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Once upon a time, there was a Golden Age in American history. The only problem has been identifying when it happened. Or if it happened at all. Or what you mean by "Golden."
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The first among American historians to draw the line between a irretrievably lost past and a ho-hum present was Frederick Jackson Turner, whose "frontier thesis" selected the Census Bureau's "closing" of the frontier in 1890 as the great divide between an American shaped by the rugged realities of frontier life into a towering figure of independence and self-sufficiency, and another American, ground up into pasty conformity by the orderly brainlessness of the industrial economy. American history, Turner said, begins with primitive settlements along the Atlantic coastline, and over time, those settlements experience "the familiar phenomenon of the evolution … from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization." But each time Americans reach westward from those developed beachheads to the frontier, they start over again, returning Americans to "continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society." Only now, with the closing of the frontier, there would be no more rebirth, and no more primitive simplicity. [1]
The long-term message of the frontier thesis was that the "authentic" American was a pre-capitalist farmer, living a life free from the lure of getting and spending, and in righteous harmony with his community—a kind of Hull House with log cabins. The enemies of this social idyll were, first, the British imperial economy, and then the larger imperialism of the Industrial Revolution. Its defenders were the Jacksonian Democrats celebrated in Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson (1945), the rebellious Revolutionary militias glamorized by Gordon Wood in The Creation of the American Republic (1967), the communitarian Puritans who populated Kenneth Lockridge's A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (1970), and—most dramatic of all—the yeomen mourned in Charles Sellers' The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1991). For Sellers, 1815 is the climacteric of yeoman democracy, and Waterloo is the mills at Lowell, Massachusetts. Yeoman democracy prospered on the frontier after the Revolution, built on subsistence agriculture rather than the growing of crops for sale—and commodification—on distant markets: "Discouraging individuality and competitive striving," Sellers wrote, "the subsistence culture socialized its young to a familism of all-for-one and one-for-all … . All rendered their services, not to an impersonal market, but to meet immediate needs of lifelong neighbors, who usually furnished the raw materials and made return in farm produce or labor." But frontier democracy clashed with the ambitions of east-coast élites, who "wanted instead a 'republic' providing security of property, equal rights before the law, and a carefully restricted system of representation through which enterprising elites could shape the state to the market ambitions of capital." It was as though a casual, leering hippie commune in Ohio had been assaulted by a legion of prim, fastidious, anal-retentive bourgeoisie from Philadelphia. [2]
The farmers fought back, Sellers argued, using the western state legislatures to ban banking and corporations and using Andrew Jackson to veto programs of state-funded "internal improvements" whose sole purpose was to extend the tentacles of the market into the hinterlands. But the yeomanry lost, as the frontier always did. They lost because they were too wedded to private property, patriarchy, and white supremacy to recognize their natural allies in black slaves and Indian tribes. And so "corporate capitalism rides a spreading free market to world dominion, competitive stress intensifies, the fruits of free-enterprise autonomy sour with job flight and social breakdown, environmental disaster looms, politics gridlocks, and huckster-driven media increasingly dominate public consciousness." Sellers brought a coruscating literary fury to his Manichaean account of the struggle between good farmers and bad capitalists, and, armed with both substance and style, The Market Revolution almost single-handedly turned the period between the Revolution and the Civil War from the dry gulch of American history to its most sensational battleground. It was all a bit too much for Sellers' publisher, Oxford University Press, which had invited him to write the volume on the Jacksonian era—and not a historical jeremiad against capitalism—for its respectable but somnolent Oxford History of the United States. Oxford published The Market Revolution, but not as part of the series; the ticket for the official series volume on the years between the War of 1812 and the Mexican War instead went to Sellers' most patient but persistent critic, Daniel Walker Howe. [3]
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