Archives of the Twelfth Headwaters Conference, November 2-4, 2001
The Encoded Space of the American Frontier:
From Open Space to Ad Space
by Frank M. Coleman
Prepared for the 12th Headwaters Conference
Western State College, Gunnison, Colorado, November 2-4, 2001. All rights reserved.
While Turner had told us that the frontier ended in 1890, nineteenth century attitudes toward nature...lasted all too vigorously into the twentieth century. — Patricia Nelson Limerick
Overview
This essay concerns the legacy of the Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. Historians reflecting on this subject suggest wilderness as the legatee of Turner's spatial imaginary of the "open" west in present times. By "spatial imaginary," I mean a culturally perceived landscape in which the perception of nature is misrepresented as nature itself. (See Mitchell 1994, and Bermingham).
Wilderness preserves the open west that Turner wrote about but this time as an artifact of law. The Wilderness Act of 1964 speaks wistfully of wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man, himself, is a visitor who does not remain," and where exist opportunities, "for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation". Since such spaces no longer exist, the Act proposes to restore them as markers of what formerly was and their formative role in shaping national consciousness. As we all know, thanks to Turner, these markers exist primarily "out west". Thus, the Wilderness Act and the movement it inspires preserve Turner's interpretation of American culture as formed by a distinctive spatial imaginary of open space.
Against this view I shall argue that a better candidate for legatee of the Turner's spatial imaginary is ad spacespace – an artifact of perception derived from the use of western "nature" scenery in consumer advertising to sell artifacts. Turner's open space was not just a place of scenic consumption but actual physical appropriation of natural resources and their commodification without the imposition of externalities. Such a view I will show is more faithfully represented in ad space than in the wilderness setting.
A leading interpreter of the Turner legacy, William Cronon, illustrates the first point of view. He writes of the class which set aside Yosemite as the first national park, "The very men who benefited from urban-industrial capitalism were among those who believed they must escape its debilitating effects. If the frontier was passing, then men who had the means to do so should preserve for themselves some remnant of its wild landscape so that they might enjoy the regeneration and renewal that came from sleeping under the stars, participating in blood sports, and living off the land. The frontier might be gone, but the frontier experience could still be had if only wilderness were preserved" (Cronon 1996: 78 and see Chaloupka 3-21).
Cronon's assertion is borne out by the composition of the groups who participated in setting Yosemite aside as a National Park. Critics have observed that both those who sought to develop Yosemite for timber and water, as well as those who wished to exempt Yosemite from the patterns of development, worshipped at the same church, as it were, differing only in the pews wherein they sat (Cronon 1996: 78). Muir and his associates found the natural beauty of Yosemite uplifting and improving. The proponents of development found wilderness to be a site where values of independence, virility, and hardiness, might be cultivated in a setting reminiscent of the "frontier experience." Cronon adds that the present day wilderness movement has never escaped this history of its privileged past nor the divided loyalties which characterize its membership.
By contrast, this essay proposes that ad space is an imaginary corresponding to Turner's intentions more nearly than wilderness. The ever receding frontier of the primal West envisioned by Turner anticipates the limitless improvisation of the self that occurs in modern advertising against a presumed backdrop of limitless resources, or, "open space." If the frontier, a topographical space, is no longer open, as Turner said it was not, then, obviously, a surrogate for the open spaces of the west must be found. Ad space and billboards fill this requirement handsomely, particularly that form of ad space known as national consumer goods advertising (as distinguished from price, corporate image, or industrial product advertising) (Schudson 1986:12, 211).
Here in this limitless ad space a spatial imaginary is created where one is free to appropriate after the fashion described by Turner as characteristic of the frontier without the imposition (at least in appearance) of any adverse externalities. This cannot be said for wilderness, a topographical entity from which the activities of the "expectant capitalists" favored by Turner are excluded.
Turner's frontier thesis held that the "environment", or more quaintly, "nature", inscribed on the American collective consciousness the expectation that there perennially had existed and should continue to exist an open space wherein appropriation of resources by isolates--"frontiersmen" (and presumably women) and other individuals isolated from society and its conventions--could and should occur, unimpeded by governmental institutions. The location of this open space, beyond the "frontier," varied in place, sometimes the east coast "fall line" separating the navigable waters from the piedmont and Appalachian mountains, sometimes the mid West, sometimes the area beyond the 100th meridian, sometimes the urban industrial setting (Worster1992: 20-21), but the idea of the frontier and of an open space, both quasi-metaphysical entities, did not. Turner uses the word "open" often and emphatically in the sense of unoccupied, illimitable resources, and absent the regulatory supervision of governing institutions (Turner 1996: 22, 30, 32, 37, 212, 293).
This conception of an enduring "open space" wherein appropriation of the commons of nature by isolates absent the impediments of government regulation underlies the modern idea of ad space. Turner's theory of open space, in short, not simply was, it is. In the Marlboro ads, which are merely a representative not an exhaustive illustration, the depiction of appropriation in an open space by isolates closely approximates the conditions visualized by Turner. The cowboy puffs his cigarette in a setting which remains pristine throughout primordial time. No effects of secondary smoke, no lung cancer, no discouraging words, no McCain committee, no restaurant partition, no need for government regulation. Such appropriation is not presented an artifact of culture, or law, or perception, as it most surely is, but rather an ideal sustained by nature itself, or as Turner labels it, the "environment", a pseudo-scientific entity alleged to exist independently of the narrow prejudices of race or class.
The Ford Explorer ads, another illustration of the same phenomenon, take place within a spatial expanse so vast that the effects of these machines--chewing up denuded crypto-biotic earth and spewing out CO, CO2, NO2, and particulates--are effectively concealed.
Of course, the idea of a frontier and of a space to which the American public is to be released rather after the manner of cattle on to the open range does not stop with Turner. This fantasy is also encountered in the rhetoric of the Sagebrush Rebellion as well as the "cowboy capitalist" fiscal policies and rhetoric of former president Ronald Reagan, and echoes of it may be heard in the addresses of the present incumbent of the office.
If imitation is one of the most sincere forms of flattery, then it is doubtless true that Turner is one of the most widely imitated and most flattered of men in American history. Trachtenberg remarks that the Turner thesis was the most vital interpretation of American history among professional historians during his lifetime and beyond (Trachtenberg l982: l4). To this Hofstadter adds that "In a very real sense the Turner thesis and the historical profession grew up together" (Trachtenberg l982: l5). But the main point for the subject matter pursued here is that the immediate source of the topography of ad space, a physical space where de-contextualized appropriation and consumption of resources is idealized, lies with the Turnerian vision of the American frontier. This essay chronicles Turner's idea of open space, its connection with the ad trade and presidential politics under Reagan, and the replies that have been made to this idea, both in Turner's own time, as well as later.
The Spatial Imaginary of the Frontier: From the Primal West to Ad Space
Frank M. Coleman
Turner's Spatial Imaginary
Turner's frontier thesis was first presented to the annual convention of the American Historical Association assembled in Chicago (l893). It claimed to offer a novel interpretation of the origins of democracy in America and the formation of the "composite nationality," or character, of the American people, one which departed from the abstract theorizing about democracy found in the literature of the French philosophes, and which instead paid attention to the "vital forces that work beneath the surface and dominate the external form" (Turner l920: l9).
The manner in which these vital forces are to be identified and brought to light is through an exhaustive study of the "environmental" influences shaping consciousness, understood chiefly in terms of the physical phenomena--landscape, population densities, migration patterns, climate, tools, conditions of living. Turner alleged that emphasis on these criteria supported his claim that the observations about democracy and human nature so characteristic of his work were not idle speculation but rested on objective nature.
