The Products of the
American Frontier
Mark Anderson
Max Stevens
Sociology 2
June 15, 1998
Scholars of American history have frequently portrayed the presence of the Western frontier as a simplifying, rugged individualist influence upon the American mind, imbuing the American people with a sense of personal opportunity and a pioneering will to succeed. Pictured thusly, the spirit of the frontiersman—which is distinctly American—would appear to fit quite naturally into the socio-economic structure of capitalism. This perception is supported further by the apparent lack of opposition from the class most oppressed by this system--the working class--and its reluctance to embrace the ideology most opposed to capitalism: socialism. However, when the actual reality of life on the Western frontier and the nature of the relations between workers and corporations that arose in the post-civil-war West is examined, the abstract generalization rendered by authors such as Sombart, Perlman, or Turner no longer maintains the same logical coherence. They explain the West as a pacifying influence upon workers’ minds. But the frontier did not compose the American mind for capitalism; capitalism, rather, composed the frontier for the American mind.
The American worker’s disinclination to form solid labor unions and accept socialism, as compared to his European counterparts, has prompted many scholars to speculate as to the character of the American worker and the reasons for his apparent acceptance of the capitalist system. Sombart wrote that “emotionally, the American worker has a share in capitalism,” a feeling which is in part explained by the presence of the frontier on the American mind, which has “given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a well-spring of hope” (Sombart, 20-119). Perlman supported this perception of the West when he wrote that “the opportunity of the ‘West’ has never ceased,” thus providing the “opportunity to migrate from older [East] to newer and less developed sections, in which a person without much or any inherited property may still find the race for economic independence a free and open race” (Perlman, 166). Turner added his chips to this perception by saying, “the frontier is productive of individualism” (Turner, 30). Thus, the frontier acts as a pacifying influence upon the mind of the worker, making him more accepting of capitalism for it caters to his sense of individualism. He does not resist the capitalist system because he finds the opportunity for personal advancement within it, and subsequently, feels little need to combat the system with socialist ideology.
However, what this viewpoint fails to acknowledge is that the frontier was never, in reality, quite the free, rugged place that it was portrayed as in American myth. Capitalism indeed could be said to have made its most early and extreme manifestations in the settlements on the frontier. What with the opportunities of mining and advanced technology, capitalism could not help but invade and come to dominate the frontier boom towns; “by 1880 many mining settlements were carried well beyond any stage that could reasonably be called the frontier. They became, instead, industrial islands in the midst of forest, desert, or mountain” (Dubofsky, 19). Dubofsky further states that “the industrial cities of the mining West represented in microcosm the emerging conditions of life in urbanized, industrial America rather than the simpler social arrangement of the passing frontier” (Dubofsky, 21). Thus, the frontier could actually be said to be a place where the tendencies, latent in the Eastern cities, that were to overtake the American socio-economic system could be seen most clearly in Western industrial cities. This reality is much different than the “wellspring of hope” for the American worker that the frontier was supposedly representing. The construction of the frontier as an opportunity for the individual to succeed was largely a myth, created in the American mind by the very presence of the dominating capitalist structure. For the American worker in the East (who undoubtedly was not perfectly content with his economic status) the myth of a frontier untainted by capitalism provided a sense of false security based on the opportunities which such a West could provide.
Sombart shows an awareness of this effect of capitalism upon the mind of the worker when he says “that the worker has been psychologically influenced into thinking that he was not an enemy of the capitalist system but even a promoter of it” (Sombart, 112). This does not mean, however, that workers were necessarily content with life under the capitalist system. If anything, what it portends is that the American worker had anxiety that was (mis)directed from its true source. To where, then, did this anxiety find its outlet?
During the Reconstruction era, the white laborers were provided an outlet in the form of racial hatred, which, by chance, happened to create a convenient—for the capitalist class--weakening of the working class as a political force by the division within its ranks between black and white. During the Progressive era, a time in which trade unions were gaining power and the working class was gaining a class consciousness, the anxiety became directed closer to the right source when workers formed together to fight business owners. This is shown by the almost outright warfare on some occasions between union workers and business owners such as in Homestead, the Pullman strike, and Cripple Creek. From events such as these, the American worker learned to direct his anxiety finally towards its true and final source: the socio-economic structure of American capitalist society. Out of this awareness rose the Industrial Workers of the World. And, not surprisingly, the roots of this formation were in the class conflicts of the West. Dubofsky states that, “even in its beginnings, Western class conflict was not (as Perlman and Taft supposed) the response of pioneer individualists to frontier conditions. . . What the miners struggled to obtain was precisely those civilized amenities they felt were being denied them. The violent Western conflicts occurred not on an undeveloped frontier but in a citadel of American industrialism and capitalism” (Dubofsky, 56). Thus, the most radical and mobilized movement in trade unionism sprung out of the most heavily industrialized and capitalist arena, the West.
The capitalist class was perhaps surprised and undoubtedly annoyed by the growing strength of national trade unions, such as the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor, and reacted immediately hostile to the demands of labor, refusing to compromise with the trade unions--a stubbornness which sometimes ended in violence. “In no small measure the industrial disputes associated with the advance of capitalism were due to the flat refusal of employers to recognize labor organization as an inescapable outcome of the economic process and to accept collective bargaining as a peaceful mode of reaching agreements on hours and wages” (Beard, 236). What trade unions did was to make the capitalist class aware that laborers were an economic force and not merely an economic factor. This demonstration of power was greeted with bared teeth by the capitalist class, who wished to ignore the laborers as real people with real needs. Pushed to the point of compromise by the unions, the business leaders would often choose force and subversion rather than open bargaining, a move which only, in the long run, made the laborers more radical; “the Westerner’s radicalism derived directly from their economic and social environment” (Dubofsky, 58).
Rather than providing an obstacle to the development of a strong labor movement, the West ended up providing a radical labor movement with the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW served not only as a response to brutal suppression by capitalists but as a response to the labor aristocracy of the American Federation of Labor, which ignored the unskilled workers. The IWW “attempted to forge a movement to revolutionize American society” by joining together black, immigrant, and migratory workers (Dubofsky, 9). Unlike the American Federation of Labor, and similar to the Knights of Labor, the IWW further tried to join workers together across craft lines. Finally, the IWW associated itself with the socialism, the logical ideology for a union forged by the violent suppression of mine workers in Colorado; “it was the actions of their employers which convinced Western workers that labor and capital could never coexist peacefully” (Dubofsky, 56).
The settlement of the American frontier thus was not an impediment to the development of a strong labor movement; the true obstacle was the socio-economic system itself, and the mentality that it subsequently produced in the mind of the American worker. The frontier as a place where man can be free to fend for himself and make his own fortune was largely a myth; the reality was that the capitalist system was firmly in place at the frontier, and indeed, fully dominant by the 20th century. The West, rather than presenting an outlet of freedom for the worker, ended up as the scene of a violent struggle between the workers and the business leaders over the simple act of compromise. The capitalist controlling class refused to acknowledge the presence of the trade union as a political and economic force, and chose instead to use aggressive and/or subversive methods in dealing with their demands. The outcome of such action was the radical and ideological union of the Industrial Workers of the World.