The End of the Myth

How does a nation built on the promise of endless expansion cope when it runs out of land to conquer? In The End of the Myth, historian Greg Grandin argues that the American frontier—the open horizon that once absorbed violence, inequality, and political tension—has finally closed. For centuries, the idea of the frontier functioned as both a story and a safety valve: it justified expansion, excused inequality, and promised that freedom and opportunity could always be found somewhere new. When that myth collapses, Grandin shows, the energies once directed outward turn inward as resentment, cruelty, and racialized politics.

Grandin traces this evolution from the early republic to the present, following how the notion of limitlessness shaped policy, war, race, and the state itself. You begin with Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, who sacralized expansion as liberty. You move through wars of conquest and slavery, where expansion became both an economic system and a racial project. Then you reach the 20th century, where Frederick Jackson Turner, FDR, and Ronald Reagan each reinterpret the frontier myth for changing times—until its exhaustion produces new forms of exclusion, culminating in Trump’s wall.

From Myth to Mechanism

In early America, the frontier was not just space—it was policy. Jefferson imagined free land as the foundation of democracy; Franklin and Madison thought its abundance would equalize society. Frederick Jackson Turner later codified that logic in his 1893 “Frontier Thesis,” suggesting that free land made the United States dynamic and democratic. The myth of the frontier thus served a dual purpose: it diagnosed American vigor and prescribed continual motion as medicine for unrest.

But this freedom depends on conquest. The same expansion that created opportunity for settlers also required indigenous removal, slavery, and war. The frontier’s “safety valve” function—its ability to diffuse class tension by exporting conflict—depends on the suffering of others. (Note: Grandin aligns this insight with scholars like Richard Slotkin, who tracked how American identity fused with frontier violence.)

Expansion as Escape—and Illusion

Grandin describes how the safety-valve metaphor justified almost every form of expansion: for workers, it meant land or migration; for planters, new slave territories; for generals, foreign wars. The logic never changed—when social conflict boiled, policymakers looked outward. Yet that expansion was always partial and unequal. Speculators, corporations, and the military defined the terms, turning freedom’s promise into dispossession. As Grandin notes, “the valve was clogged by privilege.”

After 1898, the safety valve shifted overseas: through imperialism in the Philippines, trade wars, and finally the global spread of neoliberalism. Expansion became economic and ideological—a way to export turbulence and sustain faith in American exceptionalism. But each new frontier contained its own collapse.

The Closure and Its Consequences

Vietnam revealed the breaking point. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, calling the war a “demonic suction tube” draining justice, marks a moral turning. Violence once directed outward now contaminated domestic politics. The imperial frontier, Grandin argues, “came home.” Veterans returned from Vietnam to a country they barely recognized, often channeling trauma into vigilantism and right-wing movements. Economic stagnation and racial polarization magnified these effects.

By the 1980s, Ronald Reagan revived the myth rhetorically—telling Americans that limits were illusions and that markets themselves were the new frontier. For a time, this renewal disguised the social costs of inequality. Globalization under NAFTA later promised another limitless horizon through trade, but instead produced displacement, wage erosion, and militarized borders. The supposed economic frontier thus created the very crisis—mass migration—that political leaders now treat as a threat to contain.

From Infinite Expansion to Hard Borders

Grandin’s final chapters expose the inversion of the national myth. Instead of expansion without end, Americans now confront literal walls and legal enclosures. Trump’s 2015 campaign slogan “Build the Wall” marks a symbolic reversal: the country that once imagined itself freeing others now defines itself by exclusion. The wall embodies a broader cultural shift—an admission that there is no longer an “elsewhere” to absorb discontent, combined with a refusal to share the burdens that come from living within limits.

Grandin contrasts this wall-bound politics to the social-democratic moment of the New Deal, when Roosevelt recognized that the frontier’s closure demanded a new ethics of mutual care. Today, the U.S. faces the same choice FDR did—whether to meet limits with solidarity or with cruelty. The frontier is gone; only the myth remains, repurposed as both nostalgia and weapon.

