THE STRENUOUS LIFE:
THE CULT OF MANLENESS
IN THE ERA OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Gerald Franklin Raberts.

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THE STRENUOUS LIFE: THE CULT OF MANLINESS
IN THE ERA OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

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Gerald F. Roberts

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ABSTRACT
THE STRENUOUS LIFE: THE CULT OF MANLINESS
IN THE ERA OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
BY
Gerald F. Roberts

"The strenuous life,” a phrase introduced by Theodore
Roosevelt, characterized a distinct and identifiable
phenomenon in American life in the 1890's and early 1900's.
In preaching the strenuous life Roosevelt expressed a set
of values in American culture that were associated in the
late nineteenth century with the wealthy, college-educated,
young men of the Eastern upper middle class. As the emerging
leaders in the 1880's and 1890's, members of this youthful
elite admired personal daring and adventure, and dedicated
themselves to public service. The strenuous life reflected
the strong sense of national pride, moral purpose, and Anglo-
Saxon superiority which lay behind the rationale for American
imperialism. It also reflected their concern for manliness,
which was the central theme of the strenuous life.

Against the background of the changing conditions of
American life in the late nineteenth century, and in response
to those changes, the strenuous life was cultivated as an
alternative to the discontent, uncertainty, and frustration
fostered by the threat of "overcivilization" inherent in the
nation's new urban-industrial society. The quest for the

strenuous life produced a cult of manliness which exerted

Gerald E. Roberts

great influence at the turn of the century. It expressed
itself in the boom in sports and outdoor recreation, in the
new concern for nature and the American wilderness, in the
war with Spain and America's venture into imperialism.
Generally, this spirit infused the theme of masculinity into
many areas of society.

The strenuous life characterized the America of Theodore
Roosevelt at the turn of the century. Both the man and the
nation displayed an adolescent nervousness and anxiety,
combined with an impulse for action that revealed a desperate
need to prove themselves, and that they possessed the heroic
virtues. Roosevelt became the undisputed leader of the cult
of manliness; the nation discovered itself to be a new world
power--the possessor of a far-flung overseas empire.

For advocates of the strenuous cult the Spanish-American
War provided the supreme test of manliness and courage. The
war glorified the American gentleman-soldier and completed
the building of the heroic image of American manhood which
epitomized the strenuous ideal. It also inaugurated two
decades of seeming strenuous activity in the life of the
nation, when Americans adopted the strenuous life as a guiding
principle in the conduct of both domestic and foreign affairs.

"The strenuous life" thus is an appropriate label for
the era, and it remains a key to the explanation of significant
social and intellectual currents of the American 1890's and
early 1900's. As many then believed, nations could be manly

as well as individuals, so the strenuous life represented

Gerald F. Roberts

the national struggle for maturity in the era of Theodore
Roosevelt. Like so many other currents in American life,
however, the ideal of strenuous service and sacrifice was
shattered by the time the United States emerged from World
War I. The war and the resultant disillusionment brought

the era of the Rooseveltian strenuous life to an end.

THE STRENUOUS LIFE: THE CULT OF MANLINESS
IN THE ERA OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT
B V?
YET

w
Gerald Ff Roberts

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of History

1970

Acknowledgments

I would like first of all to express my gratitude to
Professor Gilman Ostrander, who directed the writing of
this dissertation. I am especially indebted to him for his
constructive criticisms and enthusiastic support of the
project. He helped to clarify many of my ideas and often
pointed me in the right direction on various aSpects of
the tOpic. Thanks are due also Professors Marvin R. Cain
and Thomas Bushell for their valuable critical suggestions.
I wish to acknowledge, too, the assistance of the librarians
and staffs of the Michigan State University Library, the
University of Michigan Library, and the University of

Missouri Library.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................ ii
Chapter

I. THE STRENUOUS LIFE ............................ 1

II. THE IMAGE OF AMERICAN BOYHOOD ................. 29

III. MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY ......................... 52

IV. THE STRENUOUS IDEAL IN ORGANIZED SPORT ........ 78

V. THE VIGOROUS LIFE OF THE GREAT OUTDOORS ....... 107

VI. THE HARDY LIFE OF THE WEST .................... 134

VII. THE FEMININE THREAT TO MANLINESS .............. 163

VIII. THE MARTIAL SPIRIT ............................ 186

IX. WAR: 1898 ..................................... 207

X. EPILOGUE: THE STRENUOUS YEARS, 1898-1918 ...... 229

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY .................................. 239

The real service is rendered, not by the critic
who stands aloof from the contest, but by the

man who enters into it and bears his part as a
man should, undeterred by the blood and the sweat.

--Theodore Roosevelt,1894

First of all, a man must be what other men call
"square"--which implies that he must have a sense
of honor. This means so much in the relations of
men with men. . . . Fair play and the rigor of
the game is a masculine ideal; and men will trust
and like and honor those who live up to its strict
requirements.

