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

by Greg Grandin

most historians in the United States described the war on Mexico as small, inevitable, or largely inconsequential,

It was, General Ulysses S. Grant said, reflecting back at the end of his life on a war he helped win, “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”

In 1848, on the day of John Quincy Adams’s death, European workers revolted, with uprisings starting in Paris and then spreading to Vienna, Prague, Hamburg, Lyon, Milan, Palermo, Amsterdam, Budapest, Munich, Berlin, Naples, and elsewhere. Insurgents built barricades out of cobbles and waved the red flag, cutting society in two, as Alexis de Tocqueville later put it: uniting those who possessed nothing against those who possessed everything. The insurgents were defeated, but their revolt began the social-democratization of European politics,

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.

A “monster of a million minds” was how Melville described a society founded on radical individualism.

Andrew Johnson, who became president upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, thought these survivors should help themselves. “Slaves were assisted to freedom,” said Johnson, with the expectation that “on becoming free they would be a self-sustaining population.” Johnson here was explaining why he had vetoed a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau. He did so, he said, because any legislative action based on the idea that freedmen and freedwomen wouldn’t quickly “attain a self-sustaining condition” would be “injurious” to “their character and their prospects.”10 Congress overrode Johnson’s veto, and the bureau went on for seven more years.

“When American history comes to be rightly viewed,” Turner wrote, dismissing the importance of forced labor to the creation of U.S. wealth, “it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.”

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.

In notes he took on an 1887 essay that detailed the various ways frontier society generated an “exaggerated” sense of liberty and an “abnormal” anti-government ideology, Turner included a telling comment: “The West of our day relies on national gov[ernment] because gov[ernment] came before the settler, and gave him land, arranged his transportation, gov[ernment], etc. etc.”

Turner’s sequence—nature, settlement, labor, society, security, trade, trust, more trade, which leads to more security and trust, and then government—is important in that it crystallizes a number of uniquely American ideals about the relationship between the economy, rights, and sovereignty: Labor mixed with nature creates property. Property creates virtue. Private property–based virtue exists prior to the state. And the state’s only legitimate function is to protect virtue, not create virtue. It’s a sleight of hand, this sequence, for, as Turner wrote in his notes, “government came before.” But it was, and remains, a powerful move, one that premises the virtue of freedom as existing independently of the state and restricts the role of the state to only guarding virtue. 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.

The Ku Klux Klan was organized in 1865 by Confederate veterans but had lain dormant for decades. Now what historians call the “second Ku Klux Klan” emerged, in 1915, led by veterans of 1898.

Also answering the question were the thousands of white men in Wilmington, North Carolina, who in November 1898, shortly after Spain surrendered to the United States, staged a coup against the elected, multiracial coalition governing the city. The white mob, many of them veterans of the Cuban campaign just returned from the war, killed between sixty and three hundred African Americans, ransacked African American businesses, and set fire to African American homes.

In April 1917, the month the United States entered the war, Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on immigration, which included literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota restrictions. The legislation mostly applied to Europeans and Asians. Mexican migrant workers, who were needed to labor in the fields and mines of the Southwest and the West, were exempt from the quotas (“Western farmers were completely dependent on Mexican workers,” as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández writes). They were, however, supposed to go through established checkpoints, where they were subjected to health inspections and delousing.* It was an odd system, half enforced, half not—half water, half metal. Border towns turned into waiting rooms, as thousands of Mexicans every day submitted to the new rituals.22 Nearly half a million Mexicans entered the country legally between 1920 and 1928, according to immigration records.23 But probably at least that many just quietly walked over Tijuana’s unguarded chaparral or ferried across the Rio Grande, going back and forth every day to jobs in smelters, mines, fields, and households.

The United States Border Patrol was officially established two years later, as part of the comprehensive 1924 Immigration Act, and immediately became arguably the most politicized branch of law enforcement, even more so than J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. The debate leading up to the passage of the act was intense; nativists warned that with its open-border policy, the country was committing “race suicide” and was in danger of “mongrelization.” Forty thousand Klansmen marched on Washington demanding entrance restrictions. The 1924 law codified into immigration policy a xenophobia that had deep roots in the nation’s history. Immigration from Asia fell to practically zero, while arrivals from central and southern Europe were sharply reduced. Most countries were now subject to a set quota system, with western European countries assigned the highest numbers.

