Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1999
Abstract
The great historian of republicanism, J. G. A. Pocock, noted that "[f]rom Jefferson to Frederick Jackson Turner and beyond, it was commonplace that sooner or later the frontier would be closed, the land filled, and the corruptions of history-urbanization, finance capital, 'the cross of gold,' 'the military-industrial complex' -would overtake America. Here are the origins of American historical pessimism." The American frontier has long since closed, the agrarian order has long-since passed away, and the pessimism has mushroomed into a "palpable despair and cynicism and violence," "dark signs of the times," according to the philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain. The disappearance of the American farmer, long thought the anchor of a republic blessed with rich soil and a "citizenry of Virgilian farmers," imperils our democratic prospects, some would say, especially when juxtaposed with what many view as the wholesale assault on American moral and social institutions since the 1960s. Pocock's "historical pessimism" is articulated by what Christopher Lasch termed the American republic's "darker voices": heartland farmers, farm advocates, and novelists, for examples, who failed to see recent developments in American agriculture and rural life as anything resembling "progress," but as a fateful step backward for a republic dependent on civic virtue, decentralized economic institutions, a large class of property owners, and community.
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 19:4 (Fall 1999). Copyright © 1999 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.