--Rafford Pyke, 1902

Chapter I

The Strenuous Life

Nine months after his charge at San Juan Hill, Theodore
Roosevelt appeared as guest speaker of the Hamilton Club in
Chicago, declaring:

. .I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble
ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the
life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to
preach that highest form of success which comes,
not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to
the man who does not shrink from danger, from hard-
ship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these
wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

Roosevelt, and others, had been arguing this theme for
years; what came to be particularly distinctive about this
Speech, however, was Roosevelt's introduction of the phrase,
"the strenuous life."2 The point of view summarized by this
phrase functioned as a powerful dynamism in Roosevelt's

private life, in his performance as a public figure, and in

 

1Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and
Addresses (New York: The Century Co., 1904), p. IT The HamIIton
Club, béfOre which Roosevelt spoke, was one of several Chicago
clubs which sought to enlist "respectable" members of society
in the cause of reform in the 1890's. See Ernest L. Bogart and
Charles M. Thompson, The Industrial State, 1870-1893, Vol. IV
of the Centennial Hisfdry of Illinois (Springfleld: Centennial
Commission, 1920), pp. 207-208.

 

 

 

 

2Years later in his autobiography Roosevelt stated
that he had always wished that "I had myself used 'The Vigor
of Life' as a heading to indicate what I was trying to preach,
instead of the heading I actually did use." Roosevelt, An
Autobiography (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929):—
pp. 50-51.

 

his generation's role in history; his phrase, "the strenuous
life," became an appropriate label for the age and remains a
key to the explanation of significant social and intellectual
currents of the American 1890's and early 1900's.3
Attacking those who shrank from the strenuous life,

Roosevelt observed in his Chicago speech that they either
believed in the "Cloistered life," or else "are wedded to
that base spirit of gain and greed which recognizes in com-
mercialism the be-all and end-all of national life, . . ."4
At odds with the dominant trend of selfish materialism and
the quality of life it was producing in America, Roosevelt
sought to restore, through the strenuous life, the older,
hardier strain of virtues which, he felt, had been responsible
for the nation's greatness. Thus he could say on another
occasion: "No amount of commercial prosperity can supply the

5

lack of the heroic virtues." For Roosevelt these could be

 

3See for example, John Higham, "The Reorientation of
American Culture in the 1890's," The Origins of Modern
Consciousness, ed. John Weiss (Detroit: wayne State University
Press, 1965), pp. 25-48; Edwin H. Cady, "'The Strenuous Life'
as a Theme in American Cultural History," New Voices in Ameri-
can Studies, ed. R.B. Brown, D.M. Winkleman, and H. Allen
(Purdue University Studies, 1966), pp. 59-66; Cady, Stephen
Crane (New Haven: College E University Press, 1962), pp. 8I-84;
AIIred Kazin, On Native Grounds (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday E Co., Anchor Edition, 1956, pp. 69-71; Harold U.
Faulkner, The Quest For Social Justice, 1898-1914 (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1937), p. 281.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, op. cit., p. 8.

 

5Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other Essays Social
and Political (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897), p. 11.

 

 

SUpplied only through such forms of strenuous endeavor as
football, boxing, ranching, hunting, or war.

It could be argued, however, that men who were engaged
in the fierce and unrestrained economic competition which
had characterized the industrial and commercial growth of
the nation since the Civil War were themselves simply par-
ticipating in one form of the strenuous life. Indeed, in
his Chicago speech Roosevelt paid tribute to the so-called
"captains of industry": "All honor must be paid to the
architects of our material prosperity, to the great captains
of industry who have built our factories and our railroads,
to the strong men who toil for wealth with brain or hand;
for great is the debt of the nation to these and their kind."6

However, while acknowledging the role of America's
industrial giants and all others engaged in the rigours of
the economic struggle for survival, Roosevelt pointed to
another breed of men, represented by Lincoln and Grant, to
whom the nation owed a greater debt. These men, he declared,
strenuously participated in endeavors which were of a higher,
nobler order than mere money-making: "They showed by their
lives that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife;
they toiled to win a competence for themselves and those

dependent upon them; but they rec0gnized that there were yet

 

6Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, op. cit., p. 8.

 

other and even loftier duties-~duties to the nation and duties

7

to the race." For Roosevelt, as for many other men of his

background, what the nation needed was the renewal of a commit-
ment of strenuosity to worthy tasks which would make for a
better America, rather than an adherence to the values of the
Gilded Age which was producing an easy life of selfish
materialism.

