FIGHT SONG: Four American Narratives Converge in College Football

By Peter Woan

Every nation’s past is prologue to its present, and every nation’s story unfolds in its own way. In this book, a native Englishman and long-time resident of the United States, proposes four defining narratives that have helped fashion the nation’s progression toward “becoming America.”

• westward expansion, and a fascination for the moving frontier;
• hunger for land, reflected in national expansion through nineteenth-century geopolitical acquisitions, and the desire of individual Americans to grab their own piece of territory, leading to the iconic Homestead Act of 1862;
• the land-grant college movement, culminating in Justin Morrill’s 1862 landmark legislation, representing a shift away from higher education dominated by religious imperatives to a more secular model, with significant state sponsorship;
• the GI Bill of Rights, enacted in 1944 for servicemen and women returning from WW II, and which provided (among other benefits) a free college education for millions of veterans.

These four themes are brought together through the uniquely American phenomenon of college football.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Feb 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665744799

Peter Woan

Peter Woan was born and educated in England and has lived in America since 1982. A former resident of Atlanta, he now lives in Chicago. He is married to Rebecca, and they have two children.

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Copyright © 2023 Peter Woan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-4480-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4478-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-4479-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023921674

Archway Publishing rev. date: 3/13/2024

To Sophie and Cameron

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

List of Tables and Charts

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I: The Great Frontier and the Westward Movement

Introduction to Part I

Chapter 1: The Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner and Its Checkered History

• A Conference Paper Launches a Thesis

• Turner’s Paper: Summary and Sources

• American Historiography before Turner

• Reaction and Discussion

• Assault of the Heretics: New Western Historians

• Turnerians Strike Back

• Thesis Ructions: Reflection

Chapter 2: A Post-Frontier America

• The End of the Frontier: Anxiety and Nostalgia

• A Search for New Frontiers: External

• Postscript: The Great War and Geopolitical Aftermath

• A Search for New Frontiers: Internal

• The Frontier: Still with Us (see Illustration 4.)

Symposium: Huntington Library, February 2012

• Borderlands: A Reinvigorated Approach to the Clash of Cultures

• Borderlands: An Afterword

• Coda: Old and New Western History Clash at the Smithsonian

• Epilogue to Part I: The Great Frontier and Its Thesis—an Appraisal

Part II: Land Hunger; America Expands Its Borders and Legislates for the Public Domain

Introduction to Part II

Chapter 3: The Geopolitical Expansionist Imperative

• Prologue: America Wins the Revolutionary War—England in Denial

• The Spoils of War: The Paris Peace Treaty, 1783; America Digs In

• The Paris Peace Treaty: Comment

• The Louisiana Purchase, 1803

• The Floridas Fall: 1810–1819

• The Floridas: Comment

• Texas: Independence, then Annexation

Adios España, Adios Mexico—Hello America!

• Sidebar: American Exceptionalism

• War with Mexico

• War and Peace: 1846–1848

• Trist’s Settlement: The Treaty of Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo

• The Mexican War: Comment

• The Gadsden Purchase of 1854: Footnote or Flash Point?

• The Oregon Treaty, 1846

A Shared Oregon Country Becomes American Oregon Territory

• 1867: Alaska Joins the Party

• Footnote: Southeast Alaska

• American Continental Expansion: Review

• Afterword

• Coda: Oh Canada!—One Annexation Too Far?

Background

• Visions of Canada in Early America

• The American Civil War: Now It’s Serious

• Fin de Siècle Dreams–Hallucinations?

Chapter 4: Disposing of the Domain: American Land Policy to 1862

• Prologue: Land in Medieval England

• Colonial Land Policy 1763–1776

• From Wartime Land Bounties to Peacetime Land Cessions

• The Public Domain After Independence—It’s the USA now, pal

• American Land Policy 1: From 1783 to 1795

• American Land Policy 2: Groping for Stability 1796–1820

• Reader Time-Out: Pause for Review and Reflection

• American Land Policy 3: Preemption—the Elephant in the Room

Toward Universal Preemption

Claims Clubs

Preemption Nears a Solution

• American Land Policy 4: A Dream of Free Land—the Road to the Homestead Act

Free Land Begins to Gain Traction

Congressional Movement toward a Homestead Act

• A New Order: The Election of Abraham Lincoln, 1860

Secession of the South; Republicans Control Government

• American Land Policy 5: The Thirty-Seventh Congress Passes the Homestead Act, 1862

Key Provisions of the 1862 Homestead Act

• Follow-Up Land Legislation

• Commentators Assess the 1862 Homestead Act

• The Homestead Act: A Fresh Look

• Land Hunger: Afterword

• Postscript: The Closing of the Public Domain

• The Arc of the Homestead Movement: Reflection

Chapter 5: Plotting the Domain; Surveying, Surveys, Surveyors

• Introduction

• Measuring and Quantifying Norman England

The Domesday Book

Metes and Bounds (see Illustration 11.)

Gunter’s Measuring Chain (see Illustration 12.)

