I'm John Bachelors with David Davenport of the Hoover Institution, his new book along with

the late Professor Gordon Lloyd, Equality of Opportunity.

We're Joe Wilson, President of Princeton,

eventually the governor of New Jersey.

He's not a political thinker.

He's trained in political science, which

was at that time frontier thinking.

But he comes to the presidency in a country that's divided between the progressives

and the conservatives, the reactionaries, the way life used to be.

One progressive is Woodrow Wilson, one progressive is Theodore Roosevelt and as David and his colleague Wright is And the thinking here is the opportunity of the frontier is now ended.

They're dating the close of the frontier in 1890.

What did that mean to the progressive, David?

Why did they believe that was a driver for their

their reforms? Their argument, John, is an interesting one and that is that yes

individualism and equality might have worked rather naturally without a lot of government intervention when we had a free and open frontier.

When Americans who wanted a greater opportunity could simply move west, in many cases get free land,

begin their lives in a new place, my home state of Kansas was heavily populated by people who came and claimed free land.

But by 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the Western frontier was closed, that there

were no new frontiers to be conquered and the progressives saw this I think as

their opportunity to rethink government and their argument is if we could get equality naturally because of free land, we now no longer have that opportunity.

Americans were going to have to live in cities, things were going to be more crowded. We were going to have to live in cities. Things were going to be more crowded.

We were going to have to have much more government intervention.

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