The End Of The Myth,

The End Of The Myth, by Greg Grandin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize this year, baffled me a bit at first, as I wasn't quite sure what it was about. The subtitle is "From The Frontier To The Border Wall In The Mind Of America," so essentially this book is how the myth of the frontier and the fetishism of our border, particularly the Southern one, has shaped our identity.

The United States began incomplete, with thirteen colonies on the east coast. Over the course of the nest hundred or so years, white Americans pushed West, despite the people who already lived there. It started with the removal of Indians from the Southeast, sent to Oklahoma on a Trail Of Tears. But it wouldn't stop until the Pacific was reached. "But throughout the 1800s, as the United States executed one “removal” operation after another, driving Native Americans west and freeing up their land for settlers and speculators, “frontier” came more frequently to mean the line separating Indian Country from white settlement."

Grandin also writes, "By the end of the 1800s, though, there was no more Indian Country, at least apart from fragmented reservations, and the word “frontier” had come to mean not a line but a way of life, synonymous with freedom." Indeed, we  see that eyes were trained elsewhere. Ulysses Grant wanted to annex the Dominican Republic. After the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba came into the U.S. orbit. Grandin argues that adventurism all over the world, from Vietnam to Panama to Afghanistan was America pushing the concept of the frontier to basically everywhere.

A central part of the book is a speech given by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, a key moment in any discussion of the American West. "In the last decade of the 1800s, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner emancipated the concept “frontier,” unhitching it from its more mundane, earthbound meanings—used to indicate a national border or a military front—and letting it float free as an abstraction." The argument that Turner made was that the settling of the West made  America great, a view that is disputed by those who pause to consider the violence involved in taking that land. "Turner’s main argument, which he advanced in his 1893 essay as well as in subsequent writings, is straightforward: America’s vast, open West created the conditions for an unprecedented expansion of the ideal of political equality, an ideal based on a sense that the frontier would go on forever."

Gtandin gets angry in his last few chapters, when he discusses the immigration issue and the border with Mexico. He points out that Ronald Reagan cracked down on immigrants coming from Central America who were fleeing because of the wars he started there. Bill Clinton doesn't get much love, either, as he believes NAFTA did irreparable harm, and that Clinton carried out the immigration policy of Reagan. "NAFTA, though, didn’t help the country rise above the border but rather hardened the border, transforming the line—and all the hatreds and obsessions that go with it—into a permanent fixture in domestic politics and a perennial source of nationalist grievance.."

In his discussion of the border patrol, the facts are horrifying. "The border patrol, for its part, continued being what it had been since its founding: a frontline instrument of white supremacist power. Patrollers regularly engaged in beatings, murder, torture, and rape, including the rape of girls as young as twelve." And, "Officers in the patrol’s parent agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, traded young Mexican women they caught at the border to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for season tickets, and supplied Mexican prostitutes to U.S. congressmen and judges, paying for them out of funds the service used to compensate informants."

Grandin ends with Donald Trump and his wall, which since last week's election is now a thing of the past, but a useful metaphor for the end of the myth of the frontier. "Trump’s cruelty takes many such forms, but it is most consistent in its targeting of Mexicans and Central American migrants. We can think of his wall as refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own revered martyrs’ cult."

This is clearly not a book for those who voted for Trump, who harbor a belief in American exceptionalism or who unironically call themselves nationalists. For the rest of us, it's an eye opener. We knew about the brutality of U.S. expansion, but to have it all in one volume is like a punch in the solar plexus.