Since the literal frontier closed more than a century ago, the conceit of limitlessness has served to justify expanding America’s borders into first a worldwide military empire and then commercial globalization. The myth of an infinite frontier in 19th-century America also papered over the conflict raging in the United States as working-class movements for greater social and economic equality-some of them antislavery and even antiracist-were diverted by westward expansion, military expeditions, and xenophobic panics. And every open frontier eventually arrives at its end, the place where it turns into a closed border. But the frontier’s advance across the continent has always doubled as a tale of bloody conquest-of Native Americans, Mexicans, and farther-flung peoples. The individualism, mobility, and wealth that the frontier represented seemed to set the United States apart from all other countries, fostering the idea that American progress could be infinite and that, because the United States was a country uniquely oriented to the future, it could serve as a progressive model for all humankind. As early as the days of Thomas Jefferson, official American mythmakers cast the United States as a frontier nation, one defined by its sense of the boundless possibilities, personal freedom, and natural riches waiting over the western horizon.
Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America presents this delusional episode as merely the latest chapter in an old American dilemma. Trump styles himself a modern-day Cassandra: Mexicans and Central Americans are crossing the border to kill US citizens, he insists, and only he is sounding the alarm. Trump’s “state of emergency” was a new legal gambit following his failure to win congressional support for a border wall, but the sub-Boschian picture of criminal invasion from the south was at the center of his incendiary 2016 campaign and has never been far from the surface of his presidency. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America
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