• Land Measuring after Independence

The Land Ordinance of 1785

A New Methodology: Rectangular Survey System

The Public Land Survey System (PLSS)

• Pioneer Surveyors and Their Challenges

The Mason-Dixon Line: Survey Interrupted

Trouble in Texas

• Plotting the Domain: Summary

Chapter 6: To Be a Homesteader; Life on the Settler Frontier

• Elizabeth Corey—Bachelor Bess: Letters from a Homesteader

• Rachel Calof: A Russian Exiled in North Dakota

• Elinore Pruitt Rupert Stewart: Ranching on the Wyoming Frontier

• Laura Ingalls Wilder: Legendary and Controversial Storyteller

• Mari Sandoz: Child on the Nebraska Frontier

• Pioneering Stories from Custer County, Nebraska

• Willa Cather: Literary Homage to the Land

• To Be a Homesteader: Afterword

• Resources

Part III: The 1862 Morrill Act; Land-Grant College Revolution

Introduction to Part III

• Preamble

Chapter 7: Higher Education from Colonial Origins to Rebellion

• Doomed Pioneer: The Sad Story of Henrico College

• Durability Arrives: the Pre-Revolutionary Nine

Chapter 8: From Independence to Civil War: The Extraordinary Antebellum College Movement

• Counting the Colleges

• The Founding Determinants

• Case Study Success No. 1: Rollins College, Florida

• Case Study Success No. 2: Knox College, Illinois

• Case Study Failure: Lombard College, Illinois

• A Guide to Antebellum College Survival or Failure

An Aside: Twenty-First Century College Survival

Chapter 9: The Morrill Land-Grant College Act, 1862

• State Universities before Morrill

• Land-Grant Colleges: Birth of an Idea

• Success, Frustration, then Victory

• The 1862 Morrill Act

• Coda: Nineteenth- Century Federal Land Grants

Military Veterans

Railroad Companies

Land Grants for Education

The Homestead Act

Summary of Nineteenth-Century Land Donations

Chapter 10: Morrill ’62—The Immediate Aftermath

• The States Respond

What if they built an agricultural and mechanical college, and nobody came?

• Farmer Suspicion and Antipathy

• Organized Resistance: the Grange and the Populists

The Grange

The Populist Party: Early Activism

• Problems with Scrip

• Ezra Cornell—the Sultan of Scrip?

• The Immediate Aftermath: Comment

Chapter 11: Morrill ’62 Sequels

• The Hatch Act, 1887: Experiments and Research

• Morrill No. 2: the 1890 Act

• Racial Balancing under the 1890 Morrill Act

• The Smith-Lever Act of 1914: Extension Services

• Force or Footnote?—Religious Colleges Post-Morrill ’62

• Morrill Sequels: Comment

Chapter 12: A Watershed for Higher Education—Review and Reflection

• Higher Education Before and After Morrill: a Summary

Pre-Morrill ’62

Post-Morrill ’62

• Historians on the Morrill Act of 1862

• Between the World Wars: Growth, Focus, Aspiration

• The Long Road from Henrico College to Morrill: Reflection

• Postscript: Land-Grant Colleges in the Twenty-First Century

Part IV: College for the Veterans: the GI Bill of 1944

Introduction to Part IV

Chapter 13: Origins and Antecedents

• Armistice: World War I Ends

• The Challenge of Demobilization

America’s Demobilization Experience before WWI

Britain’s WWI Demobilization: Fumble, then Recovery

American WWI Demobilization: Uncle Sam Tackles the Problem

• The Boys Are (Finally) Coming Home—What Should We Do for Them?

The Bonus Plan

The Bonus March

• Demobilization after World War II: Lessons Learned; Planning Begins Early

Chapter 14: The Story of the GI Bill

• Planning for Peace

• The Birth of the GI Bill

• Prelude to the GI Bill: Mustering-Out Pay

• The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944: the GI Bill of Rights

Provisions

• Coda: Public Law 79-268

Chapter 15: The Great Unknown; Veterans Invade the Campuses

• How Many Vets Will Use the Bill?

Enrollment Numbers by Year

Comments on the enrollment data

• Where Did the Vets Enroll?

• Facilities Are Strained: Quonsets in the Quad? Diapers in the Dorm?

• A New Normal for College Life?

• What Did They Study?

• The GIs Are in Class—How Are They Performing?

• Religious Barriers Start to Dissolve

• How Many Went Solely Because of the Bill?

• Veterans Invade the Campuses: Summary

Chapter 16: The GI Bill: Caveats and Criticism

• Women and College; Women and the GI Bill

• Schools for Scandal: Fraud and Abuses

• African Americans and the GI Bill

The Military Background

The GI Bill: Promise and Disappointment

African Americans and the GI Bill: Comment

Chapter 17: The GI Bill—An Assessment

Part V: Fight Song: Pulling the Parts Together

Introduction to Part V

Chapter 18: The Visceral Appeal of College Football

• Origins

• The American College and Football: A Perfect Union

• Legions of the Fall: The Stakeholder Faithful

Chapter 19: More than a Game

• Cultural Texts: Clifford Geertz and the Balinese Cockfight

• Learning from Geertz: Football as Cultural Text

• College Football as Allegorical Text

The Line of Scrimmage and the Frontier

Territory and Field Position—Land Hunger

Measuring the Progress; Surveying the Domain

• Confluence: Bringing It Together—Game Day

Chapter 20: Looking for America

Epilogue: A New Frontier

About the Author

Bibliography

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.American Progress. John Gast, painting, 1872.

2.Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.Emanuel Leutze, mural, 1861–1862.

3.Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. Frances Flora Bond Palmer.

4.Original cartoon from The New Yorker magazine, 2021.

5.Uncle Sam’s Temptation. Original cartoon by Clifford K. Berryman, published in the Washington Post, June 26, 1898.

6.Whither? Original cartoon by Clifford K. Berryman, published in the Washington Post, July 13, 1898.

7.Uncle Sam: Too late my boys, I’ve already expanded. Original cartoon by Clifford K. Berryman, published in the Washington Post, September 14, 1899.

8.Lesson for Anti Expansionists. Original cartoon by Victor Gillam, 1899.

9.Life on the Settler Frontier (1): the Sod House (soddie).

10.Life on the Settler Frontier (2): Sod house and new house.

11.Plotting the Domain: A Georgia plat of survey from 1784 (doodle plat).

12.Photograph of Gunter’s chain at the Smithsonian Institution.

13.Morrill Hall, Cornell University, around 1868.

14.Justin S. Morrill commemorative fifty-five–cent postage stamp, issued 1999.

15.Land-Grant Fresco, Penn State University.