The key idea of Turner's presentation is that America held a unique position among the peoples of the world in that its character had been indelibly inscribed by the frontier, an ever receding open space on the other side of the divide between civilization and the wild. The frontier was incorrectly and fantastically viewed, despite the presence of Indians, Mexicans, and the Spanish, as without inhabitants and thus available, another fantasy, for unfettered appropriation as described by John Locke in the "Property" section of his Second Treatise.
"Free land" on the thither side of a receding frontier, Turner repeatedly states, is the essential ingredient in the formation of a distinctively American character (Turner 1920: 3, 32, 37). Thus the American consciousness is forged, not by European ancestry, but by nature itself. It is the product of parthenogenesis in a unique setting utterly self contained and distinct from the custom of Europe. All the true American has to do to authenticate his membership in the "composite nationality" of the American nation (Turner 1920:22)--a ghostly, collective entity, existing independently of the individuals who compose it--is to appropriate from the "free" lands to the west in the most ruthless customary ways. Since the composite nationality of the American people is formed this way, Turner fixed the idea that "nature" properly viewed, endorsed a determinate set of social and political arrangements for the people of this country. This set of arrangements accentuates the idea of appropriation from nature by isolates in a setting of minimal governmental restraint.
The visual convention used by Turner in mounting his frontier thesis is "naturalism". He invariably represents himself as doing no more than impartially reflecting a prior existing reality. This reality, once Turner has finished bringing it to light, is available for inspection by any one who cares to take the pains, comparing the evidence about the "environment" which Turner presents, with a supposed model of an objective nature which exists independently of either Turner or any second party wishing to question his claims. By these means Turner is able to assimilate his representation of the frontier to nature or, interchangeably, the environment, and to minimize or remove from view all evidence of human agency in its construction. Using language belonging to the discipline of natural philosophy, Turner may be said to supply a privileged representation of nature (Rorty 1979), what nature in its pure essence stands for, and to remove this representation from the domain of analysis and inquiry.
The earlier versions of Turner's thesis emphasize the contribution of the "frontier" (defined by the census taker in l890 as those regions of the country where population did not exceed two persons per square mile) to the formation of the character of the pioneer as hunter, trapper, tradesman, and farmer. Turner remarks on the character of this contribution as follows:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe.... The fact is that here is a new product that is American. (Turner l920: 2)
By contrast, the later versions of the same thesis emphasize the contribution of the frontier to forming the character of the "captains of industry" (Turner l920: 27). The frontier, an elastic conception for Turner, could apparently be stretched to incorporate the new demands made by industrialization on the pioneer lauded in the above passage. Just as the frontier, considered as the "West", fashioned the character of the pioneer farmer and gave birth to the institutions of economic and social democracy, so the new frontier, now considered as the conditions of urban industrialism, would be tamed by the same kind of spontaneously generating, masterful, democratically inclined, individualistic genius.
This later version of the frontier thesis discloses more than Turner might have intended. Beneath the rude buckskin clothes of the pioneer democrat shouting the war hoop, taking scalps, and so forth, an "expectant capitalist" (Turner 1920: 319) comes to view, a man on the make as distinguished from one of the urban industrialists who has already made it, but still cut from the same cloth. Both parties are engaged in appropriation from the vast natural resources of America--its minerals, oil, timber, as well as public lands. By doing so they set in motion an upward spiral of "competitive evolution" which marks the next stage of advance from pioneer days yet remains continuous with it (Turner 318-319, and see Hofstadter 1968: 160-62).
Of the contribution made by the frontier to the ethos of the industrial manager, Turner says, "The old democratic admiration for the self made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions...as enabled the development of the large corporate industries" as well as the ‘captains' who lead them" (Turner l920: 27). From this perspective America would always be able to surmount challenges posed by the latest manifestation of the frontier--outer space, international trade, urban enterprise zones, race relations, emerging markets, generational differences, gender gaps--from within its own intellectual resources.
This is a cheerful doctrine but it is well not to overlook its dark side. Turner seems not to notice the activities glossed by the transforming effect of the frontier on the American psyche. When Turner speaks of "taking the scalp in the orthodox Indian fashion" he is supplying a fairly direct endorsement of frontier annihilation of the Indian tribes (Nobles 1997, and see Hofstadter 150-51). He quotes, anecdotally but tellingly and with some joviality, the Harvard chaplain who "many Indians slew, and some of them he scalped while bullets round him flew" (Turner 46). By the same token, a labor organizer run over by the union busting activities of Frick, Carnegie, Hill, Rockefeller, might have reason to rue the practices picked up by Turner's pioneer spirits on the frontier.
Indeed Turner has been accused of simply exporting to the "frontier" Darwinian lessons originating in the labor-management conflicts of the urban locale (Slotkin (1985: 45). The formative influences on national identity were, therefore, urban-industrial-capitalist and the locale where they imposed themselves were the city not the frontier. Noting the crucial role played by "nature's metropolis", Chicago, in the exploitation of the timber, cattle, grain resources in the frontier hinterland west of the city, Cronon writes that Turner's frontier thesis logically begins with the city instead of terminating in it following frontier settlement (Cronon 1991: 32).
But the object of attention here is not the bullying, inhumane implications of Turner's frontier thesis, nor even its logical coherence. Rather the focus of attention is its implications for the representation of nature (as open space) in the American consensus. Turner pictured the Western frontier as a storehouse from which we pluck stuff that is to be transformed into commodities, a commodity bin of a sort. He also encouraged the view that such appropriation of resources could occur in the absence of public controls without injury to others or the impairment of the natural realm.
The doctrine of "prior appropriation" and its variants, "beneficial use" and "first in time, first in right," offers an illustration of this view made into water law. The doctrine confers title to water existing in the public domain through the simple expedient of putting them to one's personal use (Reisner l987). This doctrine, originating in the salad days of the Golden West, continues to determine water rights in many Western states to this day. The constitution of the state of Colorado, a case in point, stresses that "the right to beneficially appropriate water from the rivers and the streams of the state of Colorado shall never be denied." Presently, the state of Texas, following the "rule of capture" (where a property right in subsurface water exists in direct relation to acreage possessed), is faced with the mediation of disputes among those who wish to mine out the water of the Ogallala aquifer from underneath their neighbors and sell it to nearby cities (Dallas, Fort Worth, Amarillo).
Similarly, the Homestead Act (l862) and the Mining Law (l872) confer title to land, minerals, and oil on the individuals or corporations who bring these resources into development. Through these laws, which Turner might as well have written himself, much of what was formerly the public domain in the lower forty eight states (about 2/3 of the country) passed into private hands in the course of the nineteenth century (Public Land law Review Commission 1970: 27-28, Faux 1974: 21-33). The wresting and privatization of these lands and resources, formerly in the possession of the Indians, is transposed by Turner into the bloodless, and pseudo-scientific language of a description of the "environmental forces" at "work beneath the surface" shaping the American character.
Looking at the same phenomenon, Hofstadter candidly acknowledges "the highly commercial character of western settlement...the careless, wasteful, and exploitative methods of American agriculture...the general waste of resources and the desecration of natural beauty; the failure of the free lands to produce a society free of landless laborers" (Hofstadter 1968:147). Truettner says that the frontier myth "guaranteed progress without encumbering social or environmental debt…. (It is) a kind of illusory principle sanctioning greed, on the assumption that the supply of western resources was essentially unlimited" (Truettner 1990:40). Comparing the accounts of Truettner and Hofstader against the Turner doctrine, we can see that in Turner's hands, as is true for the members of the ad trade, nature is used as sign to endorse and condone the despoliation of the actual physical thing to which it refers.
