 CHAPTER IX Contributions of the West to American Democracy, Part 3 Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries, which in our own decade have marked the West. Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal and a steady increase of the social tendency in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest. This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now, in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following. Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the Western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free states on the lines of his own ideal? In a word then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history. In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Over before in the history of the world has a democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution. In short, democracy is learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problem of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions. But the very task of dealing with vast resources over vast areas under the conditions of free competition furnished by the West has produced the rise of those captains of industry whose success in consolidating economic power now raises the question as to whether democracy under such conditions can survive. For the old military type of Western leaders like George Rogers Clark, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison have been substituted such industrial leaders as James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie. The question is imperative then. What ideals persist from this democratic experience of the West and have they acquired sufficient momentum to sustain themselves under conditions so radically unlike those in the days of their origin? In other words, the question put at the beginning of this discussion becomes pertinent. Under the forms of the American democracy is there in reality evolving such a concentration of economic and social power in the hands of a comparatively few men as may make political democracy an appearance rather than a reality? The free lands are gone. The material forces that gave vitality to Western democracy are passing away. It is to the realm of the spirit, to the domain of ideals and legislation that we must look for Western influence upon democracy in our own days. Western democracy has been, from the time of its birth, idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of men's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghenes to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion and that gave in return the chance for indefinite assent in the scale of social advance. To each she offered gifts after his will. Ever again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present. The Kipling's Song of the English has given it expression. Quote, We were dreamers dreaming greatly in the man-stifled town. We yearned beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down. Came the whisper, came the vision, came the power with the need, till the soul that is not man's soul was lent us to lead. As the deer breaks, as the steer breaks from the herd where they graze, in the faith of little children we went on our ways. Then the wood failed, then the food failed, then the last water dried. In the faith of little children we lay down and died. On the sanddrift, on the velt side, in the fern scrub we lay, that our sons might follow after by the bones on the way. Follow after, follow after, we have watered the root, and the bud has come to blossom that ripens for fruit. Follow after, we are waiting by the trails that we lost, for the sound of many footsteps, for the tread of a host. Follow after, follow after, for the harvest is sown. By the bones about the wayside ye shall come to your own. End of quote. That was the vision that called to Roger Williams, that prophetic soul ravished of truth disembodied, unable to enter into treaty with its environment, and forced to seek the wilderness. Oh how sweet, wrote William Penn from his forest refuge, is the quiet of these parts, freed from the troubles and perplexities of woeful Europe. And here he projected what he called his holy experiment in government. If the later West offers few such striking illustrations of the relation of the wilderness to idealistic schemes, and if some of the designs were fantastic and abortive, none the less the influence is a fact. Hardly a Western state but has been the mecca of some sect or band of social reformers, anxious to put into practice their ideals in vacant land, far removed from the checks of a settled form of social organization. Consider the Dunkards, the Icarians, the Forerists, the Mormons, and similar idealists who sought our Western wilds. But the idealistic influence is not limited to the dreamer's conception of a new state. It gave to the pioneer farmer and city builder, a restless energy, a quick capacity for judgment and action. A belief in liberty, freedom of opportunity, and a resistance to the domination of class which infused a vitality and power into the individual atoms of this democratic mass. Even as he dwelt among the stomps of his newly cut clearing, the pioneer had the creative vision of a new order of society. In imagination he pushed back the forest boundary to the confines of a mighty commonwealth. He willed that log cabins should become the lofty buildings of great cities. He decreed that his children should enter into a heritage of education, comfort, and social welfare, and for this ideal he bore the scars of the wilderness. Possessed with this idea, he ennobled his task and laid deep foundations for a democratic state. Nor was this idealism by any means limited to the American pioneer. To the old, native democratic stock has been added a vast army of recruits from the old world. There are in the Middle West alone four million persons of German parentage out of a total of seven millions in the country. Over a million persons of Scandinavian parentage live in the same region. The democracy of the newer West is deeply affected by the ideals brought by these immigrants from the old world. To them, America was not simply a new home. It was a land of opportunity, of freedom, of democracy. It meant to them, as to the American pioneer that preceded them, the opportunity to destroy the bonds of social cast that bound them in their older home. To hew out for themselves in a new country, a destiny proportioned to the powers that God had given them. A chance to place their families under better conditions and to win a larger life than the life that they had left behind. He who believes that even the hordes of recent immigrants from Southern Italy are drawn to these shores by nothing more than a dull and blind materialism has not penetrated into the heart of the problem. The idealism and expectation of these children of the old world, the hopes which they have formed for a newer and freer life across the seas are almost pathetic when one considers how far they are from the possibility of fruition. He who would take stock of American democracy must not forget the accumulation of human purposes and ideals which immigration is added to the American populace. In this connection, it must also be remembered that these democratic ideals have existed at each stage of the advance of the frontier and have left behind them deep and enduring effects on the thinking of the whole country. Long after the frontier period of a particular region of the United States has passed away, the conception of society, the ideals and aspirations which it produced, persist in the minds of the people. So recent has been the transition of the greater portion of the United States from frontier conditions to conditions of settled life that we are over the large portion of the United States, hardly a generation removed from the primitive conditions of the West. If indeed we ourselves were not pioneers, our fathers were, and the inherited ways of looking at things, the fundamental assumptions of the American people have all been shaped by this experience of democracy on its westward march. This experience has been wrought into the very warp and wolf of American thought. Even those masters of industry and capital who have risen to power by the conquest of Western resources came from the midst of this society and still profess its principles. John D. Rockefeller was born on a New York farm and began his career as a young businessman in St. Louis. Marcus Hannah was a Cleveland grocers clerk at the age of 20. Klaus Spreckles, the sugar king, came from Germany as a steerage passenger to the United States in 1848. Marshall Field was a farmer boy in Conway, Massachusetts, until he left to grow up with the young Chicago. Andrew Carnegie came as a 10-year-old boy from Scotland to Pittsburgh, then a distinctively Western town. He built up his fortunes through successive grades until he became the dominating factor in the great iron industries and paved the way for that colossal achievement, the Steel Trust. Whatever may be the tendencies of this corporation, there can be little doubt of the democratic ideals of Mr. Carnegie himself. With lavish hand, he has strewn millions through the United States for the promotion of libraries. The effect of this library movement in perpetuating the democracy that comes from an intelligent and self-respecting people can hardly be measured. In his Triumphant Democracy, published in 1886, Mr. Carnegie, the iron master, said, in reference to the mineral wealth of the United States, quote, Thank God these treasures are in the hands of an intelligent people, the democracy, to be used for the general good of the masses and not made the spoils of monarchs, courts, and aristocracy to be turned to the base and selfish ends of a privileged hereditary class, end of quote. It would be hard to find a more rigorous assertion of democratic doctrine than the celebrated utterance attributed to the same man that he should feel at a disgrace to die rich. In enumerating the services of American democracy, President Elliott included the corporation as one of its achievements, declaring that, quote, Freedom of Incorporation, though no longer exclusively a democratic agency, has given a strong support to democratic institutions, end of quote. In one sense, this is doubtless true, since the corporation has been one of the means by which small properties can be aggregated into an effective working body. Socialistic writers have long been found out of pointing out also that these various concentrations pave the way for and make possible social control. From this point of view, it is possible that the masters of industry may prove to be not so much an incipient aristocracy as the pathfinders for democracy in reducing the industrial world to systematic consolidation suited to democratic control. The great geniuses that have built up the modern industrial concentration were trained in the midst of democratic society. They were the product of these democratic conditions. Freedom to Rise was the very condition of their existence. Whether they will be followed by successors who will adopt the exploitation of the masses and who will be capable of retaining under efficient control these vast resources is one of the questions which we shall have to face. This at least is clear. American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social mobility and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy and has brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history and with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create democracy but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals. In the later period of its development Western democracy has been gaining experience in the problem of social control. It is steadily enlarged the sphere of its action and the instruments for its perpetuation. By its system of public schools from the grades to the graduate work of the great universities the West has created a larger single body of intelligent, plain people that can be found elsewhere in the world. Its political tendencies whether we consider democracy populism or republicanism are distinctly in the direction of greater social control and the conservation of the old democratic ideals. To these ideals the West adheres with even a passionate determination. If in working out its mastery of the resources of the interior it is produced a type of industrial leader so powerful as to be the wonder of the world. Nevertheless it is still to be determined whether these men constitute a menace to democratic institutions or the most efficient factor for adjusting democratic control to the new conditions. Whatever shall be the outcome of the rush of this huge industrial modern United States to its place among the nations of the earth the formation of its western democracy will always remain one of the wonderful chapters in the history of the human race. Into this vast shaggy continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement. European men, institutions and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the new world, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs, and