Word: turner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...somehow square the original American ideal with exploitive American practices began to be the constant concern of a handful of historians. Their efforts and ideas form the background of this book by Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians tells the story of three men-Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington-who did the most to shape America's image of its history as a tapestry of continued progress. Part biography, part intellectual history, part scholarly polemic, the volume is a sharp but generous inquiry into the underlying conceptions of American history...
Frederick Jackson Turner sounded his single but remarkably lasting note-on the paramount significance of the frontier in American history-in 1893. Charles Beard created his most influential and controversial book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, in 1913. He had completed his most popular history. The Rise of American Civilization, by 1927, the year when an unknown English professor named V. L. Parrington published his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Main Currents in American Thought. These men, writes Hofstadter, were the first "to make American history relevant to the political and intellectual issues of the moment...
They had much else in common. Born in the 1860s and early 1870s, brought up in the Midwest (Turner in Wisconsin, Beard in Indiana, Parrington in Kansas), all of them came of age at a time when the balance of power and influence was shifting from the effete East to the still raw and resentful Midwest. The financial panic of 1893 was in the making. The Populist movement was galvanizing Westerners and farm folk everywhere into a struggle against big money and big-city interests...
Free Land and Hardship. As Turner grasped it, American democracy was neither a perfected political boon granted to the Founding Fathers by a Protestant Providence nor an inheritance from European political theorists, but something else again. It was a unique, home-grown institution shaped on the American frontier. Free land, Turner argued, made Americans free and generous. Frontier hardship made them self-reliant and individualistic. Frontier challenges made them willing to cooperate democratically with one another. The absence of the trappings of privilege made them egalitarian...
...vain that later critics pointed out Turner's contradictions, observing that the frontier had also made Americans ruthless and violent and that many of the facts on which Turner based his theory did not check out. (For example, frontier settlers, who Turner insisted always wanted to broaden the vote, in fact often lagged behind their urban neighbors.) Turner's creative concept had caught the imagination, not merely of historians and students who revered him but of the people as well. It still does-witness Barry Goldwater's appeal in 1964 to the nostalgic hope of returning...