The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America is a 2019 work of non-fiction by Greg Grandin, a professor of history at Yale University. The book traces the progress of the frontier—both the real frontier and its mythical counterpart—through American history, arguing that it has served the political classes as a tool for deferring class conflict in American society, in part by enforcing racial violence. Grandin suggests that as Americans cease to believe in the possibility of endless prosperity on a planet with limited resources, the myth of the frontier has finally lost its power to defer America’s internal conflicts. The End of the Myth was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

In the introduction to his book, Grandin sketches out the core of his argument. A unique feature of American history is that while every country has always had borders, “only the United States has had a frontier.” This frontier has moved over the course of history: first across the American continent from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi to the West Coast, and from there across the globe in a series of imperialist wars, finally becoming an abstract vision of an ever-expanding global market managed by U.S. corporations and secured by the U.S. Army. Throughout this trajectory, Grandin argues, the frontier has been advanced by racialized and often genocidal violence. This violence has usually created or sustained yet more racial violence at home, behind the frontier.

Grandin finds the origins of this narrative in the Founding Fathers, for whom religious and political freedom was inseparable from genocidal violence against Native Americans. He argues that George Washington, like many of his fellow revolutionaries, was motivated by the desire to seize lands beyond the Alleghenies—forbidden by the British government—as much as by the pursuit of liberty. When the fledgling American state began to move westwards, the genocide of native people was again the inevitable accompaniment.



By the nineteenth century, the reality of expansion at the frontier had entered American political mythology. Thomas Jefferson declared that the continent had “room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation,” free from the “exterminating havoc” of overcrowded Europe. The “havoc” Jefferson referred to was class conflict, which escalated in Europe throughout the century, but was largely avoided in America by westward expansion and the allocation of the newly unlocked resources to the discontent. The constant shadow of this policy was more genocide on the frontier, and more racial violence behind the frontier, as non-white Americans were denied any share in the continent’s wealth.

This westward expansion soon took America to its southwest border. Under slaveholding President Andrew Jackson, this border became a moving frontier, eventually incorporating half of Mexico. Genocidal violence, rape, and torture were central strategies of the advancing U.S. Army. The Mexicans who became Mexican-Americans found themselves immediately subject to the racial violence that had become normalized in a nation already “becoming inured to its brutality and accustomed to a unique prerogative: its ability to organize politics around the constant promise of constant, endless expansion.”

Grandin offers a detailed analysis of the work of late-nineteenth-century historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who first formulated the “frontier thesis” of American history. Only three years after the massacre at Wounded Knee, Turner declared the frontier closed, overlooking the history of violence to argue instead that pushing back the frontier had forged Americans into an individualistic and self-reliant people, a model democratic citizenry who could set an example to the whole world. Grandin sees Turner as the forerunner of contemporary liberals: the cheerleaders for globalized trade who see no contradiction between this and the ever-stricter immigration policies of twentieth-century presidents.



The closing of the continental frontier coincided—not, Grandin suggests, coincidentally—with the rise of radical labor and populists movements in America. The response was to look overseas for a new frontier. Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson began the march of American imperialism, which took the frontier to Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, the D.R., and Nicaragua. Hundreds of thousands died. In America, this violence was seen not as conquest but as the spread of American democracy.

Grandin shows that this expansion, too, was characterized by racialized violence both on the new frontier and behind it. He recounts examples of U.S. Army veterans who returned from these campaigns to violently overthrow progressive movements in America, reviving the Ku Klux Klan and instituting “relentless race terror” in the U.S.

During this period, Grandin argues, the first signs of our present-day impasse appeared. The border with Mexico became a “negation of the frontier,” the “repository of the racism and brutality that the frontier was said…to leave behind.” Grandin recounts the series of political maneuvers by which Mexican socialism was overthrown and Mexico turned into a pool of reserve labor, first for Californian farmers and later for U.S. industrialists as they moved their factories south of the border.



In the 1990s, the border became abstract, as successive governments pushed to spread American-style liberal capitalism across the globe. The myth of endless prosperity was kept alive by the claim that the entire global population could one day enjoy American levels of wealth. In reality, American military and economic interventions resulted in more than a million deaths as warfare and chaos spread through the Middle East.

The claim that American prosperity can expand throughout the world, Grandin concludes, had been exposed as the myth it always was. No one now believes that U.S. expansionism will spread anything but war, or that infinite growth is possible in a finitely resourced world. Grandin suggests that finally, deprived of a new frontier, America can no longer push “extremism to the fringe” of its territory. Instead, the long-deferred conflicts must be resolved, even if they become “all-consuming and self-devouring.” Hence, President Trump’s border wall.