Grandin’s central claim

For centuries, America sustained its democracy through expansion. When the frontier ended, violence, inequality, and mythic faith in limitlessness turned inward, producing today’s politics of walls, resentment, and repression.

You can read The End of the Myth as a cautionary genealogy: a chronicle of how the quest for infinite growth built both the U.S. and its undoing. Grandin’s insight is simple but profound—you cannot escape limits forever, and a nation that tries must eventually face what it has long deferred.

To understand America’s frontier myth, you must see how deeply it is bound to race and violence. Grandin insists that expansion and democracy rose together with removal and extermination. He calls the early United States a 'Caucasian democracy'—a system in which white freedom depends on indigenous dispossession and the control of enslaved or racialized others. The frontier offered both spectacle and alibi for this violence, transforming the massacre of others into a ritual of renewal.

Dispossession and Racial Order

The examples are relentless. The Paxton Boys massacre in 1763 and the impunity of Frederick Stump in 1768 expose a pattern: settlers kill Native families, the community absolves them, and they later become local leaders. Expansion continually reproduces this cycle—violence, exoneration, elevation. When Andrew Jackson defies federal officers who try to enforce treaty boundaries on the Natchez Trace, asking, “Are we freemen or are we slaves?”, he transforms lawlessness into patriotic defiance.

By the 1830s, Jackson’s Indian Removal Act codifies that ethos. The United States formally commits to take and reallocate indigenous land to white settlers. The Supreme Court’s ambiguous rulings—declaring tribes “domestic dependent nations”—rationalize conquest as legal management. Native Americans, now classified as both sovereign and subject, can be displaced without acknowledgment of full personhood.

War and Transformation

The Mexican–American War extends this pattern into imperial scale. John Quincy Adams foresaw the danger: removal becomes “the cause of the cause,” the first of endless wars. Polk’s invasion turns conquest into state policy, producing both the southern border and a permanent racial hierarchy. Winfield Scott’s reports from Mexico—of soldiers raping and mutilating civilians—illustrate what Grandin calls “the moral psychology of empire”: once violence is sanctified as nation-building, it becomes national character.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which transfers half a million square miles to U.S. control, fixes the border and absorbs a population treated as foreign within new boundaries. This moment completes the continental frontier—and inaugurates the border as a permanent wound.

Grandin’s racial thesis

“Caucasian democracy” means liberty for some and removal for others. Violence abroad and at the frontier created a racial order that shaped law, economy, and citizenship.

This is Grandin’s enduring message: the frontier myth has always hidden an underside of impunity. It is not a moral accident that the same energies used to settle the frontier reappear as segregation, immigration exclusion, and mass incarceration. Expansion created both the dream of freedom and the tools of domination.

One of Grandin’s most revealing metaphors is the 'safety valve'—a nineteenth-century technological phrase turned political ideology. In steam engines, a safety valve releases pressure to prevent explosion. Politicians borrowed this imagery to argue that westward expansion would release social and economic tension. It became an enduring way to think about how to manage conflict without reform.

Diffusing Class and Racial Pressure

Reformers and elites used the metaphor differently. George Henry Evans and the Free Soil movement urged land for workers—“Vote yourself a farm”—to prevent strikes. Southern leaders like Robert Walker saw the West as an outlet for slavery, “the safety-valve for the whole Union.” Colonizationists promoted resettling freed people in Liberia as a racial safety valve. Across all variations, the message was consistent: avoid confrontation by exporting problems elsewhere.

Grandin traces how that logic endures. When frontiers close, new ones replace them—imperial markets, overseas colonies, or capitalist globalization. Safety-valve thinking comforts elites: inequality need not be confronted if there’s still an external outlet for unrest.