ever a society on her eastern border grew to resemble the old world in its social forms and its industry. Ever as it began to lose faith in the ideals of democracy she opened new provinces and dowered new democracies in her most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from hewing out a home, making a school in a church and creating a higher future for his family, furnished to the pioneer. She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas Jefferson with his Declaration of Independence, his statute for religious toleration, and his purchase of Louisiana. She gave us Andrew Jackson, that fierce Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule, swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and like a gothic leader opened the Temple of the Nation to the populace. She gave us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled massive hand, told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the axe handle of the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of state, as it breasted the seas of civil war. She is furnished to this new democracy her stores of mineral wealth that dwarf those of the old world and her provinces that in themselves are vaster and more productive than most of the nations of Europe. Out of her bounty is come a nation whose industrial competition alarms the old world and the masters of whose resources wield wealth and power vaster than the wealth and power of kings. Best of all, the West gave, not only to the American, but to the unhappy and oppressed of all lands, a vision of hope and assurance that the world held a place where were to be found high faith in man and the will and power to furnish him the opportunity to grow to the full measure of his own capacity. Great and powerful as are the new sons of her loins, the republic is greater than they. The paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths. Let us see to it that the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and utilize individual achievement for the common good. End of section 32. Section 33 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon. Chapter 10. Pioneer Ideals and the State University, Part 1. Footnote. Commencement address at the University of Indiana, 1910. End of footnote. The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes and ambitions, their dreams and determinations are assets in their civilization as real and important as per capital wealth or industrial skill. This nation was formed under pioneer ideals. During three centuries after Captain John Smith struck the first blow at the American Forest on the eastern edge of the continent, the pioneers were abandoning settled society for the wilderness, seeking for generation after generation new frontiers. Their experiences left abiding influences upon the ideas and purposes of the nation. Indeed, the older settled regions themselves were shaped profoundly by the very fact that the whole nation was pioneering and that in the development of the West, the East had its own part. The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did this contest take place in a mythical past told in folklore and epic. It has been continuous to our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way, mountainous ramparts interposed, desolate grass-clad prairies, barren oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of savages all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the axe are the symbols of the backwood's pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive courage and domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness. To the pioneer, the forest was no friendly resource for posterity, no object of careful economy. He must wage a hand-to-hand war upon it, cutting and burning a little space to let in the light upon a dozen acres of hard-won soil, and year after year expanding the clearing into new woodlands against the stubborn resistance of primeval trunks and matted roots. He made war against the rank fertility of the soil. While new worlds of virgin land lay ever just beyond, it was idle to expect the pioneer to stay his hand and turn to scientific farming. Indeed, as Secretary Wilson has said, the pioneer wood in that case have raised wheat that no one wanted to eat, corn to store on the farm, and cotton not worth the picking. Thus, fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness, the destroying pioneer fought his way across the continent, masterful and wasteful, preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing, rejoicing in rude strength and willful achievement. But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had visions. He was finder as well as fighter, the trail maker for civilization, the inventor of new ways. Although Rudyard Kipling's forloper deals with the English pioneer in lands beneath the Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays American traits as well. Quote, The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire. He shall fulfill God's utmost will on knowing his desire, and he shall see old planets pass and alien stars rise, and give the gale his reckless sail in shadow of new skies. Strong lust of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand, to ring food from desert nude, his foothold from the sand. His neighbors' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest. He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed. He shall desire loneliness, and his desire shall bring hard on his heels a thousand wheels, a people, and a king. He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce cold camp there shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick, and the stamp, for he must blaze a nation's way with hatchet and with brand, till on his last one wilderness and empire's bulwark stand. End of quote. This quest, after the unknown, this yearning beyond the skyline where the strange roads go down, is of the very essence of the backwood's pioneer, even though he was unconscious of its spiritual significance. The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier, that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses, to shape former habits, institutions, and ideas to change to conditions, and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil. He had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional. Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition, and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness, where a wealth of resources and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The prizes were for the keenest and the strongest. For them were the best bottomlands, the finest timber tracks, the best salt springs, the richest ore beds, and not only these natural gifts, but also the opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming society. Here were mill sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in the law, and politics. All the varied chances for advancement afforded in a rapidly developing society, where everything was open to him who knew how to seize the opportunity. The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the government's title by the use of extra-legal combinations and force. He appealed to Lynch law with little hesitation. He was impatient of any governmental restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness. In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to jail for violating land laws, but the different spirit in the pioneer days may be illustrated by a speech of Delegate Sibley of Minnesota in congress in 1852. In view of the fact that he became the state's first governor, a regent of its university, president of its historical society, and a doctor of laws of Princeton, we may assume that he was a pillar of society. And he said, quote, The government has watched its public domain with jealous eye, and there are now enactments upon your statute books aimed at the trespassers upon it, which should be expunged as a disgrace to the country and to the 19th century. Especially is he pursued with unrelenting severity who is dared to break the silence of the primeval forest by the blows of the American acts. The hearty lumberman who is penetrated to the remotest wilds of the northwest to drag from their recesses the materials for building up towns and cities in the great valley of the Mississippi has been particularly marked out as a victim. After enduring all the privations and subjecting himself to all the perils incident to his vocation, when he is toiled for months to add by his honest labor to the comfort of his fellow man and to the aggregate wealth of the nation, he finds himself suddenly in the clutches of the law for trespassing on the public domain. The proceeds of his long winter's work are ref from him and exposed to public sale for the benefit of his paternal government. And the object of this oppression and wrong is further harassed by vexatious law proceedings against him. End of quote. Sibley's protest in Congress against these outrages by which the northern lumbermen were harassed in their work of what would now be called stealing government timber aroused no protest from his colleagues. No president called this congressman an undesirable citizen or gave him over to the courts. Thus many of the pioneers following the ideal of the right of the individual to rise subordinated the rights of the nation and posterity to the desire that the country should be developed and that the individual should advance with as little interference as possible. Squatter doctrines and individualism have left deep traces upon American conceptions. But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneers mind as the ideal of individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate hatred for aristocracy monopoly and special privilege. He believed in simplicity economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the successful man and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But the West was so free and so vast the barriers to individual achievement were so remote that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to equality could come from his competition for natural resources. He thought of democracy as in some way the result of our political institutions and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him. Occasional statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy was based on the abundance of unoccupied land even in the first debates on the public domain. This early recognition of the influence of abundance of land in shaping the economic conditions of American democracy is peculiarly significant today in view of the practical exhaustion of the supply of cheap arable public lands open to the poor man and the coincident development of labor unions to keep up wages. Certain it is that the strength of democratic movements has chiefly lain in the regions of the pioneer. Our governments tend too much to democracy wrote Izzard of South Carolina to Jefferson in 1785. A handicraftsman thinks an apprenticeship necessary to make him acquainted with his business but our back countrymen are of the opinion that a politician may be born just as well as a poet. The revolutionary ideas of course gave a great impetus to democracy and in substantially every colony there was a double revolution one for independence and the other for the overthrow of aristocratic control. But in the long run the effective force behind American democracy was the presence of the practically free land into which men might escape from the oppression or inequalities which burdened them in the older settlements. This possibility compelled the coast wise states to liberalize the franchise and it prevented the formation of a dominant class whether based on property or on custom. Among the pioneers one man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance. Conditions were simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people a devout faith in man prevailed in the west. Democracy became almost the religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that he was building under freedom a new society based on self-government and for the welfare of the average man. And yet even as he proclaimed the gospel of democracy the pioneers showed a vague apprehension lest the time be short less equality should not endure lest he might fall behind in the ascending movement of western society. This led him on in feverish haste to acquire advantages as though he only half believed his dream. Before him lies a boundless continent wrote to Tocqueville in the days when pioneer democracy was triumphant under Jackson and he urges forward as if time pressed and he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions. Even while Jackson lived labor leaders and speculative thinkers were demanding legislation to place a limit on the amount of land which one person might acquire and to provide free farms. To Tocqueville saw the signs of change. Between the workmen and the master he said there are frequent relations but no real association. I am of the opinion upon the whole that the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in