Having lost the national debate when it came to restricting Mexicans, and fearing they were losing the larger struggle in defense of Anglo-Saxonism, white supremacists took control of the newly established U.S. Border Patrol and turned it into a vanguard of race vigilantism. The patrol’s first recruits were white men one or two generations removed from farm life, often with military experience or with a police or ranger background. Their politics stood in opposition to the big borderland farmers and ranchers who wanted cheap labor.34 Unlike the Chamber of Commerce, they didn’t think that Texas—or Arizona, New Mexico, and California—needed Mexican immigrants. Earlier, in the mid-1800s, the Mexican–American War had unleashed a broad, generalized racism against Mexicans throughout the nation. That racism, in the years after 1924, distilled and concentrated along an increasingly focused line. Whatever the specific provisions of national immigration law, it was the agents who worked for the border patrol, along with customs inspectors, who decided who could legally enter the country from Mexico. They had the power to turn what had been a routine daily or seasonal event—crossing the border—into a ritual of abuse. Hygienic inspections became more widespread and even more degrading. Migrants had their heads shaved, and they were subjected to an ever-more-arbitrary set of requirements and to the discretion of patrollers, including literacy tests and entrance fees.

In 1929, before the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover signed a law that, as the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández puts it, advanced the “criminalization of informal border crossings.”

The 1924 Immigration Act, then, had an explosive effect. On the one hand, the limits it placed on the numbers of European and Asian migrants who could enter the United States reinforced Mexico’s importance as a source of cheap labor for the United States’ expanding economy. On the other hand, it created an agency—the U.S. Border Patrol—that institutionalized a virulent form of nativism and concentrated its animus on Mexican migrants.

In 1931, Harlon Carter, the Laredo son of a border patrol agent, shot and killed a Mexican American teenager, the fifteen-year-old Ramón Casiano, for talking back to him. Carter then followed his father into the patrol, becoming one of its most cruel directors. Presiding over Operation Wetback in the 1950s, Carter transformed the patrol into, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, an “army” committed to an “all-out war to hurl tens of thousands of Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”41 Carter was already a member of the National Rifle Association when he murdered Casiano, and he remained a high-ranking officer with the organization through his years with the border patrol. Then, in 1977, after his retirement from the patrol, he led what observers called an extremist coup against the (relatively) more moderate NRA leadership, transforming that organization into a key institution of the New Right, a bastion of individual-rights absolutism—in this case, for the right to bear arms.

“Utopia shut up shop forty years ago,” wrote Stuart Chase, an economist who was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brain trust.” Chase was writing in the wake of the 1929 stock market collapse, at the beginning of the Great Depression; his book, titled A New Deal, gave FDR, as a presidential candidate in 1932, the term he would use to describe his reform agenda. “The realization that our future is not boundless is only now thrusting home,” Chase said. “There is no escape; we have to fight our economic battles at home.” He continued: “Laissez-faire rides well on covered wagons; not so well on conveyor belts and cement roads. The great reaches of the continent of North America stamped into our fathers the idea that our future was boundless.” But “the frontier has collapsed” and the country’s “perpetual motion machine”—its constant flight forward that allowed it to psychologically avoid dealing with its contradictions—has “stripped its gears.”

FDR offered one such sketch, taking time in particular to celebrate Andrew Jackson’s opening of the Mississippi valley, before dismissing it all with two sentences: “Today that life is gone. Its simplicity has vanished and we are each and all of us, whether we like it or not, parts of a social civilization which ever tends to greater complexity.”7 “We must lay hold of the fact,” Roosevelt said elsewhere, making the case for Social Security, “that the laws of economics are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.”8 “This man-made world of ours,” Roosevelt called it, conveying a new ethics of social solidarity.

(the U.S. Border Patrol remained under the authority of the Department of Labor until 1940, when it passed to the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice).

they put forth a new, commonsense ethic that freedom in a complex industrial society required government intervention and that, in a phrase FDR would use over and over again, “necessitous men are not free.”

What became known as the Bracero Program started in the depths of world war, in late 1942, as the Wehrmacht laid siege to Stalingrad and the United States began pushing the Japanese back in the Pacific, still more than a year away from D-Day. Over the next two decades, nearly five million Mexican workers migrated legally, with travel permits, to the United States. The steady supply of low-wage labor was a dream for U.S. farmers, especially those based in California, Florida, the Southwest, and the Pacific Northwest, providing, as one of them put it, “a seemingly endless army of cheap, unorganized workers, brought efficiently to their doorsteps by the government.”31 Millions more came undocumented, outside the program.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” Roosevelt said in his 1944 remarks. “Necessitous men are not free men,” he said, repeating a favorite phrase.

Roosevelt, in his 1944 address, proposed the adoption of a second “Bill of Rights”—an “economic declaration of rights” that included all the rights Mexico had been guaranteeing its citizens since 1917: the right to health care, education, a living wage, decent housing, and social security.38 FDR was still more than a year from his death, but, recovering from the flu, he was too ill to address Congress in person, instead reading a portion of the text over the radio. Film footage of the broadcast shows the president looking cadaverous. He’d win a fourth term later in 1944 but wouldn’t live to complete a year of it. His proposal that the nation adopt a bill of social rights was gone shortly after.

it would be the G.I. Bill of Rights, not FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, that would provide millions of members of “the Greatest Generation” with publicly subsidized education, housing, health care, and other benefits. They just wouldn’t be called social rights. And they’d receive them in exchange for their service as veterans, not as a right of citizenship.

