The West of Frederick Jackson Turner in Three American Plays

On the muggy evening of July 12, 1893, the World Colombian Exhibition in Chicago included presentations ranging from "English Popular Culture in the Middle Ages" to "Early Lead Mining in Illinois and Wisconsin." The audience had begun to thin out by the time the last speaker, a little-known teacher from the University of Wisconsin, stood before the gathering to present "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." By the middle of the twentieth century, successors such as George Rogers Taylor would judge Frederick Jackson Turner's paper to be "the most widely known essay in American history," one which "revolutionized historical thought in the United States" (v).1 At the same time, Turner unintentionally provided an analytical tool that has been little used so far by the observers of American culture, particularly as it could be applied to that most public manifestation, the stage. If theatre can be argued to be one of the most enduringly telling measures of how America views itself,2 its depiction of the frontier-or "The West"-should not only lend itself to Turnerian analysis but also serve as a measure of how perceptive Turner actually was in delineating this fundamental, if partially mythic, element of the American psyche.3 It was Turner's contention that "ft]he existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward" was fundamental to the establishment of American values and to what might be called abstractly "the American character."4 In 1926, he would re-explain this frontier line as a "moving edge" that served as "the barometer of a society expanding into the wilderness" (Jacobs 165). The dynamism of the line, was, in fact, not only barometric (not only an instrument of measurement) but regenerative, a catalyst for human correction and renewal. In a compelling way, it helped to create a distinctive national personality: "This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character" ("Significance" 2). Consequently, according to Turner, it is to the frontier that "the American intellect owes its striking characteristics . . . coarseness and strength," its restless inventiveness and, particularly, "the exuberance that comes with freedom" (37). It was as if Frederick Jackson Turner were seeing America itself as a dramatic archetype, particularly as he placed this American character into the context of a future that would be at war with its past. While Turner asserted that "fh]e would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased," he nonetheless envisioned poignant possibilities arising from the loss of an uncirumscribed frontier: "Movement has been its dominant fact," he wrote of the American character, "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" (37-38). Under his scenario, the American psyche would undergo a powerful shift from ever again to never again. This "safety valve" component of the Turner thesis has been viewed by some to help in understanding the expansionism of American foreign policy at the end of the nineteenth century.5 Turner himself had speculated in 1891, two years before the Chicago Exhibition, that "a law of colonization" might well see the completed filling of the American West replaced by an economic colonization of South America (Bogue 97). What he may well have sensed but did not articulate was the potential for a different sort of imperialism-the colonization of a forwardlooking American spirit by its own past. This would be the stuff of playwrights rather than socio-economic historians-and when one turns to the American stage, the safety valve concept has come to its feet through the ways in which American "frontier characters" are defined and redefined by the felt presence and felt loss of Turner's moving edge. …