16.Research Bulletin No. 56, January 1898, South Dakota Agricultural College Experiment Station.

17.Breaking Home Ties. Norman Rockwell, painting, 1954.

18.Bonus Army Marchers at the Capitol, 1932: Optimism & Patriotism.

19.Defeat & Dispersal: The Bonus Army Is Routed.

20.President Roosevelt signs the GI Bill, June 22, 1944.

21.Indiana veterans after enrolling as students under the GI Bill.

22.Billboard in Columbus, Ohio, appealing for help with accommodating GI Bill student-veterans at the Ohio State University.

23.Vetsburg: the GI Bill housing solution at Cornell University.

24.The GI Bill housing solution at Northwestern University.

25.The GI Bill housing solution at Northwestern University—idealized.

26.A GI Bill family at Cornell University.

27.A GI Bill family at Northwestern University

28.College football (1): the line of scrimmage and the Turnerian frontier.

29.College football (2): Post-play chaos and the revisionist borderlands concept.

30.College football (3): the football chain team at work.

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. American territory following the Treaty of Paris, 1783

Map 2. American territory following the Louisiana Purchase, 1803

Map 3. After the Floridas fall; American territory at the end of 1819

Map 4. The Republic of Texas is annexed by the USA, 1845

Map 5. American territorial gains from the war with Mexico, 1848

Map 6. Some territorial tidying up, 1850–1853

Map 7. Oregon Country after the Oregon Treaty, 1846

Map 8. The Alaska Purchase, 1867

Map 9. British North America on the eve of revolution, 1774

LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS

Table 1. Summary of major land measures for the sale of public lands, 1785–1820.

Table 2. The First Nine Colleges.

Table 3. Occupations of Harvard Parents, 1677–1703.

Table 4. Ohio denominational colleges, founded before 1850.

Table 5. College foundings and failings by denomination, 1800–1860, per Colin Burke.

Table 6. The Florida Congregationalist College sweepstakes, 1885.

Table 7. State universities formed before the 1862 Morrill Act.

Table 8. Military land bounties granted, 1812–1855.

Table 9. Total nineteenth-century American land donation acreage.

Table 10. Total GI Bill Educational Title II participation, by category.

Table 11. Total student enrollment, showing veteran numbers, 1939–54.

Table 12. Veteran enrollment by public/private institutions, 1948.

Table 13. Alabama student enrollment, 1948.

Table 14. Georgia student enrollment, 1948.

Table 15. Kentucky student enrollment, 1948.

Table 16. Ohio student enrollment, 1948.

Table 17. Biarritz University course selection, 1945.

Table 18. Wisconsin college selections by veteran/nonveteran, 1949.

Table 19. Total college enrollment data, split male/female, 1929–30 and 1939–1946.

Table 20. Total college enrollment data, split male/female, fall 1946–fall 1949.

Table 21. Total college enrollment data, split male/female, fall 1950–fall 1952.

Table 22. Total student enrollment at Negro institutions, split by veterans/nonveterans, 1946 and 1947.

Chart 1. Total student enrollment, showing veteran numbers.

Chart 2. Total student enrollment, split male/female, 1929, then 1939–1952.

PREFACE

I arrived in America in September 1982, initially to spend twelve months working with the US correspondent company of my London firm. Until I could find a place to live, I stayed at what was then the Terrace Garden Inn at Lennox Mall, Atlanta. On my first Saturday there, I went down to the lobby, which was crowded with people decked in red. I asked a porter what was going on, and he told me they were Alabama fans, here for the game against Georgia Tech. It was only on seeing the game reported later on local television that I learned that instead of a few hundred fans (as I had imagined), there were tens of thousands. In an era long before the internet, my understanding of America had been gleaned mostly from popular culture, the occasional news item in the media, and Alistair Cooke’s weekly fifteen-minute broadcast of Letter from America on BBC radio. That evening, after seeing the Georgia Tech stadium packed with fans from both colleges, I realized—not for the last time—how little I really knew about the USA.

That twelve-month stay turned into two years, which then became more permanent. But even though now a resident, I continued to observe America as an outsider, looking to better understand my adopted country; those observations form the basis for this book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a group, the members of the university archive departments I contacted were, without exception, extremely helpful. These were, at Cornell University: Evan Fay Earle, Laura Miriam Linke, Eisha Neely, Grace Bichler; at the Georgia Archives: Allison Hudgins; at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library: Jodie Mattos; at Indiana University: Bradley D. Cook; at Northwestern University: Kevin B. Leonard; at the Ohio State University: Michelle Drobik; at Penn State University: Ben Goldman, Alex Bainbridge; at South Dakota State University: Michael Biondo, Michele Christian. Not part of the university archives but just as helpful was Brian Hennessy of Clemson Athletics.

Thanks also to Marilyn Van Winkle at the Autry Museum of the American West; Alexandra Villaseran at the Center for Legislative Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC; Michelle Kopfer and Ariel Turley at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library; Matthew C. Hanson at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library; Jonathan R. Fairchild at the Homestead National Historical Park; Jonathan Eaker at the Library of Congress, Prints and Photography Division; Bill Lommel at the National Postal Museum; Lindsey Hillgartner at Nebraska History; Stephanie Kurasz at the Smithsonian Institution; and Loren M. Clark at USPS Marketing, Licensing & Creative.

Helping me understand the arcane world of surveying were Marc Cheves, editor, The American Surveyor; Dr. Richard Elgin, PS, PE; and Richard C. Leu, PLS, Chairman, Surveyors Historical Society.

Staff at the Newberry Library in Chicago were helpful, as were the cheerful staff at the Lincoln Park branch of the Chicago Public Library system, which afforded access to the remarkable Interlibrary Loan service that pretty much guaranteed obtaining any book I asked for, wherever it resided in the US. The online digital library known as JSTOR (jstor.org) proved invaluable in accessing a vast array of scholarly journals.