The Spanish-American War and the nation's resultant
venture into imperialism had provided an Opportunity for the
exercise of the Rooseveltian brand of strenuosity, and, indeed,
that strenuosity had contributed to the coming of the war and
to the imperialist mood of the period. Roosevelt's Chicago
speech was primarily a rousing defense of American imperialism,
and his praise of "the strenuous life" was presented within
the context of America's new aggressiveness in foreign affairs:

We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront
us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines.
All we can decide is whether we shall meet them in a
way that will redound to the national credit, or
whether we shall make of our dealings with these new
problems a dark and shameful page in our history. .
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts
his country, the over-civilized man, who has lost
the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant
man, and the man of dull mind, whose soul is inca-
pable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills "stern
men with empires in their brains" -- all these, of
course, shrink from seeing the nation undertake its
new duties. . . . These are the men who fear the
strenuous life, who fear the ogly national life
which is really worth leading.

 

7Ibid.

 

81bid., pp. 6-8.

Belief in the necessity for a national strenuosity in
world affairs dominated the thinking of many who were writing
in the 1890's. It appeared in the writings of Alfred T. Mahan,
Brooks Adams, John Fiske, Josiah Strong, John Hay, Homer Lea,
John W. Burgess, and Henry Cabot Lodge. Roosevelt's speech,
therefore, was but representative of a mode of thought charac-
teristic of many men of the upper middle class in late
nineteenth century America. The strenuous life reflected the
strong sense of national pride, moral purpose, and Anglo-Saxon
superiority which lay behind their rationale for American
imperialism. It also reflected their concern for manliness,
for they attributed to strong, vigorous nations those
qualities of manliness deemed essential in men. "If we stand
idly by," Roosevelt said, "if we shrink from the hard contests
where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk
of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples
will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination
of the world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of
strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; ."9

The class of men for whom Roosevelt spoke applied the
Darwinian notion of a struggle for existence to the various

international rivalries of the period. "The life of strife"

 

9Ibid., pp. 20-21. On the views and assumptions of
the imperiaIist elite, see chapters 1 G 2 of Howard K. Beale,
Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power
(Baltimore: JOHns Hopkins Press, 1956)}

 

was the Rooseveltian version of "the struggle for existence."

Without a national commitment to such a life, Roosevelt felt

that "the bolder and stronger peOples" of the world would

pass America by, and would "win for themselves the domination

of the world." Captain Alfred T. Mahan reflected the prevailing

Darwinian view when he wrote in 1897: "All around us is

strife; 'the struggle of life,’ 'the race of life,‘ are

phrases so familiar that we do not feel their significance

till we stop to think about them. Everywhere nation is arrayed

against nation; our own no less than others."10
Roosevelt had pointed to "the overcivilized man" as the

one who shrank from the strenuous life and from the idea of

America doing its duty overseas. That people were "over-

civilized" was a matter for concern to many Americans in the

late nineteenth century. The subject was frequently discussed

in the period. Mahan asserted that the outside barrier of

Rome had crumbled "when the strong masculine impulse which

first created it had degenerated into that worship of comfort,

wealth, and general softness, which is the ideal of the peace

11

prOphets of to-day." Brooks Adams touched on the theme in

his Law of Civilization and Decay, which appeared in 1895.

 

 

10Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in
American Thought (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1962), p. 188.

 

 

11Alfred T. Mahan, "The Possibilities of an Anglo-
American Reunion" in The Interest of America in Sea Power,
Present and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 6 Co., 1903),
p. 121.

 

 

"Overcivilization" was regarded as a crucial problem in late
nineteenth century America because, it was felt, it undermined
masculinity and the masculine virtues.12

The message preached by Roosevelt in his Chicago speech
in 1899 represented his conviction from personal experience.
Roosevelt had committed himself at a very early age to the
struggles of a strenuous existence. He had been a boxer in
his Harvard days, a cowboy and rancher in the Badlands of the
West, a wilderness and big-game hunter, and he had undergone
the supreme test of manhood by performing heroically in
battle in the war with Spain.

In preaching the strenuous life Roosevelt was eXpressing
a set of values in American culture that were associated in
the late nineteenth century especially with the well-to-do,
college-educated, leisured young men of the Eastern upper
middle class. Coming to the fore in the 1880's and 1890's,

this youthful elite set the tone for much of America's social

and cultural life. When Roosevelt called upon the nation to

 

12Larzer Ziff, in his study of the American 1890's,
has emphasized the theme of "overcivilization" as being a
major factor contributing to the new cult of strenuousness.
In literature, Ziff observes, the problem of "overciviliza-
tion" helped give birth in the 1890's to a new American hero--
the cowboy: "As commerce, politics, and art, as even war
increasingly became abstract, how necessary was the Western,
the constant reminder that there really is such a thing as
being overcivilized, and the constant proclamation that
Americans were bred to be warriors . . ." The American
1890's (New York: The Viking Press, 1966), pp. 227-223.

act as he had acted, he struck a responsive chord, for in
social and cultural matters many Americans tended to follow
where the gentlemen of the Eastern upper class led; and in
the last decades of the nineteenth century some members of

this class assiduously promoted a strenuous mode of life.