Attention is often called to the contrast between the objectivist form of Turner's address and its projective content. Perhaps nowhere is this better discussed than in the work of Henry Nash Smith. After a careful search of the literature he concludes that the Turner thesis embodies "certain erroneous judgments" and depends as much on "beliefs and aspirations" as on the circumstances of western development (Smith l950: 293).
This opinion is echoed by contemporary historians who state that Turner misunderstood the forces which he claimed to describe. He missed the significance of the influence exerted by urban locales, Chicago most prominently, on frontier development; he overlooked the circumstance that the west was settled by parties bearing the cultural and political assumption of the east; he ignored a counter movement from west to east, undercutting the significance of frontier as a variable of key importance; his vision erased occupying populations and was oblivious to the actual ecology of the west.
Additionally, Turner's thesis is selectively based on a narrow segment of the population, Anglo-Saxon farmers who settled in the mid West, at the cost of ignoring patterns of ethnic migration occurring elsewhere in the country (Limerick l988:2-32, McDonald l990:539-5l, Cronon 1991). Finally, Turner overlooked the indispensable role played by the government, itself, in frontier settlement. The lands west of the 100th meridian were never "free". It required great expense of military campaigns against the native inhabitants--Mexicans, Spanish, and Indians--to dislodge them as well as secure the safety of the frontier settlements, and it required enormously expensive reclamation projects to make agriculture in an essentially desert climate viable (Limerick 1988).
The shortcomings of the Turner thesis are now apparent. But this was hardly the case for the generation of historians who followed Turner. That this is so in part because, while misleading and often mistaken, he nevertheless, was struggling to define the nature of the American consensus and the distinctive problems the national community would be called on to confront. These problems as well as the overarching issue of national identity have preoccupied subsequent generations. The remarkable aspects in which Turner was right as well as a more exact appraisal of where he was wrong can be achieved if we consider the thesis against the backdrop of subsequent developments in American history that bear directly on the thesis.
The Spatial Imaginary on Canvas and In Photographs
The encoded frontier of Turner is copiously illustrated in the art works of his late 19th century contemporaries, Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. The elements of unoccupied, open space which characterized the frontier imaginary of Turner were, in the works of Bierstadt and Moran, raised to a higher power as America's natural landscape. Whereas Turner had relied upon naturalistic details, the frontiersman donning the buckskin, uttering the war cry, and taking the scalp in the orthodox Indian fashion, etc. to verify a landscape imagined as open, unoccupied, and ungoverned, the paintings of Bierstadt and Moran rely upon visual spectacle to authenticate these same elements. Both parties depict the landscape of the primal West in ways that mislead the viewer: first, the west is represented as a site of infinite capaciousness fully able to absorb the burdens of human development laid upon it; second, all evidence of human occupation is removed inducing the viewer to suppose himself as the first occupant at creation's dawn; third, the effects of human occupation and development on the west are untranscribed.
There was great controversy from the very start about whether the western landscape Bierstadt and Moran depicted was, in fact, real (Anderson 1990). But many wished it to be so then and, then and now, that was all that mattered. Bierstadt's signature canvas, "Lander's Peak" (1863), does not hesitate to strain the imagination. It is a substantial canvas 6' x 10', combining naturalistic detail in the foreground, an Indian encampment nested in a basin of flora, fauna and scattered deer, with a sublime dreamscape of mountain vastness in the background. It is the background which discloses the intention of doing much more than rendering naturalistic observation. An overarching canopy of light cascades down from above overflowing into an enormous bowl of empty space. The heaven sent rays dramatize a scene of unspoiled nature, an opulent waterfall, a spreading pool of water bordered by trees and lush growth. Altogether this spectacle constitutes the onlooker as the first witness at the dawn of creation.
In a Yosemite Valley painting light enters the recesses of the valley from the rear coming towards the viewer as a beneficent, sanctifying influence. Again, we are invited to suppose that witnessing of this spectacle compares with the beholding of the world in the beginning (Genesis 1: 12, 18, 21, 25). Thus, paradoxically, these scenes do not, ultimately compliment the natural world but the viewer who is invited to compare him/herself, with the great pantocrator of the Genesis epic, the author of the natural world. Of the Domes of Yosemite, Mark Twain demurred that it did not look so much like California to him as the arrival of "Kingdom Come" (Anderson 1990: 87).
Similarly Moran's landscapes are pervaded by a light embracing an expansive, unoccupied spatial domain. The colors and atmospherics create the beholder as present at creation's dawn. One is drawn into a spatial domain where no restrictions, no human presence, no confinements of space apply. Even when Moran was commissioned by a railroad tycoon to paint the Green River formation (1882), bridging the intersection of the Green and the Colorado rivers, over which a bridge was built and an encampment of men situated, he did not acknowledge human presence on the landscape. Rather the painting focuses upon a resplendent butte figured in orange and red overshadowing a collection of riders and horse in the foreground.
Another painting of the Chasms of the Colorado (1873-74) figures a landscape of mist and void. Thus, again, the beholding subject, while absent, is implied as a powerful presence in the painting, one who can, in Emerson's phrase, create "a new and fairer whole" (Emerson 1950: 305) out of the elements of nature than nature itself is capable of providing. The painting thus refers to the powers of the human spirit and imagination, to the greatness of human artifice especially when modeled on the "Maker" of the Old Testament. It is worth a reminder that the paintings of Moran and Bierstadt were widely reproduced using the innovative techniques of chromolithography and lithography. Reproduced copy proved as popular as the originals and were available for purchase at the travelling exhibits back east where the originals circulated (Prown 1992: 129).
The spectacular sublime in the art of Bierstadt and Moran makes obligatory a consideration of Kant's philosophic definition of the sublime. The requisite for this landscape, Kant says, is a spectacular exhibition of the power and "limitlessness" of nature--the roaring cataract, the tsunami crashing on the shoreline, the volcanic eruption, the soaring mountain peak--which forces us back, reflexively, on our own powers of judgment for a corresponding mode of self definition (Kant Critique of Judgement, 1949: 300). Reflexively, in the act of judgment, we recognize nature as "other," demarcating, at the same moment, our own distinctively human powers of judgment and cognition. Since in its aspect as the "beautiful" nature conforms itself to our expectations as a matter of "taste" (non-analytical) rather than "judgment" (reflexive and analytical), the beautiful does not occasion reflexivity and hence fails the test of the sublime. Kant says that the ground of the beautiful is "outside ourselves"; the ground of the sublime lies "inside ourselves".
Kant, effectively, sets man apart from nature, distinguishing the richness, variety, and extent of nature (the phenomenal world) from the sublime, the contemplation of the wonders of the mind and the imagination (the noumenal world). Nature is wonderful, uplifting, yes, but only because our own powers of reasoning look better in the comparison. (Kant, 301).
Similarly, Burke says that the sublime is the sense of awe inspired by the cataract, the avalanche, and the windy tumult because observation of these elements refers back to the powers of the human spirit (Mitchell 50-52, and see Jameson 1992, 34). Contained within the depiction of nature in the sublime, therefore, is the admiration of ourselves, more particularly our intellectual powers, and, what is equally important, the regret that with the exertion of these powers nature is passing from view before us.
Thus the sublime admires the retreating thunderstorm from the safety of the doorstep, not the getting caught in the deluge. It is nature robbed of its fangs that occasions sublime melancholy, not snake bite (Soper 1995: 228). The nature fancied by the sublime is filled with high seriousness and didactic purpose. Nevertheless, a part of the reason for this is that we, ourselves, are at a safe remove. It is our ability to remove ourselves, intellectually and imaginatively, through our power over nature that we celebrate, not nature itself.