Decades after the fact, I would like to acknowledge the faculty of the History department at the University of York and express belated regret that I failed to fully appreciate or take advantage of their extraordinary scholarship. Among a glittering array of leaders in their field, I will single out Dr Allen Warren, who has kept in touch through the long years. Prior to York, my high school history teacher, Colin Prince, was both a friend and a mentor.

Emma Poland read every word of the early drafts of the manuscript until understandably diverted by motherhood, and her insightful suggestions and edits were invariably adopted. Katie Nieland crafted the maps that illustrate American expansion and constructed the bar charts that help clarify the GI Bill and college enrollment data. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Rebecca, who, throughout this lengthy process, had the tact and grace never to ask me, How’s it going?

INTRODUCTION

All narratives are partial. All succeed by ignoring vast stretches of reality. All distort the world with their selectivity. There are no genuinely totalizing narratives, just narratives that deceive their readers into believing they are such.

—William Cronon¹

Since it achieved independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century, the United States of America has probably been the most closely watched nation on the planet. It has exerted an attraction that has only increased in intensity over time, especially during the twentieth century, when its successful intervention in two world wars—notably the second—proved decisive. The acknowledged leader of the democratic countries of the free world and an economic leviathan—since 1944, its dollar has been the major global reserve currency and the primary international currency²—America remains the country where most would-be migrants wish to relocate.³

As an originator of popular culture—movies, contemporary music, television programs—America is unequalled. The land itself is massive, much of it habitable, and contains areas of outstanding—staggering—natural beauty, as well as abundant sources of raw materials. Its language is English, causing most of the world to learn English as a second language; it is home to the United Nations organization.

What makes a nation and its people distinctive? What particular influences help shape and define a nation as it moves from an amorphous feature of geography to becoming a country? For America, it is a question posed at least as far back as the famous musings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782: What, then, is the American, this new man?⁴

Some fifty years later, Alexis de Tocqueville, French visitor and quintessential observer of American life, did not specifically pose the question but answered it in his legendary Democracy in America, where he assigned much of American mettle to democracy and equality.⁵

In England, where I grew up, a list of formative influences might include the Roman occupation (of nearly four hundred years), the Norman conquest in 1066 (they never left), Magna Carta in 1215, the regicide of King Charles I and the brief interregnum in the seventeenth century, and the spirited refusal to bow to the Nazi threat at the start of the Second World War. A case might be made for the significance of the twenty-six-mile-wide English Channel separating the UK from mainland Europe.⁶ Others will have their own selection.

This book offers some answers to the question of America’s influences, chosen from an outsider’s perspective, suggesting four elements that have significantly contributed to what could loosely be described as the American experience and discussing how they might have helped set the nation apart. The narrative concludes with proposing a fifth.

Two specters hover over any such debate: the first is slavery and the Civil War. Not only is the singular impact of slavery and the war on the course of American history both axiomatic and immense, but that impact has yet to be resolved; it is therefore beyond the scope of this narrative and the abilities of this writer. The African American experience is examined as it coincides with the four major themes, but that is not the central purpose of the book.

Second, the territorial expansion of America, to a great extent, was a zero-sum game involving the existing Indigenous inhabitants, Native American Indian tribes and nations; land appropriated by governmental authorities or private parties was often done so at the expense of the Indians. As with the African American saga, our story will recognize Indigenous interaction as it occurs within the several narratives, but it is another huge subject that is receiving considerable dedicated attention from scholars and so is largely outside the realm of this work.⁷

Here, then, are the author’s first four determining factors, addressed separately in parts one through four of the narrative:

Part I: The Great Frontier and the Westward Movement

The first part discusses the importance of the westward movement of migrants across America, a migration that predated the War of Independence, but which increased dramatically following separation from Britain. It is not the story of westward expansion; that challenge has been attempted a number of times in single and multiple volumes.⁸

Rather, this narrative is about the idea of a moving frontier at the leading edge of that westward progression and what it might mean to Americans. For a large part of America’s existence, few gave much thought to the implications of a frontier; it was just an accepted reality. Everyone knew the frontier was there; everyone knew it held dangers and opportunities, and some decided to take their chances and migrate west, while many dreamed of heading west but never did. The unknowns were basic: can I survive, and will I prosper? Deeper questions about the frontier in the larger context of American history were likely not uppermost in most migrants’ minds.

This changed after 1893, when the idea of the frontier’s significance in American history was famously introduced in a presentation by Frederick Jackson Turner at a gathering of historians during the Chicago World’s Fair. What became known as Turner’s frontier thesis developed into a touchstone for extensive debate, usually—but not always—among academics, attracting support, criticism, and controversy. We examine that so-called thesis and the passionate responses it ignited throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Turner’s paper began and ended with what was then the startling observation that the frontier was now effectively closed, and so part one also considers late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century reactions to a post-frontier America.

Part II: Land Hunger; America Expands Its Borders and Legislates for the Public Domain

Part two is about the importance of and obsession with land. We trace the remarkable post-independence geopolitical territorial expansion of America across the continent that took place during the nineteenth century. It is the story—really a succession of separate but related episodes—of how the United States went from thirteen cash-strapped former colonies hugging the Eastern Seaboard to possessing the entire continent, from the Atlantic Ocean in the East to the Pacific in the West, from Canada in the North to the Mexican border in the south—a border dramatically redrawn in America’s favor following the war with Mexico in 1848.

Concurrent with that progressive enlargement of its national borders was, first, the continual concern of the government with how best to manage and dispose of the vast accreted territory that was known as the public domain, and second, the fervent desire of American citizens to acquire a piece of that land, be it a few dozen acres or several thousand.

