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

by Greg Grandin

King’s point is as simple as it is profound: A constant fleeing forward allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality, racism, crime and punishment, and violence.

In the mythology of the West, cowboys don’t join unions.21 The

What distinguishes earlier racist presidents like Jackson and Wilson from Trump, though, is that they were in office during the upswing of America’s moving out in the world, when domestic political polarization could be stanched and the country held together—even after the Civil War nearly tore it apart—by the promise of endless growth.

But it was the focus on the border and all that went with it—labeling Mexicans rapists, calling migrants snakes and animals, stirring up anger at undocumented residents, proposing to end birthright citizenship, and unleashing ICE agents to raid deep into the country, to stalk schools and hospitals, to split families and spread grief—that provided Trumpism its most compelling through-line message: The world’s horizon is not limitless; not all can share in its wealth; and the nation’s policies should reflect that reality.

Donald Trump figured out that to talk about the border—and to promise a wall—was a way to acknowledge capitalism’s limits, its pain, without having to challenge capitalism’s terms.

purpose. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.

forward. In other words, the United States won independence from Great Britain in a revolutionary war that was, among other reasons, fought to deny Great Britain the right to establish a western border; then, once independence was recognized by the Treaty of Paris establishing a western border, the United States cited earlier grants issued by Great Britain to hop-skip over that border.

Instead, Madison put forth an ideal that defined virtue as diversity, as society’s plethora of uncountable impulses, opinions, desires, talents, thoughts, ambitions, and capabilities that create wealth, or “property.” And it is government’s “first object,” its primary obligation, to protect such wealth-producing diversity.

government. But as Dinsmore wrote in his defense, “gentlemen in the Western Country” such as Jackson believed that no laws pertained to them. They practically hallucinated freedom. “Is it a dream?” They also took the mere request for documents proving their ownership of slaves to be a form of slavery, to be (as Jackson wrote in one of his letters) an “evil” and affront to the “bravery and blood of our forefathers.”

The United States was supposed to be something new, rushing into the future, which for many meant rushing into the West. But, Adams said, constant war had trapped Jacksonians in a state of constant historical grievance, transposing ancient enemies faced by their imagined forebears—including the Normans, who in 1066 invaded Great Britain to conquer Saxon freemen—onto their current opponents. “Is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your southern population and the population of Mexico,” Adams asked Polk, that “you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between you and them?”

“The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”

The midwesterner Turner had seized the discipline of history from its Brahmin ministers, from the Adamses and Bancrofts, disenchanting the Saxon fairy tale that located the origins of Madison’s Constitution in primeval German mists, to be carried forth by Saxon germs.

Turner’s main argument, which he advanced in his 1893 essay as well as in subsequent writings, is straightforward: America’s vast, open West created the conditions for an unprecedented expansion of the ideal of political equality, an ideal based on a sense that the frontier would go on forever: “The wilderness seemed so unending.”

Turner, anticipating by many decades the modern impulse to document “history from below,” instead celebrated the hunters, traders, dirt-farming families, as the executors of progress. In

That premise makes possible the ongoing refusal of the United States to accept the legitimacy of social or economic rights. Individual, inherent rights, found in nature—to have, to bear, to move, to assemble, to believe, to possess—were legitimate, as was a state that protected them. Social rights—to receive health care, education, and welfare—made possible by state intervention were perverse.24 4.

To understand the nation’s current crisis—especially the way anti-migrant nativism has become the binding agent for what is now called Trumpism—one has to understand that the border, over the long course of its history, has effectively become the negation of the frontier. The

Years before the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., had already started to criticize the frontier ideal as reinforcing deep-seated pathologies, providing mythic justification for militarism, masculine violence, and economic inequality.

“This country has socialism for the rich,” King said, and “individualism for the poor”; what was dispensed lavishly as “subsidies” to one kind of people was begrudged to another as “welfare.” And such individualism was volatile, easily triggered.