For these reasons Soper locates the Kantian sublime within the time horizons of 18th-19th century industrial and bourgeois order when "nature" is made to serve, a conflicted purpose. We can safely afford to view it as aesthetic object by virtue of its progressive marginalization. At the same time we can find in its presence, which is still sufficiently awesome to bear comparison with the achievements of the new age, an indirect tribute to the forces unleashed by modern science and industrialism (Soper 225-233).
Current scholarship amply confirms the implication that the sublime in the canvasses of Biersdtat and Moran pays tribute to the powers of the human imagination and intellect, rather than to the natural world. Bierstadt was employed by the railroad company to record the passage of the first trains through Donner Pass. Since the pass is located high in the Sierras, snowsheds constructed of redwood timbers were required along the route of the train's passage. One can judge for himself whether the famous painting, "Donner Lake from the Pass," is tribute to the wonders of the rugged terrain through which the train passes, or to the enterprise and ingenuity of the railroad tycoons who made it all a reality.
As for the redwood forests required in the construction of the sheds, their destruction is naturalized by the depiction of a diminutive railroad train passing into a tunnel through a serene landscape ensemble of blue empyrean sky, turquoise lake, forested slopes, and mellow sun (Anderson 1991: 262-63, and see Trachtenberg 1982: 19). One would never guess at the devastation wrought to achieve this spectacle because its effect on the landscape is untranscribed.
Moran's canvasses, aided, abetted, and financed by the same set of interests, do for the area surrounding Yellowstone what Bierstadt had done for Yosemite. Again a similar set of interests, the railroads and the hotel industry, perceived the unique geological characteristics of the Park as an indirect tribute to the genius of railroad technology. The majestic scenery reflects on towering human capacities, in other words, and views nature, nostalgically, sentimentally, because with the exercise of these powers nature is passing away.
The photographs of Carleton Watkins verify the landscape conventions limned by Turner and seen in the Bierstadt and Moran paintings by means of the camera. Watkins' photographs of Sentinel Peak (1861) and Washington Column (1861) in Yosemite, as an example, prominently feature the signature envelope of expansive space setting off a majestic view of the peak. The site and the conventions used in its representation are identical with landscapes of Bierstadt (Snyder 1994) but this time they appear as nature mirrored in the photo lens, not a representation of it. These photographs won praise because they appeared to settle controversy over the accuracy of paintings of the spaciousness of the western landscape, the monumentality of western buttes, the glorious vistas of open mesa, and the scale of western mountain panorama. The camera, a scientific and neutral eye like the objective "environmental forces" said by Turner to work beneath the surface, authenticated the conventions of landscape favored by Bierstadt and Moran in a way unavailable to the media of representation in which the artists worked. Joel Snyder comments that Watkins Yosemite photos "did not escape landscape conventions (of Bierstadt and Moran); they adopted and reformulated them" (Snyder 1994: 185). Watkins could disappear into the pretension that he was mirroring nature, not encoding it. Thus, the fictions of the spatial imaginary of Turner, Bierstadt, and Moran were twice removed from the domain of analysis and inquiry, first as a depiction of landscape, and second, as a photograph of "natural" landscape.
Watkins anticipates the photographic landscapes of Ansel Adams so beloved of wilderness enthusiasts. In these photographs all visible occupation of the land is removed in order to enhance the effect of pristine, unspoiled nature, awaiting human presence. As hordes of frontiersman and settlers were drawn to the unoccupied wilderness painted by Bierstadt, Moran, and photographed by Watkins, so hordes of visitors, outdoorsmen, are drawn to national parks and wilderness areas photographed by Adams (Luke 1997, Cronon 1992: 81). The techniques used in inviting occupation by Sierra Club camera enthusiasts are the same as formerly drew Turner's frontiersman to the great West.
The presumptive object of Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins, as well as the wilderness movements that follow in the footsteps of Moran and Bierstadt, is to restore the West as a pristine status quo ante. In fact, the effect of these paintings and photography is to suppress those parts of the western landscape which bear the effects of industry and the human presence. By representing the western landscape as fully able to absorb the claims of industrialization and progress, the cause of western settlement and tourism was advanced. The great canopy of light falling from above in Landers Peak, reproduced as chromolithography and sold off to the public in hundreds of thousands of copies (Prown 1992: 129), signifies that here in this space the claims of any group, sect, railroad or timber magnate could be accommodated. This claim, while preposterous, finds support in Turner and has echoes in the landscape topography of ad space. For if the frontier is no longer open, an alternate space in which the claims of the modern imperial subject are to be met is required. Ad space satisfies this requirement more so than wilderness.
Contesting Open Space: Powell and the 100th Meridian
Not every one, to be sure, agreed with Turner's vision of nature as a domain for untrammeled appropriation by isolates. Another contemporary of Turner, John Wesley Powell, viewed much of the same terrain that Turner was speaking of in the frontier thesis as a fragile ecosystem in need of careful preservation. His report to Congress, "A Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a more Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah, 1876," challenged the notion that appropriation of the western lands ever was, or could be, "free". Powell suggested limitations on the growth of the Western populations based on the circumstance that annual rainfall in most parts of the region did not average above 12 inches per year. Correctly viewed, the land west of the 100th meridian qualified as a desert and desert conditions, unmodified by government reclamation projects, had to be observed when one estimated the size of the populations which it could sustain. Given this fact, Powell recommended that irrigable land be made available in units of 80 acres, one-half the acreage allotted under the Homestead Act. Where irrigation was not possible 2,560 acres should be the unit of land ownership--sixteen times the Homestead Act allocation (Public Lands Law Review Commission 1970: 177). Everything depended, in Powell's estimate, on the extent of resources that were in place to sustain the homesteader.
Rather than unlimited exploitation and development as Turner's theory anticipated, Powell saw the need for carefully regulated growth accompanied by state development of water resources through dams, reservoirs, irrigation projects, where appropriate and necessary. Since these reclamation projects had to be executed on a scale which far outstripped the capacities of frontiersmen, taken one by one, it behooved the government to manage the commons to provide the maximum opportunities for private settlement of the west consistent with the public good.
Powell's thinking on the development of the arid country, now the states of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, bounding the Colorado River system parallels the English approach to the "commons". This theory, a legacy of history unexampled in the American setting with the possible exception of some New England townships, holds that public lands should be managed so that the populations making use of them will not exceed the "carrying capacity" of their resources. The logic of this approach was revived by Garrett Hardin (Science, 12/13/68) with the specific intent of addressing contemporary resource conflicts of the sort Powell was struggling with.
Let us suppose, Hardin says, that there is a lush pasture which is commonly owned and on which we are permitted to quarter one cow. Absent a provision for the imposition of the external costs of pasturing additional cows on each one of us who does so, it will be to the advantage of each of us to add further cows. The benefits of the added cows will be privately appropriated and enjoyed while the costs (in terms of fencing, reduced pasturage, water availability, leaner cows) will be born by the other parties--up to a point.
The turning point comes when the pasture will only sustain lean cows and its common utility is destroyed. Before that point is reached, those of us who jointly own the commons should impose the actual costs of appropriation and consumption on those who principally benefit from the same. Hardin (and Powell) insist, in contrast to Turner, that unregulated appropriation of the public domain, and additionally, the transformation of public resources into private utilities does, in fact, impose unwanted effects. The benefits of such accumulation are privately absorbed while the costs are socially borne. The proper role for government is management of the commons, considered as a public/private resource, in the optimal manner. The government should, in particular, require "rational appropriators" to pay some of the costs of their activity in terms of their impact on the work force and the environment; it should not scruple about imposing sanctions on violators of federal guidelines.