The Failure of the Valve

In practice, frontier safety valves rarely worked. Land and opportunity concentrated under corporate or political elites. Native lands were seized; Yaqui and Mexican territories were stripped for agriculture and mining conglomerates. The supposed release became another pressure point. Economic elites profited from expansion while claiming it protected democracy.

When the external outlets run out, the metaphor collapses. After Vietnam, there was no longer a frontier to vent anger abroad, and America’s internal contradictions surfaced directly in inequality, racial resentment, and militarized policing.

Lesson of the safety valve

Metaphors matter: the safety valve justified avoidance of redistribution. Once it failed, repression replaced release.

For you, the metaphor serves as warning. Whenever leaders present expansion—territorial, economic, or militarized—as a substitute for justice, you should recognize the old script at work. The valve no longer releases pressure; it redirects it inward.

Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 thesis marks a pivot in America’s self-understanding. He taught that the frontier made Americans: it produced independence, character, and democracy. But by the twentieth century, thinkers realized the corollary truth—the frontier’s closure demanded a new form of collective politics. Grandin uses Turner’s legacy to frame the New Deal as an attempt to internalize the frontier’s social promise.

From Individualism to Reform

Turner saw free land as “a gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” Early progressives reinterpreted that insight. Walter Weyl warned that the open continent had “intoxicated the American,” creating reckless individualism. Lewis Mumford lamented a society built on motion rather than community. These critics concluded that if the frontier was gone, social responsibility had to replace it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt absorbed this lesson. In speeches from 1932 onward, he declared that the era of free land had ended. The state must now provide the security once offered by expansion. His line—“Necessitous men are not free”—captures the logic of substituting social rights for open land. Programs like Social Security, public works, and labor protections collectively symbolized a 'social frontier.'

Limits and Legacy

The New Deal was far from perfect. It preserved southern racial hierarchies, avoided full redistribution, and relied on export markets. Yet it acknowledged, for the first time, that the U.S. could not expand its way out of crisis indefinitely. Grandin calls this the moment when the state partially replaced the frontier—transforming the myth of limitlessness into the foundation for a social democracy.

FDR’s insight

If the frontier once promised freedom through land, the modern state must promise freedom through security and rights.

Grandin sees the New Deal not as the end of the myth but as a brief moral correction—proof that America could face its limits creatively. Later, the Reagan era would undo that synthesis and resurrect the idea of boundless markets as the new frontier, marking another reversal.

The Vietnam War represents what Grandin calls “the collapse of the frontier outward.” Expansion through war no longer relieved domestic tension—it intensified it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech ‘Beyond Vietnam’ becomes the moral centerpiece of Grandin’s narrative, describing the war as a 'demonic suction tube' draining the resources and conscience of the nation.

The War Comes Home

In Vietnam, American soldiers explicitly used frontier language: operations named 'Daniel Boone,' 'Crazy Horse,' or 'Apache Snow.' Such metaphors turned modern warfare into a reenactment of frontier conquest, casting the Vietnamese as racialized adversaries like the Indians of old. When the war ended in defeat, its moral and psychological energy reversed direction, fueling racial backlash, paramilitarism, and the decline of liberal reform.

Grandin outlines how veterans transformed combat trauma into domestic violence and political identity. Groups like the Civilian Matériel Assistance and later the Minuteman Project framed border vigilantism as patriotic duty. Veterans became, in his words, “cultural brokers” who translated foreign combat into civic policing at home. This militarized habit of mind spread through sheriff departments, militias, and immigration enforcement.

The Militarized Border

After 9/11, border control fully merged with counterinsurgency. Operations such as Gatekeeper and Hold-the-Line introduced surveillance technologies first developed for foreign wars: sensors, drones, and walls derived from military infrastructure. The border itself became a kind of domestic battlefield, patrolled by veterans and private militias seeking recovery and meaning. Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County patrols, with chain gangs and tent camps, illustrate how military spectacle replaced civic empathy.