II

It was especially the restlessness of the young men of
comfortable Eastern family background which produced the
impetus for the strenuous life in the late nineteenth century.
Many had been born into the security of old, established
families in America, and they found themselves ill-at-ease

13 The

in the newly emerging industrial order of the East.
discontent of the sons of prominent, old-stock American

families in the industrial Northeast was reflected in

 

13G. Edward White has chronicled the early discontent
in the lives of the three members of "the Eastern Establish-
ment" who most vigorously promoted the strenuous ideal in
relation to the West--Roosevelt, Frederic Remington, and Owen
Wister. Central to White's thesis is his analysis of the
adolescent experience of these men in the urban-industrial
environment of the East, and his conclusion that, as repre-
sentatives of old-stock families whose prestige stemmed from
America's preindustrial age, each approached manhood with a
sense of anxiety and uncertainty regarding his ability and
desire to fit into the emerging industrial society of late
nineteenth century America. Hence they found a new sense of
identity in their strenuous lives in the non-urban, nonindus-
trial West. The Eastern Establishment and the Western
Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore
Roosevelt, and OWen Wister (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1968), pp. 52-74.

 

 

criticisms of the new industrial age, and of that class

which was concerned only with money-making. In The Century

 

Magazine in 1886 Roosevelt expressed his criticism this way:
In all the large cities of the North the wealthier,
or, as they would prefer to style themselves, the
"upper" classes, tend distinctly towards the bour-
geois type; and an individual in the bourgeois
stage of development, while honest, industrious,
and virtuous, is also not unapt to be a miracle of
timid and short-sighted selfishness. The commercial
classes are only too likely to regard everythingl4
merely from the stand-point of "Does it pay?"...

The discontent of the young men of Roosevelt's class and
background, fostered by the status shifts of the post-Civil
War period and by a gradual awakening to the evils of the
Gilded Age, stimulated a new activism in the political arena.
The entrance of the sons of the leisure class into politics in
the 1880's and 1890's prepared the way for the Progressive
period of the early twentieth century.15 Roosevelt emerged
as the chief spokesman for those who were initiating a
strenuous mode of service in politics. It is significant

that one of his most famous statements on the strenuous theme

was made within the context of a political lecture. "The

 

14Theodore Roosevelt, "Machine Politics in New York
City," The Century Magazine, XXXIII (November, 1886), p. 76.

 

15See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New
York: Random House, Vintage Edition, l96U), pp. l34-l48,
164-173. For a detailed discussion of the entry of Roosevelt
and Henry Cabot Lodge into politics, see Chapter II, "The
Scholars in Politics," in Matthew Josephson, The President
Makers (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1940), pp. 29-64.

 

 

10

real service," he said, "is rendered, not by the critic who
stands aloof from the contest, but by the man who enters into
it and bears his part as a man should, undeterred by the
blood and the sweat." He continued his discussion of "The
Manly Virtues and Practical Politics" by declaring that it
”must not be forgotten by the man desirous of doing good
political work" that there is "the need of the rougher,
manlier virtues, and above all the virtue of personal courage,
physical as well as moral." Certainly for those men who
would work for decent politics, he said, they must show
"that they possess the essential manly virtues of energy, of
resolution, and of indomitable personal courage."l6
Similarly, in foreign affairs the impact of the sons of
the patrician class was being felt. Their outlook reflected
what John P. Mallan has called "the warrior critique of the
business civilization" of America, which flourished as an
aspect of the expansionist argument developed by "the little
imperialist elite" of the 1890's. This group of expansionists
included Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Alfred T. Mahan, and
Brooks Adams--men whose background was largely that of the

old-stock, cultivated leisure class, and who composed an

 

16Theodore Roosevelt, "The Manly Virtues and
Practical Politics," The Forum, XVII (July, 1894), pp. 552,
555, 557.

 

11

aristocratic elite in American society which assumed
imperialist leadership. Theirs was an anti—materialist and
anti-business view which reflected a militant nationalism,
which celebrated the martial spirit, and which pictured
the business world as the enemy of the country's new and
necessary role overseas.17 They advocated a new national
strenuosity in foreign affairs as one antidote to the dangers
posed by "overcivilization." In the struggle for power,
nations, they felt, must act boldly and decisively.

The impulse to live the strenuous life was fostered
by the lingering concept of service derived from the martial
heroism of the Civil War. George M. Fredricksonélhas argued
that the legacy of the Civil War provided the basic motivation
for the strenuous life of the late nineteenth century. In
this view, the war produced a spirit of strenuous service
which carried over into peacetime, and, lacking a further
martial stimulus to self-sacrifice, found an outlet in
various peacetime manifestations of "the strenuous life":
"For many, . . . the late nineteenth century effort to

define and promote the strenuous life' was inseparably

 

17John P. Mallan, "The Warrior Critique of the
Business Civilization," American Quarterly, VIII (Fall,
1956), pp. 216-230.