Note that neither Powell nor Hardin is advocating that public lands be sequestered as wilderness, or as national parks. Wilderness, as it is commonly known, requires a cessation of all use of the lands and resources designated as scenic, wild, irreplaceable and so on. It requires that that land be vacated except as a place of unconfined recreation and solitude to cite the Wilderness Act of l964. Conversely, Hardin and Powell assume that there will be occupation and use of these lands but that it will occur in a manner where "rational appropriators" are made to pay the costs of their commercial activity. Also, implicit in Powell's theory is an argument for a regulatory state, competent to impose the costs on those who adversely affect utilization of the commons. Some of those costs may even be retroactively imposed as they are by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, which imposes costs on those who contaminate the commons which are retroactive in effect. This is a clear departure from the concept of the minimal state enshrined in Turnerian theory.
Of the two students of the western frontier, Powell and Turner, it is evident that, though Turner is more followed, Powell is the more prescient. The frontier did not close in 1893 when the population density per square mile exceeded two, as Turner said (following the census taker), because the closing of the frontier in the sense of exceeding the carrying capacity of the available resources varied with climate, soils, water, minerals, and hydraulic mechanics. Rather than analysis based on limited variables of land and people, a multi-variate analysis attentive to the carrying capacity of western resources made more sense (Worster 29). In large parts of this arid region the frontier did not close because (given that the carrying capacity of its resources were negligible, not to mention actual occupation by native populations) it had never been open. In other parts, with government backed reclamation projects, it might well remain open for some time to come even though there were considerably more than two persons per square mile.
Powell also foresaw that failure to manage diminishing resources invited disaster. At the present time, for example, the states of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico have made a conscious decision to mine out their share of the Ogallalla aquifer, a huge basin of underground water, in the approximate amount of three billion acre feet within the next forty years (Reisner l986). The Colorado River which has an annual flow of about 13.8 million acre feet is unable to meet the demands of the expanding cities of the Sunbelt (Denver, Phoenix-Tucson, and Los Angeles) and the sprawling agribusiness empires of southern California. It is presently over-appropriated. Costly water import schemes are under consideration (from the Columbia and Mississippi) paralleling the costliness of dependence on oil imports from the OPEC cartel nations (Reisner l986). Exporting water from the Columbia is preposterous because it would further endanger salmon populations already heavily impacted by an alliance of hydropower, farmers, and the barge industry (Harden 1997).
The split between Powell and Turner is decisive for the history of the west, management of resources, and the constitutive role of the western spatial imaginary in inspiring the ad industry. But in ways that foreshadow the later development of contests over natural resources, Powell's report was dismissed by Western politicians in league with the railroads and the forces of westward expansion. Eager to strengthen their hand against the east and convinced against all evidence that Turner's vision of unlimited growth would be realized, this group brushed aside Powell's warnings on western resource limitations. They rushed forward with ill conceived land grants to the railroads, hidden subsidies to mining and timber interests, homesteading, and military expeditions designed to smooth the way for settlement.
The defeat of Powell's recommendations is paralleled in our own day by the Clinton administration's withdrawal of proposals opposed by western senators, cattlemen, realtors, mineral and oil interests, to curb commercial development of natural resources primarily on western lands. "Vision of Change" (1/20/93), the president's first considered initiatives on resource policy, proposed: (1) to raise grazing fees on National Forest Lands commensurate with their market value; (2) to reform the 1872 Mining Law making it more difficult to acquire property on public lands under the pretext of minerals development, and to impose costs on development which impaired the environment; (3) to phase out below cost timber sales; (4) to implement a federal irrigation water surcharge, the proceeds from which were to be used to defray the effects of reclamation on fish and wildlife; (5) to impose a carbon tax generally making energy more expensive and, thereby, addressing global warming and dependence on oil imports at one stroke; (6) to raise the recreation fees at national parks. These proposals are all based on the theory that the commons, as public resource, should be managed with a view to maintaining their use unimpaired and for the benefit of succeeding generations.
None of them succeeded because all are arrayed against the fundamentals of the American consensus first articulated by Turner and as active and virulent in our own day as ever it was in Turner's. The cultural enthusiasms driving this consensus derive in part from the circumstance that it is maintained as the natural landscape of the American community first by frontier ideological persuasion and now by the ad industry. In short, the meaning of American politics is more readily accessed through its subtexts, the spatial imaginary of the frontier and contemporary ads, rather than through the obvious texts, presidential elections, press conferences, newspaper journalism, and the evening news programs commonly presented to our incurious eyes.
The Spatial Imaginary Continues
Turner claimed to "explain" the manner in which America's "composite nationality", i.e. national identity, came to be formed (Turner 1, 22). Behind this formulation is the view that there really is such a thing as an "American" mind, a collective framework of consciousness, working and controlling all the time, and shaping the daily course of actual events. This theory of a collective mind--while ghostly, supposing that there really does exist a mind independently of the individuals which constitute it, thinking their thoughts in advance--should be taken seriously (see Hartz 1955, Norton 1993, Bellah et. al. 1985). Its corollary is that if we fast forward in American history, looking at American political culture in some future snippet of historical time, we will encounter pretty much the same thoughts and events as were brought to the surface by Turner. Composite nationality operates, powerfully and in subterranean fashion, even as it did in Turner's own day to shape the "external form". It does no great violence to Turner, therefore, to take him at his word, to shift forward in American history with a view to uncovering those elements of archetypal American consciousness which continue to exert their formative and transformative influence on the quotidian of our lives.
The Lone Ranger:
A series of Lone Ranger episodes that appeared in the 1950's is useful for showing that possibly Turner was, unfortunately, more right than he knew. The cartoon series seeks to engage the reader in an understanding of a natural resource problem, immense pressures on national park systems such as Yosemite and Yellowstone, at an important historical juncture. A cast of characters limned in Turner's cardboard study of the American composite nationality are introduced who play decisive parts in defining and shaping the outcome to this problem (Dorfman 1983: 67-90). They are in order of their appearance: the minimal state (the Lone Ranger); second, Milo Bruno, Turner's "natural" man, out to build his own world by subjugating "nature"; third, Tonto and Wild Horse Valley, symbols of America's vanishing past and of lost nature; fourth, Bruno's son, symbol of the future generations who will inherit this unholy mix of ideological enthusiasms, insoluble resource problems, and unruly characters.
Foremost of course, is the Lone Ranger, the minimal state, who has been introduced in earlier episodes as a Texas Ranger, shot and left for dead in a confrontation with outlaws long ago. But he didn't die. Tonto faked the grave in which he was buried so that the outlaws who tried to kill him would not look for him. The grave purchases for the Lone Ranger a kind of freedom. He intones, "And since I'm officially dead...I will stay dead to the world so that I can accomplish my task without obstacles. I will cover my face with a mask and I won't rest until I hand those criminals over to Justice."
To recount the virtues of the Lone Ranger is to make us aware that he corresponds to the implicit ideal of Turner concerning the vocation of the state. He is the savior of women, children, and the white man's property; he is a cheap, self sustaining form of law and order (he draws no salary because he is sustained by Nature from the proceeds of a silver mine); he is always mysteriously and ubiquitously on hand when an emergency situation arises, and he just as mysteriously and conveniently disappears once the situation has been dealt with; he never intrudes by attempting in advance to resolve conflicts on the issues but always waits for an immediate, present, and manifest conflict before offering his services; his adversaries are always cougars and cowardly criminals, never expectant capitalists and urban industrialists.
