was turner's thesis right

How the Myth of the American Frontier Got Its Start

Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis informed decades of scholarship and culture. Then he realized he was wrong

Colin Woodard

On the evening of   July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history.

It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s gates. They had already sat through three other speeches. Some may have been dozing off as the thin, 31-year-old associate professor from the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison began his remarks.

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Turner told them the force that had forged Americans into one people was the frontier of the Midwest and Far West. In this virgin world, settlers had finally been relieved of the European baggage of feudalism that their ancestors had brought across the Atlantic, freeing them to find their true selves: self-sufficient, pragmatic, egalitarian and civic-minded. “The frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people,” he told the audience. “In the crucible of the frontier, the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”

The audience was unmoved.

In their dispatches the following morning, most of the newspaper reporters covering the conference didn’t even mention Turner’s talk. Nor did the official account of the proceedings prepared by the librarian William F. Poole for The Dial , an influential literary journal. Turner’s own father, writing to relatives a few days later, praised Turner’s skills as the family’s guide at the fair, but he said nothing at all about the speech that had brought them there.

Yet in less than a decade, Turner would be the most influential living historian in the United States, and his Frontier Thesis would become the dominant lens through which Americans understood their character, origins and destiny. Soon, Jackson’s theme was prevalent in political speech, in the way high schools taught history, in patriotic paintings—in short, everywhere. Perfectly timed to meet the needs of a country experiencing dramatic and destabilizing change, Turner’s thesis was swiftly embraced by academic and political institutions, just as railroads, manufacturing machines and telegraph systems were rapidly reshaping American life.

By that time, Turner himself had realized that his theory was almost entirely wrong.

American historians had long believed that Providence had chosen their people to spread Anglo-Saxon freedom across the continent. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Turner was introduced to a different argument by his mentor, the classical scholar William Francis Allen. Extrapolating from Darwinism, Allen believed societies evolved like organisms, adapting themselves to the environments they encountered. Scientific laws, not divine will, he advised his mentee, guided the course of nations. After graduating, Turner pursued a doctorate at Johns Hopkins University, where he impressed the history program’s leader, Herbert Baxter Adams, and formed a lifelong friendship with one of his teachers, an ambitious young professor named Woodrow Wilson. The connections were useful: When Allen died in 1889, Adams and Wilson aided Turner in his quest to take Allen’s place as head of Wisconsin’s history department. And on the strength of Turner’s early work, Adams invited him to present a paper at the 1893 meeting of the AHA, to be held in conjunction with the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

The resulting essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” offered a vivid evocation of life in the American West. Stripped of “the garments of civilization,” settlers between the 1780s and the 1830s found themselves “in the birch canoe” wearing “the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Soon, they were “planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick” and even shouting war cries. Faced with Native American resistance—Turner largely overlooked what the ethnic cleansing campaign that created all that “free land” might say about the American character—the settlers looked to the federal government for protection from Native enemies and foreign empires, including during the War of 1812, thus fostering a loyalty to the nation rather than to their half-forgotten nations of origin.

He warned that with the disappearance of the force that had shaped them—in 1890, the head of the Census Bureau concluded there was no longer a frontier line between areas that had been settled by European Americans and those that had not—Americans would no longer be able to flee west for an easy escape from responsibility, failure or oppression. “Each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past,” Turner concluded. “Now … the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

When he left the podium on that sweltering night, he could not have known how fervently the nation would embrace his thesis.

Like so many young scholars, Turner worked hard to bring attention to his thesis. He incorporated it into the graduate seminars he taught, lectured about it across the Midwest and wrote the entry for “Frontier” in the widely read Johnson’s Universal Cyclopædia. He arranged to have the thesis reprinted in the journal of the Wisconsin Historical Society and in the AHA’s 1893 annual report. Wilson championed it in his own writings, and the essay was read by hundreds of schoolteachers who found it reprinted in the popular pedagogical journal of the Herbart Society, a group devoted to the scientific study of teaching. Turner’s big break came when the Atlantic Monthly ’s editors asked him to use his novel viewpoint to explain the sudden rise of populists in the rural Midwest, and how they had managed to seize control of the Democratic Party to make their candidate, William Jennings Bryan, its nominee for president. Turner’s 1896 Atlantic Monthly essay , which tied the populists’ agitation to the social pressures allegedly caused by the closing of the frontier—soil depletion, debt, rising land prices—was promptly picked up by newspapers and popular journals across the country.

Meanwhile, Turner’s graduate students became tenured professors and disseminated his ideas to the up-and-coming generation of academics. The thrust of the thesis appeared in political speeches, dime-store western novels and even the new popular medium of film, where it fueled the work of a young director named John Ford who would become the master of the Hollywood western. In 1911, Columbia University’s David Muzzey incorporated it into a textbook—initially titled History of the American People —that would be used by most of the nation’s secondary schools for half a century.

Americans embraced Turner’s argument because it provided a fresh and credible explanation for the nation’s exceptionalism—the notion that the U.S. follows a path soaring above those of other countries—one that relied not on earlier Calvinist notions of being “the elect,” but rather on the scientific (and fashionable) observations of Charles Darwin. In a rapidly diversifying country, the Frontier Thesis denied a special role to the Eastern colonies’ British heritage; we were instead a “composite nation,” birthed in the Mississippi watershed. Turner’s emphasis on mobility, progress and individualism echoed the values of the Gilded Age—when readers devoured Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches stories—and lent them credibility for the generations to follow.

But as a researcher, Turner himself turned away from the Frontier Thesis in the years after the 1890s. He never wrote it down in book form or even in academic articles. He declined invitations to defend it, and before long he himself lost faith in it.

For one thing, he had been relying too narrowly on the experiences in his own region of the Upper Midwest, which had been colonized by a settlement stream originating in New England. In fact, he found, the values he had ascribed to the frontier’s environmental conditioning were actually those of this Greater New England settlement culture, one his family and most of his fellow citizens in Portage, Wisconsin, remained part of, with their commitment to strong village and town governments, taxpayer-financed public schools and the direct democracy of the town meeting. He saw that other parts of the frontier had been colonized by other settlement streams anchored in Scots-Irish Appalachia or in the slave plantations of the Southern lowlands, and he noted that their populations continued to behave completely differently from one another, both politically and culturally, even when they lived in similar physical environments. Somehow settlers moving west from these distinct regional cultures were resisting the Darwinian environmental and cultural forces that had supposedly forged, as Turner’s biographer, Ray Allen Billington, put it, “a new political species” of human, the American. Instead, they were stubbornly remaining themselves. “Men are not absolutely dictated to by climate, geography, soils or economic interests,” Turner wrote in 1922. “The influence of the stock from which they sprang, the inherited ideals, the spiritual factors, often triumph over the material interests.”

Turner spent the last decades of his life working on what he intended to be his magnum opus, a book not about American unity but rather about the abiding differences between its regions, or “sections,” as he called them. “In respect to problems of common action, we are like what a United States of Europe would be,” he wrote in 1922, at the age of 60. For example, the Scots-Irish and German small farmers and herders who settled the uplands of the southeastern states had long clashed with nearby English enslavers over education spending, tax policy and political representation. Turner saw the whole history of the country as a wrestling match between these smaller quasi-nations, albeit a largely peaceful one guided by rules, laws and shared American ideals: “When we think of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as steps in the marking off of spheres of influence and the assignment of mandates [between nations] … we see a resemblance to what has gone on in the Old World,” Turner explained. He hoped shared ideals—and federal institutions—would prove cohesive for a nation suddenly coming of age, its frontier closed, its people having to steward their lands rather than striking out for someplace new.

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Colin Woodard | | READ MORE

Colin Woodard is a journalist and historian, and the author of six books including Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood . He lives in Maine.

Why was the Turner Thesis abandoned by historians

Fredrick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the American frontier defined the study of the American West during the 20th century. In 1893, Turner argued that “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development.” ( The Frontier in American History , Turner, p. 1.) Jackson believed that westward expansion allowed America to move away from the influence of Europe and gain “independence on American lines.” (Turner, p. 4.) The conquest of the frontier forced Americans to become smart, resourceful, and democratic. By focusing his analysis on people in the periphery, Turner de-emphasized the importance of everyone else. Additionally, many people who lived on the “frontier” were not part of his thesis because they did not fit his model of the democratizing American. The closing of the frontier in 1890 by the Superintendent of the census prompted Turner’s thesis.

While appealing, the Turner thesis stultified scholarship on the West. In 1984, colonial historian James Henretta even stated, “[f]or, in our role as scholars, we must recognize that the subject of westward expansion in itself longer engages the attention of many perhaps most, historians of the United States.” ( Legacy of Conquest , Patricia Limerick, p. 21.) Turner’s thesis had effectively shaped popular opinion and historical scholarship of the American West, but the thesis slowed continued academic interest in the field.

Reassessment of Western History

Finally, she asked historians to eliminate the stereotypes from Western history and try to understand the complex relations between the people of the West. Even before Limerick’s manifesto, scholars were re-evaluating the west and its people, and its pace has only quickened. Whether or not scholars agree with Limerick, they have explored new depths of Western American history. While these new works are not easy to categorize, they do fit into some loose categories: gender ( Relations of Rescue by Peggy Pascoe), ethnicity ( The Roots of Dependency by Richard White, and Lewis and Clark Among the Indians by James P. Rhonda), immigration (Impossible Subjects by Ming Ngai), and environmental (Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster) history. These are just a few of the topics that have been examined by American West scholars. This paper will examine how these new histories of the American West resemble or diverge from Limerick’s outline.

Defining America or a Threat to America's Moral Standing

Unlike Limerick, Pascoe did not find it necessary to define the west or the frontier. She did not have to because the Protestant missionaries in her story defined it for her. While Turner may have believed that the West was no longer the frontier in 1890, the missionaries certainly would have disagreed. In fact, the rescue missions were placed in the communities that the Victorian Protestant missionary judged to be the least “civilized” parts of America (Lakota Territory, San Francisco’s Chinatown, rough and tumble Denver and Salt Lake City.) Instead of being a story of conquest by Victorian or western morality, it was a story of how that morality was often challenged and its terms were negotiated by culturally different communities. Pascoe’s primary goal in this work was not only to eliminate stereotypes but to challenge the notion that white women civilized the west. While conquest may be a component of other histories, no one group in Pascoe’s story successfully dominated any other.