the world. If ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter. End of quote. But the sensitive influences of the free spaces of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's condition to afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy and to postpone the problem. As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed that of the older sections pioneer democracy itself began to undergo changes both in its composition and in its processes of expansion. At the close of the civil war when settlement was spreading with greatest vigor across the Mississippi the railways began their work as colonists. Their land grants from the government amounting altogether by 1871 to an area five times that of the state of Pennsylvania demanded purchasers and so the railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer. The homestead law increased the tide of settlers. The improved farm machinery made it possible for him to go boldly out onto the prairie and to deal effectively with virgin soil in farms whose cultivated area made the old clearings of the back woodsmen seem like mere garden plots. Two things resulted from these conditions which profoundly modified pioneer ideals. In the first place the new form of colonization demanded an increasing use of capital and the rapidity of the formation of towns. The speed with which society developed made men the more eager to secure bank credit to deal with the new west. This made the pioneer more dependent on the eastern economic forces. In the second place the farmer became dependent as never before on transportation companies. In this speculative movement the railroads finding that they had pressed too far in advance and it issued stock too freely for their earnings to justify the face of the investment came into collision with the pioneer on the question of rates and of discriminations. The greenback movement and the granger movements were appeals to government to prevent what the pioneer thought to be invasions of pioneer democracy. As the western settler began to face the problems of magnitude in the areas he was occupying as he began to adjust his life to the modern forces of capital and to complex productive processes. As he began to see that go where he would the question of credit and currency of transportation and distribution in general conditioned his success he sought relief by legislation. He began to lose his primitive attitude of individualism. Government began to look less like a necessary evil and more like an instrument for the perpetuation of his democratic ideals. In brief the defenses of the pioneer democrat began to shift from freelance to legislation from the ideal of individualism to the ideal of social control through regulation by law. He had no sympathy with a radical reconstruction of society by the revolution of socialism even his alliances with the movement of organized labor which paralleled that of organized capital in the east were only half-hearted but he was becoming alarmed over the future of the free democratic ideal. The wisdom of his legislation it is not necessary to discuss here the essential point is that his conception of the right of government to control social process had undergone a change. He was coming to regard legislation as an instrument of social construction. The individualism of the Kentucky pioneer of 1796 was giving way to the populism of the Kansas pioneer of 1896. The later days of pioneer democracy are too familiar to require much exposition but they are profoundly significant. As the pioneer doctrine of free competition for the resources of the nation revealed its tendencies. As individual corporation and trust like the pioneer turned increasingly to legal devices to promote their contrasting ideals the natural resources were falling into private possession. Tides of alien immigrants were surging into the country to replace the old American stock in the labor market to lower the standard of living and to increase the pressure of population upon the land. These recent foreigners have lodged almost exclusively in the dozen great centers of industrial life and there they have accented the antagonisms between capital and labor by the fact that the labor supply has become increasingly foreign born and recruited from nationalities who arouse no sympathy on the part of capital and little on the part of the general public. Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices and democracy is thereby invaded but even in the dull brains of great masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe the idea of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise the land of pioneer democratic ideals has found lodgement and if it is given time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify. As the American pioneer passed on in advance of this new tide of European immigration he found lands increasingly limited in place of the old lavish opportunity for the settler to set his stakes where he would there were frantic rushes of thousands of eager pioneers across the line of newly opened Indian reservations. Even in 1889 when Oklahoma was open to settlement 20,000 settlers crowded at the boundaries like straining athletes waiting the bugle note that should start the race across the line. Today great crowds gather at the land lotteries of the government as the remaining fragments of the public domain are flung to hungry settlers. Hundreds of thousands of pioneers from the middle west have crossed the national boundary into Canadian wheat fields eager to find farms for their children although under an alien flag. And finally the government has taken to itself great areas of arid land to reclamation by costly irrigation projects whereby to furnish 20 acre tracks in the desert to settlers under careful regulation of water rights. The government supplies the capital for huge irrigation dams and reservoirs and builds them itself. It owns and operates quarries, coal mines and timber to facilitate this work. It seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable for those areas. It analyzes the soils and tells the farmer what and when and how to plant. It is even considered the rental to manufacturers of the surplus water, electrical and steam power generated in its irrigation works and the utilization of this power to extract nitrates from the air to replenish worn out soils. The pioneer of the arid regions must be both a capitalist and the protege of the government. End of section 33 Section 34 of the Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colleen McMahon Chapter 10 Pioneer Ideals and the State University Part 2 Consider the contrast between the conditions of the pioneers at the beginning and at the end of this period of development 300 years ago adventurous Englishmen on the coast of Virginia began the attack on the wilderness. Three years ago the president of the United States summoned the governors of 46 states to deliberate upon the danger of the exhaustion of the natural resources of the nation. The pressure of population upon the food supply is already felt and we are at the beginning only of this transformation. It is profoundly significant that at the very time when American democracy is becoming conscious that its pioneer basis of free land and sparse population is giving way it is also brought face to face with the startling outcome of its old ideals of individualism and exploitation under competition uncontrolled by government. Pioneer society was not sufficiently sophisticated to work out to its logical result the conception of the self-made man. But the captains of industry by applying squad or doctrines to the evolution of American industrial society have made the process so clear that he who runs may read. Contests imply alliances as well as rivalries. The increasing magnitude of the areas to be dealt with and the occurrences of times of industrial stress furnished occasion for such unions. The panic of 1873 was followed by an unprecedented combination of individual businesses and partnerships into corporations. The panic of 1893 marked to the beginning of an extraordinary development of corporate combinations into pools and trusts. Agreements and absorptions until by the time of the panic of 1907 it seemed not impossible that the outcome of free competition under individualism was to be monopoly of the most important natural resources and processes by a limited group of men whose vast fortunes were so invested in allied and dependent industries that they constituted the dominating force in the industrial life of the nation. The development of large-scale factory production the benefit of combination in the competitive struggle and the tremendous advantage of concentration in securing possession of the unoccupied opportunities were so great that vast accumulations of capital became the normal agency of the industrial world. In almost exact ratio to the diminution of the supply of unpossessed resources combinations of capital have increased in magnitude and an efficiency of conquest. The solitary backwoodsman wielding his axe at the edge of a measureless forest is replaced by companies capitalized at millions operating railroads sawmills and all the engineering of modern machinery to harvest the remaining trees. A new national development is before us without the former safety valve of abundant resources open to him who would take. Classes are becoming alarmingly distinct. There is the demand on the one side voiced by Mr. Harriman so well and by others since that nothing must be done to interfere with the early pioneer ideals of the exploitation and the development of the country's wealth. That restrictive and reforming legislation must on no account threaten prosperity even for a moment. In fact we sometimes hear in these days from men of influence serious doubts of democracy and intimations that the country would be better off if it freely resigned itself to guidance by the geniuses who are mastering the economic forces of the nation and who it is alleged would work out the prosperity of the United States more effectively if unvexed by politicians and people. On the other hand an inharmonious group of reformers are sounding the warning that American democratic ideals and society are menaced and already invaded by the very conditions that make this apparent prosperity that the economic resources are no longer limitless and free that the aggregate national wealth is increasing at the cost of present social justice and moral health and the future well being of the American people. The Granger and the populist were profits of this reform movement. Mr. Brian's democracy Mr. Deb's socialism and Mr. Roosevelt's republicanism all had in common the emphasis upon the need of governmental regulation of industrial tendencies in the interest of the common man the checking of the power of those business titans who emerged successful out of the competitive individualism of pioneer America. As land values rise as meat and bread grow dearer as the process of industrial consolidation goes on and as eastern industrial conditions spread across the west the problems of traditional American democracy will become increasingly grave. The time has come when university men may well consider pioneer ideals for American society has reached the end of the first great period in its formation. It must survey itself reflect upon its origins consider what freightage of purposes it carried in its long march across the continent what ambitions it had for the man what role it would play in the world. How shall we conserve what was best in pioneer ideals? How adjust the old conceptions to the changed conditions of modern life? Other nations have been rich and prosperous and powerful but the United States has believed that it had an original contribution to make to the history of society by the production of a self-determining self-restraint intelligent democracy. It is in the middle west that society has formed on lines least like those of Europe. It is here, if anywhere, that American democracy will make it stand against the tendency to adjust to a European type. This consideration gives importance to my final topic the relation of the university to pioneer ideals and to the changing conditions of American democracy. President Pritchett of the Carnegie Foundation has recently declared that in no other form of popular activity does a nation or state so clearly reveal its ideals or the quality of its civilization as in its system of education and he finds especially in the state university a conception of education from the standpoint of the whole people. If our American democracy were today called to give proof of its constructive ability, he says, the state university and the public school system which it crowns would be the strongest evidence of its fitness which it could offer. It may at least be conceded that an essential characteristic of the state university is its democracy in the largest sense. The provision in the constitution of Indiana of 1816 so familiar to you all for a quote general system of education ascending in regular gradations from township schools