Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity

Abstract

Americans living at the close of the nineteenth century had a great deal about which to feel anxious. In less than half a century, a nation fractured by civil war underwent startling economic, demographic, and territorial transformations that radically altered the nature of American society, recast its place in the world, and brought with it litany of social, political, and moral crises: industrial misery and urban squalor; the uncertainties of internal and external colonization; worries over immigration and race relations; a political powerlessness and corruption; and economic depressions labor unrest, to name but a few. Each and together, a half-century of transformations, changes, and disruptions fostered in the minds of many the belief that the promise of the American experiment, much like the frontier, was fast disappearing. Trepidation, we well know, soon turned to action; and as Richard Hofstadter argued so long ago, Americans, under the banner of Progressivism, soon set out to “remedy the accumulated evils and negligences,” albeit, with varying degrees of success.