Turner's Frontier Thesis and the Modern American Empire: A Review Essay

TURNERS FRONTIER THESIS AND THE MODERN AMERICAN EMPIRE: A Review Essay Lloyd E. Ambrosius William Appleman Williams, in his latest book, The Roots of the Modern American Empire,1 examined die nineteenth-century origins of American foreign relations during the twentieth century. The closing of the frontier in the United States by 1890, he argued, prompted Americans to advocate overseas economic expansion. Williams assigned the major responsibility for the development of this imperialist ideology to agricultural businessmen, by which he meant the farmers themselves as well as related businessmen. As the opportunities in the American West apparently diminished from the Civil War to the end of the century, they called increasingly for the opening of new foreign markets. "I came to see," emphasized Williams, "diat die expansionist outlook diat was entertained and acted upon by metropolitan American leaders during and after the 1890s was actually a crystallization in industrial form of an outlook that had been developed in agricultural terms by the agrarian majority of the country between 1860 and 1893."2 He acknowledged diat at various times American farmers have focused their attention on domestic rather than international issues; they have shown isolationist as well as imperialist tendencies. "But," concluded Williams in a summary of his thesis, there have also been times when the farmer's export-dominated relationship with the world marketplace led him to develop and advocate a vigorously assertive and expansionist foreign policy, or to support such a policy formulated by others. And, since he actively and causally related his freedom in the marketplace with his personal political and social freedom, the farmer was strongly inclined to defend and justify such expansionism on the grounds that it extended the freedom of all men. Opening the foreigner's marketplace, he often argued, would open the foreigner's society for the foreigner. American farmers evolved and agitated just such a militantly expansionist foreign policy between 1860 and 1893. That policy played a major causal role in the advent of American imperialism after 1893, and continued to exert a pervasive influence on American thinking about foreign affairs throughout the twentieth century.3 !William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York: Random House, 1969). 2 Ibid., pp. xvi-xvii. 3 Ibid., p. xxiii. 332 In this analysis Williams developed and revised the major themes which had appeared in die writings of Charles A. Beard on American foreign policy. In America in Midpassage, summarizing the interpretation which he had elaborated in The Idea of National Interest, The Open Door at Home, and The Devil Theory of War, Beard attributed the imperialist thrust to the desire of Americans to open foreign markets for agricultural and industrial products rather than confront the need for domestic reform. "For nearly fifty years previous to the domestic crash of 1929," Beard wrote, ". . . Americans had been told by influential politicians and naval officers that the prosperity of the United States depended, basically, on operations outside die country rather than on economic practices at home. Near the close of die nineteenth century, tiiis diesis had been used to justify the American adventure in imperialism ; that is to say, 'surpluses' of agricultural produce and manufactures cannot be used by domestic consumers and profitable outlets must be found through colonial expansion, sea power, and diplomatic pressures abroad." According to the advocates of diis view, Beard continued, die "American economy, having rounded out the continental domain and fairly completed the accumulation of capital goods for domestic uses, possessing surpluses, must widen beyond die seas in a contest with odier great powers for acquisition of more profits and more capital through the disposition of die domestic surpluses and other activities."4 Williams accepted Beard's interpretation, but attributed die origins of tiiis expansionist ideology to die agricultural businessmen rather than to Republican politicians and naval officers. In his modification of Beard's analysis, Williams reinterpreted nineteenth -century American history. He viewed James Madison rather than Alexander Hamilton as the leading architect of American mercantilism. Madison and also Thomas Jefferson used the power of the federal government to create a commercial as well as territorial...