 

12

bound up with the continuing search for the meaning of the
Civil War."18
Fredrickson also traces the strenuous life ideal to the
pre-Civil War patrician ethic of Francis Parkman, the great
historian of America's wilderness epic. New England
aristocrats of that earlier period, such as Parkman and
Theodore Winthrop, had deplored the growing softness of the
American aristocracy, and, in seeking to perserve the masculine
fighting qualities, had stressed the ideal of going to the
wilderness to test one's manhood. Then, the Civil War
experience resulted in "the transformation of the ideal of the
'strenuous life'--which had previously meant a retreat into
the wilderness--into a social ideal. Rather than following
the path of Francis Parkman and Theodore Winthrop and seeking
adventures outside the confines of civilization, it was now
deemed more suitable to do one's duty in a strenuous way
within society." Finally, Fredrickson declares:
With Roosevelt, the "strenuous life" ideal had come
full circle. Beginning with Parkman's glorification
of physical strife as drawing out the masculine fight-
ing qualities, it had been transmuted by young men
who were tired of war into the ideal of "useful
citizenship" in time of peace; in the eighties

and early nineties, it had regained its emphasis
on physical courage--to be demonstrated, however,

 

18George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War:
Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New
YOrk: Harper 6 Row, 1965), p. 217.

 

 

13

in the West or on the playing field rather than

on the battlefield. In the age of imperialism

we are back to an essentially military ideal.19

Concerned primarily with the strenuous ideal of those
who participated in the Civil War, this analysis offers only
a partial explanation for the strenuous life of the next
generation, which was responsible for enshrining it as a
national cult. Nevertheless, the heritage of the Civil War
remained a strong influence on the generation that grew up in
the postwar era. Roosevelt was born in 1858, Owen Wister in
1860, Frederic Remington in 1861, Caspar Whitney in 1862, and
Richard Harding Davis in 1864. To be a child in the Civil
War decade meant that one was likely to experience an early
consciousness of war and the aftermath of war. Even to be
born as late as 1871, as was Stephen Crane, did not mean a
childhood devoid of the imprint of the war, as the stories
and reminiscences of the conflict, still fresh in the minds
of the participants, could evoke something of the martial
spirit of the early 1860's.
That the martial spirit of the 1890's certainly struck

a responsive chord among the young men of the Eastern upper
class was evident in their eagerness to get into the war with
Spain. When the conflict broke out in 1898 swarms of young
Ivy Leaguers flocked to join the Rough Rider Regiment. The

men of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other American colleges

 

19Ibid., pp. 33-35, 175, 225.

14

joined the range-hardened cowboys from the West to ride with
Roosevelt into glory. This impulse for the strenuous life,
which was discernible in a wide variety of public and private
activities of members of the cultivated leisure class--in
sports, outdoor recreation, the wilderness life, and in the
ideal of a vigorous and useful citizenship--found perhaps
its greatest release in the Spanish-American War. For many
of these young men, participation in the war provided a
swift resolution of the disturbing set of problems which
faced them in the late nineteenth century: uncertainty
regarding their prOper role in society, discontent stemming
from the threat of "overcivilization" inherent in the urban-
industrial environment of the East, and the frustration--
inherited from the previous generation--of attempting to
perpetuate in peacetime the martial heroism and spirit of

strenuous service derived from the great Civil War experience.
III

The growth of the leisure class, which took up the cause
of the strenuous life, was an important phenomenon of the
times. At the turn of the century A. Maurice Low commented
on this development:

A few years ago it was distinctly true that
there was no leisure class in the United States.

To-day one will often hear it said that there
cannot exist an aristocracy in America because

15

an aristocracy is only possible where there

is a large leisure class, and the idle rich are
not known in America. But this is only partially
true. The leisure class is constantly growing
and now consists of rich men, the serious business
of whose lives is to devise means to amuse them-
selves and kill time. They are men who either

do nothing or have merely a nominal connexion
with great business enterprises which they have
inherited, the real management being in th8

hands of less known but more capable men.2

Thorstein Veblen suggested a direct relationship between
the leisure class and aspects of the strenuous life of the

late nineteenth century in his The Theory of the Leisure

 

Cla§s_in 1899. Veblen attacked the non-productive role of
the leisure class, which consumed its energies, he said, in
”conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation." He then
elaborated upon their wasteful pursuits and pastimes, their
vulgar displays of wealth, and their preoccupation with
sports. ”Addiction to athletic sports," he said, "not only
in the way of direct participation, but also in the way of
sentiment and moral support, is, in a more or less pronounced
degree, a characteristic of the leisure class, ."21

In a chapter on "Modern Survivals of Prowess" Veblen

argued that the leisure class perpetuated through sport

 

20A. Maurice Low, America at Home (London: George
Newnes, Limited, n.d.), pp. 44-45.

 

21Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
(New York: The New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953),
p. 180.

