Comment by aspenmayer

Sorry for the meandering nature of this thread. I was mistaken on a point of fact in my original comment, and I wasn't sure whether I even had an answer for you that you would find satisfying once I discovered my error relating to who the tabluating machine was for. I incorrectly recalled it was for the IRS, which was wrong, but the IRS did benefit from the machine being used for the census, because the census determines apportionment and so on. Due to the way the Constitution is written iirc, all members of a district count for representation in the House, not just US citizens.

The closure of the frontier was relevant because it signaled the end of unlimited growth in many ways. Many people today (and probably even back then) don't even know that the US had colonies. In a very real way, we colonized ourselves, but the shame of it is that we colonized others, and the US territories which remain are arguably vestiges of the US empire. Our treaties with the Native American tribes have also been willfully misinterpreted, to their detriment.