to a state university wherein tuition shall be gratis and equally open to all end of quote expresses the middle Western conception born in the days of pioneer society and doubtless deeply influenced by Jeffersonian democracy. The most obvious fact about these universities perhaps lies in their integral relation with the public schools whereby the pupil has pressed upon him the question whether he shall go to college and whereby the road is made open and direct to the highest training. By this means the state offers to every class the means of education and even engages in propaganda to induce students to continue. It sinks deep shafts through the social strata to find the gold of real ability in the underlying rock of the masses. It fosters that due degree of individualism which is implied in the right of every human being to have the opportunity to rise in whatever directions his peculiar abilities entitle him to go subordinate to the welfare of the state. It keeps the avenues of promotion to the highest offices the highest honors open to the humblest and most obscure lab who has the natural gifts at the same time that it aids in the improvement of the masses. Nothing in our educational history is more striking than the steady pressure of democracy upon its universities to adapt them to the requirements of all the people. From the state universities of the middle west shaped under pioneer ideals have come the fuller recognition of scientific studies and especially those of applied science devoted to the conquest of nature. The breaking down of the traditional required curriculum the union of vocational and college work in the same institution. The development of agricultural and engineering colleges and business courses the training of lawyers administrators public men and journalists all under the ideal of service to democracy rather than of individual advancement alone. Other universities do the same thing but the head springs and the main current of this great stream of tendency come from the land of the pioneers the democratic states of the middle west and the people themselves through their boards of trustees and the legislature are in the last resort the court of appeal as to the directions and conditions of growth as well as have the fountain of income from which these universities derive their existence. The state university has thus both a peculiar power in the directness of its influence upon the whole people and a peculiar limitation in its dependence upon the people. The ideals of the people constitute the atmosphere in which it moves though it can itself affect this atmosphere. Herein is the source of its strength and the direction of its difficulties. For to fulfill its mission of uplifting the state to continuously higher levels the university must in the words of Mr. Bryce serve the time without yielding to it. It must recognize new needs without becoming subordinate to the immediately practical to the short-sightedly expedient. It must not sacrifice the higher efficiency for the more obvious but lower efficiency. It must have the wisdom to make expenditures for results which pay manifold in the enrichment of civilization but which are not immediate and palpable. In the transitional condition of American democracy which I have tried to indicate the mission of the university is most important. The times call for educated leaders. General experience and rule of thumb information are inadequate for the solution of the problems of a democracy which no longer owns the safety fund of an unlimited quantity of untouched resources. Scientific farming must increase the yield of the field Scientific forestry must economize the woodlands. Scientific experiment and construction by chemist, physicist, biologist, and engineer must be applied to all of nature's forces in our complex modern society. The test tube and the microscope are needed rather than the axe and rifle in this new ideal of conquest. The varied discoveries of science in such fields as public health and the manufacturing processes have made it necessary to depend upon the expert. And if the ranks of experts are to be recruited broadly from the democratic masses as well as from those of larger means the state universities must furnish at least as liberal opportunities for research and training as the universities based on private endowments furnish. It needs no argument to show that it is not to the advantage of democracy to give over the training of the expert exclusively to privately endowed institutions. But quite as much in the field of legislation and of public life in general as in the industrial world is the expert needed. The industrial conditions which shape society are too complex. Problems of labor finance and social reform too difficult to be dealt with intelligently and wisely. Without the leadership of highly educated men familiar with the legislation and literature on social questions in other states and nations. By training in science in law politics economics and history the universities may supply from the ranks of democracy administrators legislators judges and experts for commissions who shall disinterestedly and intelligently mediate between contending interests. When the words capitalistic classes and the proletariat can be used and understood in America it is surely time to develop such men with the ideal of service to the state who may help to break the force of these collisions to find common grounds between the contestants and to possess the respect and confidence of all parties which are genuinely loyal to the best American ideals. The signs of such a development are already plain in the expert commissions of some states in the increasing proportion of university men in legislatures in the university men's influence in federal departments and commissions. It is hardly too much to say that the best hope of intelligent and principal progress in economic and social legislation and administration lies in the increasing influence of American universities by sending out these open-minded experts by furnishing well-fitted legislators public leaders and teachers by graduating successive armies of enlightened citizens accustomed to deal dispassionately with the problems of modern life able to think for themselves governed not by ignorance by prejudice or by impulse but by knowledge and reason and high-mindedness the state universities will safeguard democracy. Without such leaders and followers democratic reactions may create revolutions but they will not be able to produce industrial and social progress. America's problem is not violently to introduce democratic ideals but to preserve and entrench them by courageous adaptation to new conditions. Educated leadership sets bulwarks against both the passionate impulses of the mob and the sinister designs of those who would subordinate public welfare to private greed. Lord Bacon's splendid utterance still rings true quote the learning of the few is despotism the learning of the many is liberty and intelligent and principled liberty is fame wisdom and power end of quote there is a danger to the universities in this very opportunity at first pioneer democracy had scant respect for the expert he believed that a fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him there is much truth in the belief and the educated leader even he who has been trained under present university conditions in direct contact with the world about him will still have to contend with this inherited suspicion of the expert but if he be well trained and worthy of his training if he be endowed with creative imagination and personality he will make good his leadership a more serious danger will come when the universities are fully recognized as powerful factors in shaping the life of the state not mere cloisters remote from its life but an influential element in its life then it may easily happen that the smoke of the battlefield of political and social controversy will obscure their pure air that efforts will be made to stamp out the exceptional doctrine and the exceptional man those who investigate and teach within the university walls must respond to the injunction of the church sursom corda lift up the heart to high thinking and impartial search for the unsullied truth in the interests of all the people this is the holy grail of the universities that they may perform their work they must be left free as the pioneer was free to explore new regions and to report what they find for like the pioneers they have the ideal of investigation they seek new horizons they are not tied to past knowledge they recognize the fact that the universe still abounds in mystery that science and society have not crystallized but are still growing and need their pioneer trail makers new and beneficent discoveries in nature new and beneficial discoveries in the processes and directions of the growth of society substitutes for the vanishing material basis of pioneer democracy may be expected if the university pioneers are left free to seek the trail in conclusion the university has a duty in adjusting pioneer ideals to the new requirements of american democracy even more important than those which I have named the early pioneer was an individualist and a seeker after the end discovered but he did not understand the richness and complexity of life as a whole he did not fully realize his opportunities of individualism and discovery he stood in his somber forest as the traveler sometimes stands in a village on the alps when the mist has shrouded everything and only the squalid hut the stony field the muddy pathway are in view but suddenly a wind sweeps the fog away vast fields of radiant snow and sparkling ice lie before him profound abysses open at his feet and as he lifts his eyes the unimaginable peak of the matter horn cleaves the thin air far far above a new and unsuspected world is revealed all about him thus it is the function of the university to reveal to the individual the mystery and the glory of life as a whole to open all the realms of rational human enjoyment and achievement to preserve the consciousness of the past to spread before the eye the beauty of the universe and to throw wide its portals of duty and of power to the human soul it must honor the poet and the painter the writer and the teacher the scientist and the inventor the musician and the prophet of righteousness the men of genius in all fields who make life nobler it must call forth anew and for finer uses the pioneers love of creative individualism and provide for it a spiritual atmosphere friendly to the development of personality in all uplifting ways it must check the tendency to act in mediocre social masses with undue emphasis upon the ideals of prosperity and politics in short it must summon ability of all kinds to joyous and earnest effort for the welfare and the spiritual enrichment of society it must awaken new tastes and ambitions among the people the light of these university watchtowers should flash from state to state until American democracy itself is illuminated with higher and broader ideals of what constitutes service to the state and to mankind of what are prizes of what is worthy of praise and reward so long a success in amassing great wealth for the grandisement of the individual is the exclusive or the dominant standard of success so long as material prosperity regardless of the conditions of its cost or the civilization which results is the shibboleth American democracy that faith in the common man which the pioneer cherishes is in danger for the strongest will make their way unerringly to whatever goal society sets up as the mark of conceded preeminence what more effective agency is there for the cultivation of the seed wheat of ideals than the university where can we find a more promising body of sewers of the grain the pioneers clearing must be broadened into a domain where all that is worthy of human endeavor may find fertile soil on which to grow and America must exact of the constructive business geniuses who owe their rise to the freedom of pioneer democracy supreme allegiance and devotion to the common will in fostering such an outcome and in tempering the asperities of the conflicts that must precede its fulfillment the nation has no more promising agency than the state universities no more hopeful product than their graduates End of section 34 Recording by Colleen McMahon Section 35 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 11 The West and American Ideals Part 1 True to American traditions that each succeeding generation ought to find in the republic a better home once in every year the colleges and universities summon the nation to lift its eyes from the routine of work in order to take stock of the country's purposes and achievements to examine its past and consider its future This attitude of self-examination is hardly characteristic of the people as a whole Particularly is not characteristic of the historic American He has been an opportunist rather than a dealer in general ideas Destiny set him in a current which bore him swiftly along through such a wealth of opportunity that reflection and well-considered