The Turner thesis begins with an 1893 speech by a young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner about the nature of the American frontier, laying out ideas that he continued to develop over the course of a rise to nationwide fame.
Here’s the basic idea: The American frontier was a line of expansion ever-moving westward, where European men could get access to cheap land. By claiming and taming that land, and by organizing to fight its former inhabitants, they gained a number of good social qualities—strength, rugged individualism, and a democratic spirit. Those values filtered back to the effete East Coast while unifying diverse European traditions into glorious Americanism.
And, like any good theory of human nature, it includes a fall from grace. As Turner lamented in his 1893 speech, according to the census of 1890, the frontier line had finally closed, meaning that there were no longer wide connected swaths of unsettled territory. The frontier days were over, putting all those old frontier values at risk—bottling up American dynamism and shutting down the engine of American greatness.
This is appealing stuff for space settlement fans. Frontiers aren’t just a place to go—they’re a place we ought to go to, to become tough and rugged and democratic and unified. This theory, widely accepted among historians for the first half of the 20th century, entered into space settlement discourse in an especially enthusiastic and simplified form. Whereas Turner, over time, became concerned that the forces that the frontier unleashed had also resulted in a dangerous form of populism, space settlement fans tend to see settling the so-called final frontier as straightforwardly good.
Consider rocket expert and writer G. Harry Stine writing in his book Halfway to Anywhere that “We got to where we are as Americans because we are a capitalist frontier people.” Or Princeton professor Gerard K. O’Neill in his seminal book The High Frontier, writing of space settlements: “What chance for rare, talented individuals to create their own small worlds of home and family, as was so easy a century ago in our America as it expanded into a new frontier.”
This simplified version of the Turner frontier thesis has been grafted on to the space discourse—where it remains to this day, turning up in, for example, the National Space Society’s statement of philosophy, which notes how “[t]he presence of a frontier led to the development of the ‘open society’ founded on the principles of individual rights and freedoms.”
The problem is that professional historians with no position for or against Martian homesteading have largely moved on from the Turner thesis. As American West historian William Cronon wrote back in 1987, “In the half century since Turner’s death, his reputation has been subjected to a devastating series of attacks that have left little of his argument intact.”
So, if the idea is dead down here, why are we suiting up its corpse for a rocket trip?