Autopsy for an Empire: A Review of Greg Grandin’s End of the Myth

The End of the Myth
By Greg Grandin
Metropolitan, 2019

Whether that wall gets built or not, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint, but no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free — and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism. (Pg 275)

The bravado of the colonizer, if you listen carefully, is often fragility displayed loudly enough that it might be misunderstood as power. Flag-waving nativist drum-pounding is never a display of strength, but a diversion. Much like the myth of the self-made elite, the idea of the self-made nation is a fallacy. A potent one, no doubt, but a fallacy nonetheless.

Historian Greg Grandin’s new book, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, is exactly the kind of deflation, or extinguisher, our dumpster fire of a reality needs. Few are as well adept as Grandin to give a dying empire an autopsy. There is a solid nod to the book’s spiritual forbearer, Richard Drinnon’s 1980 heavy hitter, Facing West. Both books rightfully draw out a massive theme: that the American identity, the nationalist, individualist fervor, was encapsulated in the idea of the eternal frontier.

From that initial point of contact, the need for more was emboldened by the dreams of limitlessness. “Decades before its founders won their independence, America was thought of as a process of endless becoming and ceaseless unfurling.” (3)

And unfurl it did. While Columbus withered from one of the many diseases he helped infect the Americas with — believing until the end that he had, in fact, gone to India — his infectious pathology thrived alongside the biological ones.

The West, even before realizing what direction they had actually gone, saw a continent of potential. It was a terrifying world in their eyes. Its promises lay behind the manifestations of their subdued, colonial nightmares. Potential that was to be liberated through complete and utter decimation. It was in unrepentant bloodlust that the unquenchable thirst for more inched the colonies and conquerors through the Americas. As though the pent up paranoia of a resource devouring civilization had finally broken free of its limitations.

The frontier became the ideal. This was the plenty that churches sang of and markets dreamed about.

For Drinnon, the impetus to gut that narrative came in the ways that the US invasion and wars in the Pacific Islands mirrored the glutton and wrath unleashed as colonizers headed west in colonial America. Grandin, however, has his expertise in Latin America. His work clearly indicates what that looked like with such titles as Empire’s Workshop and The Empire of Necessity. Though perhaps few capture the utter delusions of the frontier better than his award winning Fordlandia.

In this book, Grandin looks back towards the United States. With skill and precision, he lays out the practices by which the birth of the American Empire was fueled in warfare and genocide. An empire built by and for white supremacists.

The subtext of the book is the outward expression of the fragility of the white male ego in violence: systemic and endemic violence. There are precursors to this for sure. It goes back to domestication, but undeniably forms the foundation of civilization. Exponential growth tips the scales of technological development, allowing the true barbarity of civilization to spread its cruelty farther and wider. The hunger for resources and paranoia-saturated loss aversion are fitting distractions, ways to keep those trumpeting their prowess and might from recognizing their own increasing dependency upon complex infrastructure.

Knowing only survival and fear, the settlers become the stranger in the woods — trigger-happy and with a mandate for viciousness that can only be called Biblical in nature. Having survived the trip to the New World, after having fought proxy wars for European powers, having used and devastated Native populations; the frontier gave purpose.

As a story-telling animal, that purpose, that narrative, matters. Unbound potential became the hope, but only because of the abysmal reality. In colonial Virginia, for example, the life expectancy hovered around 25 years. Slave traders fared only slightly better on slave ships than their captives in terms of longevity. If the reality on the ground was all that the settlers had to fixate on, it’s hard to imagine that any objective assessment would have shown that it was all worth it. Wealth could be had, but rarely was it given.

The narrative matters because it kept the settlers looking outward. In all of its absurdity, it instilled hope for an undeserving population at the expense of the native communities and wildness. In manifesting fear into a virile hatred, the earliest sense of a distinctly American ethos was born.

Though the frontier became emblematic of it, early colonials wrestled with the notion. As Grandin points out, the first English dictionary printed in the United States and the first written by an American, 1788 and 1789 respectively, didn’t even include the word “frontier.” (47) Borders were a tenuous concept, marked often by natural boundaries and followed by openness and myths of what lay on the other side. Vastness was a sense that quickly became a spoken virtue as a post-Independence nation sought to understand itself, or, more to the point, sought to define itself.

In light of such expanses, what or who it was not determined that definition. The framers of the American empire inherited hundreds of years of unchecked destruction already in progress. The colonials had found a sense of liberty in their destruction, the basis of the fight against the grasp that Europe had upon them. Liberty and freedom, through the eyes of the colonizer, were that ceaseless unfurling.

“Liberty was made possible by the right to colonize, letting freemen, when their freedom was threatened, move on to find free land and carry the torch from one place to another.” (24) I would hope anyone reading this is well aware that “free land” became “free” only through killing or dispossessing the original occupants. That is a process that Grandin also walks us through.

