10 A government of limited powers
America can hardly be in dispute. The frontier was a continuous recreation
of the story of American society. It was a reminder of the ‘open’, democratic
character of America, in which a man might carve out his own fortune from
the wilderness. It was a constant portrayal of the opportunities that America
offered, for although the hopes of the pioneers were often sadly disappointed,
they were sometimes glowingly realised. The continued westward expansion
gave to American society and politics some of its most persistent traits. It
helped to perpetuate those characteristics that had marked America from
the beginning. If socialism failed to find a root in America because feudal
class structures had never existed, it was certainly excluded from later de-
velopment by the open conditions created by the frontier. It was not until the
1920s and 1930s, when the era of expansion was over and America began to
resemble rather more closely the economic systems of ‘closed’ European na-
tions, that American politics took on something of the attitudes of Western
Europe.
Even in the early stages of American history the regional differences in
climate, soil and natural resources gave rise to distinctive interests and dif-
fering ways of life in the colonies. New England, the Middle Atlantic states
and the South differed in the crops they produced, in the role of commerce
in their economic life and, particularly because of the existence of slavery, in
the very structure of their society. As settlement progressed inland, there be-
gan that series of tensions between the more highly developed areas and the
farmers and settlers on the frontier that provided some of the most persist-
ent themes of American politics. Farmers resented the eastern commercial
and financial interests that provided the material resources and the capital
necessary to subdue the wilderness – at a price. The concentration of indus-
try and commerce near the eastern seaports, and the consequent growth of
urban centres in the northeast region, exacerbated all the traditional differ-
ences between city and rural dwellers. Furthermore, as each new area of the
United States was settled it acquired a character of its own, partly because
of the nature of its economic structure, partly because of the people who
settled it. The moving frontier became the unrolling of that map of regional
and sectional differences that formed the basis of American politics in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which even today plays a muted but
essential role in the working of American politics.
The existence of the frontier provided the mechanism by which some
of the most divisive elements in American politics were introduced. As the
development of the South progressed, the value of African slave labour in
producing the South’s staple commodities, first tobacco and later cotton, was
recognised. The establishment of slavery, together with the fact that it was
best suited to a particular area and largely restricted to that area, has been a
cardinal influence upon American politics to this day. The place of blacks in
American society, their historic sense of resentment at their former status,
and their struggle to achieve social and economic equality with white Ameri-
cans are still a major factor in American politics, not merely in the South,