F.J. Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’

Abstract

American society was transformed by the expansion of capital Westward and the explosion in opportunities for land-grabbing and agricultural and industrial investment. F.J. Turner’s ([1893] 1961) frontier thesis portrays this transformation as the fulfilment of American character. The tensions between character and personality are examined following the ideas of Carl Schmitt on the significance of ‘the occasion’ in acquiring competitive advantage. Schmitt indicated the significance of a ‘vertical’ frontier in challenging social conventions and this constitutes a counterpoint to the ‘horizontal’ frontier developed in the frontier thesis of Turner. The importance of the occasion and personality in developing the American way of life is presented by an examination of the vaudeville and celebrity traditions in American entertainment.

Keywords

america character frontier personality vaudeville

In the nineteenth century, American society was transformed by the expansion of capital Westward and the explosion in opportunities that ensued for land-grabbing and agricultural and industrial investment. In F.J. Turner’s ([1893] 1961) frontier thesis, this was portrayed as resulting in the fulfilment of American character. The frontier thesis is a neo-Darwinian contribution. It posits exceptionalism and transcendence as the keys to American character. The gene pool of the Americans, thriving in a new geographical and social environment, is depicted as achieving a higher level of development than the stratified societies of Old Europe. What the thesis ignores is the importance of orthodox Eurocentric strategies of colonization and land appropriation. Turner portrays the pioneer/settler society as a heroic departure, but in many ways, it is a continuation of European precedents. Analogously, the proposition that the push West crystallized American character obscures the role of personality, especially in urban-industrial settings, in establishing the parameters of American life. Turner conceived of character as emerging from a struggle with the spatial frontier. But the struggles of personality with the social frontier of social repression and establishment values is no less significant.

The article examines the tensions between character and personality by using ideas developed by Carl Schmitt on the significance of ‘the occasion’ in acquiring competitive advantage. Schmitt’s work demonstrates the significance of a ‘vertical’ frontier in challenging social conventions. It constitutes a counterpoint to the ‘horizontal’ frontier explained in Turner’s thesis. The importance of the occasion and personality in developing the American way of life is presented by an examination of the vaudeville and celebrity traditions in the sphere of American entertainment. The exploitation of contingency and opportunity for personal advantage, the use of melodrama to engineer social impact, the social validation of forthright behaviour are examined in the context of the careers of the film actress Mae West and the comedian Bob Hope.

For many commentators on American history, Frederick Jackson Turner’s ([1893] 1961) famous ‘frontier thesis’ has canonical status (Billington, 1966; Slotkin, 1973, 1985, 1992). Even its mistakes are believed to be instructive. The thesis purports to establish a causal connection between the territorial expansion of the Western frontier and the crystallization of American character. Turner portrays the nineteenth-century Westward pioneer as fulfilling the latent potential for adventure and achievement in American settler society. Consecutively, and by no means accidentally, he constructs the thesis to underwrite the proposition of American exceptionalism, i.e. the formation and evolution of a character type based on the values of bold endeavour, fortitude and innovation that the stratified societies of Europe, and the neo-European cities of the American Eastern seaboard, allegedly could not match. Subsequent American historians (and myth-makers), among them Theodor Roosevelt (1893), select and elaborate aspects in the frontier thesis to support frankly racist hypotheses having to do with the alleged innate superiority of pioneers and their privileged destiny to civilize the Western ‘wasteland’. These contributions obscure the three pillars upon which Turner’s thesis of American character rests. In his view, the frontier is won by American individualism, dynamism, and respect for democracy. By individualism, Turner means the liberty of individuals to develop freely and fully; by dynamism, the spirit of energy that seizes upon barriers as obstacles to be overcome; and by democracy, tolerance for equal rights and respect for majority rule. While these character traits have their origins in Ancient Society, Turner maintains that they are only fully realized in conquering the Western frontier (Keane, 2009). Implicitly, therefore, he discounts the English revolution (1642–49) and the French Revolution (1789) as courageous failures. In the fullness of time, both succumbed – to borrow a term used by William Cobbett in another context – to ‘Old Corruption’.¹ By way of hard evidence, in England, Charles II was restored to the throne in 1661; and in France, Napoleon Bonaparte was declared Emperor in 1804. Ostensibly, in America, deposing King George III, and vanquishing the redcoats, neutralized the conditions for the re-emergence of Old Corruption. The American Revolution was a once-and-for-all break in history. At least, this is what Turner believes. Given this, it is easy to comprehend why many North American historians of Turner’s generation automatically assumed that the qualities of character relating to individualism, dynamism and democracy fall on stony ground in Europe. For Turner, the new Canaan of the West supports the American character traits that elicit the prospect of unparalleled success in the pursuit of enterprise, the advance of property and the perpetual revitalization of democracy. In short, the peculiar conditions of the American Western frontier provide the prerequisites for the efflorescence of American character.

