Michael: Kevin, what's the most American idea you can think of? Kevin: Oh, easy. The American Dream. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, manifest destiny, the rugged individual conquering the West. Michael: What if I told you that 'rugged individual' was a myth designed to hide a national panic attack? That America wasn't running towards opportunity, but fleeing from its own demons? Kevin: Okay, now you have my attention. Fleeing from what? Michael: From itself. From its own internal contradictions, its racism, its inequality. That's the explosive argument at the heart of Greg Grandin's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Kevin: A Pulitzer winner, wow. And Grandin's background is fascinating—he's a leading historian of Latin America. So he's looking at the U.S. not from the inside out, but from the border in. Michael: Exactly. And he argues that for centuries, the frontier was a 'gate of escape'—a way to push all our problems outward. But now that gate is closed. And all that history, all that pressure, is coming home to roost. Kevin: That is a huge idea. It reframes everything I thought I knew about American history. Where do we even start with that? Michael: We start at the very beginning. With the Founding Fathers. Because this wasn't an accident; it was part of the design.

Kevin: Wait, you're saying the Founders designed America to be expansionist? I thought it was about liberty and a new kind of government. Michael: It was, but they had a very specific theory about how to protect that liberty. Think about James Madison. He was terrified of factions—what we'd call political polarization. He worried that in a small republic, a majority faction, say, the poor, could team up and vote to take property from the rich. Or one religious group could oppress another. Kevin: A problem we are definitely still familiar with. Michael: Precisely. So what was his solution? "Extend the sphere." Make the republic so massive, so spread out, and so constantly growing, that no single faction could ever organize effectively enough to take over. The sheer size and constant motion would dilute the political poison. Kevin: That’s a wild concept. So the plan wasn't just to have a big country, but a country that was always getting bigger as a way to manage internal conflict. Michael: It was the ultimate political safety valve. Instead of dealing with our internal divisions, we just expanded. Got a problem with class conflict? Go west! Religious tension? Go west! The issue of slavery threatening to tear the country apart? The answer, for many, was to expand it into new territories to keep the political balance. The frontier became the place where America could defer its most difficult conversations. Kevin: But that "empty" land wasn't empty. And that expansion wasn't peaceful. Michael: Not even close. And this is where the myth gets really dark. Grandin tells this absolutely chilling story about a man named Frederick Stump in the 1760s. He was a German immigrant in Pennsylvania who, after his family was allegedly killed by Native Americans, went on a murderous rampage. Kevin: A revenge story. Michael: It's much more than that. Stump and his servant went out and murdered ten Native Americans—men, women, and children—in cold blood. They scalped them, burned their bodies, and threw them in a river. These were people who were known to be friendly to the settlers. Kevin: That's horrifying. He must have been brought to justice, right? Michael: He was arrested. But then a mob of about a hundred frontiersmen, his neighbors, stormed the jail and broke him out. He was never punished. And here's the kicker: Frederick Stump, the mass murderer, fled to Tennessee, became a wealthy plantation owner, and was eventually made a captain in the militia, tasked with "clearing" the road of Creeks and Choctaws. Kevin: Hold on. An outlaw vigilante who committed atrocities becomes an agent of the state, continuing the same work? Michael: That's the frontier in a nutshell. It took individual, often psychopathic, violence and laundered it into a national project of "progress" and "civilization." Stump's barbarism wasn't a bug; it was a feature. It helped clear the land and push the border forward. He was the safety valve for racial hatred and violence, channeled outward. Kevin: Grandin uses that "safety valve" metaphor in another way too, right? With the steamboats? Michael: Yes, and it's a perfect analogy. In the 19th century, Mississippi steamboats were notorious for exploding. Why? Because reckless engineers would literally tie down the safety valve to build up more steam pressure and go faster. They knew it was incredibly dangerous, but the mania for speed and power overrode everything. Kevin: So America was like one of those reckless steamboats, constantly tying down the safety valve of its internal conflicts—slavery, inequality—for more speed, more expansion, knowing it could all blow up at any moment. Michael: Exactly. And for over a century, the myth held. The nation kept expanding, kept fleeing forward, convinced it could outrun the explosion. But eventually, you run out of river.

