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reviewed Roosevelt’s first two volumes in 1889, and had marked in his personal copy a passage describing the “true significance” of “the vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled.”25 His thesis—that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advancement of American settlement westward explain American development”—was identical with that of The Winning of the West, albeit expressed more succinctly.26 But Turner refined away much of the crudity of Roosevelt’s ethnic thinking. It was not “blood,” but environment that made the American frontiersman unique: he was shaped by the challenge of his situation “at the meeting-point between savagery and civilization.” Forced continually to adapt himself to new dangers and new opportunities, as the frontier moved West, he was “Americanized” at a much quicker rate than the sedentary, Europe-influenced Easterner. Consequently, said Turner, it was “to the frontier that the American intellect owes its most striking characteristics.”27 And in listing those characteristics, Turner painted an accurate portrait of somebody not unfamiliar to readers of this biography:

That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy which comes with freedom—these are the traits of the frontier.…28

Turner closed his great essay on an elegaic note. The Chicago World’s Fair marked more than the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the New World; it coincidentally marked the end of the era of free land. An obscure government pamphlet had recently announced that, since the frontier was now almost completely broken up by settlements, “it cannot … any longer have a place in the census reports.”29 This apparently unnoticed sentence, said Turner, made it clear that the United States had reached the limits of its natural expansion. Yet what of “American energy … continually demanding a wider field for its exercise”? Turner did not dare answer that question. All he knew was “the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”30

Theodore Roosevelt was not among Turner’s drowsy audience that hot summer’s day, but he was one of the first historians to sense the revolutionary qualities of the thesis when it was published early in 1894.31 “I think you have struck some first class ideas,” he wrote enthusiastically, “and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely.”32 This was hardly the profound scholarly praise which Turner craved; but the older man’s warmth, and his promise to quote the thesis in Volume Three of The Winning of the West, “of course making full acknowledgement,” was flattering.33 Turner thus became yet another addition to the circle of Roosevelt’s academic admirers, and a fascinated observer of his later career.34 If one could no longer see the frontier retreat, one could have fun watching Theodore advance.

Roosevelt spent much of his time during the years 1893–95 formulating theories of Americanism, partly under the influence of Turner, but mostly under the influence of his own avidly eclectic reading. Gradually the theories coalesced into a philosophy embracing practically every aspect of American life, from warfare to wild-flowers.35 He began to publish patriotic articles with titles like “What Americanism Means,” and continued to write such pieces, with undiminished fervor, for the rest of his life. In addition he preached the gospel of Americanism, ad nauseam, at every public or private opportunity. Ninety-nine percent of the millions of words he thus poured out are sterile, banal, and so droningly repetitive as to defeat the most dedicated researcher. There is no doubt that on this subject Theodore Roosevelt was one of the bores of all ages;