Turner’s ([1893] 1961) understanding of character is faithfully Darwinian. He beholds the Western pioneer as bearing unique capacities of vision, enterprise and industry. These were taken to evolve and reach enviable maturity in the American setting. Through epic struggle with soil, climate, beast and ‘primitive man’, America realizes its true self. At the level of theory, the annexation of physical space is conflated with racial triumph, i.e. over the indigenous population. Thus, the ideal of subduing the ‘wild’, ‘untamed’ frontier is advanced as simultaneously a struggle with Nature and the destiny of civilization. By these means the parturition of the ‘new man’ is achieved: the Western kinsman. Billington (1958) used the emotionally loaded term ‘virgin wasteland’ to describe the frontier. Turner would not have objected. The idea shades subtly into the concepts of a clean slate and a new beginning for anyone with the energy and pluck to give Western migration a try.

Posterity has revealed several difficulties with Turner’s thesis. To begin with, the characterization of thousands of acres as virgin space, and the native people who inhabited them, as ‘surplus’ to the requirements of private property, underwrote forms of aggression against indigenous populations that are now widely regarded as morally indefensible. The pioneers undermined the whole way of life of the American Indian. The results were devastating. Madley (2008) reports that, in 1846, the native population of California numbered 150,000; within two decades it had plunged to between 25,000–30,000. The push West, with its attendant, and, at the time, dimly apprehended, spectres of physical hazard and internecine conflict, which, in themselves, were interpreted to require unusual vigilance and firm resolve, afforded scope for pioneers to depart from Biblical doctrine and forge moral principles in their own, ad hoc, ways. Thus, they reaped the abundant economic rewards that followed from asserting new property rights. The pioneers held fast to the character value of derring-do and the belief that faint heart never wins favour. All of this coalesced to make the Western frontier a potent symbol in American cosmology. In the American imagination, the West was never simply a physical space. Nor was it liminal, in the sense of being provisional or subject to contestation from other interests. Once claimed and occupied, it became irrevocably incorporated into the American state. The geographical boundary was conflated with features of character and state ambition that identified the frontier with a perpetually expanding universe of hope and aspiration. The content of these qualities was conveniently redefined by successive generations: vast tracts of farmland for cultivation in one era, the Gold Rush in the next, oil thereafter, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and so on. What these details camouflaged was a more important character ideal in the American self-image, i.e. the vision of escaping the stifling conventions of the Old World and the Atlantic seaboard and proving oneself (and what is immanent in the race), in a confrontation with the untamed ‘wilderness’ of the West. The Christian, religious overtones of an ethic of discipline, faith in Turner’s frontier thesis, are undeniable. The Westward quest abounds with Salvationist connotations. It was a seductive vision colonized by Hollywood which has come down to us today most forcefully as the ‘gunfighter logic’ of the Wild West (Slotkin, 1992). To his credit, Turner’s thesis provides a more elevated interpretation of pioneer stock forging American character. In his view, the waggon trains rolling West were embryonic democracies in which individual resourcefulness, dynamism and vitality were called upon to set the American spirit free. The frontier settlers, with their suspicion of government and boundless appetite to seize opportunity, were self-consciously engaged in a Promethean new beginning (Billington, 1958: 5). It was the Western kinsman who showed the rest of America, confined by the stratified, suffocating rules and conventions of the Eastern and Southern seaboards, the image of their own future.

The frontier thesis, then, equates the frontier with nothing less than the progress of the American state. However, curiously, in doing so it ignores how the demarcation and control of the frontier categorize and separate people. As Tagil (1977: 14) demonstrates, the ‘separating qualities’ of frontiers condition the interaction between people situated on either side of the boundary. What is progress for the American state, is, from the standpoint of the indigenous population, more ambivalent. Yet the frontier thesis ignores this in favour of a Whiggish interpretation that regards Westward expansion to be intrinsically progressive.

