have been aligned, these never managed to gain
recognition as discrete entities in North America. We know them as “regions” or
“sections,” and give them names like “New England,” “the Midwest,” and “the
South.”