Second, there is Bruno who corresponds to Turner's idea of "natural" man. Bruno exemplifies the point that underneath the exterior of "natural" man, endlessly and remorselessly appropriating from the public domain without the apparent imposition of adverse externalities, is an "expectant capitalist". Just as the Lone Ranger is a model of the ideal public servant, unobtrusively intervening only on necessary occasions to safeguard life and property, so Bruno is a model of Turner's pioneer democrat.
Third, there is Tonto, so scalped that the wounds inflicted on him by history leave no impression. He figures as the Lone Ranger's aide in maintaining the white man's law and order.
As the episode opens, Milo Bruno and his men are about to enter Wild Horse Valley, a refuge of wild horses untamed since the dawn of man. Bruno is a wealthy rancher and he intends to capture the wild horses, a valuable commodity, and to fetch a good price for them in the market. He is met at the entrance to the valley by the masked man and his friend Tonto.
The Lone Ranger explains to Bruno. "It's practically the last refuge for animals around here, and it should be preserved, not destroyed." Bruno persists in making threats, forcing the Lone Ranger to continue. "This valley is a fund of national heritage. Nothing has changed it since the settlers first came to this part of the country."
Still Bruno is adamant.
The Lone Ranger offers an alternative. There are plenty of horses on the plains, he points out; the seizure of plains horses for sale in the market would not damage the Wild Horse Valley natural sanctuary.
Bruno's reply to this proposal illustrates the obtuseness of viewing all transformation of the public resources into commodities as "natural". He replies to the Lone Ranger that it would take a costly investment of men and money to take horses on the open plains. He wants the quick profits that will come from taking the horse in Wild Horse valley.
The Lone Ranger concedes that legally nothing can be done to stop Bruno, but there is a moral reason. Now we notice a young boy standing by Bruno's side, his own son. Bruno's actions, the Ranger says, will ruin a "good natural setting, and all the wild things living there, which is something your children will one day inherit."
Bruno doesn't agree. His son will inherit the money that Bruno makes from selling horses.
The episode is happily resolved as it progresses. The boy slips away during the night to see Wild Horse Valley, as he later recounts it, "before his father spoils it." Tonto tracks the boy to Wild Horse valley with the anxious father at his heels. The Lone Ranger saves the boy in the last instant before he falls prey to a mountain lion. A chastened Bruno is converted by the boy's attitude towards Wild Horse Valley and by the sterling qualities of the Lone Ranger and Tonto.
In the episode of Wild Horse Valley, the moral and intellectual landscape which defines the function of public authority on the "frontier", the role of nature, and the merits of accumulation, is slightly altered. Most importantly, it tells the Brunos, who formerly tamed the western frontier and wrested from it the commodities which supply us with a comfortable edge on existence, that there are limits to appropriation from the public domain. History has taken a turn, for within "open space," sanctuaries are to be created, immune from historic patterns of development and exploitation. These sanctuaries, such as Wild Horse Valley, are to exist outside the stream of history, because the very successes of the dissociated and commodity driven Brunos, along with the technologies he has enlisted in his service, have rendered nature tamed, endangered, and mortal. Whereas, formerly, man needed protection from nature, now nature needs protection from man.
The accommodation reached between the Lone Ranger and Bruno in the Wild Horse Valley saga should give us pause both for what it achieves and what it does not. Those of us who live on the plains may have reason to regret that Bruno is not reined in a bit further. Outside sanctuaries such as Wild Horse Valley, let us recollect, the normal rules of exploitation of natural resources, along with the unconstrained uses of technology, is to continue with undiminished force. Bruno, we remember, is invited by the Ranger to seize the horses on the plains and to put them up for sale in the market. Does Bruno's willingness to set aside Wild Horse Valley as a refuge sanction the pillage and pollution of the plains?
Further, the very pressures which Bruno exerts on the plains leads, unquestionably, to pressures on the sanctuaries which enable the residents to escape the plains. We can now see, thanks to the Wild Horse Valley saga, that there is nothing "natural" about unfettered appropriation from the public lands. But the consequence of Turner's theory, reinforced by ad space, remains. This is that unformed nature, nature as wilderness or "other" or independent physical existence, is to be made over as informed nature, nature as a set of collective representations about the "natural" transmitted over time and now popularized through advertisements. The minimal state represented by the Lone Ranger is a poor defense against these pressures. Thus, despite the stated misgivings about resource limits, the real logic of events is that advertising will first of all transform us into Bruno replicants. Then after the replicants have overrun wilderness and national parks recreation areas in the lower forty eight states with their RVs, SUVs, and ATVs, the ads will redirect our attention to Lindblad travel tours, an ocean going, Swedish, luxury liner featured in upscale magazines like The New Yorker and the Travel Section of the NY Times, to supply us with a glimpse of nature's wonder.
Sagebrush Rebellion:
If we fast forward still further, we find further confirmation of Turner's composite nationality at work in matters of natural resource policy. In his closing remarks in the presidential debates with Jimmy Carter in 1979, then candidate Ronald Reagan made an unmistakable reference to the frontier thesis of open space. He evoked the image of a cattle pen from which, the branding done, the cattle are to be released on to the open range. "I would like to have a crusade today. And I would like to lead that crusade with your help. And it would be to take government off the backs of the great people of this country and turn you loose again to do those things I know you can do so well, because you did them and made this nation great."(New York Times l0/30/80: Bl9).
Once elected, Reagan empowered James Watt, as Secretary of the Interior, to release large amounts of public lands and resources for private sale. This sale was chiefly to occur in those states of the West, Utah, Colorado, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, where these lands continue to exist in relative abundance. In all Watt sought disposition of 35 million acres of public lands--an area the size of Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont combined. He attempted to open up wilderness areas to oil and gas leasing; he sought a doubling of the amount of timber cut from the national forests by the year 2000; he accelerated the amount of federal property made available for leasing or sale for coal mining (Barron 1983). It was alleged that revenues from the sale would be employed in paying down the national debt.
Behind Reagan and Watt, proximately, lay the "Sagebrush Rebellion" and further back, of course, the frontier thesis. The frontier thesis is not merely quaint--not in the West, at any rate. The "Sagebrush Rebellion" in the l960's and 70's claimed that the western states, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming had been deprived of a rightful share of the national wealth because of the substantial territories reserved for public lands. This movement also asserted that control over these lands ought to be returned to the states for possible disposition through public sales. Both claims drew on the energies of Turner's frontier thesis (Lamm and McCarthy l982). This movement was quite popular in the competitive capital sector of the economy, realtors, bankers, developers, lawyers; it also had support from the major corporations and utilities interested in synfuels development and coal fired power plants. The movement had support in Congress among such spokesmen as Orrin Hatch (Utah), Barry Goldwater (Arizona), Alan Simpson (Wyoming), as well as its advocates in the Reagan administration such as, of course, James Watt (Secretary of Interior), but, additionally, Anne Gorsuch (EPA Administrator), and Robert Burford (Director of the BLM). Ronald Reagan proclaimed that he was, himself, a "sagebrush rebel".
Wilderness:
The wilderness movement, as in the saga of Wild Horse Valley, is sometimes presented as a continuation and at other times an alternative to Turner's theory of "open space". Here we reflected, history appears to have taken a turn for within Turner's open space sanctuaries are to be created immune from the customary rules of exploitation and development. Further, the guarantor of these sanctuaries is none other than the Lone Ranger.
In the latter part of l9th century, Theodore Roosevelt, still another contemporary of Turner, collaborated with an incipient environmental movement led by John Muir in the sequestration of some parts of the western landscape from intrusion and development. Muir, nevertheless, was the principal figure, a celebrant of the sublime in nature, a naturalist who extolled the values to the human psyche to be found in wilderness recreation. The designation of Yosemite as a National Park, the outcome of the movement which Muir led, is paradigmatic for analysis of the forces that set wilderness in motion. It additionally brings the shortcomings of the wilderness movement to light.