Posterity, again, pours cold water on the romance of beholding the waggon trains as embryonic democracies. In this respect Turner’s thesis is painfully muscle-bound to the idea of the Westward push as an heroic conquest of Nature and convention. Many pioneers were indentured to Old World trading companies. The ‘boom mentalities’ and commitment to ‘eruptive change’ of ‘settlerism’ were fatefully beholden to Old World precedents (Belich, 2009: 414). It is reasonable to assume that initially, at least, economic inequalities were less severe among pioneers, because they would have included a higher proportion of young, marginal people seeking their fortune. Older, richer families may have dabbled in the Westward adventure, but because of the innumerable risks involved, it is probable that comparatively few ventured to become permanent settlers. In general, for the rich, life was sufficiently agreeable at home. However, from the start, differences in wealth, power and influence were evident. By 1860, the richest 20 per cent of American households owned 64 per cent of the wealth (Pessen, 1976). Given this, the relative similarities in wealth distribution between the established settler communities of the stratified East and the supposedly free, egalitarian West, are remarkable. Pessen (1971: 1026) estimates that, on the eve of the Civil War, the wealthiest 1 per cent in Philadelphia owned 50 per cent of the city’s wealth; in the newer cities of St Louis and New Orleans, the richest 5 per cent owned about 60 per cent of each city’s wealth. In Chicago, in 1860, 80 per cent of the wealth was owned by 10 per cent of the families (Bubnys, 1982: 105). Thus, the settlers did not break with Eastern economic conventions. Western settlement quickly reproduced familiar patterns of wealth distribution. Additionally, tried and tested features of property accumulation in the Old World, namely, land-grabbing, yield speculation and the quest for monopoly power, rapidly asserted themselves (Slotkin, 1992: 57–8). Revisionist history has exposed the mythological foundations of the qualities of individualism, dynamism and democracy celebrated so fulsomely in Turner’s thesis. ‘Winning the West’ and expanding ranching settlements were supported by massive public expenditures. Settler ranchers enjoyed subsidized finance accessed from the government in Washington, Eastern bankers and robber barons (Wilshire et al., 2008). Property speculators in the East and Europe supplied the infrastructure of transportation, state education and military protection against Native Indian warriors. The brave new world of the settled West was built on tenacious Old World economic foundations.

Nor were Old World cultural ties sundered. Gitlin (2012) argues that the French merchant settlers established the so-called ‘Creole corridor’ that stretched from the Great Lakes, through the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, as a geo-political and cultural zone of French trading and influence. After 1763, this space emerged as a new profit-driven frontier beyond the Anglo sphere. Far from being ambivalent capitalists, the French pioneers invested heavily to construct a buoyant infrastructure to facilitate trade and pushed on with Indian land clearance. Gitlin (2012) portrays the French merchants in the Creole corridor not so much as utopian settler stock, but as representatives of Old World values and impulses, intent upon land annexation and profiteering. The culture retained deep loyalties to the cultural values of discrimination and taste common in the homeland. They may have been convulsed with the romance of taming ‘the Wild West’, but, for generations, they saw France as their true home.

What does ‘frontier’ mean?

Another problem having to do with etymology remains. The English word ‘frontier’ derives from the classical Latin root (‘front’ or ‘forepart’) via the medieval Latin term, ‘fronteria’, meaning line of battle. Cognate terms such as the French frontière, the Spanish frontera and the English frontier, have widely different connotations (Baud and Van Schendel, 1997: 213). The earliest, most common usage in America is thought to designate the frontier as a ‘fortress’ or ‘fortification’ (Juriceck, 1966: 10–11). This meaning suggests defensive qualities to the term ‘frontier’. These are obscured in Turner’s tendency to associate the term with hope, expansion and a fresh start. The Turner thesis exaggerates the connections with ‘liberation’ and ‘opportunity’, and under-values the links with ‘containment’, ‘defence’ and ‘domination’.

