Atd and the Wild West #3

[Paul Nightingale]

Michael J. Devine, "The Closing of the Frontier, c. 1890s" in John E.
Findling & Frank W. Thackeray eds (1997) Events That Changed America in the
Nineteenth Century, Greenwood Press

"By the 1880s, careful observers of American life began to notice that the
frontier was rapidly disappearing, and they expressed concern. Americans had
been conditioned to think of their nation as an agrarian utopia, an
'American Eden,' with unlimited resources.

[...]

"Suddenly in the late nineteenth century, some American policymakers noted
with dismay that much of the land in the United States was controlled by
foreign syndicates, railroads, or giant monopolies. They worried that
American stability would be threatened by further immigration, and they
endeavored to curtail it." (168-169)

Hence Turner's 1893 speech takes place against fears that America was now
"too crowded" (169). Moreover, according to Devine here, the "American Eden"
was threatened both by the virus of immigration and also monopoly
capitalism.

Devine goes on to note that Turner enjoyed some celebrity at the turn of the
century. Roosevelt and Wilson were admirers, the latter "agree[ing] that
with the closing of the frontier, the United States needed to seek new
frontiers overseas, in Asia and the Pacific" (171). At the same time, of
course, as already noted, William Cody was inventing history as theatre, the
Plains Wars morphing into the Spanish-American War, into the Boxer Rebellion
in China.

One question to ask unanswered at the moment: will AtD actually begin, ie on
page one, 'in' the US and 'in' the 1890s. And how? I'm thinking of the way
'the past' is juxtaposed to 'the present at the beginning of other P novels,
in particular VL (which, not being Californian, I've never managed to
finish, of course).

The connections I have traced thus far between American Exceptionalism and
the Wild West as cultural/political discourse emphasise the way the past is
always a construct in the interests of the present. Nothing new there, of
course; but what is foregrounded is the way in which the concerns of the
present are also used to construct the future. Which takes us back to the
title, and the different connotations that phrase might have.