Sometime around 1880, Mark Twain leaned back in a Morris chair or a stupor or both and quipped: “Buy land. They’re not making any more of it.” That quote – two sentences, half a joke – is now regurgitated birdlike by every visiting drunkle with a BA in economics. But Twain wasn’t talking about investment. He was talking about the West.
The American frontier was closing. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, Twain’s only rival on the lecture circuit, delivered his “Frontier Thesis” – a Planet Money mix of economic anxiety and TEDx bravado – declaring the end of “the first period of American history.” Turner ignored the genocide and focused instead on what the frontier meant to settlers.
“That coarseness and strength...that dominant individualism...that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier,” he declared.
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