“Do we really need another book on the Turner thesis?” a relative said with a sigh, flipping through my copy of Greg Grandin's The End of the Myth on a family getaway. Granted, there's a textbook whiff of social studies about the book's murky cover art, its vague subtitle, and most of all, its focus on Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis.
Fortunately, Grandin, a Bancroft Prize winner and the author of six previous histories, doesn't care what my relatives, or I, found boring in middle school. The End of the Myth kicks hard-packed certainties into dust as he strides across three centuries in pursuit of his ideas.
Like Turner, Grandin asserts that both the fact and the idea of an ever-expanding frontier are keys to America's political culture and identity. But where Turner saw “an unprecedented expansion of the ideal of political equality,” Grandin sees self-delusion: “A constant fleeing forward allowed the United States to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems.” Europe had grown close and crowded, and periodically consumed itself in social and religious conflict. But America had an escape hatch. It had space, and with it the option of projecting its problems outward. In practical terms, this meant diluting class tension without infringing on property rights. “The promise of a limitless frontier meant that wealth wasn't a zero sum proposition,” Grandin writes.
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