corporation-dominated economy, the economic supremacy of
the North over the South and the West. In _The Great Frontier_
(Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1952) he considers the
Western Hemisphere as a frontier for Europe--a frontier
that brought about the rise of democracy and capitalism and
that, now vanished as a frontier, foreshadows the vanishment
of democracy and capitalism.

In _Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and
a Myth_ (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1950) Henry Nash Smith plows deep. But the tools of this
humanistic historian are of delicate finish rather than of
horsepower. To him, thinking is a joyful process and lucidity
out of complexity is natural. He compasses Parrington's
_Main Currents in American Thought_ and Beadle's Dime
Novels along with agriculture and manufacturing. Excepting
the powerful books by Walter Prescott Webb, not since
Frederick Jackson Turner, in 1893, presented his famous
thesis on "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History" has such a revealing evaluation of frontier movements
appeared As a matter of fact, Henry Nash Smith leaves
Turner's ideas on the dependence of democracy upon farmers
without more than one leg to stand upon. Not being a King
Canute, he does not take sides for or against social evolution.
With the clearest eyes imaginable, he looks into it. Turner's
_The Frontier in American History_ (1920) has been a fertile
begetter of interpretations of history.

Instead of being the usual kind of jokesmith book or
concatenation of tall tales, _Folk Laughter on the American