Closure of the American Frontier
Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 thesis that free frontier land was the 'safety valve' of American opportunity — and the Georgist reading, via Phillip J. Anderson, that its 1890 closure removed the free margin that had kept wages up and land speculation in check.
Overview
In an 1893 address to the American Historical Association — delivered at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and published the same year as "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" — historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the existence of a continuous belt of "free land" to the west, and its steady settlement, had shaped American economic and political character: a safety valve that drew off surplus population, sustained high wages by letting discontented workers become landowners instead, and fostered individualism and democracy.[1] Turner took as his starting point the U.S. Census Bureau's 1890 finding that a continuous frontier line could no longer be traced on the map — the frontier, in the Census's terms, had closed.
Georgist and land-cycle writers read the frontier's closure through the lens of the margin of production: so long as free or cheap land remained open at the western edge, it set a floor under wages and gave restless labor an alternative to wage employment, tempering the pressure of land speculation nearer the settled core. Phillip J. Anderson, in The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (2008), treats the 1890 frontier closure — alongside the era's Oklahoma land rushes and the depression of 1893 — as removing that safety valve and making subsequent land-driven depressions, especially the 1930s, more severe.[2]
See Also
- Oklahoma Land Rush (1889) — the vivid single-day scramble for free land that Anderson cites in the same chapter on frontier closure
- Margin of Production — the Ricardian concept the frontier's free land instantiated
- Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking — the source connecting frontier closure to the land cycle
- Land Speculation — what the frontier's openness had held in check
- Boom-Bust Cycle — the pattern Anderson argues intensified after 1890
Sources
- Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893). Full text, National Humanities Center · Wikipedia overview — used for the thesis, the 1893 AHA delivery, and the 1890 Census closure finding.
- Phillip J. Anderson, The Secret Life of Real Estate and Banking (Shepheard-Walwyn, 2008), Ch. 9 — used for the Georgist reading of 1890 frontier closure as removing the "safety valve" and its link to the severity of later depressions; see the wiki's book summary.