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

by Greg Grandin

Many more thousands fell ill.

In 1867, no African Americans held any office. Within three years, they held fifteen percent of all elected positions, at the local, state, and national level.

Roosevelt’s history reads like an epic poem to the doctrine of discovery, a brutalist’s answer to those who were beginning to show concern about the extermination of Native Americans: “Let the sentimentalists say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill.”14 Like Turner, Roosevelt believed that the frontier created a particular kind of political culture. Unlike Turner, however, Roosevelt identified the first step in this creation as wild terror and rough justice.

Stuart Chase, A New Deal (1932), full text available via Hathi Trust, at: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015063999323.