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

by Greg Grandin

“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.”