Changing the Narrative of Native Americans in the West

Two books were written before Legacy was published, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (James Rhonda) and The Roots of Dependency (Richard White) both provide a window into the world of Native Americans. Both books took new approaches to Native American histories. Rhonda’s book looked at the familiar Lewis and Clark expedition but from an entirely different angle. Rhonda described the interactions between the expedition and the various Native American tribes they encountered. White’s book also sought to describe the interactions between the United States and the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, but he sought to explain why the economies of these tribes broke down after contact. Each of these books covers new ground by addressing the impact of these interactions between the United States and the Native Americans.

Instead of describing the initial interactions of the United States government with the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, White explained how the self-sufficient economies of these people were destroyed. White described how the United States government turned these successful native people into wards of the American state. His story explained how the United States conquered these tribes without firing a shot. The consequence of this conquest was the creation of weak, dependent nations that could not survive without handouts from the federal government. Like Rhonda, White also sought to shatter long-standing stereotypes and myths regarding Native Americans. White verified that each of these tribes had self-sufficient economies which permitted prosperous lifestyles for their people before the devastating interactions with the United States government occurred. The United States in each case fundamentally altered the tribes’ economies and environments. These alterations threatened the survival of the tribes. In some cases, the United States sought to trade with these tribes in an effort put the tribes in debt. After the tribes were in debt, the United States then forced the tribes to sell their land. In other situations, the government damaged the tribes’ economies even when they sought to help them.

The Impact of Immigrants to the West

While illegal immigration is not an issue isolated to the history of the American West, the immigrants moved predominantly into California, Texas and the American Southwest. Like Anglo settlers who were attracted to the West for the potential for new life in the nineteenth century, illegal immigrants continued to move in during the twentieth. The illegal immigrants were welcomed, despite their status, because California’s large commercial farms needed inexpensive labor to harvest their crops. Impossible Subjects describes four groups of illegal immigrants (Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese and Mexican braceros) who were created by the United States immigration policy. Ngai specifically examines the role that the government played in defining, controlling and disciplining these groups for their allegedly illegal misconduct.

The Rise of Western Environmental History

Environmental history has become an increasingly important component of the history of the American West. Originally, the American West was seen as an untamed wilderness, but over time that description has changed. Two conceptually different, but nonetheless important books on environmental history discussed the American West and its importance in America. Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon and Rivers of Empire by Donald Worster each explored the environment and the economy of the American West. Cronon examined the formation of Chicago and the importance of its commodities market for the development of the American West. Alternatively, Worster focuses on the creation of an extensive network of government subsidized dams in the early twentieth century. Rivers of Empire describes that despite the aridity of the natural landscape the American West became home to massive commercial farms and enormous swaths of urban sprawl.

In Nature’s Metropolis , Cronon, used the central place theory to analyze the economic and ecological development of Chicago. Johann Heinrich von Thunen developed the central place theory to explain the development of cities. Essentially, geographically different economic zones form in concentric circles the farther you went from the city. These different zones form because of the time it takes to get the different types of goods to market. Closest to the city and then moving away you would have the following zones: first, intensive agriculture, second, extensive agriculture, third, livestock raising, fourth, trading, hunting and Indian trade and finally, you would have the wilderness. While the landscape of the Mid-West was more complicated than this, Cronon posits that the “city and country are inextricably connected and that market relations profoundly mediate between them.” (Cronon, p. 52.) By emphasizing the connection between the city of Chicago and the rural lands that surrounded it, Cronon was able to explain how the land, including the West, developed. Cronon argued that the development of Chicago had a profound influence on the development and appearance of the Great West. Essentially Cronon used the creation of the Chicago commodities and trading markets to explain how different parts of the Mid-West and West produced different types of resources and fundamentally altered their ecology.

Both Cronon and Worster described how commercial interests shaped the landscape and ecology of the American West, but their approaches were very different. Still, each work fits comfortably into the new western history. Both Cronon and Worster see the West as a place and not as a movement of westward expansion. Cronon re-orders the typical understanding of the sequence of westward expansion. Instead of describing the steady growth of rural communities which transformed into cities, he argued that cities and rural areas formed at the same time. Often the cities developed first and that only after markets were created could land be converted profitable into farms. This development fits westward development much more closely than paradigms that emphasized the creation of family farms. Worster defines the West by its aridity. While these definitions differ from Limerick’s, they reflect new approaches. Conquest plays a critical role in each of these books. Instead of conquering people, the authors describe efforts to conquer western lands. In Cronon, westerners forever altered the landscape of the west. Agricultural activities dominated the zones closest to Chicago, cattle production took over lands previously occupied by the buffalo, and even the wilderness was changed by people to satisfy the markets in Chicago. The extensive damming of the West’s rivers described by Worster required the United States government to conquer, control and discipline nature. While this conquest was somewhat illusory, the United States government was committed to reshaping the West and ecology to fit its vision.

Each of these books demonstrates that the Turner thesis no longer holds a predominant position in the scholarship of the American West. The history of the American West has been revitalized by its demise. While westward expansion plays an important role in the history of the United States, it did not define the west. Turner’s thesis was fundamentally undermined because it did not provide an accurate description of how the West was peopled. The nineteenth century of the west is not composed primarily of family farmers. Instead, it is a story of a region peopled by a diverse group of people: Native Americans, Asians, Chicanos, Anglos, African Americans, women, merchants, immigrants, prostitutes, swindlers, doctors, lawyers, farmers are just a few of the characters who inhabit western history.

Suggested Readings

Was Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis Myth or Reality?

Two scholars debate this question.

Written by: (Claim A) Andrew Fisher, William & Mary; (Claim B) Bradley J. Birzer, Hillsdale College

Suggested sequencing.

• Use this Point-Counterpoint with the  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893  Primary Source to give students more background on individualism and western expansion.

Issue on the Table

Was Turner’s thesis a myth about the individualism of the American character and the influence of the West or was it essentially correct in explaining how the West and the advancing frontier contributed to the shaping of individualism in the American character?

Instructions

Read the two arguments in response to the question, paying close attention to the supporting evidence and reasoning used for each. Then, complete the comparison questions that follow. Note that the arguments in this essay are not the personal views of the scholars but are illustrative of larger historical debates.

Every nation has a creation myth, a simple yet satisfying story that inspires pride in its people. The United States is no exception, but our creation myth is all about exceptionalism. In his famous essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner claimed that the process of westward expansion had transformed our European ancestors into a new breed of people endowed with distinctively American values and virtues. In particular, the frontier experience had supposedly fostered democracy and individualism, underpinned by the abundance of “free land” out West. “So long as free land exists,” Turner wrote, “the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power.” It was a compelling articulation of the old Jeffersonian Dream. Like Jefferson’s vision, however, Turner’s thesis excluded much of the nation’s population and ignored certain historical realities concerning American society.

Very much a man of his times, Turner filtered his interpretation of history through the lens of racial nationalism. The people who counted in his thesis, literally and figuratively, were those with European ancestry—and especially those of Anglo-Saxon origins. His definition of the frontier, following that of the U.S. Census, was wherever population density fell below two people per square mile. That effectively meant “where white people were scarce,” in the words of historian Richard White; or, as Patricia Limerick puts it, “where white people got scared because they were scarce.” American Indians only mattered to Turner as symbols of the “savagery” that white pioneers had to beat back along the advancing frontier line. Most of the “free land” they acquired in the process came from the continent’s vast indigenous estate, which, by 1890, had been reduced to scattered reservations rapidly being eroded by the Dawes Act. Likewise, Mexican Americans in the Southwest saw their land base and economic status whittled away after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that nominally made them citizens of the United States. Chinese immigrants, defined as perpetual aliens under federal law, could not obtain free land through the Homestead Act. For all these groups, Euro-American expansion and opportunity meant the contraction or denial of their own ability to achieve individual advancement and communal stability.

Turner also exaggerated the degree of social mobility open to white contemporaries, not to mention their level of commitment to an ideology of rugged individualism. Although plenty of Euro-Americans used the homestead laws to get their piece of free land, they often struggled to make that land pay and to keep it in the family. During the late nineteenth century, the commoditization and industrialization of American agriculture caught southern and western farmers in a crushing cost-price squeeze that left many wrecked by debt. To combat this situation, they turned to cooperative associations such as the Grange and the National Farmers’ Alliance, which blossomed into the Populist Party at the very moment Turner was writing about the frontier as the engine of American democracy. Perhaps it was, but not in the sense he understood. Populists railed against the excess of individualism that bred corruption and inequality in Gilded Age America. Even cowboys, a pillar of the frontier myth, occasionally tried to organize unions to improve their wages and working conditions. Those seeking a small stake of their own—what Turner called a “competency”— in the form of their own land or herds sometimes ran afoul of concentrated capital, as during the Johnson County War of 1892. The big cattlemen of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association had no intention of sharing the range with pesky sodbusters and former cowboys they accused of rustling. Their brand of individualism had no place for small producers who might become competitors.

Turner took such troubles as a sign that his prediction had come true. With the closing of the frontier, he said, the United States would begin to see greater class conflict in the form of strikes and radical politics. There was lots of free land left in 1890, though; in fact, approximately 1 million people filed homestead claims between 1901 and 1913, compared with 1.4 million between 1862 and 1900. That did not prevent the country from experiencing serious clashes between organized labor and the corporations that had come to dominate many industries. Out west, socialistic unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World challenged not only the control that companies had over their employees but also their influence in the press and politics. For them, Turner’s dictum that “economic power secures political power” would have held a more sinister meaning. It was the rise of the modern corporation, not the supposed fading of the frontier, that narrowed the meanings of individualism and opportunity as Americans had previously understood them.

Young historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his academic paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago on July 12, 1893. He was the final presenter of that hot and humid day, but his essay ranks among the most influential arguments ever made regarding American history.

Turner was trained at the University of Wisconsin (his home state) and Johns Hopkins University, then the center of Germanic-type graduate studies—that is, it was scientific and objectivist rather than idealist or liberal. Turner rebelled against that purely scientific approach, but not by much. In 1890, the U.S. Census revealed that the frontier (defined as fewer than two people per square mile) was closed. There was no longer an unbroken frontier line in the United States, although frontier conditions lasted in certain parts of the American West until 1920. Turner lamented this, believing the most important phase of American history was over.

No one publicly commented on the essay at the time, but the American Historical Association reprinted it in its annual report the following year, and within a decade, it became known as the “Turner Thesis.”

What is most prominent in the Turner Thesis is the proposition that the United States is unique in its heritage; it is not a European clone, but a vital mixture of European and American Indian. Or, as he put it, the American character emerged through an intermixing of “savagery and civilization.” Turner attributed the American character to the expansion to the West, where, he said, American settlers set up farms to tame the frontier. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” As people moved west in a “perennial rebirth,” they extended the American frontier, the boundary “between savagery and civilization.”