Kevin: And that's where the 20th century comes in. The physical frontier is declared closed in 1890, and suddenly, America has to look at itself in the mirror. Michael: And it doesn't like what it sees. This is the great inversion of the myth. A new generation of thinkers starts to argue that the frontier wasn't the source of American virtue, but the source of its deepest pathologies. It didn't create democracy; it created a violent, lawless individualism that made true social progress impossible. Kevin: Who was making this argument? Michael: It was a whole range of people, from critics like Lewis Mumford, who said the pioneer life was just a way to "avoid society," to the architects of the New Deal. FDR himself, in a famous 1932 speech, basically said the age of the rugged individual is over because the free land is gone. Now, government has to step in to create security. Kevin: So the closing of the frontier was the justification for the modern social safety net? Michael: It was a huge part of it. But no one articulated the dark side of the frontier myth more powerfully than Martin Luther King Jr. during the Vietnam War. He saw the war as the frontier myth playing out on a global stage, with the same tragic results. Kevin: I think most people remember King for his civil rights work, not his foreign policy stance. Michael: But for him, they were inseparable. He gave this earth-shattering speech in 1967 called "Beyond Vietnam," and it's where he connects all these dots. He said the war was a "demonic, destructive suction tube," pulling money, resources, and moral attention away from the War on Poverty and the fight for civil rights at home. Kevin: That’s such a powerful idea. It's not just about the budget. It's about psychic energy. When a country is obsessed with a foreign war, it can't fix itself. We see that today. Michael: Absolutely. And he made the most famous connection of all, saying, "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home." They exploded in the form of gutted social programs, but also in the form of inflamed racial hatred. Kevin: How so? Michael: Because the war fused opposition to civil rights with hostility towards the anti-war movement. Suddenly, you had white soldiers in Vietnam flying Confederate flags over their bases, not just as a symbol of Southern pride, but as a symbol of defiance against the federal government that was pushing for desegregation back home. Kevin: Wow. So Grandin talks about this "Pact of 1898," where the North and South reconciled their Civil War differences by agreeing to go fight other people—in Cuba, the Philippines—together. You're saying that pact officially died in the jungles of Vietnam? Michael: It completely shattered. The Confederate flag went from being a symbol of a reconciled, if still white-supremacist, nation to being a symbol of pure racial resentment against the system. The war didn't just expose the cracks in the American foundation; it split them wide open. The frontier myth of endless progress through expansion was dead, and in its place was a brutal reality. Kevin: Okay, so the frontier is closed, the myth is dying, the pressure valve is welded shut. What happens to all that pent-up energy, that anger, that division? Michael: Well, that's the final, and most frightening, part of Grandin's argument. It has to go somewhere.

Kevin: And his answer is that it turns inward. Michael: It turns inward, and it concentrates right on the new symbolic center of American anxiety: the border. All the violence, racism, and paranoia that were once projected outward onto a moving frontier now get focused on a fixed line in the sand. Kevin: And this isn't just a recent thing. Grandin makes it clear that the border has always been a violent place. Michael: Unbelievably so. He documents a century of horrors that most Americans never knew about. Vigilante groups like the "Metal Militia" in the 90s hunting migrants for sport. The Texas Rangers carrying out mass executions. And the Border Patrol itself, which in its early days was filled with Klansmen and operated with total impunity. There's a story about its agents using a racial slur, "tonk," which they defined as "the sound a flashlight makes when you hit someone over the head." Kevin: That is sickening. It's a completely different history of the border than the one we're usually told. Michael: And this violence gets supercharged after the failures of the wars in the Middle East. Grandin points to the rise of the Minuteman Project in the early 2000s. These were often veterans, disillusioned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who came home and decided to fight a new war on the border. They brought their camouflage, their military tactics, and their anger, and aimed it at migrants. Kevin: So the energy of a failed foreign war comes home and becomes a domestic war. The "bombs in Vietnam explode at home" all over again. Michael: Exactly. The cycle continues. And this simmering nativism finally finds its ultimate political champion. Kevin: Donald Trump. Michael: Of course. Grandin argues that Trump's promise to "Build the Wall" is so powerful because it's not just a policy proposal. It's a grand, symbolic statement. It is the final tombstone on the grave of the frontier myth. Kevin: How so? What does it signify? Michael: The frontier was a promise of limitlessness. It said, "There's always more space, more opportunity, more future out there." The wall is the opposite. It's an admission of limits. It says, "There is no more. This is it. And we have to defend what's ours from the outside world." It's the ideology of a nation that feels like it's in a siege. Kevin: So Trump's wall isn't an anomaly; in Grandin's view, it's the logical, tragic endpoint of a 250-year-old story. When a nation built on 'fleeing forward' runs out of places to go, the walls go up. Michael: And the conflict turns inward. The wall represents a nation that still equates freedom with a lack of restraint, but it no longer pretends that freedom is for everyone. It's freedom for 'us,' protected by a wall against 'them.' It's the frontier myth stripped of its universal promise, leaving only the ugly core of exclusion and domination.

Kevin: Wow. So this whole book is basically the biography of a single, dangerous idea: that America could outrun its problems. From the Revolution to the Civil War, to Vietnam, the answer was always 'more space, more expansion.' But now, there's nowhere left to expand. Michael: The gate of escape is closed. And we're left in the room with all the problems we never solved. Grandin's analysis is so powerful because it argues that the political polarization we see today isn't new. It's the old, unresolved conflict of American history, but without the frontier to absorb the shock. Kevin: It really makes you think. The book is widely acclaimed, a Pulitzer winner, but it's also a tough read for anyone who holds onto that idea of American exceptionalism. It's a direct challenge to it. Michael: It is. And Grandin leaves us with a stark choice, quoting the old line from the socialist Rosa Luxemburg: 'socialism or barbarism.' With the frontier gone, he suggests we can either turn on each other, which is the 'barbarism' of nativism and wall-building, or we finally have to figure out how to live together and create a just society within our own borders. Kevin: That's a heavy thought to end on. It makes you look at the news, at the political debates, completely differently. The wall isn't just about immigration; it's a symbol for which future we're choosing. Michael: A fortress, or a community. Kevin: We'd love to hear what you all think. Does this idea of a 'closed frontier' explain the polarization you see today? Does it feel like the country is turning inward? Let us know your thoughts. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.