The Turner Thesis just won't die. Stephen Colbert has a category of "truthiness" for things that seem like they just ought to be true, but aren't, and Turner's notion would be one of them. Maybe some of it comes from a Rousseau-like conviction that too much civilization is bad, that people get better when they go outside and live simple. And of course it's self-congratulatory, too: it's pleasant to read about how the frontier made you a pillar of democracy, if you got your farm because your ancestors cleared off a bunch of Cherokee from their land. And you're likely to send your children to the school that teaches it.

Turner's notion of a frontier as a place of great freedom where people created their own institutions out of having to be self-reliant just wasn't valid. Government was there. In the US, there would be government military operations needed to take the land from the indigenous population. There would be land speculators, gaining title to the lands from the government and selling them to others. Those buyers would also title them. Anyone who thought they could just plunk down in the wilderness either got walloped by the Native Nations ( which happened to Daniel Boone) or could get evicted by the titled landowner ( like the folks who tried to squat on George Washington's western Pennsylvania lands during the Revolution). In a new territory there could be a basic economy of self-reliant smallholders, but it would exist in the public sphere of local government: taxes, law enforcement, elections, etc. Even the ephemeral state of Franklin would collect taxes- if only in the currency of raccoon skins and deer hides- and register marriages, probate wills and estates. And democracy was...well, not really the main goal or result. The defeat and displacement of the Iroquois Nation, with its own democratic features, by a land-hungry New York militia was not what anyone would call a triumph of civilization.

When I was a student, years ago, my medieval history professor trotted out James Westfall Thompson's Feudal Germany just so he could kick it around.. Thompson applied Turner to the medieval frontier, had noble civilized Teutonic Knights bringing the light of Christianity and other good things to the Slavs. But it turns out those Slavs were not a racial block, nor were the Knights, that trade had been going on for quite some time, that the Knights used Slav irregulars..... It's not my field, but I think that perhaps using Turner for the Roman Empire would also get damned in the details. It's hard to see Turner's frontier democracy developing anywhere in this picture : just tribal leaders becoming bigger tribal leaders, assembling bigger armies, Roman generals rallying their armies and attempting a putsch, the western Empire becoming more and more chaotic and hard for anyone to manage. And the sides are mixed up, also. The Roman army was filled with German recruits, and got German commanders. Instead of newly-arriving invaders, the Germanic tribes at the edge of the empire from the 1st century often carried on a very useful trade with the Empire, much of the time acted as suppliers, sometimes got subsidies, sometimes were economic refugees being a nuisance more than a real military threat. Living was better in the Empire and, on the whole, it was useful to live within it or nearby- and battle the neighboring tribes when they wanted to also get close, get a better treaty.

Turner's Social Darwinist thinking was fit for a time when historians could ask ludicrous questions like, "what is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race?" and get an audience to seriously consider it. In his 19th c. , plenty of the citizens of Kansas might think that surely all those badly dressed people living out there on the plains in their badly-heated teepees had to be inferior racial stock. The rise of anthropology in the 20th c. and the collapse of Social Darwinist thinking has ended that. Indigenous people were not necessarily stupid, and under closer examination their adaptations to their environment often were more sustainable than the intense resource development of their conquerors.

But it's never going to go away, Turner's thesis. Political speeches are going to echo it, when someone talks about the great American strength of self-reliance, our noble pioneers, the frontier spirit. Like football fans, wanting to believe there's something really special about their own team.