‘‘Locke dominates American political thought,’’ Hartz writes, ‘‘as no
thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive
national cliche ́’’ (Hartz 1991 , 140 ). America is exceptional in this, then: a
devotion to a Lockean ideal of rational liberal individualism. The overwhelm-
ing predominance of this model was abetted by a lack of obvious enemies.
There was no aristocracy in America, according to Hartz, and no one argued
for absolutist monarchy; there was no North American Filmer. American
liberalism is premised on the ideal of enlightened self-rule among free people,
trusting as self-evident the truth that governments exist to serve the interests
of these industrious and rational citizens.
In making this argument, Hartz takes exception to a third version of Ameri-
can exceptionalism. At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Jackson
Turner had argued that it was the perpetually expanding American frontier
(again we return to the wilderness) that had rendered the United States what it
was. The American republic had been, in Turner’s thesis, a constantly refounded
nation, as successive generations invaded new lands, transformed them into
territories and states, and removed indigenous populations. ‘‘Up to our own day
American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the
great West,’’ Turner writes:
The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of
American settlement westward, explain American development.... Decade after
decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society has gone on, has left its
traces behind it, and has reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions,
our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing; it is a history of the
evolution and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of
the origin of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a
constructive force of the highest signiWcance in our life. (Turner 1996 , 1 , 205 )
With the closing of the frontier (and the US Census had declared this to be
the case), Turner foretold the end of the forces that had shaped the ‘‘essential
American soul,’’ or else a call to arms across the sea, in our new post-Spanish/
American War possessions—Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. In
such places, Turner argued, ‘‘we are beginning to consider the relations
between democracy and empire’’ (Turner 1996 , 245 – 6 ). This search for do-
minion in new lands is somewhat problematic for Turner’s deWnition of the
development of the American republic, but the dilemma is resolvable. Con-
quering a perpetual west, an incessant battle between civilization and bar-
barism on the frontier is, for Turner, much more central to American identity
than democracy per se could ever be.
286 ronald j. schmidt, jr.