Notwithstanding these reservations, the frontier thesis continues to wield considerable influence in debates about American character. To a considerable degree this reflects the over-determination of geo-physical, cultural, emotional and psychological connotations embodied in the concept. Inter alia, the term stands for perennial rebirth, creativity, mobility (social and geographical), escape, freedom, opportunity, promise, courage, resourcefulness, restlessness, redemption, purification and conquest. In Turner’s ([1893] 1961: 205) own words, the frontier ‘breaks the cake of custom’ to translate the Western kinsman into the apotheosis of American character. The expression of this finds its vital, renewable focus in what might be called frontierism, i.e. the philosophy that the frontier is a perpetually shifting horizon that tests the individual and is the catalyst for personal progress and wealth creation. The spatial frontier denotes an imaginative expanse in which social being and personal character are tested, reinvented, and, crucially, rewarded. Reductively, the essence of frontierism is therefore a combination of American expansionism and exceptionalism. It is an equation that today finds disturbing echoes in American foreign policy, especially, in recent times, in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At bottom, Turner’s ([1893] 1961) logic of frontier character is very orthodox. As noted, it portrays the evolution of character in simple Darwinian terms as a struggle with wilderness and rival, inferior species types. Through this titanic battle, the fittest prosper and the fulfilment of American character is achieved. A happy side effect is that American endeavour, fortitude and know-how become the benchmark for the subdued and oppressed everywhere. Yet the veracity of this reductive equation, namely, the twin theses of American expansionism and American exceptionalism, is by no means sound. The annexation of land and the elevation of private property as the decisive principles of ownership were hardly unique to America. To be sure, throughout the 1800s and at the turn of the next century, Federal initiatives applied a legal basis of egalitarianism in the recognition of split-estate interests in water rights, transport improvements and grazing values (McIntosh, 2002). However, these were matters of expedience, plainly secondary to the private procurement of land for ranch development and urban accumulation. Together with the brutal suppression of the native population, it is hardly convincing to regard this as a departure from European colonial precedents. Rather, it stands in direct line with them (Slatta, 1990, 2001; Vandervort, 2006). As to derring-do and giving everyone a fair shake, of course, there were countless examples of individual heroism and examples of primitive, communal democracy that support Turner’s thesis. However, properly speaking, they were epiphenomena of the prime mover behind expansion. Fundamentally, the Western push was about the advance and multiplication of capital. The logic of expansion was not unprecedented. It followed European examples in Asia and the New World (Belich, 2009). With hindsight, Turner over-egged the case for American expansionism and American exceptionalism. In doing so, he produced a teleological explanation of American character. It wrongly mistook its conclusion for its predicate. The three principles of individualism, dynamism and democracy that Turner took to be the culmination of American character were, in fact, idealistic constructs. They could only be advocated by framing the history that preceded them through a questionable prism. They ignored pioneer land-grabbing, vigilante law and episodes of violence against the population of Native Americans (Slotkin, 1983, 1985, 1992; Wolin, 2008). In the Westward push, the culture of everyday reality, wherein pragmatic individualism, dynamism and democracy were enacted and refined, was replaced by a virtual reality in which economic accumulation was conducted around a virtuous political diplomacy. In effect, this diplomacy was encouraged to make its own reality. In a word, with respect to American character, idealism was permitted to replace awkward historical facts and contrary everyday experience. By no means accidentally, this proved convenient in what is properly described as the colonization of the West. Later, it became the bulwark of American foreign policy and global ambition. The success of ‘the American way’ in linking the Pacific shore with the Atlantic seaboard on the American continent appeared to underwrite the construct of American character. It has encouraged twentieth- and twenty-first-century leaders of American ‘managed democracy’ to interpret effective globalization as the Americanization of the world (Wolin, 2008).²

A frontier of character or personality?

Conversely, the frontier thesis deflected attention from the cultural revolution in opportunity and mobility. In America, this was concentrated, not primarily, in conquering the Great Plains and the Rockies, but in challenging and eroding the conventions of urban stratified society. Turner’s ([1893] 1961) view of the frontier is a constantly shifting spatial horizon. In holding so fast to this, he fails to grasp the importance of the erosion of what might be called the vertical frontier, i.e. the conventions of stratified society. The social transformations in the main metropolitan centres of America, which occurred, as it were, behind Turner’s back, directly challenged the neo-Darwinian emphasis upon the crystallization of character through the Westward expansion of the American state. After the 1880s, migration, industrialization and accumulation were challenging or overturning nearly all boundaries in Anglo-American culture. An analytically distinct type of frontierism was at play here. It focused on testing the boundaries of stratified society. Achieved (upwardly mobile) celebrities in the fields of art and literature, and later sport and entertainment, played a dramatic, symbolic role in pushing back the social mores and conventions associated with old money.

In Turner’s thesis, American character is about building and refining virtue through overcoming adversity to acquire the integrity of serene wisdom. What happened in the earth-shaking, mould-breaking expansion of the leading American cities after the 1880s was a convulsive appreciation that the display of aptitude and the exhibition of virtue and boldness were sufficient to seize the day. The wisecrack challenged the Westward push as a means of social and economic advancement.

As a by-product, social relations gradually became popularly understood as provisional and subject to manipulative dramaturgy. This is anticipated brilliantly in Herman Melville’s (1857) great, but long misunderstood, novel, The Confidence Man. The book was neglected for many generations because it was dismissed as possessing vague, unrealized characters and an obscure narrative. Why this is a mistake is that the absence of character and uplifting narrative is precisely the point that Melville wants to establish about the industrial transformation of American society. All of the action takes place on April Fool’s Day aboard a Mississippi steamboat heading South. Revealingly, the boat is called the Fidele. Melville uses the nicety of the name of the vessel to contrast with the tumultuous deceits, bluffs, double dares, swindles, japes and confidence tricks played by all of the passengers on board. On the Fidele, all of the action, all of the inexhaustible social jockeying and posing, are about nothing more than gaining personal advantage over the other fellow. Melville portrays a social universe in which no-one and nothing can be trusted or believed. Belief is entirely secondary to getting ahead by whatever means necessary.