planning seemed wasted time He knew not where he was going but he was on his way cheerful, optimistic, busy and buoyant Today we are reaching a changed condition less apparent perhaps in the newer regions than in the old but sufficiently obvious to extend the commencement frame of mind from the college to the country as a whole The swift and inevitable current of the upper reaches of the nation's history has borne it to the broader expanse and slower stretches which mark the nearness of the level C The vessel no longer carried along by the rushing waters finds it necessary to determine its own directions on this new ocean of its future to give conscious consideration to its motive power and to its steering gear It matters not so much that those who address these college men and women upon life give conflicting answers to the questions of wence and wither the pause for remembrance for reflection and for aspiration is wholesome in itself Although the American people are becoming more self-conscious more responsive to the appeal to act by deliberate choices we should be over-sanguine if we believe that even in this new day these commencement surveys were taken to heart by the general public or that they were directly and immediately influential upon national thought and action But even while we check our enthusiasm by this realization of the common thought we must take heart The university's peculiar privilege and distinction lie in the fact that it is not the passive instrument of the state to voice its current ideas Its problem is not that of expressing tendencies Its mission is to create tendencies and to direct them Its problem is that of leadership and of ideals It is called of course to justify the support which the public gives it by working in close and sympathetic touch with those it serves More than that it would lose important element of strength if it failed to recognize the fact that improvement and creative movement often come from the masses themselves instinctively moving toward a better order The university's graduates must be fitted to take their places naturally and effectually in the common life of the time But the university is called especially to justify its existence by giving to its sons and daughters something which they could not well have gotten through the ordinary experiences of the life outside its walls It is called to serve the time by independent research and by original thought If it were a mere recording instrument of conventional opinion and average information it is hard to see why the university should exist at all To clap hands with the common life in order that it may lift that life to be a radiant center in kindling the society in which it has its being these are primary duties of the university Fortune at the state which gives free play to this spirit of inquiry Let it grub stake its intellectual prospectors and send them forth where the trails run out and stop A famous scientist holds that the universal ether bears vital germs which impinging upon a dead world would bring life to it So at least it is in the world of thought where energized ideals put in the air and carried here and there by the waves and currents of the intellectual atmosphere fertilize vast inert areas The university therefore has a double duty On one hand it must aid in the improvement of the general economic and social environment It must help on in the work of scientific discovery and of making such conditions of existence economic, political and social as will produce more fertile and responsive soil for a higher and better life It must stimulate a wider demand on the part of the public for right leadership It must extend its operations more widely among the people and sink deeper shafts through social strata to find new supplies of intellectual gold in popular levels yet untouched And on the other hand it must find and fit men and women for leadership It must both awaken new demands and it must satisfy those demands by trained leaders with new motives with new incentives to ambition with higher and broader conception of what constitute the prize in life of what constitutes success The university has to deal with both the soil and sifted seed in the agriculture of the human spirit Its efficiency is not the efficiency which the business engineer is fitted to appraise If it is a training ship it is a training ship bound on a voyage of discovery seeking new horizons The economy of the university's consumption can only be rightly measured by the later times which shall possess those new realms of the spirit which its voyage shall reveal If the ships of Columbus had engaged in a profitable coast-wise traffic between Palos and Cadiz they might have saved sail cloth but their keels would never have grated on the shores of a new world The appeal of the undiscovered is strong in America For three centuries the fundamental process in its history was the westward movement the discovery and occupation of the vast free spaces of the continent We are the first generation of Americans who can look back upon that era as a historic movement now coming to its end Other generations have been so much a part of it that they could hardly comprehend its significance To them it seemed inevitable The free land and the natural resources seemed practically inexhaustible Nor were they aware of the fact that their most fundamental traits their institutions, even their ideals were shaped by this interaction between the wilderness and themselves American democracy was born of no theorist's dream It was not carried into the Susan constant to Virginia nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth It came out of the American forest and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire Today we are looking with a shock upon a changed world The national problem is no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest It is how to save and wisely use the remaining timber It is no longer how to get the great spaces of fertile prairie land in humid zones out of the hands of the government into the hands of the pioneer These lands have already passed into private possession No longer is it a question of how to avoid or cross the great plains in the arid desert It is a question of how to conquer those rejected lands by new method of farming and by cultivating new crops from seed collected by the government and by scientists from the cold dry steps of Siberia the burning sands of Egypt and the remote interior of China It is a problem of how to bring the precious rills of water on the alkali and sage brush Population is increasing faster than the food supply New farmlands no longer increase decade after decade in areas equal to those of European states While the ratio of increase of improved land declines the value of farmlands rise and the price of food leaps upward reversing the old ratio between the two The cry of scientific farming and the conservation of natural resources replaces the cry of rapid conquest of the wilderness We have so far won our national home rested from it its first rich treasures and drawn to it the unfortunate of other lands that we are already obliged to compare ourselves with settled states of the old world In place of our attitude of contemptuous indifference to the legislation of such countries as Germany and England even western states like Wisconsin send commissions to study their systems of taxation working men's insurance, old age pensions and a great variety of other remedies of social ills If we look about the periphery of the nation everywhere we see the indications that our world is changing On the streets of northeastern cities like Boston and New York the faces which we meet are to a surprising extent those of southeastern Europe Puritan New England which turned its capital into factories and mills and drew to its shores an army of cheap labour governed these people for a time by a ruling class like an upper stratum between which and the lower strata there was no assimilation There was no such evolution into an assimilated commonwealth as is seen in middle western agricultural states where immigrant and old native stock came in together and built up a homogenous society on the principle of give and take But now the northeastern coast finds its destiny politically and economically passing away from the descendants of the Puritans It is the little Jewish boy the Greek or the Sicilian who takes the traveller through historic streets now the home of these newer people to the old north church or to Paul Revere's house or a tea wharf and tells you in his strange patois the story of revolution against oppression Along the southern Atlantic and the Gulf Coast in spite of the preservative influence of the Negro whose presence has always called out resistance to change on the part of the whites the forces of social and industrial transformation are at work The old tidewater aristocracy has surrendered to the upcountry democrats Along the line of the Alleghenes like an advancing column the forces of northern capital textile and steel mills year after year extend their invasion into the lower south New Orleans once the mistress of the commerce of the Mississippi Valley is awakening to new dreams of world commerce On the southern border similar invasions of American capital have been entering Mexico At the same time the opening of the Panama Canal has completed the dream of the ages of the Straits of Inean between Atlantic and Pacific 400 years ago Balboa raised the flag of Spain at the edge of the sea of the west and we are now preparing to celebrate both that anniversary and the piercing of the continent New relations have been created between Spanish America and the United States and the world is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile between the contending forces of Mexico and the Union Once more alien national interests lie threatening at our borders but we no longer appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and send our armies of frontiersmen to settle our concerns offhand We take counsel with European nations and with the sisterhood of South America and propose a remedy of social reorganization in place of imperious will and force Whether the effort will succeed or not it is a significant indication that an old order is passing away when such a solution is undertaken by a president of Scotch Presbyterian stock born in the state of Virginia End of Section 35 Section 36 of the Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 11, Part 2 If we turn to the northern border where we are about to celebrate a century of peace with England we see in progress like a belated procession of our own history the spread of pioneers the opening of new wildernesses the building of new cities the growth of a new and mighty nation That old American advance of the wheat farmer from the Connecticut to the Mohawk and the Genesee from the great valley of Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle West is now by its own momentum and under the stimulus of Canadian homesteads and the high price of wheat carried across the national border to the once-loan plains where the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the desolate snows of the wild Northland In the Pacific Northwest the era of construction has not ended but it is so rapidly in progress that we can already see the closing of the age of the pioneer Already Alaska beckons on the North and pointing to her wealth of natural resources ask the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with her Across the Pacific Looms Asia no longer a remote vision and a symbol of the unchanging but born as by Mirage close to our shores and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people of the ocean The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient when the long march of Westwood civilization should complete its circle seem almost to be in process of realization The age of the Pacific Ocean begins mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning for our own future Turning to the interior we see the same picture of change When the superintendent of the census in 1890 declared the frontier line no longer traceable the beginning of the rush into Oklahoma had just occurred Here where the broken fragments of Indian nations from the east had been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the southwest were being settled came the rush of the land-hungry pioneer Almost at a blow the old Indian territory passed away popular cities came into being and it was not long before gushing oil wells made a new era of sudden wealth The farmlands of the middle west taken as free homesteads or bought for a mere pittance have risen so in value that the original owners have in an increasing degree either sold them in order to reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the west or have moved into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers The growth of absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious problem in the former centers of the Granger and the populist Along the old northwestern the Great Lakes are becoming a new Mediterranean sea joining