Just as the Lone Ranger series touts an accommodation between the Brunos, who are given the run of the plains, and the Ranger, who now presides over wilderness sanctuary, so Yosemite was a compatible, symbiotic construct of culture and law, enabling capitalism to engage in open space policies insofar as the greater portion of the public resources were concerned, while still maintaining a few remarkable, privileged areas, exempt from the normal rules of development.
Nevertheless, since the respite wilderness provides only reinvigorates the Brunos to engage in the unfettered development on the "plains," wilderness is continuous with the values of capitalism and does not in any important way oppose them. Briefly put the sanctuary view segregates nature from the plains, where unconfined Turnerian rapacity prevails, and the sanctuary, where we go to worship. The melancholy language of the Wilderness Act reinforces the point that the Turnerian theory of nature has had a head start and remains remarkably strong.
The wilderness movement suggests that the Turnerian theory of an open space is not dependent on a "frontier", in the sense of a distinct topographical space, for its continued existence. Given its purchase in the beliefs and expectations of the American people, the "frontier" may persist as an abstraction, altering the form in which is which it achieves manifestation, while remaining the same in terms of its controlling principles. The elites of Turner's day, as is true of today, wish to preserve some portion of the public lands so that the wilderness experience could remain alive. Cronon, as we noted above, concludes that wilderness is a spatial entity which most nearly captures Turner's idea of a "frontier" experience where the values formative of national consensus could be relived (Cronon 1996: 78).
Ad Space
As suggested earlier, "ad space" is a better candidate for preservation of the values held by Turner to be at the core of the national. In ad space an imaginary is created where one is free to appropriate after the fashion described by Turner without the imposition (at least in appearance) of any adverse externalities.
This cannot be said for wilderness, a topographical entity from which the activities of the expectant capitalists favored by Turner are excluded. Ad space combines the best of all worlds: it incorporates the enthusiasms at the heart of the American enterprise from the beginning and it places them in a fictional setting where there are no environmental consequences. Another way of putting this is that the natural landscape visualized by Turner and by the ad industry is entirely continuous with the enthusiasms of capitalist development in the American setting. This landscape does not in any respect propose to interrupt the stream of American history but to further its course.
Turner's ideal of the American composite nationality is recapitulated in modern ad space. The view conveyed by the Marlboro commercials is that it is natural, even patriotic and American, to appropriate from the commons of nature; that such acts of appropriation are always beneficial, never imposing adverse externalities; that it is the function of government on the "frontier", an ideal standard which governs American history but stands beyond it, to make itself scarce. The apparent referent system of the Marlboro ads is to the period of the primal West.
The ads appear to celebrate the period of the Golden West, about the second half of the nineteenth century when the West, a vast, untamed region, was being settled by miners, sheepherders, sod busters, and ranchers. In the decade following the Civil War, Congress passed the Homestead Act (l862) and the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads linked the east and the west (l869). Suddenly, the West was accessible and a hardworking homesteader could acquire l60 acres free and clear by the simple expedient of grabbing and holding on. The Marlboro ads appear to celebrate this period when circumstances called for a display of Turnerian qualities: initiative, pioneer sturdiness and independence.
Closer inspection, however, suggests that it is not only the primal West that is being used as a referent system but, additionally, nature, itself. Nature is also the signifier, as the environment is for Turner; and the values associated with the natural realm--the enduring, the appropriate, the permanent, the lasting--are what is signified. These values are detached from the natural realm and reassigned to the life of heroic dissociated consumption represented by the cowboy puffing away on his cigarette. The Marlboro ads are thus able to unify the primal west, nature, and the commodified relationships of modern life as if they were all parts of a seamless whole. To summarize: the Marlboro ads celebrate as "natural" a vision of the individual as an isolate, engaged in independent acts of appropriation and consumption from the public domain all without the apparent imposition of any adverse externalities on others.
Despite the frequent use of nature as sign in many ads there is, nevertheless, something particularly striking about its appearance in Marlboro country. The cowboy leans down from his horse to extend an invitation. "Come to Marlboro country," he says. A country, we know, is a people and a place. It is defined by common language, a specific turf, collective memory, and customary ways. We dimly grasp that the country to which we are being invited is none other than America. But it is America seen from a particular vantage point: that of the isolate, individual appropriator and consumer, taking from the public domain without any apparent harm or injury to anybody or to the domain. Such appropriation and consumption is "natural", and it is American, or at least to the extent that others may think otherwise, nevertheless, in Marlboro country, which is an imperishable ideal, guiding the American experience but standing beyond it, the ideal remains in all its magnificent integrity. The purchase of Marlboro cigarettes, therefore, not only transforms the client into a rugged pioneer and frontiersman (the primal West reference material) but also into a patriot (it is natural and American to appropriate from public lands and resources).
This Turnerian ideal, memorialized in the Marlboro commercials, applies to all other ads. For the ad industry wishes to restore the status quo ante of Turner's frontier where all appropriation is guiltless because "free". To see that Marlboro country is the model followed by other ads it is necessary to reconceive the boundaries traversed within the spatial imaginary of the frontier. These boundaries are not only geographic and cultural--the dandy from Europe transformed into Daniel Boone by setting out for the frontier--but also ethnic, status, gender, stylistic, and occupational. Thus, for example, Nike woman forsaking her Buster Browns and faux pearl necklace for cross trainers; Lady Clairol (Shirley Polykoff) throwing off her Ukranian/Jewish past and embracing Nordic specular beauty through hair dye; the gauche college student transformed into a casual, suave gentleman by Polo Lauren; the organization man become an adventurous ex-colonial with the help of Banana Republic and Myer's Rum; the couple who regain exuberant sexual relations through Obssession, a particularly transgressive perfume are all, in a sense, frontiersmen as much as Turner's pioneer spirits.
Much of this transformation seems harmless, albeit hollow, as indeed it is. But what of the lady who becomes Eve in the Garden through Vanilla Fields hair spray? Typically, the ingredients of these aerosols are trichloroethane or chlorofluorocarbons (Gottlieb 1995: 359-82, Harte 1991: 265-68), both known causes of ozone depletion. What of the Banana Republic colonial who goes on safari out west in his Explorer? Does the "No Boundaries" slogan apply to polluting the air and destroying vegetation as well? And while we are at it does a shot of Absolut entitle you to a breast, a belly, buttocks, a topknot as well? Much of the blindness and ignorance and absence of civility which characterizes Turner's outlook is perpetuated by the ad industry and by the same technique of encoded landscape. If a "savage" in darkest Africa conducted himself after this fashion, it would be instantly denounced as cruel and fetishistic. But in the encoded space of ads it passes for nature itself.
The limitless improvisation of self against a backdrop of infinite resources is what Turner is about and what the ad industry is about. It is this imaginary, figured as open space but actually originating in the imperial subject who uncritically summons it, as projection, into existence, that clings to the idea of modern ad space. This imaginary is called into question by circumstances of resource depletion, population growth, toxic saturation, and a global extinction crisis. All these phenomena point to the passing of the open space and the imperial subject whom Turner invoked in his frontier thesis. Whether America can ever get beyond this spatial imaginary to see the limitations of the ecology on which its survival depends turns on whether as a culture we can look behind commercial advertising to see what is there.