The frontier shaped the American character because the settlers who went there had to conquer a land difficult for farming and devoid of any of the comforts of life in urban parts of the East: “The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.”

Politically and socially, according to Turner, the American character—including traits that prioritized equality, individualism, and democracy—was shaped by moving west and settling the frontier. “The tendency,” Turner wrote, “is anti-social. [The frontier] produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control.” Those hardy pioneers on the frontier spread the ideas and practice of democracy as well as modern civilization. By conquering the wilderness, Turner stressed, they learned that resources and opportunity were seemingly boundless, meant to bring the ruggedness out of each individual. The farther west the process took them, the less European the Americans as a whole became. Turner saw the frontier as the  progenitor  of the American practical and innovative character: “That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom – these are trains of the frontier.”

Turner’s thesis, to be sure, viewed American Indians as uncivilized. In his vision, they cannot compete with European technology, and they fall by the wayside, serving as little more than a catalyst for the expansion of white Americans. This near-absence of Indians from Turner’s argument gave rise to a number of critiques of his thesis, most prominently from the New Western Historians beginning in the 1980s. These more recent historians sought to correct Turner’s “triumphal” myth of the American West by examining it as a region rather than as a process. For Turner, the American West is a progressive process, not a static place. There were many Wests, as the process of conquering the land, changing the European into the American, happened over and over again. What would happen to the American character, Turner wondered, now that its ability to expand and conquer was over?

Historical Reasoning Questions

Use  Handout A: Point-Counterpoint Graphic Organizer  to answer historical reasoning questions about this point-counterpoint.

Primary Sources (Claim A)

Cooper, James Fenimore.  Last of the Mohicans (A Leatherstocking Tale) . New York: Penguin, 1986.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”  http://sunnycv.com/steve/text/civ/turner.html

Primary Sources (Claim B)

Suggested resources (claim a).

Cronon, William, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds.  Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992.

Faragher, John Mack.  Women and Men on the Overland Trail . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Grossman, Richard R, ed.  The Frontier in American Culture: Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson.  The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West . New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds.  Trails: Toward a New Western History . Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1991.

Milner II, Clyde A.  A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West . New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Nugent, Walter.  Into the West: The Story of Its People . New York: Knopf, 1991.

Slotkin, Richard.  The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 . Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Suggested Resources (Claim B)

Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge.  Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier . Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.

Etulain, Richard, ed.  Does the Frontier Experience Make America Exceptional?  New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Mondi. Megan. “’Connected and Unified?’: A More Critical Look at Frederick Jackson Turner’s America.”  Constructing the Past , 7 no. 1:Article 7.  http://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol7/iss1/7

Nelson, Robert. “Public Lands and the Frontier Thesis.”  Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States , Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond, 2014.  http://dsl.richmond.edu/fartherafield/public-lands-and-the-frontier-thesis/

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Frederick Jackson Turner

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• Wisconsin Life - Frederick Jackson Turner and the History of the American West
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• Frederick Jackson Turner - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)

Frederick Jackson Turner (born November 14, 1861, Portage , Wisconsin , U.S.—died March 14, 1932, San Marino , California) was an American historian best known for the “ frontier thesis.” The single most influential interpretation of the American past, it proposed that the distinctiveness of the United States was attributable to its long history of “westering.” Despite the fame of this monocausal interpretation, as the teacher and mentor of dozens of young historians, Turner insisted on a multicausal model of history , with a recognition of the interaction of politics, economics , culture , and geography. Turner’s penetrating analyses of American history and culture were powerfully influential and changed the direction of much American historical writing.

Born in frontier Wisconsin and educated at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Turner did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University under Herbert Baxter Adams . Awarded a doctorate in 1891, Turner was one of the first historians professionally trained in the United States rather than in Europe. He began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin in 1889. He began to make his mark with his first professional paper, “ The Significance of History” (1891), which contains the famous line “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” The controversial notion that there was no fixed historical truth, and that all historical interpretation should be shaped by present concerns, would become the hallmark of the so-called “New History,” a movement that called for studies illuminating the historical development of the political and cultural controversies of the day. Turner should be counted among the “progressive historians,” though, with the political temperament of a small-town Midwesterner, his progressivism was rather timid. Nevertheless, he made it clear that his historical writing was shaped by a contemporary agenda.

Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins , had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents . Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history . (Ironically, Turner passed up an opportunity to attend Buffalo Bill ’s Wild West show so that he could complete “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” on the morning that he presented it.) He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism , inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism. Turner’s “frontier thesis” rose to become the dominant interpretation of American history for the next half-century and longer. In the words of historian William Appleman Williams, it “rolled through the universities and into popular literature like a tidal wave.” While today’s professional historians tend to reject such sweeping theories, emphasizing instead a variety of factors in their interpretations of the past, Turner’s frontier thesis remains the most popular explanation of American development among the literate public.

For a scholar of such wide influence, Turner wrote relatively few books. His Rise of the New West, 1819–1829 (1906) was published as a volume in The American Nation series, which included contributions from the nation’s leading historians. The follow-up to that study, The United States, 1830–1850: The Nation and Its Sections (1935), would not be published until after his death. Turner may have had difficulty writing books, but he was a brilliant master of the historical essay. The winner of an oratorical medal as an undergraduate, he also was a gifted and active public speaker. His deep, melodious voice commanded attention whether he was addressing a teachers group, an audience of alumni, or a branch of the Chautauqua movement . His writing, too, bore the stamp of oratory; indeed, he reworked his lectures into articles that appeared in the nation’s most influential popular and scholarly journals.

Many of Turner’s best essays were collected in The Frontier in American History (1920) and The Significance of Sections in American History (1932), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. In these writings Turner promoted new methods in historical research, including the techniques of the newly founded social sciences , and urged his colleagues to study new topics such as immigration , urbanization , economic development , and social and cultural history . He also commented directly on the connections he saw between the past and the present.

The end of the frontier era of continental expansion, Turner reasoned, had thrown the nation “back upon itself.” Writing that “imperious will and force” had to be replaced by social reorganization, he called for an expanded system of educational opportunity that would supplant the geographic mobility of the frontier. “The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than ax and rifle,” he wrote; “in place of old frontiers of wilderness, there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science.” Pioneer ideals were to be maintained by American universities through the training of new leaders who would strive “to reconcile popular government and culture with the huge industrial society of the modern world.”

Whereas in his 1893 essay he celebrated the pioneers for the spirit of individualism that spurred migration westward, 25 years later Turner castigated “these slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the corn and livestock for their own need, living scattered and apart.” For Turner the national problem was “no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest” but “how to save and wisely use the remaining timber.” At the end of his career, he stressed the vital role that regionalism would play in counteracting the atomization brought about by the frontier experience. Turner hoped that stability would replace mobility as a defining factor in the development of American society and that communities would become stronger as a result. What the world needed now, he argued, was “a highly organized provincial life to serve as a check upon mob psychology on a national scale, and to furnish that variety which is essential to vital growth and originality.” Turner never ceased to treat history as contemporary knowledge, seeking to explore the ways that the nation might rechannel its expansionist impulses into the development of community life.

Turner taught at the University of Wisconsin until 1910, when he accepted an appointment to a distinguished chair of history at Harvard University . At these two institutions he helped build two of the great university history departments of the 20th century and trained many distinguished historians, including Carl Becker , Merle Curti, Herbert Bolton , and Frederick Merk, who became Turner’s successor at Harvard. He was an early leader of the American Historical Association , serving as its president in 1910 and on the editorial board of the association’s American Historical Review from 1910 to 1915. Poor health forced his early retirement from Harvard in 1924. Turner moved to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California , where he remained as senior research associate until his death.

How Did an Expanding Frontier Shape American Culture?

During the summer of 1893, a young historian presented a paper to the American Historical Society on the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” pointedly noted an announcement by the Census Bureau in 1890 that a western frontier as such no longer existed in the United States, since the entire continent had now been settled. Turner went on to explore what the fact of an expanding frontier had meant in the first century of the republic’s development, drawing large conclusions about the frontier’s effect in shaping a distinctly American individualism. Turner argued that the virtually free land of the west had provided opportunity and diffused social discontent; that in traveling west, Americans had shed many European cultural traits and shaped new ones, partly borrowed from native Americans;  and that the necessary self-sufficiency of westward-moving settlers inclined them to devalue central governmental authority. He left open the question of how the nation would adapt to the closing of this frontier.

Turner’s essay—published in the Report of the American Historical Association for 1893 and later incorporated in his 1920 book, the Frontier in American History —profoundly influenced American historiography in the early 20 th century.  Many of Turner’s claims are currently disputed (for example, his claim that the long struggle to resolve the problem of slavery did less to shape the nation than did the frontier). Nevertheless, the essay still provides an informative summary of the process of western settlement, while raising interesting questions about American self-understanding.

It is interesting to compare Turner’s retrospective view of westward expansion with the prospective view of Jefferson, an early and active proponent of western settlement. In 1783, two decades before pushing through the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson had broached the idea of an exploratory party into the west with George Rogers Clark. He would eventually recruit Clark’s younger brother William to make the trek with Meriwether Lewis, secretly requesting funding from Congress for the expedition in January 1803–three months before he would learn that the ambassadors he had sent to France (James Monroe and Robert Livingston) had been able to negotiate purchase of the entire Louisiana territory.

Seeing in America “an immensity of land courting the industry of the husbandman,” Jefferson rejoiced in Query 19 of Notes on the State of Virginia that the majority of American citizens could live for generations as small yeoman farmers, not as artisans crowded into cities. Jefferson thought the “manners and spirit” of the small farmer best suited to “preserve a republic in vigour.” The speed with which the continent was peopled surely would have surprised him. But Jefferson correctly anticipated the hunger of Americans for western lands, as well as the importance of the trans-Mississippi lands for American strength and security, as seen in his letter to John Breckinridge on August 12, 1803, where he describes his aims in purchasing the Louisiana territory.

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Frederick jackson turner, “significance of the frontier in american history” (1893).

Perhaps the most influential essay by an American historian, Frederick Jackson Turner’s address to the American Historical Association on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” defined for many Americans the relationship between the frontier and American culture and contemplated what might follow “the closing of the frontier.”

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. …

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not  tabula rasa . The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.

Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History, 1919.