the realms of wheat and iron ore at one end with the coal and furnaces of the forks of the Ohio where the most intensive and wide-reaching center of industrial energy exists City life like that of the east manufacturers and accumulated capital seem to be reproducing in the center of the republic the tendencies already so plain on the Atlantic coast Across the Great Plains where Buffalo and Indian held sway successive industrial waves are passing The old free range gave place to the ranch the ranch to the homestead and now in places in the arid lands the homestead is replaced by the 10 or 20 acre irrigated fruit farm The age of cheap land, cheap corn and wheat and cheap cattle has gone forever The federal government has undertaken vast paternal enterprises of reclamation of the desert In the rocky mountains where at the time of civil war the first important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the frontier backward on a march toward the east the most amazing transformations have occurred Here where prospectors made new trails and lived the wild free life of mountain men Here where the human spirit seemed likely to attain the largest measure of individual freedom and where fortune beckoned to the common man have come revolutions wrought by the demand for organized industry and capital In the regions where the popular tribunal and the free competitive life flourished we have seen law and order break down in the unmitigated collision of great aggregations of capital with each other and with organized socialistic labor The Cripple Creek strikes the contests at Butte the Goldfield mobs the recent Colorado fighting all tell a similar story the solid impact of contending forces in regions where civic power and loyalty to the state have never fully developed Like the Grand Canyon where in dazzling light the huge geologic history is written so large that none may fail to read it so in the rocky mountains the dangers of modern American industrial tendencies have been exposed As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle one of the passengers was moved to explain his feeling on the excellence of Pudet Sound in contrast with the remaining visible universe He did it well in spite of irreverent interruptions from those fellow travelers who were unconverted children of the East and at last he broke forth in passionate challenge Why should I not love Seattle? It took me from the slums of the Atlantic Coast a poor Swedish boy with hardly $15 in my pocket It gave me a home by the beautiful sea It spread before my eyes a vision of snow-capped peaks and smiling fields It brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I love it If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern cities and the old world the toiling masses and let them loosen our vast forests and all-lated mountains to learn what life really is And my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods and peaks through which we passed But as I looked and listened to his passionate outcry I remembered the words of Talleyrand the exiled bishop of Orton in Washington's administration Looking down from an eminence not far from Philadelphia upon a wilderness which is now in the heart of that huge industrial society where population presses on the means of life even the cold-blooded and cynical Talleyrand gazing upon those unpeopled hills and forests kindled with the vision of coming clearings the smiling farms and grazing herds that were to be the populous towns that should be built the newer and finer social organization that should be there arise And then I remembered the hall in Harvard's Museum of Social Ethics through which I passed to my lecture room when I speak on the history of the westward movement That hall is covered with an exhibit of the work in Pittsburgh Steel Mills and of the congested tenements Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours of work the death rate the relation of typhoid to the slums the gathering of the poor of all southeastern Europe to make a civilization at that center of American industrial industry and vast capital that is a social tragedy As I enter my lecture room through that hall I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio where Braddock and his men carving a cross on the wilderness rim were struck by the painted savages in the primeval woods huge furnaces belched forth perpetual fires and huns and bulgas Poles and Sicilians struggle for a chance to earn their daily bread and live a brutal and degraded life Irresistibly they're rushed across my mind the memorable words of Huxley Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit a condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor even possesses the merit of stability I do not hesitate to express the opinion that if there is no hope of a large improvement of the condition of the greater part of the human family if it is true that the increase of knowledge the winning of a greater dominion over nature which is its consequence and the wealth which follows upon that dominion are to make no difference in the extent and the intensity of the want with its concomital physical and moral degradation among the masses of the people I should hail the advent of some kindly comet which would sweep the whole affair away as a desirable consummation But if there is dissolution and shock and apprehension as we come to realize these changes to strong men and women there is challenge and inspiration in them too In place of old frontiers of wilderness there are new frontiers of unwon fields of science fruitful for the needs of the race there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored Let us hold to our attitude of faith and courage and creative zeal Let us dream as our fathers dreamt and let us make our dreams come true Daughters of time the hypocritic days muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes and marching single in an endless life bear diadems and faggots in their hands to each they offer gifts after his will bread kingdom stars and sky that hold them all I in my pleached garden watch the pump forgot my morning wishes hastily took a few herbs and apples and the day turned into parted silent I too late under her solemn fillet saw the scorn What were America's morning wishes? From the beginning of that long westward march of the American people America has never been the home of mere contented materialism It has continuously sought new ways and dreamed of a perfected social type In the 15th century when men dealt with the new world which Columbus found the ideal of discovery was dominant Here was placed within the reach of men whose ideas had been bounded by the Atlantic new realms to be explored America became the land of European dreams its fortunate islands were made real where in the imagination of old Europe peace and happiness as well as riches and eternal youth were to be found To Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends of the London Company Virginia offered an opportunity to erect the Republic for which they had longed in vain in England To the Puritans, New England was the new land of freedom wherein they might establish the institutions of God according to their own faith As the vision died away in Virginia toward the close of the 17th century it was taken up anew by the fiery bacon with his revolution to establish a real democracy in place of the rule of the plantar aristocracy that formed along the coast Hardly had he been overthrown when in the 18th century the democratic ideal was rejuvenated by the strong frontiersmen who pressed beyond the New England coast into the Berkshires and up into the valleys of the green mountains of Vermont and by the Scotch-Irish and German pioneers who followed the Great Valley from Pennsylvania into the upland south In both the Yankee Frontiersmen and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the South the Calvinistic conception of the importance of the individual bound by free covenant to his fellow men and to God was a compelling influence and all their wilderness experience combined to emphasize the ideals of opening new ways of giving freeer play to the individual and of constructing democratic society When the backwardsmen crossed the Alleghenies they put between themselves and the Atlantic coast a barrier which seemed to separate them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left and as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the Mississippi they called themselves men of the western waters and their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the western world Here by the 30s Jacksonian democracy flourished strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man in his right to make his own place in the world and in his capacity to share in government But while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights it was also loyal to leadership as the very name implies It was ready to follow to the uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust whether the hero were frontier fighter or president and it even rebuked and limited its own legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran counter to their chosen executive Jacksonian democracy was essentially rule It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling of the frontier in which classes and inequalities of fortune played little part But it did not demand equality of condition for there was abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self-made man had a right to his success in the free competition which western life afforded was as prominent in their thought as was the love of democracy On the other hand they viewed governmental restraints with suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own individuality For the banking institutions and capitalists of the east they had an instinctive antipathy Already they feared that the money power as Jackson called it was planning to make cures of wood and drawers of water of the common people In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of the east who in the same period began their fight for better conditions of the wage earner Those loco-focos were the first Americans to demand fundamental social change for the benefit of the workers in the cities Like the western pioneers they protested against monopolies and special privilege But they also had a constructive policy whereby society was to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land so that surplus labor might not be against itself but might find an outlet in the west Thus to both the labor theorist and the practical pioneer the existence of what seemed inexhaustible cheap land and unpossessed resources was the condition of democracy In those years of the 30s and 40s western democracy took on its own distinctive form Travellers like de Tocqueville and Harriet Martinot came to study and to report it enthusiastically to Europe End of section 36 Section 37 of The Frontier in American History This LibriVox recording is in the public domain The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner Chapter 11 part 3 Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic liberty-loving democratic backwardsmen went to more northern stream of pioneers who cherished similar ideas but added to them the desire to create new industrial centres to build up factories to build railroads and to develop the country by founding cities and extending prosperity They were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this by subscriptions to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking and internal improvements These were the wig followers of that other western leader Henry Clay and their early strength lay in the Ohio Valley and particularly among the well-to-do In the south their strength was found among the aristocracy of the cotton kingdom Both of these western groups, wigs and democrats alike, had one common ideal the desire to leave their children a better heritage than they themselves had received and both were fired with devotion to the ideal of creating in this new world a home more worthy of mankind Both were ready to break with the past to boldly strike out new lines of social endeavour and both believed in American expansion Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three new forces entered In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific Coast which took place in the 40s the nation won so vast a domain that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces At the same period the great activity of railroad building to the Mississippi Valley occurred making these lands available and diverting attention to the task of economic construction The third influence was the slavery question which becoming acute shaped the American ideals and public discussion for nearly a generation Viewed from one angle this struggle involved the great question of national unity From another it involved the question of the relations of labour and capital democracy and aristocracy It was not without significance that Abraham Lincoln became the very type of American pioneer democracy the first adequate and elemental demonstration