Frontier 2

The first guys pushing west of Virginia must have thought of themselves as Virginians, but it seems like the further away they got from that nebulous border the more their ranks were bolstered by folks from other states, so after awhile they probably had more allegiance to each other than Old Virginny.  If  Jackson Turner is to be believed the folks of old Virginny probably didn't like the idea of those uncouth butternuts (an old name for frontier folk because they used to dye their clothes with oil from the butternut.), having their own senators and whatnot, but likely as not the then rulers didn't want them to to take over their state so they didn't mind them voting in their own guys in their own state, 

There must have been some rules, there had to be so much land and so many people before you could petition to be a state.  There doesn't seem to have been much opposition to a territory becoming a state, except for that free/slave state thing just before the civil war.

I'm reading beyond the meat of the book now, they added a bunch of his speeches at the end and they are more florid and hence less interesting than the bulk of the book.  He must have had some particular axe to grind though I don't know if it ever got so specific as to come down to favoring a presidential candidate.  He is a big fan of Teddy Roosevelt though.

He does love those frontiersmen.  I think he goes a bit overboard with how they were conquering the west to promote the ideas of democracy.  Myself I think they were like all Americans of then and now, trying to get rich.  He has no sympathy for the savages, they are just one more impediment, like drought and flood, for the pioneers to overcome.  He looks down on slavery, but mainly because it was an impediment to the advancement of the frontier, not that he had much concern for human bondage. 

Two things he doesn't like are socialism and big business, the forces that were fighting it out in the gilded age when he was writing the book.  He seems to favor populism in the form of the granges and stuff like that, but not when it got too active politically.

One thing he points out is that the midwestern pioneers had a pretty good time about it where the land was fertile and mainly, wet.  The guys on the plains didn't have it so easy because it was dryer and the distances were so vast, so they depended more on government aid in the form of irrigation I think,  And they were dependent on big business in the form of the railroads, though the railroads got considerable government aid in the form of free land.  Anyway he thought this was a problem, about how the west was not by nature as independent and democratic as he would like it to be.  He didn't seem to have an answer to that.


Speaking of democracy, I have just been overhearing some speech by one of Trump's guys in relation to war with Iran, to wit how the US stands ready to aid the people of Iran where the shoots of democracy grow in the, I don't know, desert of tyranny.  Iran is a democracy.  They vote, just not the way we would like them to because they hate us because we put in that Shah asshole.  But when the US promotes democracy abroad, what they really mean is doing what America wants them to do.

But that is all yesterday's papers now.  We are on to security clearances this morn, and who knows what we will be on come the noon..