The End of the Myth: Nonfiction by Greg Grandin
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By Steven Weisenburger
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” —Robert Frost
When it comes to border fences or walls, Americans are like the characters in Robert Frost’s 1913 poem “Mending Wall.” The speaker mocks his troglodyte neighbor for sustaining a fieldstone property-line wall that’s stood for generations but now serves no purpose. Still, that he and the neighbor annually meet to share the labor of repairing that wall proves the neighbor’s claim: “good fences make good neighbors.” But do they? In this timely, strongly written, and important book, Greg Grandin surveys ideas of frontier and border spaces and fences spanning four centuries of American history. He opens with a plain fact: from the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, America was, until 1900, unique among nations in having an ever-advancing frontier line, and then, after 1900 and the closing of the frontier, having to reckon perennially with intractable Southwest borderland issues. For a hundred-plus years, this has been a cornerstone of America’s national mythology. And now comes Donald Trump, promising to build “a big, beautiful wall”: 1,933 miles of it costing billions of dollars, and running from Tijuana to Brownsville, Texas, and then requiring massive annual funding in order to maintain and police the boondoggle. For it’s a wall that people will go under or get over, as they always have. Just the prospect, the ineffectuality, the hubris of such a border barrier reminds us that the forces of a long-held, quintessentially American myth still leverage Americans’ cultural, social, and political life.
Frederick Jackson Turner provided the myth’s essentials in his classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Its argument: that westwarding settlers had realized the promises of free land, which would underwrite an equality that land ownership confers, and thus develop a “forward-looking individualism” uniting socially and politically a diverse (white) population of British, Scandinavian, Dutch, German, and French immigrants. They were destined, Turner concluded, to build a nation that the world would envy.
Contrarians have always voiced strong doubts. Looking westward from England in 1651, Thomas Hobbes knocked Americans’ land-lust as “an insatiable appetite, or Bulimia.” Yet the prevailing view in the colonies aligned with that of Anglican Bishop George Berkeley. Having toured extensively from 1729 to 1732, from Georgia to Nova Scotia, and from the Atlantic to the Appalachian front, he concluded that the seemingly endless availability of western land would bless centuries of American merchants, yeomen, and ordinary servants (but not slaves) with a unifying vision of political equality and modest but enduring wealth. Native peoples standing in their way were to be exterminated, and survivors pitchforked westward. Such was the fate, for example, of Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee people, driven at gunpoint in the 1830s from ancestral lands guaranteed to them by treaties. Bishop Berkeley’s famous poem hadn’t seen the need even to mention indigenous peoples. His closing stanza foretells history’s fifth and final act, as white people have fulfilled their divine mandate, as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.”
In 1845, as the vast expanse of trans-Mississippi lands came into focus, and especially as John Fremont reported on his second (1843–44) expedition to California, newsman John O’Sullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to define American exceptionalism. Boundless free land, indeed just the idea of it, as Grandin shows, always invoked claims for the significance of the West as “mankind’s second chance,” in historian Paul Horgan’s phrasing. A corollary nineteenth-century thought about westwarding Americans was that by owning and improving “free” land, the West would be a “safety valve” releasing socioeconomic pressures from back east. Through the centuries Hobbes-like skeptics perennially voiced strong doubts. As Grandin remarks, in 1967, three hundred and sixty years after the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown, and a year before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King argued that processes of settling the American West, such as exterminating native peoples, had only deepened the roots of linked national “pathologies”: white supremacy, violent masculinity, and soul-killing poverty.
Grandin sets forth the myriad ways that in our time the issue of illegal immigration has made strange political bedfellows. President Carter backed proposals for a “border fence,” that wasn’t funded during his term. In his turn President Reagan dismissed Carter’s fencing plan, saying, “You don’t need to build a nine-foot fence along the border between friendly nations.” But then, campaigning for reelection in 1984, he reversed course and mollified a radical, anti-immigration right wing by promising to repair “out-of-control borders.” These years also began the effort of right-wing extremists to abolish birthright citizenship, as set forth in the Fourteenth Amendment; and to axe the Immigration and Nationality Act, with its guarantee of citizenship rights of children born abroad to the parents of US citizens, and its further assurance of such persons’ right to become the president or vice-president. Grandin shows that, from Reagan to Bush I to Clinton, the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) enabled US agribusiness consortiums to buy up massive land tracts formerly worked as traditional ejidos (communal farms). Their workers were then forced by necessity to reside in slums and to accept low-wage labor from new, US-owned factories strung along the Mexican side of the border. That many of those displaced agrarian workers then sought jobs, homes, and schools by migrating legally or illegally to the United States should surprise no one.
As I write, the Trump administration announces that it is requesting $8.6 billion for border-wall construction, an increase of $3 billion above prior requests. Here then is more proof that borders are big business because, as Grandin’s last chapters show, the US border is no longer restricted to the border. Rather, borderland zones now extend 110 miles inland, which is why ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) presently employs some twenty thousand officers, in some four hundred local posts, requiring a budget over $6 billion annually. The “border zone” now includes not just the traditional southwest borderlands but all of Michigan, Florida, and Hawaii, great swaths of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, as well as land all across the southern border of Canada. In this historical moment “the point isn’t to actually build ‘the wall,’ but to constantly announce the building of the wall.” In the through-line of Grandin’s book, this is the terminus: an epoch in which there is no more American exceptionalism, only an “exemptionalism” figured as a sociocultural divorce from fact, nature, history, and rational deliberation.
One quibble with Grandin’s fine study: it omits the beginning of this history’s through-line, brought into sharper focus by recent archaeological and climatological research. When Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean and assessed its indigenous people, he was looking at a synecdoche for about 60.5 million people, from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Ocean. Of those people, 4.5 million resided in what is now the United States and Canada. In the sixteenth century, as European ships were exploring eastern North American coast and exchanging goods with Indians, they were also transmitting infectious diseases formerly alien to the Americas—waves of smallpox, measles, influenza, malaria, and bubonic plague that devastated indigenous peoples. By the later sixteenth century, European colonists were bringing herds of domesticated animals that spread all through the Americas yet more diseases such as diphtheria, typhus, and cholera. This slowly unfolding catastrophe known as “The Great Dying” eliminated some ninety-percent of populations throughout the Americas—a cascade of dying, with profound aftereffects. The pre-Columbian population of 4.5 million North American indigenes had been reduced to just 450 to 500 thousand. Along with so much dying, millions of hectares of formerly arable lands were no longer cultivated, so that carbon-capturing grasses, shrubs, and trees moved back into dormant fields, lowering atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and helping to usher in the “Little Ice Age,” from circa 1570 to 1700. One takeaway from this new view is that, absent “The Great Dying,” those relatively small bands of English pilgrims would have been swiftly exterminated.
As if the Great Dying hadn’t brought enough death, surviving indigenes in the Americas then became the first to confront man-made climate change, a scourge whose toll hasn’t yet been reckoned. In any case these two linked tribulations explain why the colonists who landed at Jamestown in 1607, and Plymouth in 1620, were surprised by the small, ragged bands of Indians they encountered. And why one pilgrim had thanked his God for opening North America to their habitation, and offered special praise to God for having “made way for his people by removing the heathen and planting them in the ground.” This is a way of thinking about the long-prevailing story of European settlement in North America as a massive error, or delusion. This is why Greg Grandin’s study will be essential reading for those who are rethinking “The Myth” of the American frontier, and why its end is a good thing.
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