Review of \u3ci\u3eThe End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal\u3c/i\u3e By David M. Wrobel

More than a decade before the 1890 Census, some Americans began to perceive that the frontier was disappearing; they worried that, with the closing of the frontier, the country might lose its tough and resourceful individualism, its ability to assimilate foreigners and forge democratic institutions, its safety valve and its future hopes-in short, its uniqueness. Soon this frontier anxiety pervaded American writing, speech, and thought. David M. Wrobel traces the theme of frontier anxiety and its variations in American journalism, political rhetoric and policy, literature and popular culture, and academic discussions from the 1880s to the 1930s. He shows that racists, nativists, and Malthusians used the closing of the frontier to support their arguments; so did conservationists, preservationists, and antiregulationists; and so did imperialist expansionists, monopolists, labor leaders, Marxists, Progressives, and New Dealers