The frontier myth of opportunity obscured capitalist capture of land and wealth

Evidence

“Go West, young man!” advised Horace Greeley in 1851. A century later, he might have said: “Go to college!” … The Western frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white settlers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out— out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of the crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape. … Few escaped. Railroad companies, mine owners, and, before long, an elite of successful farmers and ranchers soon captured both land and op­ portunity. The rest were left with the adventure of making ends meet. But throughout the nineteenth century, the image of the frontier sustained the vision of economic opportunity and unfettered personal freedom in an emerging industrial system offering little of either. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 174

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Friedman’s free-market ideal rested on a pastoral myth of prelapsarian equilibrium — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 85; Frontier opportunity rhetoric masked elite capture of land and wealth — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 175; Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475

Broader Connections

• Frontier opportunity rhetoric masked elite capture of land and wealth #corroborates (1.00) — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, 175
• Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475