Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1995
Abstract
More than a decade before the 1890 Census, some Americans began to perceive that the frontier was disappearing; they worried that, with the closing of the frontier, the country might lose its tough and resourceful individualism, its ability to assimilate foreigners and forge democratic institutions, its safety valve and its future hopes-in short, its uniqueness. Soon this "frontier anxiety" pervaded American writing, speech, and thought. David M. Wrobel traces the theme of frontier anxiety and its variations in American journalism, political rhetoric and policy, literature and popular culture, and academic discussions from the 1880s to the 1930s. He shows that racists, nativists, and Malthusians used the closing of the frontier to support their arguments; so did conservationists, preservationists, and antiregulationists; and so did imperialist expansionists, monopolists, labor leaders, Marxists, Progressives, and New Dealers.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 15:2 (Spring 1995). Copyright © 1995 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.