to the world that democracy could produce a man who belonged to the ages After the war new national energies were set loose and new construction and development engaged the attention of the westerners as they occupied prairies in great plains and mountains democracy and capitalistic development did not seem antagonistic With the passing of the frontier western social and political ideals took new form Capital began to consolidate in even greater masses and increasingly attempted to reduce the system and control the processes of industrial development Labour with equal step organized its forces to destroy the old competitive system It is not strange that the western pioneers took alarm for their ideals of democracy as the outcome of the free struggle for the national resources became apparent They espoused the cause of governmental activity It was a new gospel for the western radical became convinced that he must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and free competition in order to maintain his ideal of democracy Under this conviction the populist revised the pioneer conception of government He saw in government no longer something outside of him but the people themselves shaping their own affairs He demanded therefore an extension of the powers of governments in the interest of his historic ideal of democratic society He demanded not only free silver but the ownership of the agencies of communication and transportation the income tax the postal savings bank the provision of means of credit for agriculture the construction of more effective devices to express the will of the people primary nominations direct elections initiative referendum and recall In a word capital labour and the western pioneer all deserted the ideal of competitive individualism in order to organize their interests in more effective combinations the disappearance of the frontier the closing of the era which was marked by the influence of the west as a form of society brings with it new problems of social adjustment new demands for considering our past ideals and our present needs Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along our borders the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in the solution of our domestic problems Let us recall those internal evidences of the destruction of our old social order If we take to heart this warning we shall do well also to recount our historic ideals to take stock of those purposes and the fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the American spirit and the meaning of America in world history First of all there was the ideal of discovery the courageous determination to break new parts in difference to the dogma that because an institution or a condition exists it must remain all American experience has gone to the making of the spirit of innovation it is in the blood and will not be repressed then there was the ideal of democracy the ideal of a free self-directing people responsive to leadership in the forming of programs in their execution but insistent that the procedure should be that of free choice not of compulsion but there was also the ideal of individualism this democratic society was not a disciplined army where all must keep step and where the collective interests destroyed individual will and work rather it was a mobile mass of freely circulating atoms each seeking its own place and finding play for its own powers and for its own original initiative we cannot lay too much stress upon this point for it was at the very heart of the whole American movement the world was to be made a better world by the example of a democracy in which there was freedom of the individual in which there was the vitality and mobility productive of originality and variety bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of unlimited resources open to all men for the taking and considering the recoil of the common man when he saw the outcome of the competitive struggle for those resources as the supply came to its end over most of the nation we can understand the reaction against individualism and in favor of drastic assertion of the powers of government legislation is taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving the ideal of democracy but at the same time it is endangering the other pioneer ideal of creative and competitive individualism both were essential and constituted what was best in America's contribution to history and to progress both must be preserved if the nation would be true to its past and would fulfill its highest destiny it would be a grave misfortune if these people so rich in experience in self-confidence and aspiration in creative genius should turn to some old world discipline of socialism or plutocracy or despotic rule whether by class or by dictator nor shall we be driven to these alternatives our ancient hopes our courageous faith our underlying good humor and love of fair play will triumph in the end there will be give and take in all directions there will be disinterested leadership under loyalty to the best American ideals nowhere is this leadership more likely to arise than among the men trained in the universities aware of the promise of the past and the possibilities of the future the times call for new ambitions and new motives in a most suggestive essay on the problems of modern democracy Mr. Godkin has said M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence in all countries in which excellence is found is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy the democracy is generally content with mediocrity but where is the proof of this the incentive to exertion which is widest most constant and most powerful in its operations in all civilized countries is the desire of distinction and this may be composed either of love of fame or love of wealth or of both in literary and artistic and scientific pursuits sometimes the strongest influence is exerted by a love of the subject but it may safely be said that no man has ever labored in any of the higher colleges to whom the applause and appreciation of his fellows was not one of the sweetest rewards of his exertions what is there we would ask in the nature of democratic institutions that should render this great spring of action powerless that should deprive glory of all radiance and put ambition to sleep is it not notorious on the contrary that one of the most marked peculiarities of democratic society or of a society drifting toward democracy is the fire of competition which rages in it the fevered anxiety which possesses all its members to rise above the dead level to which the law is ever seeking to confine them and by some brilliant stroke becomes something higher and more remarkable than their fellows the secret of that great restlessness which is one of the most disagreeable accompaniments of life in democratic countries is in fact due to the eagerness of everybody to grasp the prizes of which in aristocratic countries only the few have much chance and in no other society is success more worshiped its distinction of any kind more widely flattered and caressed in democratic societies in fact excellence is the first title to distinction in aristocratic ones there are two or three others which are far stronger and which must be stronger or aristocracy could not exist the moment you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the man who has the most talent you make aristocratic institutions impossible all that was buoyant and creative in american life would be lost if we gave up the respect for distinct personality and variety ingenious and came to the dead level of common standards to be socialized into an average and placed under the tutelage of the mass of us as a recent writer has put it would be an irreparable loss nor is it necessary in a democracy as these words of god can well disclose what is needed is the multiplication of motives for ambition and the opening of new lines of achievement for the strongest as we turn from the task of the first rough conquest of the continent there lies before us a whole wealth of unexploited resources in the realm of the spirit arts and letters science and better social creation loyalty and political service to the common well these and a thousand other directions of activity are open to the men who formerly under the incentive of attaining distinction by amassing extraordinary wealth saw success only in material display newer and finer careers will open to the ambitious when once public opinion shall award the laurels to those who rise above their fellows in these new fields of labor it is not being the gold but the getting of the gold that has caught the imaginations of our captains of industry their real enjoyment lay not in the luxuries which wealth brought but in the work of construction and in the place which society awarded them a new era will come if schools and universities can only widen the intellectual horizon of the people help to lay the foundations of a better industrial life show them new goals for endeavor inspire them with more varied and higher ideals the western spirit must be invoked for new and nobler achievements of that matured western spirit Tennyson's eulises is a symbol I am become a name for always roaming with an hungry heart much have I seen and known I am a part of all that I have met yet all experience is an arch where through gleams at that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever when I move how dull it is to pause to make an end to rust unburnished not to shining use and this gray spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge like a shining star beyond the utmost hound of human thought come my friends it is not too late to seek a newer world push off and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset and the bards of all the western stars until I die to strive to seek to find and not to yield end of section 37 section 38 of the frontier and American history by Frederick Jackson Turner this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Colleen McMahon chapter 12 social forces in American history part one footnote annual address as the president of the American Historical Association delivered at Indianapolis December 28th 1910 end of footnote the transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day are so profound so far reaching that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we're witnessing the birth of a new nation in America the revolution in the social and economic structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable to what occurred when independence was declared and the constitution was formed or to the changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago the era of civil war and reconstruction these changes have been long in preparation and are in part the result of worldwide forces of reorganization incident to the age of steam production and large-scale industry and in part the result of the closing of the period of the colonization of the west they have been prophesied and the course of the movement partly described by students of american development but after all it is with a shock that the people of the united states are coming to realize that the fundamental forces which have shaped their society up to the present are disappearing 20 years ago as I have before had occasion to point out the superintendent of the census declared that the frontier line which its maps had depicted for decade after decade of the westward march of the nation could no longer be described today we must add that the age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed resources of the nation is nearing its end it is taking less than a generation to write the chapter which began with the disappearance of the line of the frontier the last chapter in the history of the colonization of the united states the conclusion to the annals of its pioneer democracy it is a wonderful chapter this final rush of american energy upon the remaining wilderness even the bare statistics become eloquent of a new era they no longer derive their significance from the exhibit of vast proportions of the public domain transferred to agriculture of wildernesses equal to european nations changed decade after decade into the farm area of the united states it is true there was added to the farms of the nation between 1870 and 1880 a territory equal to that of france and between 1880 and 1900 a territory equal to the european area of france germany england and wells combined the records of 1910 are not yet available but whatever they reveal they will not be so full of meaning as the figures which tell of up leaping wealth and organization and concentration of industrial power in the east in the last decade as the final provinces of the western empire have been subdued to the purposes of civilization and have yielded their spoils as the spheres of operation of the great industrial corporations have extended with the extension of american settlement production and wealth have increased beyond all precedent the total deposits in all national banks have more than troubled in the present decade the money in circulation has doubled