Restless Americans: The Significance of Movement in American History (With a Nod to F. J. Turner)

The Thesis Regardless of the merits of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis (Turner), it is clear that from the first days of the Republic, the phenomenon of movement characterized Americans, and influenced them as much as did the frontier. Directly or indirectly it influenced virtually everyone, from the elites to the dispossessed; its influence continues. Understanding that influence? which can be quite subtle as well as overt? requires more than familiarity with the integrated history of transportation, and certainly more than familiarity with railroads, airlines, or the automobile with its highways. How has the freedom? and at least as important, the ability? to move affected Americans' views of themselves, their tendency toward individualism, their government and politics, their environment, and the structure of their daily lives? To be sure, especially in the country's early decades, movement affected different groups in varied ways. Native populations tended to be pushed aside - or more likely, far away? often even to be crushed. Those of African descent frequently found themselves forcibly moved by having been sold, or relocated as slaveholders increasingly occupied the territories. After the passage of decades when the automobile culture burgeoned, African Americans participated in the restless movement across the nation as did other Americans, but even during much of the twentieth century, as discussed below, they faced obstacles to their movement that most of the population did not encounter. The people's push westward covering the continent? and extending beyond into the Pacific and north to Alaska? is only the most dramatic manifestation. When Yale's George W. Pierson nearly five decades ago wrote of the "M-Factor" in American history, he defined the term as "movement, migration, mobility," and identified the "M-Factor" as key to what the nation had become (Pierson 78). Pierson apparently hoped that American historians would take up his coinage as they had done the "Frontier Thesis," and that it would enter American Studies discourse and become as common there as John Kenneth Galbraith's felicitous phrase, the "conventional wisdom" (from his 1958 classic, The Affluent Society) was to become in the general public's vocabulary (Galbraith chap. 3). It was not to be. Perhaps the failure came about because Pierson was merely developing academic jargon to apply to the obvious. Certainly, though, Pierson was correct. Americans were restless from the beginning, and remain so. Early Government and Movement on Road and Water Already by the 1790s, a boom had begun in the construction of private toll roads. Earlier roads generally had been the creations of local governments, which meant? in view of the limited resources available? that they were poorly built and maintained, limited in distance, and otherwise wholly inadequate. As the Republic began, "the poor state of the road system was a major problem .... a viable steamboat had not yet been built, canal construction was hard to finance and limited in scope, and the first American railroad would not be completed for another forty years" (Klein and Majewski). This meant that improvements in transportation required better roads, and it meant also that private resources would be required to supplement the limited resources available to public bodies. In 1792, Pennsylvania chartered the first private turnpike in the country, "spanning 62 miles between Philadelphia and Lancaster." By 1810, there were nearly four hundred such roads (Klein and Majewski). Until the coming of the railroad, the only options for movement were by horseback, wagon or carriage, on foot, or by water. Water afforded the easiest movement, but greatly restricted direction and destination. Ingenious Americans looked for ways to bend waterways to their will, and ultimately managed to overcome many of the obstacles to canals, since they seemed to be the obvious solution to the problem. …