The Historian Who Inspired Justifications for US Interventions Abroad
Our season finale!
After all of the countries we’ve visited this season, subscriber,
Let’s head back to where the rationale for US interventions abroad, including the War in Afghanistan, was born. It all dates back to a self-flattering presentation by Frederick Jackson Turner at a history conference in 1893:
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This week’s story comes from The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin; How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson; and The Afghanistan Papers by Craig Whitlock.
Next season on Skipped History...
We’ll unearth skipped bits of history tied together by the theme of erasure. Season 3 will come out sometime in the fall. I’ll keep you posted!
Next week, paying subscribers will learn more about the historical theories that Turner’s Thesis supplanted, particularly the so-called Germ Theory, which may or may not have to do with germs, Germans, or both. I’ll also dish a little more info on what’s in store for Season 3.
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Thank you so much for tuning in this season. Our forays into the depths of the past and the heights of fashion are only getting started.
Have a great summer!
Ben
This week’s transcript
Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome to Skipped History. I got my first professional haircut of the pandemic... right in time for our season finale! Today’s story is about the Turner Thesis. I read about it in The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin; How the South Won the Civil War by Heather Cox Richardson; and the Afghanistan Papers, by Craig Whitlock.
This season on Skipped History, we’ve discussed US interventions that led to the deaths of over a million people and reshaped dozens of countries, including the US itself. Meanwhile, the US is winding down its longest war ever in Afghanistan, which cost a lot of money and a lot of lives. As Jeffrey Eggers, a retired Navy Seal and White House staffer mused to government interviewers in 2016, “What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion? ...After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave,” although to be fair, that sound of laughter might’ve come from a pod of pacifist dolphins whistling “We told you so” and flipping us the middle fin.
And yet despite the high costs and few positive outcomes of the war, many people continue to view the US as a liberating force simply “trying to lead the world,” as President Bush stated when announcing the war in 2001. Today I’d like to explore the origins of this dissonance; the discrepancy between lofty justifications of US activity overseas and what the actual results tend to be. In many ways, the divergence dates back to a conference in 1893, where Frederick Jackson Turner transformed conceptions of the frontier.
Up to that point, most scholars had viewed the academic discipline of history as primarily concerned with compiling facts, dates, and names. But Turner, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, was part of a new generation of historians trying to “explain” the relationship between economics, science, culture, and politics. And as he theorized in a late afternoon session during the 1893 World’s Congress of Historians and Historical Students—a can’t miss event—this relationship originated on the western frontier. “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advancement of American society westward, explain American development,” Turner argued while presenting from a paper called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” As settlers tamed this “free land,” they developed “striking characteristics” like “dominant individualism” and “that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom”; qualities which then led to “the promotion of democracy here and in Europe.” In short, Turner said, the frontier “was a magic fountain of youth in which America [and by extension, the world] continually bathed and was rejuvenated.”
Now, there are a few problems with this theory, which became known as the Turner Thesis. First, if you continually bathe in a fountain, you will not be rejuvenated, but rather will emerge like a steamed dumpling or Xherdan the Sphynx Cat. Second, describing the frontier as a paradise filled with “free land” ignores the fact that, for several thousand years, there’d been a lot of people on that land—a fact that Turner knew well. As a boy growing up in Wisconsin, he had gone canoeing with local tribes like the Winnebago and Menominee. But there is no mention of these tribes in Turner’s thesis; nor any mention of how, when Turner was 13, US soldiers forced them off their land at bayonet point, encouraged by people like Turner’s father, who described the native peoples as “utterly despised, disgusting everyone with their filthiness.”
In fact, there was barely any mention of Native peoples at all in Turner’s thesis; nor any mention of any people of color; nor any mention of women. And therein lay part of the appeal of Turner’s argument to his fellow white male pals at the history conference: it was all about them, and not only that, but Turner also either erased or whitewashed genocidal acts from US history. For example, that whole forced labor thing that built the US economy? “When history comes to be rightly viewed,” Turner wrote, “the slavery question would come to be seen as an incident,” a mere blip on the radar, kind of like if your cousin wore an Ed Hardy t-shirt every day for 250 years and then said, Sorry, it was just a phase.
And as we’ve seen time and time again, telling white men what they want to hear is a winning strategy in the US. Turner’s self-flattering argument tying life on the frontier to the advancement of freedom and democracy spread among historians, economists, and novelists. By 1922, as one prominent historian at the time attested, so many books employed Turner’s arguments that it was impossible to list them all. And shortly after the conference—which did I mention was a must-attend?—politicians began to employ his arguments, too.
Why? In the 1890s, the western frontier closed. The Census Bureau reported in 1890 that there were so many people in the West “that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.” So what did US leaders do, keen to continue bathing in the frontier’s fountain of youth (plus, y’know, exploit and unleash genocidal hatred on other indigenous peoples)? They moved the frontier overseas and adopted Turner’s arguments, as well as his lack of concern for harmful consequences, to justify doing so.
Hence Teddy Roosevelt describing the Spanish-American War in 1898, when the US first sent its military abroad, as “a righteous war,” necessary to prevent the country, now that its frontier was closed, from getting too comfortable and “rot[ting] by inches in ignoble ease within our borders”—even though, as we explored this season on Skipped History, the “righteous war” led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. And hence Woodrow Wilson describing the US’ wars in the Caribbean that followed as part of a “great revolution in our lives” when “we made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas”—a “great revolution” that, as we’ve also explored, led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people of color and the revival of the KKK. And also hence FDR, who was a student of Turner’s, justifying entering World War II by saying, “Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in a perpetual change... a perpetual peaceful revolution” which led to the rise of “human freedoms” that we must now protect—and of course a lot of people died in that war, although it was a bit more justified than the other ones.
But you get the point: self-flattering righteousness, freedom, perpetual revolution, and rejuvenation: in each of these statements the tendrils of Turner are clear. And no, Turner didn’t create those concepts, but the influence of his thesis helped embed them into justifications for US interventions abroad. So, fast forward to 2001, can we be surprised that President Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan by saying it was an effort “to protect not only our precious freedoms but also the freedom of people everywhere”; efforts that, all told, led to the deaths of around 150,000 people? I don’t think so. Rosy rhetoric combined with catastrophic results has been a hallmark of US activity overseas ever since it began. And if you ask me, we ought to be very skeptical any time we hear this lofty kind of language again, unless of course, the last 125 years of the US wreaking havoc in other countries was just an unfashionable phase. We’ve all been there!
Either way, as Turner’s Thesis also helps illuminate, before deploying tactics of erasure abroad, US citizens developed and perfected them at home. Tune in next season to learn more about those bits of Skipped History and for more fashion guidance.
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