It is this dimension of gaining immediate, momentary advantage without much thought, and with no attention to the long-term future, that is absent in Turner’s thesis. It suggests that to conceive of frontierism only in terms of the evolution of character in an epic struggle with ‘wilderness’ that results in the crystallization of the Western kinsman misconstrues the full extent of the many-sided upheavals in the American road to modernization.

In fact, there were two frontiers in American society. The horizontal frontier, addressed by Turner, refers to the spatial push West and the struggle with Nature and the indigenous population. The vertical frontier refers to the challenge to the social boundaries and cultural conventions set by stratified society. In pushing back these boundaries and conventions, upwardly mobile Americans and migrant labour transformed the power structure of American society. The tools and weapons that they used to do so can loosely be called individualism, dynamism and democracy. But the means through which they were applied, and the ends involved, were very different from Turner’s construct of the exalted progress of the American state and evolution of character.

It is my submission that, to encompass the complex movements and counter-movements in challenging the vertical horizon, the concept of ‘personality’ is preferable to that of character. In order to explain why, it is helpful to refer briefly to Carl Schmitt’s (1919) discussion of engineered intimacy and strategic emotional labour.³ Of course, Schmitt’s interest is not in the American frontier or the social transformations in the stratified culture of American cities. His (1919) book, Political Romanticism, is about German politics in the nineteenth century. However, its real aim is to unmask the role of personality in communicating (and seeking to convey the impression of elucidating) the dialectical forces and processes identified in Marxist theory. Through elucidation comes the impression of command, i.e. a source of personal status and power. However, a good deal of what Schmitt says about the hectic, episodic display of emotional labour to gain personal advantage transfers readily to the challenges against the vertical frontier in the American urban-industrial milieu. Schmitt’s point is that the desire to change the world progressively is not, fundamentally, a matter of upwardly evolving objective forces. It is rather, above all, a matter of tumultuous subjective interest. Schmitt’s political candidates for influence and fame are driven by personal ambition and the search for opportunity. They are moved by ‘the emergency’, ‘the event’, ‘the incident’ or – to use Schmitt’s (1919) term, the occasion, because it affords the opportunity to shine and be noticed. There is a strong element of ‘excessive sociability’ about this urge. Being noticed is intrinsically a matter of using one’s social skills to gain acceptance and approval. Emotional intelligence and labour are directed, not merely to the business of achieving change, but, more narrowly, to being personally noticed and acquiring individual reputation. Schmitt views these manoeuvres in emotional intelligence and emotional labour as expressions of what he calls ‘transcendental ego’. The personalities in German Romantic politics in the nineteenth century often behaved as if they only have themselves to answer to. Higher theological and metaphysical arbiters are dismissed as delusions. What really excites and absorbs the transcendental ego is acquiring and grasping attention for themselves, rather than doggedly advancing a collective cause based on objective reality. This fully embraces the business of staging events or engineering incidents in order to acquire attention capital.⁴ In contrast to Turner’s ([1893] 1961) Western kinsman, these men and women cannot be relied upon for their wisdom and unflinching, reliable behaviour on every occasion. Rather, they are adept at having their cake and eating it. This is because their orientation to life obeys the demands of an ego primed to exploit the occasion. The successful personality must seize the day to prosper. The dynamics of industrial change, in which ‘the fleeting’, ‘the ephemeral’ and ‘the transient’ abound with dizzy profusion, create a surfeit of opportunities to seize ‘the occasion’ and generate attention capital.⁵

The vaudeville tradition

In brief, the case that I wish to advance at this point is that the challenge to the vertical frontier was primarily about the display and refinement of personality in accumulating attention capital. It is this accumulation of attention capital that provided the foundation of new forms of power and influence. The logic of advantage was based on relations of consumption rather than production. In the course of this, celebrity culture, rooted in the sphere of commercialized entertainment, was fundamental in extending cultural literacy about dramatizing personality and communicating the cultural literacy necessary to bloodlessly test the boundaries of stratified control. Needless to say, in the space available here it is impossible to fully test this argument with detailed historical evidence. But a taster of what I have in mind can be supplied by briefly considering the vaudeville tradition and further, addressing two case studies of celebrity personalities who marshalled attention capital and eroded stratified boundaries through their use of personality: Mae West and Bob Hope.