Still, in 1945, at the end of the war, the first significant physical barrier went up along the Mexican border: “4,500 lineal feet of chain link fencing,” ten feet high and “woven of No. 6 wire,” near Calexico, California.29 The fence’s posts and wire mesh had been recycled from California’s Crystal City Internment Camp, which had been used to hold Japanese Americans during World War II.

“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.”

On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech in Riverside Church in Manhattan, to an overflow crowd of thousands.13 It was time, he said, to “break the betrayal of my own silences.” King didn’t just condemn the United States’ war in Southeast Asia. He condemned all of it: the country’s long history of expansion, its “giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism,” and a political culture where “profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people.”

Then, one year to the day of his “Beyond Vietnam” speech, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. As protests and riots spread in cities across the United States, white soldiers in Vietnam raised Confederate flags in celebration. Commanding officers let them fly for days. At Cam Ranh Bay Naval Base, a group donned white robes and held a Klan rally. At Da Nang and elsewhere, they burned crosses. The Department of Defense, following these and similar incidents, tried to ban the Confederate flag on its bases and its theaters of war. But Dixiecrat politicians, who controlled the votes President Lyndon Johnson needed to fund the war, objected. The Pentagon backpedaled and withdrew its ban.

Richard Nixon, of course, was the kind of politician Bell had in mind. Nixon’s “southern strategy” famously played to racist resentment. But it turns out, he also had a stratagem farther south, a “border strategy.”27 As the historian Patrick Timmons has written, Nixon, running for president in 1968, promised to get tough on illegal drugs—the “marijuana problem,” as he put it—coming in from Mexico. And then, shortly after winning the White House, Nixon did put into place “Operation Intercept,” a short-lived, military-style, theatrical crackdown on the border. That the operation was run by two right-wing personalities, G. Gordon Liddy and Joe Arpaio, highlights the continuities between Nixon and the kind of demagoguery Bell warned, presciently, would become a staple of U.S. politics. Liddy went on to run Nixon’s “Plumbers,” as the burglars who broke into the Watergate Hotel were called, precipitating Nixon’s downfall. Arpaio, the racist sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona who gratuitously imposed humiliating, brutal, and often deadly conditions on his overwhelmingly Latino prisoners, would become an early supporter of Trump.

Policy changes in the 1960s had by this point heated up the immigration debate. In 1963, Washington ended the Bracero Program, which for two decades had allowed millions of low-skilled Mexican workers to earn seasonal wages on U.S. farms.18 In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act. Mostly a liberalizing reform, the act is denounced today by nativists for repealing the explicitly racist quota system put into place in 1924. But the new law did also impose, for the first time, a limit on how many migrants could enter from Mexico. Then, in 1968, Congress set up a separate magistrate court system to try migrants for unlawful entry, allowing for a significant expansion in the number of people prosecuted, detained, and deported. Combined, these policy revisions further criminalized Mexican migration. The “legal” migrant stream slowed to a trickle.19 The “illegal” one poured forth, as demand for Mexican labor increased.20 According to the historian Ana Raquel Minian, the number of Mexicans arrested in the United States for entering unlawfully jumped from fifty-five thousand in 1965 to one and a half million in 1986.21

Loss in Vietnam radicalized a generation of veterans, pushing many into the ranks of white-supremacist groups. Ronald Reagan, as the standard bearer of an ascendant New Right, effectively tapped into this radicalization, which helped lift him to victory in his 1980 presidential campaign. Once he was in office, Reagan’s re-escalation of the Cold War allowed him to contain the radicalization, preventing it from spilling over (too much) into domestic politics. Anti-communist campaigns in Central America—a region Reagan called “our southern frontier”—were especially helpful in focusing militancy outward.46 But Reagan’s Central American wars (which comprised support for the Contras in Nicaragua and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) generated millions of refugees, many, perhaps most, of whom fled to the United States. As they came over the border, they inflamed the same constituencies that Reagan had mobilized to wage the wars that had turned them into refugees in the first place. For its part, the White House continued to deflect, venting revanchism outward (back toward Central America and other places in the third world, including Afghanistan). It was, to say the least, a highly volatile game Reagan and his “cowboys” were playing, one that could only continue as long as the frontier remained open.

Clinton was Reagan’s greatest achievement. He carried forward the Republican agenda by combining a postindustrial fatalism—regulation wasn’t possible, austerity was unavoidable, budgets had to be balanced, crime was a condition of culture, not economic policy—with a folksy postmodern optimism, offering sunny bromides touting the “politics of inclusion” that endless growth would make possible.

Meanwhile, the border patrol had tripled its size to become the nation’s second-largest law-enforcement agency, behind only the FBI.

By 2016, the United States was spending more on border and immigration enforcement than on all other federal law-enforcement agencies combined.