Close
Multiple ironies surround the Turner thesis in the present day. First, the frontier was never "out there" where Turner said it was. Rather it is a largely fictive space originating in colonialist and capitalist views of nature as an infinitely plastic substance awaiting exploitation. But this cultural projection, represented as landscape, serves the important purpose of enabling its authors to disappear into their own projections. No railroad barons, grain merchants, land speculators, timber interests elevate this representation of nature, mind you. Rather this imagery is intended to be taken as pure, unadulterated nature itself, something like that bottled holy water mined from deep within the mountain fastness of Switzerland that is now sold in place of its heavily chlorinated substitute at the kitchen tap.
Second, if the frontier is largely a fiction, so is the beholding subject who regards this landscape as open and inviting occupation. This is to say, if the frontier imaginary of Turner erased occupying populations and complex ecologies, putting in their stead the appealing image of the pioneer democrat settling the west, then the latter is as much a fictional creation as the landscape s/he is sent to occupy. This result carries more than a passing resemblance to contemporary ad space where, as one critic reflects, we are invited to "freely" create ourselves through commodity acquisition (and within the spatial imaginary above) "in accordance with the way they have already created us" (Williamson 1978: 42). Putting this more crudely, the effete European who dons the buckskin of the pioneer democrat is as much a part of the stage scenery (and the sales job) as the primal west landscape s/he is encouraged to grab a piece of.
Third, if ad space is the legatee of Turner's open space, then its effects on contemporary culture bear comparison with the consequences which Turner had on the public of his own day. We, too, as is the case for Turner's excited students of history, will be supporters of private appropriation without government oversight. We, too, will claim to have environmental concerns when what we actually mean is that we wish to have the cover of "nature" for our commercial activities. For Turner's claim to describe the open west will not bear inspection. He did not supply a depiction of nature out west but rather an artifact of perception which effectively promoted the transformation of the west into, what else, artifacts--i.e., railroads, granaries, beaver coats, scenic tours, plumed hats, belt buckles, furniture, cowboy boots, hydropower dams and irrigation projects, gold fillings, Kodak cameras, buckskin shirts.
So his vision is not about nature but artifice. Turner's perceptual artifact performs the same function today. The Ford Explorer, Marlboro Country, Polo Lauren, Sierra Club, and Wilderness Society ads follow in Turner's footsteps and to the same effect. The west is thoroughly Laurenized (Fabian 1992: 223) and it is doubtful that its actual ecology is any more visible in the present time than in Turner's.
Modern ad space, better than the Sagebrush Rebellion, the wilderness movement, or the Lone Ranger comics, is the medium in which the ideals of Turner are lastingly realized. It avoids the objections encountered by other alternatives such as, for example, Powell's approach to the commons, the wilderness movement, the sagebrush episode, while retaining the key elements Turner valued: (1) it is a distinct, physical space that is open in all the senses formerly described--it is unregulated, it is unoccupied, it has illimitable resources; (2) it indulges the modern proprietary isolate in a fantasy of appropriation unaccompanied by the imposition of adverse externalities; (3) it makes use of nature as sign to underwrite, not simply choice of product, but adoption of a way of life. Such a space possibly has never has existed except as an ideal imagined by Turner. But to the extent that the ideal does exist, it is found reinforced and projected in ad space and with the same consequences in the present day as it did in Turner's.
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William Greider, The Education of David Stockman (N.Y.: Dutton, l982).
Richard D. Lamm and Michael McCarthy, The Angry West (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1982)
John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill, The Reagan Record (eds.) (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, l984).
Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie (Berkeley: University of California, l987).
David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics (N.Y.: Harper and Row, l986).
Garry Wills, Reagan's America (N.Y.: Penguin, 1988).
John Wesley Powell:
Garrett Hardin (Science, 12/13/68) 107-121.
Blaine Harden, A River Lost (N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1996).
John Wesley Powell, A Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a more Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah, 1876.
Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (N.Y.:Penguin, l986).
and Sarah Bates, Overtapped Oasis (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, l990).
Donald Worster, Under Western Skies (N.Y.: Oxford, 1992)
Western Landscape:
Nancy Anderson, Albert Bierstadt: Art and Enterprise (N.Y.: Brooklyn Museum, 1990).
"Curious Historical Artistic Data," in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
"The Kiss of Enterprise," in The West as America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1991).
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconisn, 1978)
The Rites of Assent, (N.Y. Routledge, 1993).
"The Biblical Basis of the American Myth, " in The Bible and American Arts and Letters, ed. by Giles Gunn (Phila., Pa.: Fortress Press, 1983)
Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: University of California, 1986).
"System, Order, and Abstraction," in W.J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).
John Brewer, The Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, and Text (N.Y.: Routledge, 1995)
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis (N.Y.: William Norton, 1991).
"Telling Tales on Canvas," in Jules David Prown, Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
E. H. Gombrich, "The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape," in E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1971).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, ed. by Brooks Atkinson (N.Y.: Modern Library, 1950).
Timothy Luke, "Nature Protection or Nature Projection: A Cultural Critique of the Sierra Club," Capitalism, Nature, and Socialism (March 1987).
Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (N.Y.: Harper, 1964).
W.J. T. Mitchell "Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine, and the American Wilderness," Critical Inquiry (Winter 2000).
"Imperial Landscape" in Landscape and Power ed. by Willliam J. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).
"Gombrich and the Rise of Landscape," in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, The Consumption of Culture: Image, Object, and Text (N.Y.: Routledge, 1995)
Jules David Prown, ed. Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America: 1500 1845 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
William H. Truettner, The West as America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1991).
Advertising theory:
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1968).
Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire (N.Y.:McGraw Hill, l982.
Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (N.Y.: McGraw Hill, l976).
All Consuming Images (N.Y.:Basic Books, l988).
Richard Wrightman Fox and T. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption (N.Y.:Pantheon, l983).
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (N.Y.: Mentor, 1958)
Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising (N.Y.:St. Martin's, l987).
T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (N.Y.:Pantheon Books, l98l).
(ed.) The Culture of Consumption (N.Y.:Pantheon, l983).
William Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally, Social Communication in Advertising (N.Y.:Routledge, 1990).
Roland Marchand. Advertising and the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, l985).
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (Boston: Beacon Press, l98l).
Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (N.Y.:Signet, l964).
Mark Crispin Miller, Boxed-In (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, l988).
W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986).
Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1984).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (N.Y.: Hill and Wang, l982).
Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Marion Boyars, l978).
Theory of nature:
Jane Bennett and William Chaloupka (eds.), In the Nature of Things (Minneapolis, Minn.:1993).
Daniel Botkin Discordant Harmonies (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990).
William Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1993)
William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground (N.Y. W. Norton, 1996).
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (N.Y.: Random House, 1993).
Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1995).
David Harvey, "The Nature of Environment," in Real Problems and False Solutions, ed. by Ralph Milliband and Leo Panitch (London: Merlin Press, 1993).
Gordon D. Kaufman, "The Concept of Nature," Harvard Theological Review
65 (1972) 337-366.
Lesek Kolakowskii, The Presence of Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989).
David Macauley (ed.), Minding Nature (N.Y.: Guilford Press, 1996).
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature (San Francisco, Ca.: Harper, 1983).
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).
David Quammen, The Song of the Dodo (N.Y.: Scribner, 1996).
Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (N.Y.: Vintage, 1995).
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (N.Y.: Norton, 1992)
The sublime:
Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (N.Y.: Knopf, 1971)
William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground (N.Y. W. Norton, 1996).
Dennis Crow, "Remote Sensus:Identifying the Midcontinent in Five Dimensions," (unpublished, 1998).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Poems (London: J.M. Dent, Everyman, 1995).
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J.M. Dent, 1969).
Kate Soper, What is Nature? (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995).