In the American road to modernization, the development of personality occurred along many fronts. Melville’s (1857) gamers, tricksters, and exponents of one-upmanship aboard the Fidele convey something of this prolific variety and invention. However, nowhere was it realized more publicly than in the vaudeville tradition. By the 1880s, for ordinary men and women domiciled in the cities, the popular palaces of amusement that multiplied in direct proportion to the growth of urban populations, the influx of migrant labour from Europe and the rise in real wages, were not only places of entertainment and distraction. They were beacons of upward mobility where performers brazenly ridiculed the excesses and vanities of stratified society and pointed to the riches that would follow if one had enough chutzpah (Allen, 1991; Fields and Fields, 1993; Kibler, 1999; Lewis, 2003). Historical research has demonstrated that colonizing and extending vaudeville culture were important in raising the profile of, respectively, Irish and Jewish migrants on the American mainland (Lavitt, 1999; Snyder, 2006; Cherry, 2013). Style and attitude were weapons for contesting the established social and economic power mould. While most of the acts had their day in the sun and were swiftly forgotten, some rose to become important enduring referents of attention capital that changed the balance of power between established and outsider groups (Van Kriekan, 2012). This article is not a contribution to the social history of vaudeville. Instead the focus of interest is the mixture of emotional intelligence and emotional labour that combined on stage in the presentation of personality, and later the radio waves and screen, to test and overcome stratified social frontiers. The vaudeville tradition, combined with the expansion of mass communications, equipped audiences with a new emotional literacy. Ernest Gellner (1985, 1988) advanced the proposition that material and social transformation in industrial development operates to replace the struggle for survival with demands for acceptance and approval.⁶ The vaudeville tradition dramatized the demands of labour, migrants and women for more recognition and resources. It was a front from which attention capital accumulated with consequences that extended well beyond the stage, the recording studio or the film set. In pushing back the vertical frontier, it allowed energies, accomplishments and ambitions ‘from below’ to become not only socially acceptable but also actively desired. In order to substantiate this train of thought, consider the cases of Mae West and Bob Hope.

Mae West

At the peak of her cultural influence, in the 1920s and early 1930s, Mae West played the part of public amanuensis to cultural strata and social problems from which respectable society chose to discreetly avert its cultivated gaze. While her later career disintegrated into self-parody, the heyday of her stage and film work criticized many of the hypocritical mores and standards of stratified society and broke down phobias of prejudice and intolerance. In the Jazz Age and Prohibition era, West developed various tricks of personality in order to seize ‘the occasion’ and disclose the transgressive, alternative underworld that lurked beneath the veneer of American straight society. She learned the craft of sexual innuendo and testing frontiers from female impersonators, like Bert Savoy and Julian Eltinge (Curry, 1996). The risqué popularizing of outlawed pleasures was her trademark. She exhibited familiarity and ease with the taboo cultures of prostitution and camp. Two of her plays were raided by the vice squad, and a third was ‘dissuaded’ from opening on Broadway (Hamilton, 1990: 384). Her scandalously successful stage plays Sex (1926), for which she received a 10-day prison sentence (for allegedly corrupting public morals), and The Drag (1927), dealt with controversial subjects of sex workers, homosexuality and cross-dressing. In a pioneering move on Broadway, The Drag employed openly gay actors and freely used camp repartee. West wrote, produced and starred in these productions. Very visibly, she defied social and sexual conventions. To be sure, her plain-speaking style ridiculed these conventions as the bastions of a bankrupt culture. Her confrontational, provocative personality did not make her an outcast. On the contrary, she became an icon of the gay community, the ‘new’ woman and, more generally, a symbol of the transgressive metropolis.

Her stage persona was carried over into film. Like Bob Hope after her, West made the Westward migration to Hollywood from the New York stage. ‘In most of her films’, comments Mellen (1974: 576), ‘she reduces herself to a sexual object in quest of economic security while she is, simultaneously, defiant and self-sufficient, seeking mastery over her life.’ The wisecracks, the double entendres, the take-it or leave-it attitude cemented the public image of her as a hard-boiled, mould-breaker. Her film work discards the respectable idea that the relationship between the sexes is one of politesse and decorum. For West, the real relationship between the sexes is the endless see-saw between dominance and submission. There is a frank, self-knowing attitude to her portrayal of sexuality. ‘When women go wrong’, she has her character, Lou, say in the film She Done Him Wrong, ‘men go right after them’ (Williams, 1975: 120). This would have been deplored as coarse and common by the apostles of stratified society, but many trapped in the lower levels of power or marginalized relished it as refreshing ‘straight talk’. In West’s hands, it turns into an assault on the idea of crystallized American character, forged through a struggle in which Might and Right triumph and a serene social hierarchy is instigated. For West, stratified society plays a deceiving game of immoveable, arbitrary, justified social divisions and settled social order. ‘By rejecting the divisions between black and white’, observes Watts (2001: 317), ‘man and woman, rich and poor, self and other, she continues to challenge a society that thrives on fixity and certainty.’ This life-long interest in role play, counter-identity and grand bluffs of concealment, led some writers to call her ‘the first female leading man’ and the ‘greatest female impersonator’ (McCorcle, 2011: 48). Her cultivation of provocation, confrontation and teasing on stage and screen was designed to produce instant attention capital and achieve maximum social impact (Wortis-Leider, 1997: 4). It all boiled down to projecting personality – deployed artfully in conducive ‘occasions’ in different settings – to be noticed, publicized and adored. West had no interest in being a role model or providing lessons in character. Her aim was to display how personality can be used to seize the occasion and gain a greater share of unequally distributed resources. All of this disguised a shrewd, hard-headed business woman who, like Bob Hope later, built a substantial and lucrative property empire in California.

