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

by Greg Grandin

The Age of Jackson, or what some scholars have called the Jacksonian consensus, entailed a radical empowerment of white men. At the same time, though, it witnessed an equally radical subjugation of African Americans.

“The soldiery raised to protect the frontier may supersede your electoral colleges,” he said in a House

speech, “and impose upon you a dictator.”

The United States too had crowded cities and hungry workers, fighting efforts to subordinate their lives to mechanical routine. But instead of waging class war upward—on aristocrats and owners—they waged race war outward, on the frontier.

“Popular sovereignty”—a rallying cry for settlers who wanted to be free of federal control—had become a “synonym for racist brutality and wanton usurpation,” advancing the sectional crisis that would soon lead to the Civil War.

Whether that wall gets built or not, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint, but no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism.

Coming generations will face a stark choice—a choice long deferred by the emotive power of frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.