John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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PLOWBOY: And what did he think the worst case might be?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Walter Prescott Webb was too gentle a man to line out the distasteful details of the worst possible case. He just said that, if no substitute boom maker was found to replace the Frontier, we would be faced with "radical changes indeed."

PLOWBOY: And that's all? That's all he said?

SHUTTLEWORTH: No. There's more. Although he refused to go into the gory details of the wars and famines and disease that his predictions imply, Webb sketched out a loose scenario for a boomless future.

Society will go through a process of "devolution and retrogression rather than evolution and progress". Rural life will become more important and the cities will become less pleasant places in which to live. Population will stabilize — too late, of course, and for the wrong reasons — and society will take on some of the steady state characteristics of the Medieval Age.

The democracy of the frontier will give way to socialism and fascism. Governments will become stronger and individuals less important. Capitalism will decline and prosperity will slip through the fingers of England, Europe, and — finally — the Americas.

As population expands toward its final balance with the land, food and clothing — the very basics of life — will become relatively more and more costly. As a result, we'll soon give up our efforts in name, as well as fact to feed the planet's hungry, defend the "free" world, and prop up the economy of every nation that sides with us.

Eventually, if we're lucky enough to reach a standoff which offers enough stability for reflection, Webb feels that the historians and philosophers of the future will "view the Age of the Frontier as an aberration, a temporary departure from the normal, a strange historical detour in which men developed all sorts of quaint ideas about property for all, freedom for all, and continuous progress". The institutions that we now take for granted, Webb thinks, will appear "to have been so highly specialized that they could not survive the return of society to a normal state where there was a balance between land and the men who lived on it."

PLOWBOY: That part about the cities, the cost of food and clothing, and England is already coming true! Are you sure Webb made these predictions 25 years ago?

SHUTTLEWORTH: He most certainly did. His book was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1952 and I picked up my copy in an Oklahoma City secondhand bookstore in about 1961 ... when I was helping Milton Kirkpatrick set up an aircraft electronics shop at Downtown Airpark. The Great Frontier had quite an impact on me back when I first read it because ten years or so after he had developed his theory it was already quite apparent that Webb's predictions were coming true. Now, of course, it would take an absolute fool which is to say most of the economists, politicians, and captains of industry now in control of the world's destiny to deny that Webb was 100% right.

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