The westward movement described in part one was fueled by a passion for and a desire to obtain land; for many pioneering settlers—like frontier, a term now freighted with controversy—it was typically a quest for land to help make a new life for themselves and their families in the opening West. While the traditional, mythic image of the independent and hardy pioneers driving their covered wagons toward the sunset is inadequate as a depiction of the migration and its collateral effects, it is not wholly inaccurate.

The seemingly limitless supply of land was the asset that was used by the government to reward, encourage, incentivize, and provide revenue. How this asset was sold or doled out in grants was a constant source of dispute and discussion among members of Congress. If sold, how much should be sold, to whom, and at what price? If granted, who should receive it, and how much should be given? These questions were debated just as much outside Congress by the press and public.

After years of discourse and disagreement, with a domestic land policy that seemed to be ever-shifting—often reacting defensively to powerful migrant and western influences—the Thirty-Seventh Congress, soon after the start of the Civil War in 1862, passed the Homestead Act that provided for 160 acres of free land for settlers who could satisfy its conditions.

This narrative sees the Homestead Act as the culmination and symbol of the American fascination for land; the actual reach and success of the act has been the subject of debate and controversy, which we will look at, but its status as a landmark in American legislation and part of the American national psyche is generally unquestioned.

Part III: The Morrill Act of 1862: Land-Grant College Revolution

The third element is the Morrill Act of 1862, signed into law by President Lincoln in the same year as the Homestead Act, not entirely coincidentally.

Less well known than the homestead measure, the Morrill Act provided for the creation of public universities that initially would be devoted mainly to agriculture and the mechanical arts [engineering]. They were to be funded by federal grants of public land; hence, their familiar description as land-grant colleges. There was to be at least one in every state.

Education in America had generally been the province of the individual states, and this federal incursion into that field, while not unprecedented, was significantly different in its universal scope. The Morrill Act and the land-grant movement should be viewed within the context of the history of higher education in America, especially the strong sectarian influence, and so that story is related starting from the colonial era.

The genesis of the land-grant movement is discussed, as is the winding, uneven road to its eventual success. The ripples from enactment, with its perhaps surprisingly mixed reception among the farming community; the critical passage of a follow-up second Morrill measure in 1890; and further federal legislation that gave the movement a significant boost are all addressed. This narrative sees the land-grant achievement as a watershed in American higher education, and an assessment is offered.

Those state public education institutions created under the two Morrill Acts, in tandem with previously formed public universities and the larger private colleges, have developed into the core of the American higher education system.

Part IV: College for the Veterans, the GI Bill

This federal legislation enacted at the end World War II, popularly and affectionately known as the GI Bill of Rights, provided (among many other things) the chance of a free college education for eligible returning troops.⁹

It was a massive, inspired, generous, and far-reaching measure that transformed the lives and prospects for servicemen and -women following the end of the war. It was unprecedented and unparalleled; no other nation emerging from that struggle had the resources or probably the desire to take such a step. It was a mid-twentieth century version of the land donations made to American veterans at various times, from the Revolutionary War through the nineteenth century, but much grander. It is suggested here that the acclaim awarded to the GI Bill is largely justified but with some significant reservations.

Like the Homestead and Morrill Acts, the GI Bill did not suddenly materialize, and so its antecedents are traced back to World War I.

If the Morrill Act(s) cracked open the door to democratizing college for the people—and at first, it was no more than a crack—the GI Bill advanced that principle, albeit for a special segment of the population, by providing mostly unconditional federal aid for a college education—and also for a below college education—for the veterans. The bill expanded the accessibility of college, a privilege that previously had been mostly confined to a more select section of Americans, and firmly introduced the notion that going to college was not just desirable but attainable.

We track the measure’s progress from concept to enactment and outline the provisions of its five key titles. The GI Bill would take the American college system into unknown territory; the impact and ramifications are considered.

Not every outcome was positive. Women’s progress in higher education was temporarily hampered; the generosity and latitude of the programs allowed room for widespread fraud; and the African American experience was handicapped by bigotry and prejudice. These three blemishes are examined.

Part V: Fight Song; Pulling the Parts Together

Part five is initially concerned with football. Most American readers need little education on the wildly popular phenomenon of college football. For a dozen or so Saturdays in the fall, then with post-season bowl games and a national championship finale that stretches into January, college football provides a spectacle that grips the attention and emotions of a large section of Americans across the country.

Bound up in the phenomenon are the devoted loyalties and pride of generations of alumni for whom the games and attendant traditions provide an ideal occasion for demonstrating alma mater affiliation. Rippling out from the alumni embrace, the importance and affection is felt in the wider college communities of connected stakeholders.

Statewide allegiance is grounded in more than sentiment: the extension programs developed by the land-grant colleges and boosted by the federal Smith-Lever Act of 1914 meant that the resources and facilities of the land-grant universities were made available as appropriate for state citizens without their having to attend the institution; Extension is discussed in part four.

Football has been the subject of analyses that go beyond seeing it as a mere game. From anthropological studies comes the idea of cultural texts that can reveal unique features of a society—famously in a study of Balinese cockfighting—and we look at how this notion has been adopted and applied to football. Moving on from that concept, we also observe informative allegorical texts connecting back to parts one through four. This leads to a concluding premise of the narrative, which sees college football as a nexus in which the first four premises converge, drawing together those separate strands to form a loose but still coherent synthesis.

College football, in other words, can act as a kind of prism, revealing texts that provide clues to some of the key elements of the American story; they are certainly not the only elements in that story, but they are intrinsic elements, and they are, perhaps above all, American elements.

The narrative ends with a reflection on the American college system as something unique in global higher education and how it has become the fifth core element in our search for an understanding of the USA.