Grandin’s assessment

When the frontier can no longer move outward, its violence turns back on the republic itself. The border becomes the new battlefield—the war at home.

This insight carries through the rest of Grandin’s book. The militarized border is not an aberration—it is the logical end of a nation that once defined virtue through conquest. Every drone flight and checkpoint literalizes the end of the old myth: America has become its own frontier.

Reagan’s America revives the language of the limitless frontier but recasts it through markets. 'Nothing is impossible,' he declared, turning frontier optimism into neoliberal ideology. Grandin shows how this rhetoric produced both deregulation and renewed militarism—the domestic and foreign faces of a single idea: expansion without accountability.

Markets as New Territory

For Reagan and his intellectual allies—Hayek, von Mises, and neoconservatives—the frontier became metaphor for economic freedom. Privatization, tax cuts, and global trade were sold as a new voyage into prosperity. Social programs were redefined as constraints; inequality as natural selection. Neoconservatives also reframed 'human rights' to exclude social rights, limiting moral language to individual liberty and property. This ideological turn justified intervention abroad while curbing welfare at home.

Globalization and the Fate of Labor

NAFTA exemplifies Reagan’s legacy. Promoted as a frontier of trade, it dismantled Mexican agrarian protections, displacing millions of farmers. Migrants who crossed north, pushed by economic necessity, encountered a militarized border shaped by the same logic of 'freedom.' Clinton-era operations like Hold-The-Line combined deregulated capital with constrained human movement—a dual regime Grandin summarizes as “free money, fenced people.”

The contradiction is staggering: the same policy that opens America outward economically closes it inward politically. The promise of borderless capital is secured by literal borders of steel.

Paradox of neoliberalism

Global freedom for markets coexists with barbed limits for people. The frontier survives only for the rich.

Grandin’s analysis helps you recognize today’s political crossroads. The wall, the deportations, and the rhetoric of scarcity are not new—they are the shadow of neoliberal expansion, where every open market requires a guarded gate.

The wall, Grandin concludes, is not simply policy—it is performance, symbol, and mirror. For two centuries Americans defined themselves by motion; now, halted, they define themselves by exclusion. The wall embodies this reversal: a nation that once treated boundlessness as virtue now worships containment as strength.

Institutionalizing Enforcement

Law has codified the new frontier. From the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act to IRCA (1986), the 1996 deportation laws, and the 2006 Secure Fence Act, each reform embedded “enforcement first” into governance. Agencies like ICE and the Border Patrol expand as permanent institutions, their budgets and legitimacy dependent on crisis. A vast “100-mile border zone,” touching two-thirds of the U.S. population, normalizes exceptional powers and constant surveillance.

This apparatus reshapes democracy into what Grandin calls an “enforcement trap”: reform is forever postponed until the border is declared secure, which it never is. Meanwhile, cruelty—family separations, indefinite detentions—becomes daily spectacle.

Race Realism and Moral Reversal

Intellectuals like Garrett Hardin and John Tanton inject 'race realism' into policy debates, arguing that scarcity and demography justify exclusion. Borrowing ecological language, they claim the lifeboat is full. Grandin reads these arguments as moral inversion—the rhetoric of survival disguising the politics of dispossession. Meanwhile, elites preserve their own private frontiers: capital crosses borders freely while workers are immobilized by fences.

The Moral Choice

Ultimately, the wall is a referendum on how America responds to limits. It can embrace solidarity, as Roosevelt urged, or weaponize scarcity, as Trump performed. Anne Carson’s line—“To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing”—frames Grandin’s closing insight: without a frontier to flee into, the nation must either build a society within limits or collapse into brutality within walls.

Final message

The wall is not protection—it is confession. It reveals that the myth of endless renewal has ended, leaving only the question of how to live with what remains.

In that sense, Grandin offers not despair but clarity. Recognizing the end of the myth is the first step toward creating a politics that confronts inequality honestly rather than walling it away.