In doing so, he articulates the way in which that ceaseless unfurling became a means to displace aggressions onto a moving battlefield: “Expansion became the answer to every question, the solution to all problems, especially those cause by expansion.” (30)

The bedrock of colonialism is entitlement. Having granted divinity to the right to take, old cycles repeat on larger levels and with more vitriol. As societies settled, as domestication emerges, the first discernible means of building a group identity — one based on exclusion — emerged. Slowly and largely inconsequential at first, but the way those societies dealt with the tensions that arise after having removed the flux and flow of our nomadic existence into larger, more stable communities, was in turning internal tension outwards.

Accusations of witchcraft and sorcery made sense of a new ecological reality that domestication began to inch into our psyches. But it is not an ecology that scales. We see that in all of its tragedy as the introduction of Western diseases, tools, and weaponry catastrophically flooded in waves beyond the frontier. It’s easy to look at that and say these new objects and illnesses entered societies that lacked any understanding of them, but that absolves the mirror of brutality that the West had used them set that table with.

We aren’t less enamored with the mystique of technology: we’re simply aloof to it. The difference is that those tools were already enmeshed in our mythology. The right of conquest, the entitlement of the colonizer, become so innate to our perception of the world that outright and untethered aggressions become not only an act of defense, but that our paranoid minds flower that bloodlust into our notion of freedom itself.

The history of the Americas, from the colonies onward, was always a matter of displacement. The hunger of a burgeoning white supremacist empire is a constant continuation of that conquering orgy of decimation. The idea of a nation is forged in a channeling of the aggression of white men. It begins in a pure hatred of Native Americans, and it remains there. The Atlantic slave trade wasn’t just about a system of industrious efficiency; it was saturated with a profound hatred of Africans, a viciousness that also continues.

Independence was far from the end of hostilities, but the emboldening of the hostiles. The frontier became the frontline as new wars unfurled, an outward expression of US against the world. Power is never as consolidated as it is in war. Nationalism is never as cohesive as it is when under attack, even speaking existentially.

This nation, once framed in conquest and war, had to continue shuffling its impotent rage and displaced aggressions. You have war after war: campaign of clearing and subjugating after genocidal campaign. Freedom, like war, becomes an infantile expression. It becomes the defining trait: “soldiers experienced the violence they committed…as a form of liberty.” (98)

It becomes fundamental to understand the American psyche on this level because this is the foundation of the world that we’ve come to. A world in which “the wall” becomes the last rallying call of a dying empire. The notion of the wall becomes the extension of the concept of the frontier. By definition alone, these notions should be contrary, but one is an outgrowth of the other. A modification of the public relations pitch that the dreams of liberty America prides itself on were always a lie meant to protect and serve fantasies of a white supremacist nation.

The frontier was “a mirage, an ideological relic of a now-exhausted universalism that promised, either naively or dishonestly, that a limitless world meant that nations didn’t have be organized around lines of domination.” And the “wall, in contrast, is a monument to disenchantment, to a kind of brutal geopolitical realism: racism was never transcended; there’s not enough to go around; the global economy will have winners and losers; not all can sit at the table; and government policies should be organized around accepting these truths.” (272)

If there was to be a moment of reckoning between past and present in the American identity, it was blasted over by a defiant recapitulation of that underlying premise: freedom is the right to conquest and exclusion. Lest there be any question about it, Grandin lays bare the reality behind whatever iteration of the mythos currently exists, showing that it has always been the same. That is why the first clearing of the US-Mexico border takes place in response to World War I. That is why the first significant, constructed barrier on that border was made with fencing and posts repurposed from Japanese internment camps following World War II. That is why the Border Patrol was founded as the institutionalization of the Ku Klux Klan.

The violence that stems from the border is a direct response to the frontier-bravado that white supremacists instilled in it as Westward expansion was overflowing the entirety of this continent and spilling across the world. And it is the same short sighted, knee-jerk reactionism that keeps on attempting to talk about “invasions” coming across the border — direct responses to unilateral, imperialist US policies, all of them — as canned stump pitches to cover for the fragility of the empire America prides itself for being, while completely and utterly denying that it ever has been.

That’s a mirror that Grandin removes the smoke from. And our reflection is ugly.

There’s a ton of history presented with precision here and it’s the aspects I’m not even touching on that will be some of the most lasting. I take it as a given that this is a book that must be read. It isn’t the shallow reaction to Trump: one that will pretend like this is a new problem. The wall arises at a point in American history not by happenstance, but by a nearly calculated metric that has infected all who upheld concepts of liberty and freedom as the frontier made possible. From socialists to fascists, from Ed Abbey to Bill Clinton: the border, in whatever form it did actually exist, was always the encapsulation of the impossibility of the American empire.

Toxic, divisive, emboldening, and dehumanizing, it upholds potential as virtue while evading the reality that it can only exist in a conqueror’s world. The embodiment of a mythos is a string that must be pulled. Grandin and I might not agree on just how far that unraveling might lead, but, ironically, hitting the wall is a fine starting point.