***

Identifying the elements described in parts one through four as key factors in American development is not original. Numerous commentators have made similar observations, either noting them individually or combined together. One author produced a seventy-six-page monograph that almost overlaps this narrative by deeming the Morrill, Homestead, and GI measures, along with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, as evidence of American Singularity.¹⁰

There are, of course, other epoch-making legislations that might reasonably claim a place in this narrative as major formative influences—measures, for example, such as the abolition of slavery, suffrage rights for women, the various Social Security measures, and civil rights acts. However, our feeling is that these landmark statutes were inevitable. Though not arriving as quickly as many would like, all eventually would occur as America moved to put its society on a roughly equal footing with other western democracies.

Inevitability is not the case with the Morrill and Homestead Acts and the GI Bill.

Morrill was a visionary movement enacted despite widespread congressional opposition and an earlier presidential veto; it took decades to justify the faith of its supporters and quiet its doubters.

The Homestead Act was only passed after years of lobbying by the western bloc and advocates in the East. In fact, when the government sale price of some land dropped to as low as twelve and a half cents an acre following the Graduation Act of 1854, some wondered, not unreasonably, if the difference between $20 for a 160-acre plot and $0 (plus filing fees) for a similar-sized tract under the Homestead Act was worth the legislative effort (especially as the Homestead measure came with restrictive conditions).¹¹ But it was passed anyway—also following an earlier presidential veto—and the siren call of free land proved not just a way for millions to become landowners but became a totemic symbol of American opportunity.

For its part, the GI Bill became law largely due to the tireless efforts of the American Legion, guardian of veterans’ interests. Even then, when originally enacted, it limited higher education benefits to those whose education was interrupted; there was nothing inevitable about the universal scope that the amended measure came to provide, thereby achieving its iconic status.

These first four pillars upon which the manuscript is constructed probably deserve to be better understood. The vague, mostly anecdotal awareness of these central themes in America’s history merits a refresher. The concluding assessment of the extensive, distinctive, and generally robust American system of higher education is probably something that many Americans take for granted and which perhaps can be more readily recognized by a distanced observer.

PART 9201.png ONE

THE GREAT FRONTIER

AND THE WESTWARD

MOVEMENT

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

Frontier. To many, it symbolizes the rugged and triumphant process of America’s growth as the nation expanded from the East to the West; to others, it represents a dismal record of devastation inflicted on Indigenous peoples and the environment: the F word.

Whatever one’s viewpoint—including the many shades in between those extremes—the reality of American westward expansion across the continent is indisputable. The importance of that expansion and the subsequent impact and influence on American life is a central part of this book’s narrative, along with the three other factors described in parts two, three, and four.

The outer limits of early European settlement in North America bordered land that appeared vast and mostly vacant but was populated by a significant number of distinct Indigenous tribes, albeit sparsely.

This region was variously described by contemporary British colonizers as the borderland, the boundary line, the back country, or the frontier. As we will see, it is the term frontier that has achieved descriptive dominance.

Until the early nineteenth century, frontier was generally used to mean a military demarcation line, fortified against hostile outsiders: a line to be defended rather than advanced. It was, suggests one historian who has extensively researched the origins and meaning of frontier, only after the War of 1812 against Britain that most Americans began to orient themselves primarily toward the west, although it must not be forgotten that this conceptual reversal was essentially an individual matter.¹²

This individual matter qualification is important, as there were certainly significant numbers of Americans moving west between the time of formal independence in 1782 and the War of 1812. Indeed, colonists were heading across the Appalachian Mountains in search of new lands on which to settle years before the Revolution, and it was partly due to these westward migrations and the trouble they caused with the Indians, that the British rulers issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which aimed at halting that movement (see chapter 4).

The term frontier, then, came to signify the leading, uneven edge of white settlement as it migrated west, away from the original thirteen colonies; no longer a bulwark against hostile outsiders but representing the vanguard of an expanding nation.

This idea of the moving American frontier is today generally accepted as a prominent feature of the nation’s history (the details and implications are more contentious). But it was really in the last decade of the nineteenth century that the notion of a frontier and its importance in American development were crystalized and elevated, following what became an epoch-making statement outlined in an academic paper delivered in Chicago in 1893 by a young historian from Wisconsin, Frederick Jackson Turner.

The story of that delivery has become part of American historiographical folklore. Some readers will be familiar with the story; it is likely that many more are not, and so it bears a brief retelling as a prelude to subsequent analysis.

The term frontier has had a volatile history; its associated connotations, ranging from the noble to the despicable, have rendered its use highly sensitive. This narrative recognizes and addresses some of these controversies, but for ease of reading, the term frontier will be used to broadly indicate the threshold of generally westward expansion by people of European descent. Definitions of the frontier region have been formulated—famously by the US Census Bureau in 1890—and these tend to use population density as a marker. That can cause difficulties, as the Indigenous population may not be included in the calculations.

As a practical matter, if you stood on land claimed by British colonizers and looked to the West, and if there was ahead of you a complete absence of the societal infrastructure that existed behind you in the East, you were probably at the leading edge of the frontier. This was generally how contemporaries saw it; of course, they did not have the word infrastructure (coined in 1927, per Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary) and instead would have tended to use the word civilization, but they would have recognized what is meant by it.

Chapter 1 will consider the launch of the frontier thesis by Fredrick Jackson Turner and its subsequent extended and uneven reception. Turner’s paper cited the US Census Bureau’s startling declaration of 1890 that the frontier was now closed. Chapter 2 will consider the psychological impact of that closing—a closing more notional than actual—and a search for new, alternative frontiers. Part one concludes with an epilogue appraising the frontier thesis.