 

16

aspects of the predatory habit of life developed in barbarian
cultures. He declared, in typical Veblenese, that "the ground
of an addiction to Sports is an archaic spiritual constitution--
the possession of the predatory emulative propensity in a
relatively high potency."22 To apply Veblen's analysis to

the social scene of late nineteenth century America, which
included both a growing leisure class and a widespread
enthusiasm for sports and outdoor recreation, suggests that

the impulse for much of the strenuous life lay in the atavism
that reacted against the leisure class scheme of life.

Veblen exaggerated the role of the leisure class in the
rise of sports and outdoor recreation in America, as one of
Veblen's contemporaries, Charles D. Lanier, indicated when
he expressed a contrary view of "The World's Sporting Impulse"
in 1896:

There is an Open air movement almost revolu-
tionary in its degree and which cannot by any
means be accounted for by any theories of a
more numerous leisurely class. People are
bicycling, yachting, running, jumping, fishing,
hunting, playing baseball, tennis and golf,
to an extent which is new in this generation.
Nor is any considerable fraction of these
people of the class whose wealth makes some
such diversion inevitable; they are the
workers in stores and offices of the great
cities; typewriters, elevator boys, barbers,

physicians, layers and clergymen--in short,
"the people." If it be true that the times

 

22Ibid., p. 170.

17

are too strenuous, that Americans are a nation

of dyspeptics because they work too hard and

take too little physical exercise, the signs

of 1896 are very promising of better things.23

Still it was the growth of leisure which made it possible

for "the people" to devote time to sports and outdoor re-
creation in the fashion of the higher leisure class. The
American people as a whole were becoming conscious of the
new leisure which accompanied the rise of the city. In an
address at Lake Chautauqua in 1880, James A. Garfield declared:
"We may divide the whole struggle of the human race into two
chapters; first, the fight to get leisure; and then the second
fight of civilization--what shall we do with our leisure when

24

we get it." One man's answer appeared in Harper's Weekly

 

in 1895, in a light-hearted note on the "new cult" of lei-
sure. The writer reported overhearing a conversation in
which a lawyer disclosed that he had deliberately cut down

his work load in order to concentrate on leisure. The lawyer
remarked: ”I enjoy my leisure. I enjoy life. I read; I con-
verse with congenial people on congenial topics; I walk; I
take lots of out-of-doors exercise, and steer clear of nervous

prostration; I play tennis and chess; I go wherever there are

 

23Charles D. Lanier, "The World's Sporting Impulse,"
The Review of Reviews, XIV (July, 1896), p. 58.

 

24Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the
City, 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1933), p. 287.

 

 

18

beautiful things to see--you have no idea how many are
available, both in nature and art--and I let them soak in
and become assimilated with my being. I live."25
This description of an active life of leisure is marked
by an air of comfort and satisfaction. Some men of leisure,
however, did not permit themselves so relaxed an attitude.
They felt compelled to seek a strenuous mode of life within
the context of the new leisure. Imbued with the ideal of
the strenuous life, they aspired to lives of personal daring

and adventure, and to lives of strenuous public service to

the nation.

IV

"Overcivilization" was viewed as a threat to national
virility. The central theme of the strenuous life--the
emphasis on "manliness"--ref1ected this basic concern. Con-
fused by the complexities of life in a new urban-industrial
civilization, faced with the realization that the frontier
was rapidly disappearing--or had already in fact disappeared,
and beset by the rising power and influence of women, men
were increasingly defensive about the masculine image. Per-

haps many men turned to various forms of the strenuous life

 

25Duffield Osborne, "A New Cult," Harper's Weekly,
XXXIX (January 12, 1895), p. 46.

 

19

as a means of testing their manhood and of maintaining some
semblance of physical prowess in a society which threatened
to destroy the archetypal male role of hunter and warrior.
The great popularity of Rudyard Kipling indicated the
strength of the male attachment to the concept of an auto-
nomous man's world. Austin Lewis, in celebrating Kipling in

the Overland Monthly in 1903, declared that Kipling "talks

 

not as an exhorter, but as a man to men, perhaps too much

in the language of the smoking-room, but none the less truly
and plainly. He addresses us all, men and women, in terms of
good comradeship, and he shows us men and women, living and

'"26 The strenu-

suffering, and above all, in 'a world of men.
ous cult sought to perpetuate in a new urban-industrial and

evidently womanized society those masculine values and skills
enshrined in ages past by the archetypal male hunting groups

27 Such values and skills had ex-

of primitive societies.
perienced a great New World revival in America's frontier
experience. Then, with the end of the frontier in the late

nineteenth century the pattern of hardy male associations

 

26Austin Lewis, "Kipling and Women," Overland
Monthly, XLII (October, 1903), p. 360.

27Man's role as a hunter in primitive societies has
been interpreted by anthrop010gist Lionel Tiger as the source
of the male bonding pattern in society, or the marked tendency
in men to form groups that exclude women. This pattern, ac-
cording to Tiger, is responsible for male dominance in politics,
war, Sport, etc. See Men in Groups (New York: Random House,
1969), passim.

