Western Crossroads (Unit IV)

In his conciliatory inaugural address of 1801, President Thomas Jefferson said that the United States had “room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” And yet, within four generations the population of the United States had increased over twelve fold and the Bureau of the Census reported (in 1890) that the so-called American frontier had come to an end. Indeed, the

nation of farmers that Jefferson had hoped for within approximately 100 years (by 1920) had become an industrial giant that produced over one-third of the entire world’s manufactured goods. By 1920, more than half of the United States’ population lived in towns and cities.

In 1800 the center of the U.S. population was 18 miles west of Baltimore, Maryland. By 1920 it had shifted roughly 700 miles westward to around 20 miles east of Terre Haute, Indiana, which is just east of the Indiana - Illinois border. As population shifted westward, so also did political power. From 1921 to 2010 there have been 15 U.S. presidents, only 4 of whom (FDR, Kennedy, Carter, G. H. W. Bush) were born in the original 13 states. Many Americans clung tenaciously to Jefferson’s dream of a nation of free and independent farmers, a dream that for some people was transmogrified into the romantic and for the most part mythic life of the cowboy of the Old West. Yet both ways of life were suffering from various problems. By 1900 in 19 states over 30% of all farmers were tenants and in six states (Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana) the figure was over 50%, not a few of them former slaves. And by the 1890s, the so-called “Wild West” had been fenced in and the days of the cowboys (never as romantic as portrayed in the dime-store novels) were almost over. In (Unit IV) we will discover the “Real West.”