Frontier Thesis

"The emergence of western history as an important field of scholarship can best be traced to the famous paper Frederick Jackson Turner delivered at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. It was entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The "Turner thesis" or "frontier thesis," as his argument quickly became known, shaped both popular and scholarly views of the West (and of much else) for two generations. Turner stated his thesis simply. The settlement of the West by white people - "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" - was the central story of American history. The process of westward expansion had transformed a desolate and savage land into modem civilization. It had also continually renewed American ideas of democracy and individualism and had, therefore, shaped not just the West but the nation as a whole. "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bonds of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States." The Turner thesis shaped the writing of American history for a generation, and it shaped the writing of western American history for even longer. " (quoted from "Where Historians Disagree: The 'Frontier' and the West" in Alan Brinkley, American History: A Survey, Chapter 16)

• Turner thesis text
• Turner biography from The West by PBS

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/isern/103/turner.htm

Turner's thesis can be considered:

• as a reflection of the 1890s,
• as a statement of American expansionism,
• as an idea in American thought,
• as an historical philosophy, and
• as the site of debate over the meaning of the "frontier" in American culture.  

The Past is Present

Does Turner Still Live? Considerations on the Popular Afterlife of the American Frontier

Walter Nugent  

Last July marked the 125th anniversary of the “Turner thesis,” which boldly asserted that the westward-moving frontier determined the shape and nature of American civilization. The Turner thesis resonated profoundly. It became the accepted explanation of U.S. development for generations, both among professional historians and the broader public. Does it today?

Let us have a look at the birth of the Turner thesis in July 1893. It took place in Chicago, at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which was in full swing that summer. It boasted a huge Ferris wheel on the Midway Plaisance, along the south side of the newly-opened University of Chicago, and a host of classical-styled buildings eastward to Lake Michigan. (All but one was temporary; it became, and still is, the Museum of Science and Industry.) Exotic ethnic exhibits of strange, “primitive” peoples entertained thousands of visitors; ethnic-themed concerts edified them (Antonín Dvořák, for example, conducted his and other composers’ works on Bohemian Day on August 12th ); and Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show delighted many fair-goers . Several miles to the north, just off the Loop, another freshly-built, classical structure—the only one on the east side of Michigan Avenue and about to become the Art Institute of Chicago—served as the venue for scholarly and literary conferences from May into October. The nine-year-old American Historical Association (AHA) sponsored one of them.

The AHA meeting opened on the hot and humid night of Tuesday, July 11—Chicago’s daytime temperature was in the nineties that week—with a session chaired by James B. Angell, president of the University of Michigan and of the Association. It included four academic papers. Jesse Macy of Iowa College spoke on “The Relation of History to Politics.” George Kreihn of Johns Hopkins described “English Popular Uprisings in the Middle Ages,” followed by Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin Historical Society on “Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin.” The final speaker was thirty-year-old Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin, who spoke on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Press coverage of the session began bravely in the Chicago Herald, which gave Professor Macy seven paragraphs, but the reporting petered out after that. The press probably had their deadlines to meet and had likely braved enough of the day’s heat. In even the most conscientious newspapers, Turner received only a mention. The journalists did not describe or discuss it, then or in the following days. His eventual biographers doubted that he could have read the entire paper or even much of it, given the length of the program, the heat of the evening, and the fatigue of the historians who had spent the afternoon with Buffalo Bill. When it was published later in the Proceedings of the AHA, it ran to nearly fifty pages.

Turner’s thoughts on the frontier’s significance did not catch on immediately, but they gained momentum and attention after 1900. In fact, his accumulating fame propelled him to the presidency of the AHA in 1910, when he was only forty-eight, making him one of the youngest ever to receive that honor. The Chicago daily newspapers, and for that matter, historians at that time, little noted what Turner said. But in time, historians and a good bit of the general public would long remember “the Turner thesis.”

In even the most conscientious newspapers, Turner received only a mention. The journalists did not describe or discuss it, then or in the following days.

What, then, was that thesis? Turner began by noting a fact: that the official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled. The “frontier line” had, up to then, demarcated the two regions. By the end of the 1880s, the Census report found, “the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” This, Turner concluded, “marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West.” And here comes the thesis: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. ” (Italics added.) And, he would go on to say, that movement explains American culture. A student once said in a class of mine that she did not think much of Western history because it lacked ideas. I should have quoted Turner to her (but failed to), as it’s almost impossible to conceive of a more comprehensive statement than his—or one more audacious.

Only later did historians and others point out that the land was not “free”—it usually cost good money to own it and start a working farm on it, and it was certainly not empty. Indians already lived there. But those objections surfaced in the years ahead. The conventional wisdom in the 1890s among those who pondered America’s origins was that Europeans had brought with them the germs of civilization, and those germs evolved, in time, into the forms of American civilization. Not so, said Turner. “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West…. The frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization…. Little by little [the American] transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs…. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.”

So strikingly comprehensive was this proclamation, so in contrast with the conventional wisdom, yet so flattering to Americans’ nationalism, that it took firm hold among historians, academic and amateur, who concerned themselves with how America came to be whatever it had become. Although the thesis had some serious flaws, they were not immediately obvious. For one thing, the frontier was not over in 1890. A line may have been gone, but a great many unsettled places remained. Homesteading, the creation of quarter-section (160-acre) farms by personal and family industriousness, had indeed been chartered by the Homestead Act of 1862 and reinforced by later statutes, but its heyday was post-1890. More homesteads were patented from 1900 to 1920 than in the previous forty years. The “Indian wars” were over by 1890, after the surrender of the Apache Geronimo in New Mexico Territory in 1886 and the murder of Sitting Bull and the Army’s massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee in 1890. For that matter, the consigning of indigenous peoples to “savagery” placed Turner within a comfortable consensus among Euro-Americans who did not doubt the superiority of their own “civilization.” It would be decades before reflective “New Western Historians” would seriously question these categories.

The official report of the results of the 1890 U.S. Census observed that it was no longer possible to draw a “frontier line” between the Canadian and Mexican borders, east of which was settled territory and west of which was unsettled.

The Turner thesis took firm hold beginning in the late 1890s because it was a simple explanation, tied to a Census fact, the “end of the frontier,” and because it was uncritically nationalistic and self-assuring. Territorial expansion, thought to be over after Oregon and the northern half of Mexico were incorporated into the continental U.S. by 1854, resumed with the taking of Hawaii and the Spanish colonies of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico after the “splendid little war” of 1898. Through “protectorates” over Central American countries and Cuba from 1898 to the 1930s, the Caribbean became an American lake. The Turner thesis seemed to ratify and resurrect, in academic language, the old idea of Manifest Destiny. National chest-thumping continued anew, and Turner’s thesis gave it resonance.

Turner and his thesis flourished for several ensuing decades. One of his biographers, Ray Allan Billington, remarked that by 1950 or so, the entire field of American historians had become “one big Turnerverein .” [1] Turner mentored many graduate students at Wisconsin and then at Harvard where he taught from 1910 until retiring in 1924. By the 1930s and 1940s they were scattered in history departments around the country, engaging in research on aspects of the Turnerian West and producing their own students who carried the Turnerian torch a generation further. Turner kept track of when his students gave papers at the AHA or the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (now the Organization of American Historians), the two national organizations of professional historians. They “sometimes number a third of those reading papers.” [2] My undergraduate teacher of American history, Peter Beckman, earned his Ph.D. at the Catholic University in Washington in the late 1940s. Asked one time what his dissertation topic had been, he replied, “What was anybody’s dissertation at the Catholic University about at that time? The Catholic Church on the XYZ frontier, from bumpty-bump to bumpty-bump.” (His was on Kansas in the 1850s and 1860s). History departments made sure they included faculty who specialized in regions of the U.S., so as to explore their development in the Turnerian mode. In the late 1940s, the AHA named Turner and Francis Parkman the most outstanding U.S. historians ever. [3] In 1963, when I joined the faculty at Indiana University, history students could take Oscar Winther’s “History of the Far West,” or Chase Mooney’s “History of the South,” or John Barnhart’s (himself a Turner student) “History of the Middle West.” By 1970 all three of these senior colleagues had died or retired. They were not replaced. Their courses, begun in the late 1930s heyday of Turnerism, were not taught again. The department prioritized newer subfields—first, quantification, and soon, African-American history, and a bit later, women’s history. The Turnerian hegemony had begun to erode.

More homesteads were patented from 1900 to 1920 than in the previous forty years.

By the 1980s it was definitely crumbling. Turner himself wrote many essays, but only one book. That book, The Rise of the New West 1819-1829 (1906) and a good portion of his published articles were on events that took place in the early nineteenth century. His students and followers traced frontiers of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, concentrating on trans-Appalachia to the Mississippi and a little westward before the frontier was reputed to have closed. But in time, the sheer weight of eighty years of further history after 1893, whether of “frontiers” or simply of events that happened in the West, however defined, made younger historians uneasy. How to fit the twentieth century within Turner’s framework? Often, it didn’t work. Historians were also aware of trends and currents in the general culture—the civil rights movement, women’s rights in its various aspects, a troubling suspicion that Native American history had not been told fairly, and that ethnic minorities in the West—Asians, Latinos and others—had never had a frontier history in the Turnerian sense, but they undoubtedly had histories. Beyond those areas that the Turnerian canvas hardly covered, the United States had changed from a society and economy in which farm life was the norm, as it still was in Turner’s own day and certainly was in the times he wrote about, to the urban, even metropolitan, society of the late twentieth century. The Turner thesis was showing too many holes. Too many monographs and journal articles were appearing that owed nothing to it. It was time, by the 1980s, for a new thesis—a new paradigm—a new Western history.

And lo, that appeared. A one-time student of Howard R. Lamar at Yale and a native of inland Southern California, Patricia Nelson Limerick brought out The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West in 1987. [4] Within a few years, the book was acclaimed and recognized as the charter of the “New Western History.” Limerick treated Turner with appropriate deference. He was, she wrote, “a scholar with intellectual courage, an innovative spirit, and a forceful writing style. But respect for [Turner] the individual flowed over into excessive deference to the individual’s ideas.” [5] Turner’s assertion, based on the Census, that the frontier had “closed” in 1890, left a question: what came, or comes, after? (Turner never could decide; late in his life he suggested some form of capitalism, maybe socialism, something as yet inchoate.) And if it had closed, then pre-1890 American history was walled off from anything later. That alone fossilized the field of Western history. Limerick’s answer was to break the end of the frontier from the Census straitjacket. How to date the “end of the frontier”? Perhaps with the acquisition of Oregon and the Southwest in the late 1840s. Perhaps with the statutory end of homesteading in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. Her “preferred entry in the ‘closing competition’ is the popularization of tourism and the quaintness of the folk: when Indian war dances became tourist spectacles, when the formerly scorned customs of the Chinese drew tourists to Chinatown….” Then the “frontier” could be considered over with. [6]

The Turner thesis seemed to ratify and resurrect, in academic language, the old idea of Manifest Destiny.

