The Two Frontiers

The fundamental quality of the American took its origin at the outset from an overwhelming passion for land. The innumerable shiploads of people that have sped westeard across the Atlantic from Columbus' first voyage, down to the latest ocean liner, have sought to find land, to achieve land, to settle land, to overrun land, to subdue land (111).

...The Revolution itself was less a war to put an end to British oppression than a successful attempt on the part of the colonial land-holding aristocracy to attain to an indefinite expansion to the westward without British interference. It was directed by Washington who was himself one of the largest landowners of the period, and whose whole life was motivated by the passion for acquiring new land, notably in the Ohio region. Fro the Revolution through the Civil War and down to the fantastic scenes of the Florida land boom of a few years ago, the passion for land has been the motive force - one might also say the virtue - of the great majority of Americans(112).

...the Americans were individualist pioneers, and far from toning down their individualism, Emerson would make it still more acute. His chief ethical doctrine is self-reliance to the uttermost. And self-reliance to him meant in reality reliance on nature and external brute fact, as it must in every pioneer and rapidly developing community. In other words, Emerson's theory logically meant that the backwoodsman was equally if not more important to the scheme of things than the sage, the poet, and the scholar(127).

...Emerson's philosophy was entirely a philosophy for pioneers and with the vanishing of the pioneer type its influence and the influence of the vague mystical land-hunger of the frontier - that marvelous realm where wonderful things were always to be done, but never accomplished - began to diminish in American life. Yet with its insistence on individual self-reliance and on possession, Emerson struck the keynote of the American philosophy of today with its "go-getter" shrewdness, its refrain of "getting as much as you can and giving as little as you can," its assumption of superiority based on individual cunning, its vague and pernicious subsidiary hankering for what is mysterious and occult and esoteric, whereby its crudeness is leavened. All this America owes to one man, to Emerson, and it is obvious that we must forgive this man the enormous damage he did(129).

...The American is afflicted therefore with an incredible nostalgia for the past, but the country he sees about him offers no past at all but that of the wilderness, of the pioneer and the Indian. He therefore aims, according as he is sensitive to beauty, or fundamentally in discord with his own surroundings, either to transfer the riches of Europe bodily to his shores and to strive to live in the midst of the them; or to revert to pure and simple savagery. The first path was that trodden by Irving; the second was that chosen by Cooper(200).

- John Gould Fletcher, The Two Frontiers