Review
Reviewed Work(s): The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the
Mind of America by Greg Grandin
Review by: Mark A. Goldberg
Source:
The Southwestern Historical Quarterly
, January, 2020, Vol. 123, No. 3 (January,
2020), pp. 374-375
Published by: Texas State Historical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26876173
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374 Southwestern Historical Quarterly January
on the significance of the frontier as America’s unique experience influ-
enced European and Asian thinkers to conquer their own frontiers: Alge-
ria for the French, southwest Africa for Germans, and even Hokkaido for
a rapidly changing Japan. Just as a variety of people entered the West, the
West entered the psyche of peoples across the globe.
In a time when regional history seems increasingly threatened, per-
haps this new global, transnational history can help it retain its vitality and
importance. The American West and the World is an admirable primer on
recent scholarship, and the extensive bibliographies following each chap-
ter are particularly useful. Specialists in the American West will see much
that is already familiar, but this book is intended for students and other
newcomers to the field. As such it fulfills its author’s goal of encouraging
“historians and students to think big, to explore in a transnational and
global vein, and to avoid isolationist perspectives, insular paradigms, and
unnecessary divisions” (8).
Angelo State University Jason E. Pierce
The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of Amer-
ica. By Greg Grandin. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019. Pp. 370.
Sources, notes, index.)
In this sweeping book, historian Greg Grandin demonstrates the
power, influence, and transformation of the frontier myth in the history
of the United States. Writing for a popular audience, Grandin argues that
President Trump’s border wall signifies the true closing of the frontier, or
the “promise of boundlessness” (7), more than one hundred years after
Frederick Jackson Turner first declared the frontier closed. Instead of a
reckoning with America’s imagined limitlessness and its harmful impact
on democracy, equity, the environment, and countless human bodies,
Trump’s acknowledgment of limits embraces domination, targeting those
same victims of this once powerful myth.
The End of the Myth covers three centuries of American history, begin-
ning in colonial America with the Royal Proclamation Line of 1763. For
colonists, the boundary separating Native and British territories hindered
their ability to achieve individual independence through agriculture
and land ownership. This was not the first time Euro-American settlers
invaded Native lands; however, such acquisition solidified the notion that
expansion would solve America’s problems. In the post-independence
era, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison advocated a westward-looking
empire of liberty and extensions of the sphere, respectively, as ways to
achieve “true” American democracy and freedom. As the United States
industrialized in the nineteenth century, Americans saw the West as the
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solution for all obstacles to progress, at least progress for ordinary white
men, built on the backs of women, Native peoples, African Americans, and
ethnic Mexicans. Slave owners removed Indians and instituted a growing
cotton industry while paying little attention to a growing sectional crisis,
and militias and military men achieved their masculinist dreams through
violent expansion.
Then came Turner and the so-called closing of the frontier, which
introduced a new reading of limitlessness. In his 1893 speech, Turner
solidified Anglo westward expansion as the essence of American democ-
racy. The way to achieve progress and build America would now expand
beyond its geopolitical borders. In 1898, three decades after the Civil War,
northern and southern soldiers worked together to “save” the Caribbean
and Philippines from Spanish tyranny. Yet white soldiers, reveling in the
havoc they wreaked on people of color on the islands, employed violence
against fellow African American military men. Frontiers also produced
fear, which has continued to the present day. Early twentieth-century
white nativists mapped their anxieties about a closed frontier onto U.S.
borders and influenced the creation of the Border Patrol and immigra-
tion quotas. Americans viewed World War II, the New Deal, and the Cold
War through a frontier lens, and the brutality of Vietnam built on the
nineteenth-century Indian Wars and Spanish-American War as “another
frontier war” (201).
While Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists used the frontier myth
to push alternative visions of America predicated on civil rights and anti-
war critique, the Right advocated “the right to limitlessness,” most mark-
edly characterized by Ronald Reagan (214). Boundless U.S. interventions
abroad and global trade in the late twentieth century helped restructure
North American economies to benefit the few, leaving the many without
living wages and, in many cases, a place to call home. The attacks of Sep-
tember 11, 2001, and the subsequent collapse of the economy once again
transformed discussions of the frontier, and Americans responded with
fear to what they perceived as chaos. By the election of President Obama,
the frontier myth’s safety valve had disappeared, giving rise to Trump and
his wall, a symbol that “no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that every-
one can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination,
and racism” (275).
The End of the Myth is an excellent intellectual history of the enduring
frontier myth. It accessibly reframes the significance of U.S. expansion
and adeptly ties the distant and recent pasts to the present day. Students
of history as well as audiences interested in thinking about what history
can teach us about our world should read this book.
University of Houston Mark A. Goldberg
2020 Book Reviews 375
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