Looking westward from England in 1651, Thomas Hobbes knocked Americans’ land-lust as “an insatiable appetite, or Bulimia.” Yet the prevailing view in the colonies aligned with that of Anglican Bishop George Berkeley. They were destined, Turner concluded, to build a nation that the world would envy.Ĭontrarians have always voiced strong doubts. Just the prospect, the ineffectuality, the hubris of such a border barrier reminds us that the forces of a long-held, quintessentially American myth still leverage Americans’ cultural, social, and political life.įrederick Jackson Turner provided the myth’s essentials in his classic 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Its argument: that westwarding settlers had realized the promises of free land, which would underwrite an equality that land ownership confers, and thus develop a “forward-looking individualism” uniting socially and politically a diverse (white) population of British, Scandinavian, Dutch, German, and French immigrants. For it’s a wall that people will go under or get over, as they always have. And now comes Donald Trump, promising to build “a big, beautiful wall”: 1,933 miles of it costing billions of dollars, and running from Tijuana to Brownsville, Texas, and then requiring massive annual funding in order to maintain and police the boondoggle.

For a hundred-plus years, this has been a cornerstone of America’s national mythology. He opens with a plain fact: from the first settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth, America was, until 1900, unique among nations in having an ever-advancing frontier line, and then, after 1900 and the closing of the frontier, having to reckon perennially with intractable Southwest borderland issues. Still, that he and the neighbor annually meet to share the labor of repairing that wall proves the neighbor’s claim: “good fences make good neighbors.” But do they? In this timely, strongly written, and important book, Greg Grandin surveys ideas of frontier and border spaces and fences spanning four centuries of American history. When it comes to border fences or walls, Americans are like the characters in Robert Frost’s 1913 poem “Mending Wall.” The speaker mocks his troglodyte neighbor for sustaining a fieldstone property-line wall that’s stood for generations but now serves no purpose.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” -Robert Frost

End of the myth grandin