Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down (review)

In the first decades after Frederick Jackson Turner’s death in 1932, former students worked to support and defend the work of this most influential American historian, but by the 1960s the tide had turned and Turner-bashing became de rigueur for up-and-coming scholars in Western American studies. Whether defended or critiqued, Turner’s seminal 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” has exerted an enormous influence over scholarship on the American West, the frontier, and, indeed, much of American history. Allan G. Bogue’s biography enters this ongoing conversation and works as a corrective. Bogue’s detailed study seeks to diminish the dominance of Turner’s early work, while emphasizing the development of ideas throughout his career. Bogue works to discover how Turner came to have such a profound influence on American historical studies and popular thought when he published relatively little for a scholar of his stature.

In Bogue’s view, Turner found many other ways to influence the development of American historical studies. He was an influential teacher whose own work benefited from his students’ scholarship. With few exceptions, his students paid homage to Turner as a devoted mentor and tireless booster for the study of the American West. Turner also worked assiduously to build a strong program in American history at the University of Wisconsin. Many of Turner’s students followed him into powerful positions within the academy, whether as professors at major research institutions or as officers of professional organizations, such as the American Historical Association (AHA). Turner himself was highly adept at self-promotion. He often circulated copies of his essays and lectures to important scholars and literary figures; he published extensively in popular magazines; he recycled favorite material, attaining the largest possible audience for key concepts; and he wielded considerable influence within the AHA, as an officer and advisor for the American Historical Review.

Although Bogue carefully details these other routes to lasting influence, he also resituates Turner’s published work, finding, for example, that even the much lambasted “frontier thesis” calls attention to the very aspects of regional history his critics accuse him of neglecting. In examining the totality of Turner’s published work, Bogue reveals that Turner was influenced by such nature writers as Thoreau and Burroughs and attentive to issues taken up by environmental historians; he was also a strong proponent of interdisciplinary study, calling for analysis of the “literary aspect of American history,” the study of the social sciences, and acknowledgment of the importance of geography to any examination of American historical events. Most importantly, Bogue reminds his readers that, ironically, “the frontier was not Turner’s primary interest through much of his career” (435). Turner’s unwavering interest in sectionalism, or region, has legitimated the work of those Western historians who have been his harshest critics. As Bogue so carefully points out, it was Frederick Jackson Turner who put Western American history on the map and in college curricula nationally. Bogue’s balanced treatment finds Turner far more relevant to current multidisciplinary and regional studies than his detractors have led us to believe.