only manly Italians in our literature.)nThere are more iron laws of history than just the law of oligarchy.nOne of them was stated succinctly by Bob Dylan:n”He who is not busy being born is busy dying.” It is the naturenof states (using that term very loosely to cover all polities) tonexpand, either by conquest or colonization. Their rivals are eithernabsorbed to become part of the successful expandingnpower or else find their own avenues for growth. By the 18thncentury the competition for colonies and foreign markets playsna dominant role in European politics, and the New World tailnbegins to wag the Old World dog, decades before the AmericannWar for Independence.nThe expansion of European man across the Americas isnone of the great sagas of world history, and while it isncustomary to depict our progress across the continent as an uninterruptednsequence of genocidal massacres, the other side ofnthe story—our side, if you will—is far more interesting. Whatncan we say of the character of men like Columbus and JohnnSmith or, even better, of Cortez, whose bones the Mexicannrevolutionaries wanted to dig up and desecrate. The story ofnhis conquest is the most incredible tale since Xenophon. ThatnColumbus and Cortez were ruthless adventurers goes withoutnsaying, but it is their hardihood and recklessness that definenthe American character at its best. The official historynthat now proclaims the conquistadores and frontiersmen outlawsnis, in a profound sense, a rejection of ourselves—if it isnproper, any longer, even to speak of an American “us.”nThe frontier, starting at the Atlantic, replaced the East, notnonly in an economic sense, but also in a moral and politicalnsense. As an outlet for European expansion, North Americanbecame the new setting for the recreation of political liberty,nand while the social and political evolution of the Americannstates and Italian communi took quite different paths, there arencommon themes. If Genoa and Pisa found their liberty atnsea, the Americans discovered their liberty—and their identity—onnthe frontier.nIn his famous essay on the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turnerndwells at length upon the formation of a distinctive Americanncharacter and on the development of democratic institutions.nAs an aside, he pointed to what he regarded as thendarker side of the frontier experience—the tendencies towardnanarchism and violence:n. . . the frontier is productive of individualism. Complexnsociety is precipitated by the wilderness into ankind of primitive social organization based on the family.nThe tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathynto control, and particularly to any direct control. Thentax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppressionn. .. the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies arenimportant factors in the explanation of the Americannrevolution, where individual liberty was sometimesnconfused with the absence of all effective government.nA few pages later. Turner inserts a footnote on “the lawlessncharacteristics of the frontier,” and cites “the gambler andndesperado, the regulators of the Carolinas, and the vigilantes ofnCalifornia” as “types of that line of scum that the waves of advancingncivilization bore before them.” Turner, one has tonremember, wrote at the height of the Progressive era, whennall the best men assumed, as a matter of course, that govern­n12/CHRONICLESnnnment was the benign agency of progress.nReduced to less polemical terms, Turner’s observations arena fair description of the frontier experience. The “primitive socialnorganization based on the family” is otherwise known asnpatriarchy, the most basic and essential form of social organization.nCivilized communities slowly wean themselves fromnthe elementary facts of life and learn to nourish themselves onnpeculiar diets and bureaucratic regimens, but thrust back intonthe real world they easily rediscover the most natural institutions.nRobinson Crusoe becomes king of his island, the SwissnFamily Robinson functions as a patriarchal clan, the admirablenCrichton changes from obsequious butler into a father of hisnpeople, and a boatload of Anglican choirboys transforms itselfninto a ruthless band of hunters, complete with leaders, rules,nand cults. These are European fables, but they go to the heartnof the American experience.nI shall not repeat what I have previously written (Octobern1990) on the rediscovery of family autonomy on the Americannfrontier, except to say that it—and not the ideas of John Lockenor even Thomas Jefferson—was the real basis of Americannliberty. Free families in search of free land might view thentax-collector as the enemy, but they were far from lawless.nThe very examples that Turner cites—the Carolina Regulatorsnand the California vigilantes—are the refutation of his rhetoric.nCommittees of vigilance are the expression of a community’sndetermination to enforce a moral order, and even wherengovernment agents existed, many frontier communities preferrednlynch law as a concrete demonstration of their moralnsentiments.nVigilante groups are only one manifestation of the Americannpreference for private associations over government agencies,nand in a later essay Turner was to repeat Tocqueville’s praise forn”extra-legal, involuntary associations”:nThis power of the newly arrived pioneers to join togethernfor a common end without the intervention ofngovernmental institutions was one of their markedncharacteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, thenhusking bee, the apple paring, and the squatters associationsnwhereby they protected themselves against thenspeculators in securing title to their clearings on thenpublic domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp,nthe vigilantes, the cattle-raisers’ associations, 1;he ‘gentlemen’snagreements,’ are a few of the indications ofnthis attitude. . . . America does through informal associationsnand understandings on the part of the peoplenmany of the things which in the Old World are and cannbe done only by government intervention and compulsion.nThese associations were in America not due tonimmemorial custom of tribe or village community.nThey were extemporized by voluntary action.nTurner follows Tocqueville in emphasizing the differencenbetween the Old World and the New, and the distinction isnvalid—up to a point—for the period he is discussing, but thenvoluntary associations of America are rooted in the immemorialncustoms of European villages. Consider only the distinctivenAmerican institution of the shivaree—the rowdy mockery,nburlesque, and practical jokes to which newlyweds were exposed.nThe origin of the term is, of course, the French charivari,na general European (really, a universal human) devicenused to repress excessive individualism and to express com-n