So what next? Limerick argued that “the idea of the frontier is obviously worth studying” but it “is an unstable concept,” which “required that the observer stand in the East and look to the West.” [7] There were other perspectives. In fact—while Turner thought of the frontier as a repeating process, why not instead think of the West, or the many Wests, as places? Thus, “In rethinking Western history, we gain the freedom to think of the West as a place—as many complicated environments occupied by natives who considered their homelands to be the center, not the edge…. Deemphasize the frontier and its supposed end, conceive of the West as a place and not a process, and Western American history has a new look.” [8]

Indeed it did. Prior to Legacy, historians of the West had already broken out of the Turnerian confines with books and articles on aspects of Native American, Latino/a, Asian and European immigrant, and women’s history. Legacy, however, which Limerick always insisted was a book of synthesis rather than of fresh research, provided a new framework for such endeavors. The victory of the new framework was not sudden or complete, as was revealed in a survey I conducted of about three hundred Western historians and fiction writers in early 1991, about four years after Limerick’s book appeared. I asked three questions: where do you think the West is? Where do you personally have to go to enter it (if you’re outside) or exit it (if you’re inside)? and what sets “the West” apart? The historians who responded showed lingering signs of Turnerian loyalties or training, i.e. a view of the West looking at it from the East. The eastern edge was most commonly said to be the north-south line along the Red-Missouri-and Sabine rivers, i.e. the eastern boundaries of the Great Plains states. Nearly as many responders chose the Mississippi, thus making the region the “trans-Mississippi West” of traditional college courses. A smaller cluster chose the 98th or 100th meridians. For the majority, the western boundary was the Pacific, though a good number excluded the coastal areas west of the Cascades and Sierras as not really “Western” despite geography. About one-eighth of the historians, but almost half of the fiction writers, refused to give any actual geographical limits, but claimed the “the West” was a myth, or a state of mind; and after all, that is what Western fiction is largely about.

Thus there remained in 1991 a residue, or even loyalty, to the Turnerian viewpoint. But two collections of essays, all in the New Western History camp, were already in the works. Limerick co-authored one with Clyde A. Milner II and Charles E. Rankin: Trails: Toward a New Western History, which included a dozen essays by various historians on historiography. A then-all-Yale team of William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin produced Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, which included another fifteen essays with a similar non-Turnerian thrust. [9]

At the University of Indiana in 1963, history students could take Oscar Winther’s “History of the Far West,” or Chase Mooney’s “History of the South,” or John Barnhart’s “History of the Middle West.” By 1970 all three of these senior colleagues had died or retired. They were not replaced.

To return now to our original question, does the Turner thesis still live? Are there still any Turnerians? Or has the New Western History obliterated it and them? I have not conducted another survey like the one I did in 1991, so the following report on the status of the field is impressionistic and hardly random. But it may be indicative. First let me quote a biographical item. For the program of the 2013 AHA meeting, Stanford University’s Richard White wrote a short biography of the new Association president, William Cronon. Both were outstanding, well-published historians of the American West and were also leaders in the related field of environmental history. [10] Cronon also happened to hold the Frederick Jackson Turner chair at the University of Wisconsin. Recapitulating Cronon’s career, White pointed out that Cronon had been a student at Yale of Howard R. Lamar’s—as were Limerick, John Faragher, and others who became leaders in the new Western history. That history “gestated at Yale,” White wrote, “and those outside the field as well as the popular press sometimes lumped Yale, the New Western History, and a rejection of Turner’s frontier thesis into one homogenous lump.” But that missed the mark. “Turner and the Frontier Thesis had long ago lost influence among American historians,” White continued, “although Turner retained, at least indirectly, a great hold on the American popular imagination [more on this in a moment]. Patty Limerick certainly was explicitly and wittily anti-Turnerian, but her target was his hold over popular culture and popular history.”

Perhaps another survey like the one I conducted thirty-odd years ago would end up completely obliterating the Turner thesis. Perhaps not. In lieu of a full-blown survey, I contacted a handful of friends in the profession who have all achieved considerable eminence. I asked them about their views on the thesis today, at its 125th anniversary. Their responses—with one exception—pretty well confirmed White’s epitaph.

How to fit the twentieth century within Turner’s framework? Often, it didn’t work.

Anne F. Hyde reported that she had just met with graduate students who “were complaining about western historians still feeling obligated to use Turner as a straw man.” [11] She agreed with one of them “who said it is fine if you take Turner seriously as part of a cultural moment” or if regionalism is taken seriously. But she doesn’t require students to “use Turner himself.”

Nor does Steve Aron. [12] He wrote that he “stopped assigning ‘The Significance of the Frontier’ in my American West course about ten years ago. I still briefly summarize its argument and its impact in my opening lecture and come back to it in a lecture about intellectual and political currents at the end of the nineteenth century, but no longer make students read it…. It’s clear that very few have encountered it before though a slightly larger number have heard of Turner.” In short, Aron finds that “[T]he idea that the ‘settlement’ of the frontier/West shaped American history/character/culture has great popular resonance, though much less than it did decades ago.”

William F. Deverell, finds that “Turner and his thesis have wandered largely out of my courses on the West, either as topics or as organizing principle…. [H]e and the thesis have begun to appear more in my US survey and environmental history courses as a moment in time in post-Civil War intellectual history.” He also lectures about “what motivated the thesis” and notes Turner’s blind spots—lots of nature, few indigenous peoples.” [13]

Virginia Scharff writes, “I guess I’d say that Turner lives in pop culture and politics, most assuredly…. At the same time, I don’t see Turner resonating much in the most exciting scholarship. Some of the best stuff goes right at him, for example, Honor Sachs’ brilliant Home Rule (Yale, 2015) explores the way in which the settlement of Kentucky was premised not on valiant men taming the wilderness, but the establishment of other exploitative and violent households where the labor of women and children was crucial.” [14]

Even as the Western story triumphed on all fronts it was increasingly burdened with a melancholy nostalgia. The West was won—now what? Enter Turner and his 1893 “Significance” essay.

These historians, then, agree (within their own nuances) that Turner and the thesis are no longer the engines of new scholarship or of historical pedagogy. Yet they believe that versions of the frontier idea) still command much respect in American popular culture. Paul Andrew Hutton takes a quite different position. [15] “I not only still teach Turner but I still firmly believe that he was correct,” he writes. Hutton attached to his e-mail to me a piece he wrote for True West magazine in the November 2018 issue called “When the West Was True.” I cannot do justice to it here, but I encourage reading it. Turner appears, favorably, toward the conclusion. “Got a great response from that readership,” Hutton writes. He adds that by the 1880s-1890s and just beyond, besides Turner there appeared Buffalo Bill Cody’s show, Theodore Roosevelt’s “magnificent” four-volume The Winning of the West, Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian, and works by the artists Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. All of them had “made the story of the West into America’s story.” But not without a shadow, according to Hutton. “[E]ven as the Western story triumphed on all fronts it was increasingly burdened with a melancholy nostalgia. The West was won—now what? Enter Turner and his 1893 “Significance” essay. Hutton believes that it “revolutionized the teaching of American history [and made Turner] the godfather of the academic field of Western history.” No doubt about that. Thus he concludes, “There is a powerful truth in the story of the American frontier that is far too valuable to our country to ever be cast aside.” [16]

Turner wondered himself about “now what”? In correspondence late in his life (he died in 1932), he lamented that the frontier, the force that shaped America and Americans’ character, was over. What would come next? He did not know and did not predict. He also realized that the frontier thesis was not perfect, and that some of its critics were correct. The criticisms, of course, broadened and deepened as the New Western History developed in the 1980s and onward. Yet it was still a fair statement in 1998, as Allan G. Bogue wrote in his biography of Turner, that “of American historians only Francis Parkman and Henry Adams left an imprint upon American history comparable to that of Turner, and theirs were less varied than his.” [17] Penetrating assessments of Turner’s understandings of American democracy and nationalism appear in the final chapter of the other major biography, by Ray Allen Billington. [18]

To many Americans, this country is not just different, it is exceptional—something Turner affirmed in 1893. “Make America Great Again” is a manifestation of that. And it has been not only from the Right; Barack Obama clearly repeated the exceptional idea.

The hegemony of the Turner thesis, so all-encompassing among professional historians and history teachers and so resonating and echoing among the general public, began to erode about a decade before it reached its centennial. Some reasons for that have already been mentioned—the near-disappearance of anything like the frontier homestead, the steady increase of the country’s metropolitan population and the thinning of rural and small-town population, the mass media and social media and the fading away of TV and movie Westerns. Important too was the rise, overall, of a very different national agenda dating from the 1970’s, not to say from the early twentieth century or 1893, the year of Turner’s epochal essay.

Yet aspects and remnants of the frontier idea do linger on. To many Americans, this country is not just different, it is exceptional—something Turner affirmed in 1893. “Make America Great Again” is a manifestation of that. And it has been not only from the Right; Barack Obama clearly repeated the exceptional idea. Whether “exceptional” means just “different,” or something unique and privileged, is another discussion. Despite the fact that Americans shoved aside the indigenous peoples of North America and practiced their own form of settler colonialism, as various European nations did elsewhere in the world since 1500, they have not wavered—in their popular culture—from believing that they have been exceptional, a people guided and motivated by lofty, humane ideals. We are unique, we are the best, and we have been destined by God—so say many Americans.

So is Turner’s frontier thesis dead or is it alive? To academic historians, it’s pretty dead. Yet it is very much alive to fans of the History Channel and other consumers and conveyors of popular culture. They may not think much about free land, its recession westward, and the line between savagery and civilization, but in a real sense, they are Turnerians still.

[1] Billington was referring to the Turnvereine , or Turner Clubs, a popular and widespread social and athletic organization of that time among German-Americans.

[2] Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 330.

[3] Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), xiii.

[4] New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

[5] Legacy of Conquest, 20.

[6] Ibid., 25.

[7] Ibid., 25-26.

[8] Ibid., 26-27 .

[9] Limerick, Milner, and Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), and Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Aky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

[10] White had been president of the Western History Association and of the Organization of American Historians, and author of many books on Western and environmental history.

[11] Hyde is professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, editor of the Western Historical Quarterly, and author (among other things) of the prize-winning Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860

[12] Professor and chair of history at UCLA and former director of the Institute for the Study of the American West at the Autry Center of the American West in Los Angeles.

[13] Professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington Library-USC Institute on California and the West.

[14] Distinguished professor emerita at the University of New Mexico, past president of the Western History Association, and author of several successful novels as well as histories.

[15] Distinguished professor at the University of New Mexico, longtime executive director (1990-2006) of the Western History Association, past president of the Western Writers of America and winner of many of its Spur writing awards.