Bob Hope

Bob Hope offers a paradigmatic case of the dividends and costs of celebrity personality politics. On stage and screen, he was the bravado-charged braggart who characteristically yielded to innate cowardice when incidents and episodes turned against him; the butt of the wily Bing Crosby’s stunts in the highly popular Road movies; the skirt-chaser who continued to play the game until well into middle age; the syndicated cheer leader for the troops in successive wars after 1941; the regular ‘Ordinary Joe’, whose financial worth, at the time of his death in 2003, was conservatively estimated to be $100 million (mostly concentrated in an extensive West Coast property portfolio) (McCann, 2003). The themes of avarice, manipulation, injustice and inequality are all present in Hope’s standard comedic repertoire. At his peak, between 1939 and 1950, his use of the wisecrack, his brashness, the adroit smart-aleck aside together with his impeccable comic timing epitomized opportunism and the dissolving vertical boundaries of American society. As he grew older, especially in the Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan years, this was awkwardly counterbalanced with a dogged attachment to personal wealth accumulation and the values of the Republican Party. Commentators have seen this as sign of weakness in Hope’s comic persona. It suggests hypocrisy about his identification with the helpless and the powerless (Gopnik, 2014). How could Hope’s dedicated journey of self-advancement marry up with exposing the absurdities of stratified society and championing the common Joe? The answer is that Hope’s trajectory is fully in line with the dynamics of opportunism outlined by Schmitt (1919). His most successful movies, such as The Cat and the Canary (1939), The Paleface (1948), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951) and of course, the Road movies, portray success and failure in American life as entirely a matter of personality. Hope’s testing of boundaries employs incidents and occasions to reveal the points of leverage and where to get a break in market society. His repeated barbs against Democrats, insistently, treat Republican values as laws of nature. Although Hope is outwardly on the side of the downtrodden and oppressed, the structural dimensions of power and inequality are not addressed. Fate rules destiny and the only person to trust is yourself.

As such, Hope, who migrated from Britain at the age of 4, and whose family initially struggled to make ends meet in Cleveland, may be described as an exemplary opportunist, in Schmitt’s sense of the term. He was the ultimate capitalist comedian to boot. That is, his faith in the American way, and his hostility to opponents in the Cold War, were ferociously uncritical. His vision identified progress, not with social change, but personal advancement. While he supported charities, through personal donations and free performances, it was always an open question whether he was selflessly trying to alleviate suffering or calculatingly aiming to strengthen his brand. In the 1950s, when comics indignant with the political status quo, such as Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, advocated system transformation, Hope was more comfortable with conserving and honouring values of continuity and order. This is not to say that, he was impervious to the craftsmanship of the best political humour. For example, after admiring Lenny Bruce’s politically charged act at a Florida nightclub and publicly praising him, Bruce flagged Hope down in a parking lot and asked for a guest spot on his TV show. As Richard Zoglin (2014: 335), Hope’s most recent, and best biographer, recounts, ‘Hope laughed him off: “Lenny you’re for educational TV.”’ In his movies, stage act and private life, Hope persistently seized the occasion to build attention capital. In the mid-1940s, he broke with the Paramount Studio system, to become an independent producer. This gave him a bigger stake in his movies and reap higher profits. In the next decade he made a similar deal with NBC, becoming his own producer and charging the network a licence fee which ensured royalty payments in perpetuity. He was a celebrity pioneer in bespoke aggregation.⁷ In addition to his stage performances and radio and movie productions, he published his autobiography, memoirs and books on his travels and golf. Throughout his career he was a prolific endorser of products in national and global advertising campaigns. He also had a syndicated newspaper column (ghost-written) and sponsored lucrative mega-events, such as the Bob Hope Desert Classic Golf Tournament. From the 1950s he was even the star of a comic book, The Adventures of Bob Hope, launched by DC Comics and published quarterly. Hope’s business interests shaded comfortably into his politics. The Bob Hope Classic Golf Tournament, founded in 1965, used the involvement of sitting US Presidents (Bill Clinton) and former Presidents in the competition and substantial corporate investment, notably from Chrysler cars.⁸ These manifold business activities were designed to be mutually reinforcing. The twin aim was to maximize revenue and keep Hope prominently in the public eye (Zoglin, 2014: 14–15). In addition, they reinforced a particular view of normative order in which protest and challenge were automatically labelled as gratuitous and ungrateful. Hope’s politics were unwaveringly patriotic and supportive of property interests. To my knowledge, even at the height of the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, he never publicly criticized American foreign policy. His attacks on justice and inequality appealed to a primitive, unexplicated idea of natural right, rather than a coherent, integrated political standpoint. Hope’s dedication to support the troops in Vietnam, was translated into blind support for American foreign policy (Davis, 2004: 306). Large sections of American youth culture became estranged from him. He was regarded to be at odds with grassroots opinion and in the pocket of the government.