 

20

required to conquer a continent crumbled. It seemed, finally,
that women were making the final assault on the all-male
groupings which controlled and directed society. The last
remaining hOpe for men to salvage the masculine virtues and
preserve the ideal of adventurous, male comradeship lay in
the strenuous life.

The widespread speculation regarding the state of the
national virility in the late nineteenth century reflected
a growing tension between the sexes in America. Industrial-
ization, urbanization, and the feminist movement brought
about a disruption of the accustomed relationship between
men and women. The alteration of relations between the sexes
contributed to a heightened consciousness of masculinity and
femininity as factors in human society. The question of the
relative worth and success of the male and female Species in
the new urban-industrial order was now explored in earnest,
and the broad outline of the debate revealed the disharmony
between men and women. "Sometimes, at dinner," wrote Henry

Adams in his Education, "one might wait till talk flagged,

 

and then, as mildly as possible, ask one's liveliest neighbor
whether she could explain why the American woman was a failure.
Without an instant's hesitation, She was sure to answer:

'Because the American man is a failure.' She meant it."28

 

28Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An
Autobiography (Boston 8 New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.,

: P-

 

21

Seeking to avoid failure and dependence upon men, the
modern American woman of the late nineteenth century was
striking out on her own, vigorously asserting herself in
society and extending her influence and power. Robert Grant,
one of the more thoughtful contemporary observers of the re-
lations between the sexes, posed the question of her sincerity:
"Woman's authority over matters social is far greater than it
has ever been. . . .If she is Sincere, society will become
both more earnest and more attractive; if she is simply seek-
ing liberty at the expense of religion, purity, sentiment, and
the fine things of the spirit, it were almost better she were

29 Many were quick to con-

again a credulous, beautiful doll."
demn the "New Woman." H.B. Marriott Watson declared of Ameri-
can women that "their cold-bloodedness is, in effect, a sig-
nal of degeneracy, testifying to the desiccation of natural

30 Even astute female observers, though critical

sentiment."
of man, expressed concern regarding the new breed of woman.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, writing on "The Restlessness of the

Modern Woman" in 1901, declared that "man is a weak animal

and a self-indulgent one, . . ." Still, She found man to be

 

29Robert Grant, "Search-Light Letters: Letter to a
Modern Woman with Social Ambitions," Scribner's Magazine,
XXV (March, 1899), p. 378. .

 

30H.B. Marriott Watson, "The Deleterious Effect of
Americanisation Upon Woman," The Nineteenth Century and After,
LIV (November, 1903), p. 790.

 

22

"a less dangerous factor in our present feverish social

conditions than I find women to be."31

The new assertiveness of women contributed to the mas-
culine confusion generated by the threat of "overcivilization."
The impulse to clarify the proper relationship between the
sexes in society was apparent in Roosevelt's address to the
National Congress of Mothers in 1905:

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material
growth, no brilliance of artistic development,
will permanently avail any people unless its
home life is healthy, unless the average man
possesses honesty, courage, common sense, and
decency, unless he works hard and is willing
to fight hard; and unless the average woman
is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing
to perform the first and greatest duty of
womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to
bring up as they Should be brought up, healthy
children, sound in body, mind, and character,
and numerous enough so that the race shall
increase and not decrease.

Roosevelt's preaching to American women that they should
aspire to greater fecundity reflected his alarm over the
declining birth rate and his consequent fear of "race

suicide." Of all American evils he found the worst to be

 

31Ella Wheeler Wilcox, "The Restlessness of the
Modern Woman," Cosmopolitan, XXXI (July, 1901), p. 317.

 

32Theodore Roosevelt, "The Woman and the Home,"
American Problems (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926),
o . o e orks of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Hermann
Hagedorn (20 v6ls., Nainnal Edition, New YOrk, 1926),
p. 165.

 

23

"the diminishing birth rate among the old native American
stock." Seeking to save the Anglo-Saxon from the threat of
extinction, he led a campaign against birth control while
president, and exhorted his fellow Americans to have large
families. "Willful sterility," he insisted, "inevitably
produces and accentuates every hideous form of vice.
It is itself worse, more debasing, more destructive, than
ordinary vice. . . .I rank celibate profligacy as not one
whit better than polygamy."33
Although condemning both men and women for refusing to
have children, Roosevelt tended to put the blame primarily on
what he characterized as the new breed of Shallow-hearted

34 The strenuous life,

and self-indulgent women in America.
which eXpressed a masculine counter-reaction to the threat
of "overcivilization" and to the radical expansion of femi-
nine influence and power, also implied a new sexual vigor

in American men. The fact that the birth rate was declining,
thegefore, was not very flattering to them--particular1y to
those men who pursued the strenuous life. Surely it was

the new breed of cold, selfish women who were to blame, and

not the virile, active men who were leading the nation toward

 

33Quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of
an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methbdist U. Press, 1963),
pp. 305, 306. Also see Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt:
A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Harvest’Edition,
1956), pp. 332-333, and Faulkner, op. cit., pp. 162-166.

