The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

In a striking 1935 essay titled “No More Frontiers,” undersecretary of agriculture Rexford Tugwell said that centuries of easy U.S. expansion across the continent had resulted in “riotous farming.”10 “It was all very romantic,” Tugwell said, this “national epic” of pulling up stakes and moving on. But it had habituated U.S. farmers to unsustainable techniques, which produced widespread soil erosion. In the nineteenth century, the Homestead Act distributed good land to the powerful, including lumber barons who stripped the trees off the land and assigned the rocky margins to the poor. The act was a “death warrant” for the soil, accelerating the practice by which farmers farmed until depletion and then moved on to a new plot.