[16] Hutton’s communication, and those from Anne Hyde, William Deverell, Stephen Aron, and Virginia Scharff are e-mails I received from them in late November 2018.

[17] Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner, 451.

[18] “XVIII: The Persistence of a Theory: the Frontier and Sectional Hypotheses,” in Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner.

Church Life Journal

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The Conflict Thesis Reimagined: From Theological Reform to Secular Weapon

by James Ungureanu September 17, 2024

R ecent scholarship on the so-called conflict between science and religion has revisited the reception of John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). [1] Indeed, contrary to common perception, Draper and White did not frame science and religion as inherently antagonistic; their positions were far more complex and nuanced.

This complexity is reflected in the diverse public responses to their works, where three predominant patterns emerge. [2] First, the more liberal press heralded Draper and White’s narratives as facilitating a “new Reformation.” They viewed the conflict rhetoric as instrumental in advocating for a distinction between religion and theology, and as a necessary step towards aligning faith with modernity.

In contrast, orthodox religious critics found such separation untenable. For them, faith was inseparable from doctrinal foundations, and they regarded Draper and White’s approach as a direct threat to Christianity, condemning their works as historically inaccurate and ideologically dangerous.

Meanwhile, secularists and atheists appropriated Draper and White’s conflict thesis to advance their own agendas. They interpreted it as an indictment of all religious belief, deploying the language of conflict to erode faith entirely, while finding it paradoxical that Draper and White themselves retained religious convictions.

In retrospect, the anxieties of conservative critics were not entirely misplaced. Here I will investigate how early twentieth-century skeptics appropriated and transformed the conflict thesis into a more secular narrative, significantly broadening its influence.

Organized Freethought in Victorian England

Liberal Protestantism, emerging from the Enlightenment and Romanticism, sought to align religion with contemporary values and scientific understanding. However, this modernization often led to a deeper questioning of religion’s relevance. As James Turner noted, religion was increasingly humanized, making it feasible “to abandon God, to believe simply in man.” [3]

While liberal Protestants adapted their faith, skeptics doubted whether religion retained any substantive value. Leslie Stephen, for instance, critiqued Matthew Arnold’s idea of preserving a “sublimated essence of theology,” questioning whether aesthetic judgments could sustain religious belief in the absence of doctrinal foundations. [4] By the late nineteenth century, these theological concessions helped pave the way for organized secularism to gain societal respectability.

Victorian freethought inherited diverse traditions, particularly the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and Deist principles. In mid-nineteenth-century England, “secularism” emerged as a philosophical movement, deeply influenced by Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1793). Paine denounced the church as enslaving humanity, advocating for faith in reason and a “Religion of Humanity.” His critique of the Bible as inconsistent and mythological laid the groundwork for radical freethought.

Freethought, tracing its roots to English Deists, found resonance with the Protestant Reformation’s spirit of liberating religious thought from clerical authority. [5] Figures like Richard Carlile, Robert Taylor, Robert Owen, and Charles Southwell were key advocates of freethought, pushing for self-improvement, education, and reform. Carlile, imprisoned for reprinting Paine’s The Age of Reason , saw the printing press as a tool to dismantle the “double yoke” of “Kingcraft and Priestcraft,” using publications to rally against religious and political institutions.

As public opinion grew more tolerant and English society became more stable, freethinkers adopted a less combative stance. By mid-century, leading figures institutionalized irreligion on an unprecedented scale, shifting from radical opposition to a broader, more accepted promotion of secularism.

The Rise of Radical Freethought in the Late Nineteenth Century

The late nineteenth century marked a golden age for radical freethought, during which freethinkers celebrated the liberation of humanity from religious constraints. This movement, led by figures such as George Jacob Holyoake, Charles Bradlaugh, Robert G. Ingersoll, and Joseph M. McCabe, extended its influence across both urban and rural areas through tracts, pamphlets, and magazines.

Interestingly, many freethinkers came from liberal Protestant backgrounds. Scholars like Leigh Eric Schmidt and Christopher Grasso have highlighted the complex relationship between American Protestantism and secularism. [6] For instance, Robert Ingersoll, raised by a liberal Presbyterian minister, eventually favored science over religious belief. Similarly, Samuel P. Putnam’s rejection of theism was shaped by liberal religious ideas from figures like Channing and Emerson. Many American Protestants, navigating from liberalism to infidelity, demonstrated the intersection of Protestantism and secularism, revealing a matrix of rivalry, alliance, and opposition.

In Britain, secularism advanced through both secularists and agnostics. As Bernie Lightman observed, while Thomas H. Huxley used agnosticism to distance himself from atheism, secularists increasingly employed the term to articulate atheistic views. Yet secularists recognized the influence of thinkers like Spencer, Huxley, and Tyndall, even as they criticized agnostics and religious liberals for compromising with religion.

Foote’s Freethinker magazine ridiculed agnostics who attended church, and Bradlaugh condemned figures like Huxley and Spencer for “intellectual vacillation” in failing to promote materialism fully. [7] Darwin, too, faced Bradlaugh’s criticism for what was seen as pandering to religious norms, especially in securing his place in Westminster Abbey. [8]

Ultimately, figures like Bradlaugh were perplexed by agnostics who, in their view, remained too closely tied to religious traditions.

Responses from Agnostics and the Evolving Secularist Landscape

Agnostics often responded to critiques with sharp rebuttals. Thomas Huxley, a leading figure in the agnostic movement, expressed disdain for certain elements within the freethought community. He criticized much of its literature, dismissing what he saw as “heterodox ribaldry,” which he found more distasteful than orthodox fanaticism. Huxley argued that attacking Christianity with scurrilous rhetoric was counterproductive, particularly in England, where such methods were outdated. He harbored a “peculiar abhorrence” for Charles Bradlaugh and his associates.

Bernie Lightman has demonstrated that Huxley and his scientific naturalist peers were repelled by Bradlaugh’s coarse atheism. [9] In correspondence with agnostic Richard Bithell, Huxley declined to support Charles Watts, criticizing freethought literature as repetitive and tiresome. He lamented how such works alienated thoughtful readers, noting: “It is monstrous that I cannot let one of these professed organs of Freethought lie upon my table without someone asking if I approve of this réchauffé of Voltaire or Paine.” [10]

Even moderate freethinkers like George Jacob Holyoake faced discrimination from agnostics. Although Holyoake and Herbert Spencer were longtime friends, Spencer refused Holyoake’s proposal to travel together to America in 1882, fearing it would be seen as an endorsement of Holyoake’s ideas.

Despite this, Holyoake remained a central figure among secularists. Raised in a religious household, his path led him through Christian denominations and eventually to freethought and naturalism. Holyoake often referenced his Christian upbringing to bolster his credibility as a freethinker, using his religious past to enhance his standing as a critic of religion. [11]

Holyoake’s Secularism and Its Impact

During his studies, George Jacob Holyoake encountered Robert Owen’s teachings and joined the Owenite movement as a “social missionary.” By 1843, he had taken over The Oracle of Reason and later founded The Reasoner and Herald of Progress , which became one of the longest-running freethought publications. Throughout the 1850s, Holyoake traveled widely, advocating for social reform and engaging in debates with religious opponents.

In 1849, Holyoake designated The Reasoner as “secular,” and in 1851, coined the term “secularism” to describe his freethought philosophy. He saw secularism as focused on this life, differentiating it from atheism by attracting theists and deists while avoiding the negative connotations of atheism. Holyoake’s secularism centered on social reform rather than religious critique, arguing that salvation, if it existed, was achieved through works, not faith. By promoting secularism, Holyoake sought collaboration with Christian liberals to advance rational morality.

In 1855, Holyoake and his brother Austin established a printing house on Fleet Street to distribute secularist literature. As president of the London Secular Society, Holyoake first met Charles Bradlaugh. Unlike Bradlaugh, Holyoake advocated cooperation among unbelievers, deists, and liberal theists to promote social reform, encouraging atheists to collaborate with liberal clergy to bridge the gap between secularists and Christian liberals.

The Watts Legacy and Secular Propaganda

Most importantly, George Jacob Holyoake’s conciliatory approach to secularism was embraced by Charles Watts and his son, Charles Albert Watts. In 1884, Charles Albert took a significant step toward consolidating secularist efforts by publishing the Agnostic Annual , marking a shift toward greater coordination within the secular movement.

The story of the Watts family’s contribution to freethought is well-documented. [12] Charles Watts, originally a Wesleyan minister’s son, became involved with Bradlaugh’s National Reformer before distancing himself after the “Knowlton affair” and aligning with Holyoake’s ethical humanism. By the 1880s, he took over Austin Holyoake’s printing firm and became a leading rationalist publisher. He eventually left the business to his son, Charles Albert, who sought to attract middle-class unbelievers by promoting agnosticism through the Agnostic Annual . Despite an incident where Huxley publicly disavowed any connection to the Annual, Charles Albert’s relationships with scientific naturalists remained intact.

Charles Albert expanded his efforts by publishing The Agnostic and establishing the “Agnostic Temple” in 1885, offering literature and holding meetings grounded in Spencer’s ideas. That same year, he launched Watts’s Literary Guide , a monthly publication catering to working-class and lower-middle-class audiences. The Guide , which eventually became the New Humanist , featured works from notable figures like Spencer, Huxley, Darwin, and Draper, often depicting the conflict between theology and science in dramatic terms.

Charles Albert also established the Propagandist Press Committee to further the distribution of rationalist literature, successfully expanding both the subscriber base and the visibility of secular publications.

Charles Albert Watts and the Rationalist Press Association

By the late nineteenth century, Charles Albert Watts had founded Watts & Co., and in 1899, his group of rationalists formed the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). Evolving from the Propagandist Press Committee, the RPA sought to promote freedom of thought in ethics, theology, and philosophy while advocating secular education and challenging traditional religious creeds. The RPA published books on religion, biblical criticism, and intellectual progress, emphasizing the perceived conflict between science and religion and advocating secular moral instruction.

The RPA featured works from key figures like Joseph McCabe and John M. Robertson. McCabe, a former Jesuit and prolific author, predicted the downfall of Christianity through scientific naturalism and biblical criticism. His Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists celebrated Draper and White, though he acknowledged that both were theists. McCabe viewed Draper’s work as rationalist literature and praised White’s contribution to rationalism while noting his aim to purify, rather than destroy, Christianity. [13]

John M. Robertson, in his History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929), referred to Draper’s Intellectual Development as a key contribution to rationalist culture. He argued that Draper’s theism was likely a result of social pressure but acknowledged the naturalistic approach in his work. [14] Other secularists like Joseph Mazzini Wheeler and Samuel P. Putnam similarly recognized Draper and White as freethinkers, with Putnam seeing the Reformation as a precursor to the eventual decline of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. [15]

In the early twentieth century, the RPA expanded its influence by reprinting “Rationalist classics” using mass-production techniques. Charles Albert Watts collaborated with publishers like Macmillan to produce affordable editions of influential works, distributing six-penny editions of texts by authors such as Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Paine, and notably Draper and White. Draper’s work, which he saw as a preface to a broader departure from “the faith of the fathers,” was integral to the RPA’s mission to reach a wider audience with rationalist ideas.