CHAPTER 1

The Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson

Turner and Its Checkered History

wa.png A Conference Paper Launches a Thesis

On the evening of July 12, 1893, at the Columbian Exposition¹³—popularly called the World’s Fair or the Chicago World’s Fair—a young historian from the University of Wisconsin approached the podium in room 3 at the newly constructed Art Institute of Chicago to present a paper to a meeting of some two hundred historians. The session was part of one of the several Auxiliary Congresses concerning literacy and the arts, intended as intellectual events to complement the less cerebral but generally more appealing attractions at the exposition.¹⁴

This particular gathering was under the banner of a World’s Congress of Historians and Historical Students and was the result of a joint effort between the local expertise of the private Newberry Library and the American Historical Association, which was holding a special meeting of its membership at the fair.

It was getting late, and the historian’s paper was the last of five presented to the audience, and it was likely that some previous talks had run longer than anticipated. July is the height of summer in Chicago, where summers tend to be very hot. For most of the audience, it was the end of a rather long day spent touring the exposition, which, for some, might have included taking in a performance of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, specially put on for the historians.

Anyone who has attended a lengthy conference would understand if some of those in the audience had a hard time staying focused on yet one more lecture.

And anyone who has ever struggled to find history a stimulating and engrossing subject might find some of the preceding lecture topics particularly challenging, such as English Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ages or Early Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin.¹⁵

The young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who would turn thirty-two in November, had worked hard on the paper, and, as was his customary practice, he was still making revisions to the text in the final hours before his presentation; he had taken a pass on Buffalo Bill.

Turner had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1884. He’d stayed on as a postgraduate, receiving his master of arts degree in 1888, and then moved to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to perfect himself in his specialty, as announced by the Board of Regents at Wisconsin.¹⁶ After about a year in Baltimore, he returned to Wisconsin as an assistant professor in the Department of History. So at the time of the Chicago World’s Fair four years later, his career as a professional historian was not exactly lengthy in a field where respect and status generally come with age.

Following delivery of his paper—which he may have cut short out of sympathy for his listeners¹⁷—there were no questions from the audience, always a little dispiriting for public speakers; according to one attendee, the audience reacted with a bored indifference normally shown to a young instructor from a backwater college reading his first professional paper.¹⁸ As Turner made his way back to his hotel room in the warm Chicago night, the nervous excitement that doubtless accompanied his delivery probably gave way to anticlimactic deflation.

There was little indication during or immediately after the meeting that Turner’s short essay would come to upend current American historiography—the study of American history—and that its content would reverberate for many years, not just inside the cloistered academic world of American historians but also beyond. He never could have imagined that, years later, his essay would be called the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history.¹⁹ Or that Turner opened a new era in American historiography … this essay was to make him the prophet of a new order of historians.²⁰ An essay that subsequently went [rolling] through the universities and into the popular imagination as a tidal wave.²¹

The paper propelled the westward expansion of America to a new prominence and came to symbolize a particular interpretation of that expansion, an interpretation that attracted faithful disciples, moderate followers, polite dissenters, and sometimes vitriolic criticism. It continues to be cited and debated more than 125 years after its delivery: Every student of American civilization at one time or another confronts the Turner thesis.²² What was this paper about?

wa.png Turner’s Paper: Summary and Sources

The title of Turner’s paper was The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and its opening statement is worth quoting in full:

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.²³

Turner had taken his cue from the US Census Bureau: the frontier, declared the bureau superintendent, had effectively ceased as a point of reference in delineating the westward extent of the nation’s westward movement.²⁴ Henceforth, implied the superintendent, the unbroken or uninterrupted frontier no longer existed ; the nation was essentially settled, albeit unevenly. The notional ending of the frontier gave Turner the inspiration for his paper: What did its closing mean? What had the frontier meant in the story of America? What would it mean in future? The paper then sets out what became variously known as Turner’s frontier hypothesis or frontier thesis. It could also be called a proposition.

Conventional nineteenth-century historical thought tended to identify the great formative influences on America as, first, its colonial beginnings; second, the seismic separation from Britain following the War of Independence; and last, the huge and tragic shadow cast by slavery and the ensuing self-destruction of the Civil War.

Turner, while acknowledging the importance of these factors, maintained that it was the western movement of American pioneers and settlers that had given America its distinct form:

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.²⁵

Turner saw the westward advancing frontier line as creating an evolutionary and recurring process of development, and in a phrase that would become infamous, Turner observed the outer edge of the westward-rolling wave as the meeting point between savagery and civilization.²⁶

The character of the movement was far from homogenous. Turner notes distinct types of migrations, to which he assigns their own frontier labels: the [fur trapper’s and] trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier … the miner’s frontier … and the farmer’s frontier. Turner allows there is much scope for further investigation: It would, says Turner, be a work worth the historian’s labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one with another.

Moving at different times, at varying speeds, and in different places, like raindrops meandering randomly down a windowpane, these several frontiers advanced across the country. The largely nomadic fur trappers and traders—the advance guard of westward movement—generally were out ahead, following the geography of the landscape and the rivers—such as the Ohio, the Shenandoah, the Mississippi basin—and going through the mountain passes and over long-established animal trails, which became Indian trails, then traders’ paths, which widened into roads and ultimately into railroads.

The miner’s frontier, however, resembled hopscotch rather than the more linear pedestrian progress of farmers and ranchers. Driven by gold and other mineral fevers, prospectors ignored potential farmland and went straight to the mines of California, Oregon, and Utah: As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghenies, so now [the mining frontier] skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

The rancher’s frontier, like that of the trapper and miner, is something of an anomaly from the great movement of migrants looking mainly to cultivate the land. Turner’s comments are mostly in passing: The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas … the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and once the great herds of buffalo had been slaughtered which destroyed the economic foundation of the Indians … the Great Plains were open to the cattle ranchers.

It is, then, the arable farming frontier²⁷ that gets most attention, and to describe this pattern, Turner refers to John M. Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in 1837, where he describes three types of successive farmer-settler, like the waves of the ocean [rolling] one after the other. First comes the pioneer, subsisting on hunting and foraging among the natural vegetation; he clears some of the forest and lays claim to the property, legally or not; next come emigrants, who purchase the cleared fields, sometimes aggregating their holdings and erecting more permanent structures that reflect a plain, frugal, civilized life.

