Two Important Historians of the Frontier American Culture, Bernard Pyron

Two important American historians were interested in the background of that American culture. Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), professor of History at the University of Wisconsin and later at Harvard, taught that the American Frontier shaped the American mind and culture. Turner said that the spirit and success of the United States was due to its Western frontier culture. As each generation of pioneers moved farther west, they abandoned European and early American Eastern practices, institutions and ideas, and found new solutions to new problems created by their new environment. Over several generations in the 19th century the frontier changed the European and American Eastern "civilized" urban culture to a rural and small town frontier culture of informality, democracy, initiative, freedom and self-reliance that the world saw as "American." That frontier culture also enforced its right to self defense. There were some real outlaw gunslingers in the Old West, yet the gunslinger figure is exaggerated in fiction. The cowboy image is a better representation of the character of the Old West frontier on the Great Planes. He carried guns and was capable of using then in self defense, but few cowboys ever fired a gun at another man. A Texas Ranger was supposed to have said, "You hardly ever need a gun, but when you do need one, you need it real bad." The real cowboy had rather ride his horse on the open range and sit sound campfires at night telling tall tales than getting into gun fights.

Walter Prescott Webb (1888-1963), as a boy lived on what he later defined as the Great Planes, in Eastland county in west central Texas, went to the University of Texas and became a professor of history at Texas. In his 1931 book, The Great Planes, Webb described and exalted the culture of the Great Planes. He said that in Texas -and on north to Canada - the 98th meridian marked the division between the wet area to the east, with its forests, from the dry area to the west, which did not get enough rain, and tended to be open planes with few larger trees. The 98th meridian runs through Meridian, Texas, which is in the middle of Basque county. If you draw a line due north from Meridian, it would run west of Tarrant county, or Fort Worth, putting it and Dallas in the "wet" east. A line going due south from Meridian would run through Gonzales county, Texas, which puts San Antonio clearly in Webb's Great Planes West. Most of Travis county is west of the 98th meridian, making Austin officially in Webb's West, though it may not now be too western in culture. In Austin there is almost an abrupt change in the character of the land you can see if you are near Lamar Boulevard and Shoal Creek not far west of Congress Avenue and "downtown" Austin. To the east of Shoal Creek and Lamar Boulevard is the wooded prairie region, and then suddenly west of the creek and Lamar Boulevard there is the hill country, the Edwards Plateau, which is in the Great Planes West of Webb.

Webb pointed out in The Great Planes that the region west of the 98th meridian is different from the land east of it, and that in adapting to this different environment the pioneers of the West had to change their institutions and way of life. One of the ideas of The Great Planes is that the environment itself had an influence upon the culture of Webb's West - the great planes - which emerged from the experiment of Americans adapting to life in the West.

The people of the Great Planes West were "lawless," said Webb, not meaning that they were all outlaws, but that they became unconventional, mavericks and more resourceful by the cultural standards of the civilized East. Webb’s idea that history is "a branch of literature"put him in opposition to the conventional academic historians of the Ivory Towers.

He said "In graduate school the student is taught to select a subject of such small dimensions that it offers no challenge to the intellect, does not develop the mind, and has little or no significance when developed. He is encouraged to write without benefit of imagination, to avoid any statement based on perception and insight unless he can prove by the documents that his idea is not original.” Quoted in George Wolfskill, “Walter Prescott Webb and The Great Plains: Then and Now,” Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 302."

Walter Prescott Webb said in his presidential address to the American Historical Association: “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 69 (1959): 265–81, that "The excitement of that moment was probably the greatest creative sensation I have ever known. I had come upon something really important, that I was no longer an imitator, parroting what I read or what some professor had said. This idea that something important happened when the Americans came out of the woods and undertook to live on the plains freed me from authority, and set me out on an independent course of inquiry.”

When the Americans of the 19th century "came out of the woods" they grew out of the culture and personality traits of the more urban and "civilized" East, and grew out of both the Northeast Establishment and the Southern Tradition.

The culture and personality
traits described by Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter Prescott Webb,
historians of the frontier and of the great planes, is useful in understanding
the difference between the older American generations and the Baby Boomers.. The
largest change that Transformational Marxism, among other things,
caused was the contrast between those born before about 1940 in the
rural and small town West and those born after 1946, the Baby
Boomers.

Frederick Jackson Turner and Walter
Prescott Webb wrote about the mentality of Americans of the western
frontier, saying they were more independent, self-reliant and
resourceful.

One of the reasons for this contrast between the older generations, now aged, and the generations born after about 1941-1946 is the influence of the counterculture and behind it, and other cultural influences for change, is Cultural Marxism, also called Political Correctness and Transformational Marxism.

The Baby Boomer generation became the target of the Frankfurt School's
intellectuals, the first American generation to live under the new
collectivist cultural dominance created by Transformational Marxism.

American generations born before the Baby Boomers began in 1946 tended
to follow a culture of individualism, a culture that
valued individual freedom, individual moral responsibility and
self-reliance.

But the Baby Boomers became the first American generation to be educated in a school system that was being taken over by transformational educational psychologists, such as Benjamin Bloom. Bloom wrote two volumes of his Taxonomy of Educational Goal Objectives, the Cognitive Domain of 1956 and his 1965 Taxonomy of Educational Objectives Handbook II: Affective Domain. All teachers after the publication of these handbooks had to be certified by knowledge of what Bloom's Educational Goal Taxonomies taught.