At the same time, Hope was unequivocally an achieved celebrity who dramatically symbolized the rising power of the migrant and labouring classes. In his movies and stage act, he is uneasy with, and often dismissive of, the values of old money. Having the right pronunciation, and bearing, are secondary to having the right personality. In his visits to combat zones in Viet Nam and elsewhere, Hope hob-nobbed with Generals, but he emphatically sought to identify with the regular troops. Among most of them, he was seen as a champion of their interests often against the top brass. His valour in voluntarily flying to frontline zones was also appreciated as demonstrating that, at heart, Hope was one of them, the common Joes. Conversely, his career and property speculation ultimately reinforced the bedrock values of stratified society.

Conclusion

Frontierism is a Janus-faced concept in the study of American culture. Historically, the term refers to the nineteenth-century pioneer Westward push. F.J. Turner ([1893] 1961), the architect of the so-called ‘frontier thesis’, enjoined that the triumph of the settlers over Nature and ‘Savages’ confirmed American exceptionalism. The Western kinsman emerged as a heroic model for the nation: an archetype of invention, fortitude and derring-do. This version of frontierism certainly captures the redrafting of cultural boundaries and the latitude this affords in cultural innovation and enterprise. Consecutively, it glosses over both the violence entailed in pioneer land-grabbing and the parallels with European colonialism.

The second meaning of the term frontierism refers to challenging the boundaries of hierarchical society. The hammer and anvil of this were industrialization and urbanization. The concentration of populations in metropolitan centres and the growth in real wages, that both reflected and reinforced the condition of the secure labouring classes, exposed most of the core mores and cultural motifs of the Eastern seaboard and old Europe as arbitrary. A major aspect of this meaning of frontierism was the emergence of celebrity culture. Symbolically, celebrity expressed accelerated, rags to riches, forms of upward mobility. As befits a seismic cultural change, it often ridiculed and trashed hierarchical society by dwelling upon its pomposity, sterility and self-absorption. The new values of the urban celebrities made a virtue of straight-talking and giving everyone a fair shake until, and unless, experience differed. The expansion of this form of frontierism owed much to the new technologies of print and, later, radio and film.

One helpful way of distinguishing between the two forms of frontierism is to relate each to a particular type of ascendant psychology. Turner’s frontierism was mostly about character formation. According to his way of thinking, the Western kinsman was the apotheosis of piety, fortitude, courage and invention. Turner was a man of his time in holding a neo-Darwinian view of development and progress. He considered the Western kinsman to signify a new benchmark in world civilization. The American West was teaching the stratified societies of the Eastern seaboard and old Europe a lesson. This form of frontierism, then, is not just about pushing back boundaries, but about establishing nation-building foundations.

In contrast, the metropolitan form of frontierism had more to do with personality. Schmitt (1919) was one of the first commentators to draw attention to the significance of ‘the occasion’ in promoting attention capital for the individual. The compression of populations in urban centres and the new channels of accessibility afforded by mass communications multiplied opportunities designed to engineer the accumulation of attention capital for individuals. This type of frontierism challenged the hierarchy by seizing the moment and revealing the aridity of congealed status boundaries. Celebrity culture was an important pathway, because it dramatized the futile constraints of hierarchy while at the same time promoting the competitive advantage of unfettered expression and urban derring-do.

In the course of all of this, American culture became locked between the aspiration to get ahead by whatever means necessary and to demonstrate backbone. The contradictions are self-evident today, in American attitudes to wealth inequality, the philosophy of homeland security, and the adventurism of military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Yemen and the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2015), to date in 2015, there have been 13 drone attacks in Pakistan territory. It is reported that 62–85 people have been killed (i.e. terrorists) and 2–5 civilians killed. There is considerable and understandable doubt about the extent of so-called ‘collateral damage’ casualties. Randle (2013) estimate the numbers killed in the FATA attacks to be as high as 3577, including 197 children. At the same time, there is no legal doubt that a state of war does not exist between America and Pakistan. As Turner’s ([1893] 1961) frontier thesis reminds us, American destiny is based on the maxim that feint heart never won favour.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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