The third wave are men of capital and enterprise, who transform the nascent communities into substantial urban entities; brick buildings of churches and colleges are complemented by trappings of eastern luxury: Broad cloths, silks, leghorns, crepes. Thus, says Turner, wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on.

Ensuing throngs of migrants would either decide to stay put in the newly founded settlements, or, energized and beckoned by dreams of an Eldorado, they would push farther westward and become the next pioneers, expanding the leading edges of the frontier boundaries. This cyclical regeneration of a new frontier with each successive band of pioneers and settlers—not always the same thing²⁸—was, according to Turner, a fundamental element in the formation of the distinctive features of America and its people. In a passage packed with uplifting images, Turner makes one of his more grandiose statements:

This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.

America, for Turner, looked toward the sunset, rather than the sunrise: The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. And the farther west that the frontier(s) advanced meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe. Studying this westward advance, Turner declared, is to study the really American part of our history.

In one of the paper’s most famous passages, Turner’s narrative has an almost cinematic imagery about it as he invites us to witness the westward progress of the intrepid pioneers, bathed in the golden glow of what would become Hollywood, as they trudge resolutely in slow motion through the valleys, over the hills, and across the plains, using characteristically evocative language that helps account for Turner’s appeal:

Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by: Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between.²⁹

Modern scholarship acknowledges that it is impossible to consider the trajectory of westward movement without recognizing the concomitant havoc it wreaked on the Indigenous peoples, but Turner is somewhat ambivalent in his paper about the role and the fate of the Indian.

He notes the symbiotic, profitable relationship between trader, usually fur, and the Indians—often guns for furs—which is then set against the consequent rapid and extensive infiltration of the trader into the Indian lands: The disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society, with the result that Long before the pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away.

Indian trails pointed the way for the thoroughfares of the pioneer, and fledgling urban development followed a similar pattern of originating with the Indians:

The [Indian] trading posts … were on the sites of Indian villages … and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City.

So even as Turner chronicles the inevitable demise of the Indian, he acknowledges the debt owed to them as guides and trading partners and—unwittingly—for laying out a primitive blueprint for the progress and settlement of the settlers who would eventually cause their destruction: the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization.

For Turner, any benefits the Indians brought were tempered by their constant threat as menacing aggressors, and here, Turner sees the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history. He was referring to the bond formed among the colonies in response to the threat from Indians. This cooperation, Turner suggested, helped facilitate the collaboration and alliances of the colonies during the Revolutionary period: The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action.

To the present-day reader, the absence of regret over the fate of the Indians may jar; in Turner’s reading (and, to be fair, that of many of his contemporaries), the tribes had their uses, but any gratitude was limited and subsumed within the brutal reality of the all-powerful advancing frontier and the expanding American nation. Against that juggernaut, the Indians were mostly in the way.

Turner identifies four particular features resulting from the influence of the frontier; first was the formation and composite nationality for the American people. The distinctive multinational elements that comprised the original inhabitants were in the crucible of the frontier … fused into a mixed race. Turner was careful to point out that although the common language was English, this new hybrid stock, emanating from across Europe, was certainly not. Speaking of the Old World, Turner posits that the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England.

Second, the impact of the frontier was seen in legislation that most developed the powers of the national government. With the western advance across the vast spaces, federal legislation that addressed the disposition of the public domain was needed, and Turner approvingly quotes Senator Scott of Indiana who, in 1841, stated, I consider the preemption law merely declaratory of the custom or common law of the settlers.³⁰

After noting how the nationalizing tendency of the western frontier broke down the sectional interests of the East—Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility is the death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population—Turner makes a third and perhaps his most notable claim: But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. Turner cites an unnamed western Virginia lawmaker, commenting in 1830:

But sir, it is not the increase in population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits imparts to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically, I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians, and the difference, sir, between a talking and working politician is immense.

Turner emphasizes the boundless drive of the westward pioneers, quoting the English writer Edmund Burke from 1775 in what might be seen as reflective of the pioneers’ creed:

If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their annual tillage and remove their flocks and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlement are already little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon forget a government by which they were disowned.³¹

Burke’s comments were issued in pre-Revolutionary England as a warning to the British rulers against trying to corral these hordes of English Tartars, but a general desire to limit the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies was very much part of an independent America’s thinking.

Turner then makes the fourth significant claim, already hinted at, which is a defining statement of the frontier’s effect on the American personality:

The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive attentive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things; lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.

This catalog of American attributes comes near the end of the paper, but a little earlier, Turner had conceded that the formative influence of the frontier has not been without drawbacks: Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit … permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild cat banking. A rare moment of critical commentary by Turner.

We are now nearing the conclusion of the paper; Turner places the frontier and the nation’s westward progress in a broader historical context of America’s development. Since Columbus sailed to the New World, Turner declared,

America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert [with the closing of the frontier] that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact.

The frontier has been to America what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities. The narrative then culminates with Turner’s dramatic and—to contemporaries—stunning climax:

And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

For as long as every American could remember, there had always been a frontier, a line, however fuzzy, however defined, that served to separate the settled colonies, which became the states, from the perceived wilderness to the west.

It had meant different things to different people. Some had packed up their worldly possessions and headed off toward it, hoping for a better life. Some had dreamed about making that move but never did. Some had no intention of moving to the West but were nonetheless fascinated by the adventure and imagery it evoked. To be informed—by what was essentially a eulogy—that the frontier was now gone gave a jolt to the American psyche.³² This will be examined in more detail later.

Some of the points made by Turner in his paper were not original. Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, identified a number of earlier commentators on the influence of the American frontier. The journalist Edwin L. Godkin published a piece in 1865, Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy, declaring that