Origins of American Freethought

The roots of American freethought trace back to Thomas Paine, whose influence remains foundational. Freethought, as a movement, challenges established beliefs and seeks knowledge, empowering citizens to discern truth and strengthen democracy. Freethinkers advocate reason over passion or outdated customs, overlapping with rationalism, secularism, and skepticism.

Paine’s Common Sense (1776) electrified America and became a rallying cry for revolution. His later works, The Rights of Man (1791) and The Age of Reason (1794), more directly engaged with freethought, with The Age of Reason launching a bold attack on organized religion. Declaring himself a deist, Paine famously stated, “my own mind is my own church.” For his views, he was censored, ridiculed, and ostracized upon his return to America. Even Thomas Jefferson distanced himself. Paine died in 1809, nearly forgotten, his funeral attended by only a few. It was only after the Civil War that freethought gained new life in the U.S.

Secularism, though less organized than in Britain, grew in prominence after the Civil War. James Turner notes that agnosticism emerged as a self-sustaining phenomenon within twenty years. [16] Robert G. Ingersoll, known as the “Great Agnostic,” became the chief exponent of this movement, leading the “Golden Age of Freethought” (1875–1914). Ingersoll’s oratory revived Paine’s tarnished reputation, defending his legacy in essays like Vindication of Thomas Paine (1877). Ingersoll himself opposed religion, which cost him his political career, though he diverged from Paine on issues like socialism. [17]

Ingersoll’s freethought views were complex. Though the son of a minister, he grew to abhor religion, and this stance cost him his political career, which ended while he was still in his twenties. His story reflects the broader challenge faced by the freethought movement, which struggled to gain mainstream acceptance. A mere accusation of being anti-religious could destroy a political candidate’s chances. Ingersoll himself opposed socialism, diverging from some of Paine’s more progressive ideas.

Ingersoll’s death in 1899 marked the end of an era. Unlike Paine, he was neither poor nor forgotten, and even his critics admired his eloquence and ability to connect with audiences across the social spectrum.

Freethinkers Respond to Draper

Freethinkers like Joseph Treat and T. D. Hall seized upon Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science as a powerful tool in their efforts to promote secularism and challenge Christianity. Treat, in correspondence with Draper, argued that Christianity had consistently hindered genuine scientific inquiry. He praised Draper’s work for exposing this historical antagonism, asserting that Draper had liberated science from the “bondage” of Christian influence.

Hall, in his pamphlet Can Christianity Be Made to Harmonize with Science? , echoed Treat’s appreciation of Draper’s clarity but critiqued him for stopping short of declaring an outright incompatibility between science and Christianity. Hall insisted that Draper lacked the boldness to acknowledge Christianity’s inevitable collapse in the face of scientific progress. Once Christianity’s central doctrines—such as the Fall, Atonement, and Resurrection—were stripped away, Hall believed, the religion would unravel entirely.

These voices were part of a broader American freethought movement, led by publications like Truth Seeker , founded by D. M. Bennett in 1876. Truth Seeker and groups like the National Liberal League united freethinkers, rationalists, and religious skeptics in advocating for the complete secularization of society.

Across the Atlantic, Draper’s narrative also resonated with British freethinkers, particularly through Charles Albert Watts and the Rationalist Press Association. Watts, via his Watts’s Literary Guide (later New Humanist ), treated Draper’s work as a cornerstone for promoting secularism and rationalism. The Rationalist Press Association published works that undermined traditional religious views, with prominent figures like John M. Robertson and Joseph M. Wheeler consistently citing Draper’s analysis to support their campaigns for secular education and religious criticism.

For Robertson, Draper’s naturalistic outlook made his work indispensable to the freethought movement, despite Draper’s own theological leanings. Similarly, Wheeler and Samuel P. Putnam integrated Draper’s arguments into their broader critiques of religion, using his historical analysis not merely as a chronicle of science but as a potent tool in the battle to free society from religious dominance.

Freethinkers on both sides of the Atlantic adopted Draper’s narrative to legitimize their belief in the fundamental incompatibility of science and religion. Through their publications, organizations, and correspondence, they transformed Draper’s work into a weapon for advancing a secular society, one free from the influence of religious institutions.

Freethinkers Respond to White

Freethinkers, as they did with Draper, appropriated Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom to further their secular agenda. Publications like The American Free Thought Magazine praised White’s work for illustrating the historical struggle to modernize Christian theology, framing it as a triumph of science over religious dogma. The magazine argued that White’s history was essential for any freethinker’s library, not merely for cataloging religious errors but for celebrating science’s victories.

In England, thinkers like Alfred W. Benn placed White alongside luminaries such as Buckle, Draper, and Lecky. However, Benn expressed frustration with White’s reluctance to fully reject Christianity, arguing that his conclusions logically pointed to the abandonment of its doctrines. For Benn and others, White’s work symbolized the deepening conflict between rational thought and religious belief.

White’s work also drew criticism from prominent atheists like Edward Payson Evans and Elizabeth Edson Gibson Evans. They were perplexed by White’s attempts to reconcile religion and science. Elizabeth criticized White’s refusal to fully disbelieve in religion, insisting that science had consistently debunked religious claims. Edward accused White of being overly generous to religion, contending that the conflict between science and faith was irreconcilable.

This tension was further evident in White’s interactions with Robert G. Ingersoll, the renowned agnostic orator. While Ingersoll appreciated White’s contribution to intellectual openness and his critique of religious authority, he saw White’s lingering religious sentiment as unnecessary. Ingersoll dismissed Christianity as not worth saving, sarcastically asking why God would make truth-seeking safe now after allowing it to be dangerous for centuries.

Despite White’s reluctance to fully embrace secularism, freethinkers eagerly adopted his work to undermine religious institutions. Charles Albert Watts, a prominent British secularist, published extensive reviews of White’s book in the Watts’s Literary Guide , encouraging White to write for the secularist Annual . Although White declined, secularists continued to use his work to advance their cause.

White himself was unsettled by this reception. He had aimed to provide a balanced critique, addressing both religious “scoffers” like Ingersoll and the religious “gush” of figures like John Henry Newman. In private, he expressed to his secretary George Lincoln Burr that he sought to present “the truth as it is in Jesus,” but both religious and irreligious readers often misinterpreted his work as an attack on faith itself.

In conclusion, while White’s intentions were more conciliatory than Draper’s, freethinkers and secularists embraced his narrative as part of their broader efforts to secularize society. Regardless of White’s personal beliefs, his work became a cornerstone in the intellectual campaign to discredit religious authority and advance rationalism.

Joseph McCabe and the “Land of Bunk”

One of the most significant secularists to appropriate Draper and White’s conflict thesis was Joseph McCabe, a former Franciscan monk turned outspoken atheist. McCabe believed that science and technology would not only solve society’s problems but also lead to a more rational and egalitarian world. His translation of Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe (1900) introduced Haeckel’s ideas to English-speaking audiences, and despite McCabe’s lack of formal scientific training, this association lent authority to his writings. A prolific author, McCabe produced over 200 books on science, history, and religion, championing evolutionary thought and forecasting Christianity’s inevitable demise in the face of modern science.

McCabe’s personal journey mirrored his intellectual transformation. Raised in a Franciscan monastery, where he took the name Brother Antony, McCabe was tormented by doubts about Christianity. His experiences in the monastery, marked by physical suffering and intellectual conflict, eventually led him to leave the priesthood in 1895. His account, Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897), detailed his disillusionment with the Church and marked his formal break with religion. From that point on, McCabe became a relentless advocate for atheism, insisting that science, not religion, held the answers to life’s great questions.

McCabe’s partnership with Kansas-based publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius was one of the defining collaborations of his career. Haldeman-Julius, known for his “Little Blue Books” series, provided affordable and accessible literature on topics ranging from politics to science. McCabe became the series’ most prolific contributor, writing 134 Little Blue Books and over 100 Big Blue Books . Haldeman-Julius praised McCabe as “the greatest scholar in the world,” crediting his works with advancing humanity’s cultural progress.

This partnership gave McCabe a renewed sense of purpose, especially after facing personal and professional setbacks in Britain. By 1925, after separating from his wife and severing ties with key British publishers, McCabe found both financial stability and intellectual validation through his collaboration with Haldeman-Julius. Over the following years, McCabe produced an immense body of work, earning substantial income while continuing to challenge religious orthodoxy.

One of McCabe’s most influential works, The Conflict Between Science and Religion (1927), essentially echoed Draper’s narrative but with a tone of triumph. McCabe confidently predicted that future historians would regard the denial of the science-religion conflict as laughable. He argued that “science has, ever since its birth, been in conflict with religion,” with Christianity as its “most deadly opponent.”

McCabe’s critique extended beyond traditional religious beliefs. He reserved particular scorn for modernist and liberal theologians, dismissing their attempts to reconcile Christianity with science as “the veriest piece of bunk that Modernism ever invented.” In McCabe’s view, rejecting Christianity’s core doctrines—whether through scientific reinterpretation or otherwise—was tantamount to rejecting Christianity entirely. For him, “progressive religion” was a contradiction, and those who embraced it were deluding themselves.

Ironically, McCabe used arguments similar to those of conservative Christians, accusing liberal theologians like Shailer Mathews of undermining Christianity’s foundations. He argued that attempts to reconcile science with religion were futile, given that science operated as a unified field while religion had never achieved such coherence. McCabe quipped that applying science to religion would require addressing “three hundred different collections of religious beliefs,” making any reconciliation impossible.

In McCabe’s final analysis, whether one adhered to orthodox Christianity or its modernist variants, the conflict with science was inevitable. He contended that modernists, in reducing God to abstractions like “Cosmic Force” or “Vital Principle,” had gutted religion of any meaningful content. Both fundamentalists and modernists, McCabe concluded, inhabited the same “land of bunk,” unable to recognize the inherent incompatibility between science and religion.