since 1890 the flood of gold makes it difficult to gauge the full meaning of the incredible increase in values for in the decade ending with 1909 over 41,600,000 ounces of gold were mined in the united states alone over four million ounces have been produced every year since 1905 whereas between 1880 and 1894 no year showed a production of two million ounces as a result of this swelling stream of gold and instruments of credit aided by a variety of other causes prices have risen until their height has become one of the most market features and influential factors in american life producing social readjustments and contributing effectively to party revolutions but if we avoid those statistics which require analysis because of the changing standard of value we still find that the decade occupies an exceptional place in american history more coal was mined in the united states in the 10 years after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time 50 years ago we mined less than 15 million long tons of coal in 1907 we mined nearly 429 million at the present rate it is estimated that the supply of coal would be exhausted at a date no farther in the future than the formation of the constitution is in the past iron and coal are the measures of industrial power the nation has produced three times as much iron ore in the past two decades as in all its previous history the production of the past 10 years was more than double that the prior decade pig iron production is admitted to be an excellent barometer of manufacture and of transportation never until 1898 had this reached an annual total of 10 million long tons but in the five years beginning with 1904 it averaged over twice that by 1907 the united states had surpassed great britain germany and france combined in the production of pig iron and steel together and in the same decade a single great corporation has established its domination over the iron mines and steel manufacture of the united states it is more than a mere accident that the united states steel corporation with its stocks and bonds aggregating 1 billion 400 million dollars was organized at the beginning of the present decade the former wilderness about lake superior has principally in the past two decades established its position as overwhelmingly the preponderance source of iron ore present and prospective in the united states a treasury from which Pittsburgh has drawn wealth and extended its unparalleled industrial empire in these years the tremendous energies thus liberated at this center of industrial power in the united states revolutionized methods of manufacture in general and in many indirect ways profoundly influenced the life of the nation railroad statistics also exhibit unprecedented development the formation of a new industrial society the number of passengers carried one mile more than doubled between 1890 and 1908 freight carried one mile has nearly trebled in the same period and has doubled in the past decade agricultural products tell a different story the corn crop has only risen from about two billion bushels in 1891 to two and seven tenths billions in 1909 wheat from 611 million bushels in 1891 to only 737 million in 1909 and cotton from about 9 million bales in 1891 to 10 and 3 tenths million bales in 1909 population has increased in the united states proper from about 62 and one half millions in 1890 to 75 and one half millions in 1900 to over 90 millions in 1910 it is clear from these statistics that the ratio of the nation's increased production of immediate wealth by the enormously increased exploitation of its remaining natural resources vastly exceeds the ratio of increase of population and still more strikingly exceeds the ratio of increase of agricultural products already population is pressing upon the food supply while capital consolidates in billion-dollar organizations the triumphant democracy whose achievements the iron master celebrated has reached a stature even more imposing than he could have foreseen but still less did he perceive the changes in democracy itself and the conditions of its life which have accompanied this material growth having colonized the far west having mastered its internal resources the nation turned at the conclusion of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to deal with the far east to engage in the world politics of the pacific ocean having continued its historic expansion into the lands of the old Spanish empire by the successful outcome of the recent war the United States became the mistress of the Philippines at the same time that it came into possession of the Hawaiian islands and the controlling influence in the Gulf of Mexico it provided early in the present decade for connecting its Atlantic and Pacific coasts by the ismian canal and became an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates admittedly a new world power with the potential voice in the problems of Europe Asia and Africa this extension of power this undertaking of grave responsibilities in new fields this entry into the sisterhood of world states was no isolated event it was indeed in some respects the logical outcome of the nation's march to the pacific the sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of the west when it had achieved this position among the nations of the earth the united states found itself confronted also with the need of constitutional readjustment arising from the relations of federal government and territorial acquisitions it was obliged to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy in view of the task of government of other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped if we turn to consider the effect upon American society and domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are met with palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic order obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the centers of industrial life in the past 10 years beginning with 1900 over 8 million immigrants have arrived the newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would according to a writer in 1908 quote repopulate all the five older new england states as they stand today or if properly disseminated over the newer parts of the country they would serve to populate no less than 19 states of the union as they stand end of quote in 1907 quote there were one and one quarter million arrivals this number would entirely populate both new hampshire and main two of our oldest states the arrivals of this one year would found a state with more inhabitants than any one of the 21 of our other existing commonwealths which could be named end of quote not only has the addition to the population from Europe been thus extraordinary it has come an increasing measure from southern and eastern Europe for the year 1907 professor Ripley whom I'm quoting has redistributed the incomers on the basis of physical type and finds that one quarter of them were of the Mediterranean race one quarter of the Slavic race one eighth Jewish and only one sixth of the Alpine and one sixth of the Teutonic in 1882 Germans had come to the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand in 1907 they were replaced by three hundred and thirty thousand south Italians thus it is evident that the ethnic elements of the United States have undergone startling changes and instead of spreading over the nation these immigrants have concentrated especially in the cities and great industrial centers in the past decade the composition of the labor class and its relation to wages and to the Native American employer have been deeply influenced thereby the sympathy of the employers with labor has been unfavorably affected by the pressure of great numbers of immigrants of alien nationality and of lower standards of life the familiar facts of the massing of population in the cities and the contemporaneous increase of urban power and of the massing of capital and production in fewer and vastly greater industrial units especially attest to the revolution quote it is a proposition too plain to require elucidation wrote Richard Rush secretary of the treasury in his report of 1827 that the creation of capital is retarded rather than accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil end of quote thirty years before rush wrote these words Albert Gallatin declared in Congress that quote if the cause of the happiness of this country were examined into it would be found to arise as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the inhabitants which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom of their political institutions end of quote possibly both of these Pennsylvania financiers were right under the conditions of the time but it is at least significant that the capital and labor entered upon a new era as the end of the free lands approached a contemporary of Gallatin in Congress had replied to the argument that cheap lands would depopulate the Atlantic coast by saying that if a law were framed to prevent ready access to western lands it would be tantamount to saying that there is some class which must remain quote and by law be obliged to serve the others for such wages as they pleased to give end of quote the passage of the arable public domain into private possession has raised this question in a new form and has brought forth new answers this is peculiarly the era when competitive individualism in the midst of vast unappropriated opportunities changed into the monopoly of the fundamental industrial processes by huge aggregations of capital as the free lands disappeared all the tendencies of the large scale production of the twentieth century all the trend to the massing of capital in large combinations all of the energies of the age of steam found in America exceptional freedom of action and were offered regions of activity equal to the states of all Western Europe here they reached their highest development the decade following eighteen ninety seven is marked by the work of Mr. Harriman and his rivals in building up the various railroads into a few great groups a process that had gone so far that before his death Mr. Harriman was ambitious to concentrate them all under his single control high finance under the leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation of the greater industries into trust or combinations and affected a community of interests between them and a few dominant banking organizations with allied insurance companies and trust companies in New York City have been centered as never before the banking reserves of the nation and here by the financial management of capital and speculative promotion there has grown up a unified control over the nation's industrial life colossal private fortunes have arisen no longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the prosperity of the average man labor on the other hand has shown an increasing self-consciousness is combining and increasing its demands in a word the old pioneer individualism is disappearing while the forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before the self-made man has become in popular speech the coal baron the steel king the oil king the cattle king the railroad magnet the master of high finance the monarch of trusts the world has never before seen such huge fortunes exercising combined control over the economic life of a people and such luxury has come out of the individualistic pioneer democracy of America in the course of competitive evolution at the same time the masters of industry who control interests which represent billions of dollars do not admit that they have broken with pioneer ideals they regard themselves as pioneers under changed conditions carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources of the nation compelled by the constructive fever in their veins even in ill health and old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond their power to enjoy to seek new avenues of action and of power to chop new clearings define new trails to expand the horizon of the nation's activity and to extend the scope of their dominion quote this country said the late mr. Harriman in an interview a few years ago has been developed by a wonderful people flush with enthusiasm imagination and speculative bent they have been magnificent pioneers they saw into the future and adapted their work to the possibilities stifle that enthusiasm deaden that imagination and prohibit that speculation by restrictive and cramping conservative law and you tend to produce a more abundant and conservative people and country end of quote this is an appeal to the historic ideals of americans who viewed the republic as the guardian of individual freedom to compete for the control of the natural resources of the nation on the other hand we have the voice of the insurgent west recently given utterance in the new nationalism of ex-president roosevelt demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests the powerful industrial organizations and the monopolies for the sake of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of american democracy end of section 38 recording by collie micman