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius and the Philosophy of the “Little Blue Books”

Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, later known as the “Henry Ford of publishing,” was born to Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia and grew up in a secular household. Though his formal education ended in the eighth grade, his passion for reading and self-education shaped his early worldview. Influenced by thinkers like Omar Khayyam, Voltaire, and Robert Ingersoll, he developed a deep rejection of religion, identifying as a materialist and dismissing the notion of an afterlife. His early exposure to cheap pamphlets like The Rubaiyat and The Ballad of Reading Gaol ignited his desire to make literature accessible to the masses.

In 1915, Haldeman-Julius moved to Girard, Kansas, where he worked for the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason . After marrying Annie Haldeman, niece of social reformer Jane Addams, he purchased the paper and began distributing pamphlets, marking the beginning of his publishing empire. His vision of providing affordable, pocket-sized booklets on a wide range of topics took shape in the Little Blue Books series, which covered literature, philosophy, science, and religion, and initially sold for just five cents. These pamphlets aimed to provide a “university in print” for working- and middle-class readers, offering access to ideas traditionally reserved for the educated elite.

The Little Blue Books became a massive success, with over 500 million copies sold. Haldeman-Julius’s marketing genius—using sensational ads like “Books are cheaper than hamburgers!”—helped spread his freethought and socialist ideas. He published works by influential authors such as Shakespeare, Twain, Darwin, and Emerson, alongside freethought titles like Why I Am an Atheist and The Bible Unmasked , which challenged religious orthodoxy. His goal was to democratize knowledge and encourage critical thinking, particularly against religious and political authority.

Central to Haldeman-Julius’s success was his collaboration with Joseph McCabe, a former monk turned atheist and prolific writer. McCabe contributed significantly to the Little Blue Books , with works like The Story of Religious Controversy , a key text that attacked Christianity and promoted a rationalist worldview. Together, McCabe and Haldeman-Julius saw their work as a means to combat what they viewed as the intellectual stagnation of religious dogma.

Despite the series’ success, Haldeman-Julius faced criticism for the mixture of high-quality literature with less scholarly content. H. L. Mencken famously remarked that the Little Blue Books contained “extremely good books” alongside “unutterable drivel.” However, the series continued to thrive, offering over 2,000 titles on a range of subjects from classic literature to freethought.

Haldeman-Julius’s own contributions to the series often included sharp critiques of religion. He dismissed attempts to reform religion as futile, arguing that modernism was simply a way to escape the intellectual difficulties of faith without embracing rationalism. He viewed religion as “medieval” and atheism as “modern,” believing that science and the social sciences provided the tools to debunk religious beliefs. Pamphlets like Is Science the New Religion? and The Meaning of Modernism reflected his disdain for attempts to reconcile science and faith, which he saw as inherently contradictory.

At its peak, Haldeman-Julius’s publishing empire became the largest mail-order publishing house in the world, based in the small town of Girard, Kansas. By 1921, he was selling over a million Little Blue Books each month, reflecting the widespread appetite for accessible education and freethought. He argued that the success of his series demonstrated a growing tendency toward skepticism and intellectual independence in America.

However, the post-World War II rise of conservatism and the anti-communist fervor of the McCarthy era led to a decline in the influence of Haldeman-Julius’s publications. He continued to publish controversial pamphlets, including The F.B.I.: The Basis of an American Police State (1948), but faced increasing harassment from the government. In 1951, after being convicted of tax evasion, Haldeman-Julius was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

Despite his personal and financial struggles in his later years, Haldeman-Julius’s impact on American intellectual life was profound. His Little Blue Books brought sophisticated ideas and literature to the masses, helping to foster a culture of skepticism, critical thinking, and freethought in early twentieth-century America.

Thus by the early twentieth century, Draper, White, and the scientific naturalists had lost control of their attempts to reconcile science and religion. Their narratives, once intended to bridge the two fields, became powerful weapons for secularists in the battle for authority in public and political spheres, wielded against religion. Though some secularists later reconverted to forms of Christianity, the damage was done. The conflict narrative had taken hold, and many minds came to view the relationship between science and religion as one of perpetual antagonism. In time, historians of science would attribute to Draper, White, and the scientific naturalists the founding of what became known as the Conflict Thesis.

Reactions to Draper, White, and other scientific naturalists were varied and complex. Religious liberals were among the protagonists, many of whom went to great lengths to defend these figures against accusations of atheism and materialism. These liberal leaders sought to modernize Christianity, ensuring it remained in step with the emerging scientific worldview, hoping this would stem the erosion of belief. Some even argued that Christianity itself was outdated, suggesting that both physical and historical sciences had revealed a new religion or theology. Religious agnostics and scientific naturalists, in turn, were not only conciliatory toward liberal Christianity but also drew spiritual inspiration from its tenets, incorporating them into their own work.

The antagonists included not only conservative or orthodox theologians but also rationalists and secularists, all of whom rejected the so-called reconciliation between science and religion, though for different reasons. The efforts of the “peacemakers” ultimately failed. Secularists did not accept the redefinitions of religion and the reconstructions of Christianity that men like Draper and White proposed. A paradox emerged in their attempt to reconcile science and religion: narratives meant to demonstrate religion's progress through scientific investigation were instead seized by rationalists and secularists, who used them as a weapon against all religion, aiming to eradicate it entirely.

[1] See James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (UPP, 2019).

[2] For a more detailed analysis, see James C. Ungureanu, “Science and Religion in the Anglo-American Periodical Press, 1860-1900: A Failed Reconciliation,” Church History , 88:1 (2019): 120-149.

[3] James Turner, Without God, Without Creed , 261.

[4] Leslie Stephen, Studies of a Biographer , 2 vols. (London: Duckworth and Co., 1898), 2.76-122.

[5] See Edward Royle, “Freethought: The Religion of Irreligion,” in D.G. Paz (ed.) Nineteenth-Century English Religious Traditions: Retrospect and Prospect (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 171-196.

[6] Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[7] Louis Greg, “The Agnostic at Church,” Nineteenth Century , vol. 11, no. 59 (Jan 1882): 73-76; Freethinker , vol. 1 (Jan 15, 1882).

[8] Cited in James Moore, The Darwin Legend (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1994), 64-65.

[9] Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science , 264.

[10] Richard Bithell to T.H. Huxley, 20 Sept 1894 and T.H. Huxley to Richard Bithell, 22 Sept 1894, T.H Huxley Collection, Imperial College Archives, Box 11.

[11] See McCabe, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake , 1.1-17, 18-36; George Jacob Holyoake, The Trial of George Jacob Holyoake on an indictment for blasphemy (London: Printed and Published for “The Anti-Persecution Union,” 1842), 20-21.

[12] F.J. Gould, The Pioneers of Johnson’s Court: A History of the Rationalist Press Association from 1899 Onwards (London: Watts & Co., 1929); A.G. Whyte, The Story of the R.P.A., 1899-1949 (London: Watts & Co., 1949).

[13] Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (London: Watts & Co, 1920), 221-222, 886-887.

[14] J.M. Robertson, A History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century , 2 vols. (London: Watts & Co., 1929), 1.261-262. See also A Short History of Freethought: Ancient and Modern (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1899), 420. By 1906, Robertson revised and expanded this work into a massive two-volume edition (London: Watts & Co., 1906). In this edition Robertson listed Draper’s Intellectual Development and History of Conflict as general histories of freethought.

[15] J.M. Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (London: Progressive Publishing Co., 1889), 112, 332; S.P. Putnam, 400 Years of Freethought (New York: The Truth Seeker Company, 1894), 47-50.

[16] Turner, Without God, without Creed , 171.

[17] See Martin E. Marty, The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1961); Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971); and Eric T. Brandt and Timothy Larsen, “The Old Atheism Revisited: Robert G. Ingersoll and the Bible,” Journal of the Historical Society , vol. 11, no. 2 (2011): 211-238.

Featured Image: Udo Kepler, The last stand - science versus superstition, 1899; Source: Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-100. 

James Ungureanu

James C. Ungureanu is Adjunct Professor at Carthage College, where he teaches in the Intellectual Foundations Program. He is the author of several books on science and religion, most recently, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict .

Read more by James Ungureanu

A Catholic History of the Fake Conflict Between Science and Religion

May 04, 2020 | Christopher Baglow

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The Centre for Fundamental Rights announces the winners of the Hertie School Human Rights Master’s Thesis Award 2024

Zoe Sigman (MPP 2024) is awarded the Human Rights Master’s Thesis Award 2024; Kasyoka P. Mutunga (MIA 2024) receives an honourable mention

Nine theses focusing on the role of human rights in domestic, regional, or global law and governance, submitted as part of the MIA, MPP, MDS, or EMPA programmes, were nominated for the 2024 award. These were evaluated by the Selection Committee in August 2024.

The committee, comprising researchers from the Centre for Fundamental Rights not involved in supervising any of the theses, selected Zoe Sigman (MPP 2024) as the recipient of the Human Rights Thesis Award 2024 for her dissertation titled "Migrant Deaths on the United States-Mexico Border, 2014-2017. A Multiple Systems Estimation Approach," in which she collaborated with the International Organization of Migration’s Missing Migrants Project.

The committee was highly impressed by Sigman’s thesis, which investigates how state policies contribute to migrant mortality and analyses data from four independent organisations to account for the true number of migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border. Sigman clearly problematises the reporting issues of the United States in accounting for such deaths. By applying a novel and innovative statistical approach, she finds that official sources significantly undercount deaths along the border, estimating the true number of deaths to be 35-61% higher than previously reported figures.  In its consideration the committee noted that the thesis is of exceptional quality and makes an excellent contribution to human rights scholarship, both on a substantive and methodological dimension, by demonstrating how forensic data infrastructure can be used to highlight the terrible human costs of border policies.  Sigman’s work thus does not only speak to an urgent and pressing human rights problem but also examines it from a highly interdisciplinary perspective, combining statistical inference with a deep understanding of migration law and policy. She concludes with a range of concrete policy proposals that can be used to improve data collection and standardisation in migration as well as to create better governmental border enforcement policies to prevent migrant deaths.

The Committee also awarded an honourable mention to Kasyoka P. Mutunga (MIA 2024) for her thesis “The International Monetary Fund’s Conditionality Regime: A Cautionary Tale on the Pitfalls of Human Rights Mainstreaming”. She comprehensively investigates whether the IMF’s new strategy aimed at centring human rights concerns leads to changes in its lending regime. Her thesis is focused on a deep single case study of the IMF’s conditionality measures vis-à-vis Kenya from 1988 to today. Her detailed work demonstrates the absence of any substantial impact of the respective human rights strategy on lending, offering a highly critical analyses of the potentials and limitations of human rights mainstreaming in financial institutions.

The award winners were announced during the “Meet the Centre” event, hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights on 12 September 2024.

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