 

 

 

 

34Theodore Roosevelt, "The Women and the Home,"
American Problems, op. cit., pp. 168-169.

 

24

greater muscularity and vigor.

The social and literary record of the 1890's and early
1900's reveals at every hand a widespread and crucial con-
cern for what is "manly" (one of Roosevelt's frequently used
words). Hence the importance of sports for American youth:
they were essential for building "manliness." This was the
message preached by most of the contributors to the juvenile

periodicals of the day. The pages of St. Nicholas, Harper's

 

Young People, and The Youth's Companion are filled with

 

 

stories, articles, and editorials which drive the point home.

This was the message of Gilbert M. Patton in his immensely

successful "Frank Merriwell" series, uniting manliness and

morality in the field of athletics.35
Advocates of the strenuous life celebrated the masculine

fighting qualities. Part of the legacy of the Civil War and one

of the results of the search by many for an "equivalent of

war" in the late nineteenth century was that various forms

of the strenuous life, particularly those which called for a

high degree of physical courage, were viewed in terms of the

war metaphor. The football field became a battlefield where

the martial virtues could be developed and tested; the dis-

appearing frontier became increasingly popularized as an

arena where soldierly courage was still required; hunting

 

35See Russel B. Nye, "The Juvenile Approach to
American Culture, 1870-1930," New Voices in American Studies,
op. cit., pp. 75-78.

 

25

and the confrontation with wild animals became an exciting
new way for Easterners to foster manliness.36
The emphasis on manliness in the 1890's led to a near
obsession concerning the question of courage. It is no ac-
cident that one of the most important and popular novels of

37

the period dealt with the subject. Stephen Crane's Red

Badge of Courage was more than one man's investigation of

 

the theme. It was representative of a national preoccupation
and search for the explanation of what constituted courage
and what could be done to develop it. Lyman Abbott, a

minister and editor of The Outlook, declared in a sermon

 

during the Spanish-American War:

But there is one virtue which we have a right
to look for in young men, one virtue which you
have a right to demand of yourselves. It is this
virtue of courage; the virtue of the soldier on
the battle-field. It is the virtue that does
and dares, that hopes and expects, that rushes
forward into the fight, that is eager for the
battle.

We have a right to expect of young men the high
ideal, the hopeful aspiration transmuted into

action by high and strong and strenuous endeavor.38

 

36Fredrickson, op. cit., pp. 222-225.

37The Red Badge of Courage ranked 8th on the best
seller list in 18961 Alice Payne Hackett, 60 Years of Best
Sellers, 1895-1955 (New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1956), p.796.

 

 

 

38Lyman Abbott, "The Seven Ages of Man," The Outlook,
LIX (August 13, 1898), pp. 927-929.

 

26

Courage was the necessary virtue of the strenuous life.

In "The Essence of Heroism" which appeared in The Youth's

 

Companion, Roosevelt analyzed this virtue. There are two

 

kinds of courage, he said: moral and physical. A boy or a
man ”must be able to master himself, to master his own pas-
sions and overcome his own weaknesses. This iS what we usu-
ally mean when we speak of moral courage." Roosevelt then
defined physical courage as "the quality which enables the
man not so much to master himself as to hold his own among
outside rivals or enemies. It is the quality which is in-
dispensable if a man is to be a good soldier, a good police-
man, a good fireman, a good sailor; in short, if he is to
succeed in anything requiring the qualities of bravery and
hardihood." The essence of heroism was a blending of the
two forms of courage, so that "the man of perfect courage
alike on the physical and moral sides must have each of so
peculiar a quality that it could not be distinguished from
the other."39
The concern for what constituted courage contributed
to the impulse to display courage. The Spanish-American War
provided a Splendid opportunity for this, and the war of 1898

became a testing ground for American manhood. Stories, often

exaggerated, of the heroic eXploits of American fighting men

 

39Theodore Roosevelt, "The Essence of Heroism,"
The Youth's Companion, LXXV (April 18, 1901), p. 202.

 

27

filled the pages of the nation's newspapers and magazines
during the summer and fall of 1898, and of these none cap-
tured the imagination of the public more than the adventures
of Roosevelt's "Rough Riders.” The war seemed to both
strengthen and vindicate the heroic image of American manhood.
Although the war afforded the supreme opportunity for
the exercise of the strenuous life, not all advocates of
strenuous endeavor championed war and the imperialist impulse.
William James, for example, who celebrated man's capacity for
what he called "the strenuous mood,” became a vocal anti-
imperialist who launched a bitter attack against Roosevelt's
Chicago speech.4O Eight years before Roosevelt's famous

expression of the idea, James had praised “the strenuous mood“

of man. ”The deepest difference, practically,“ he said, ''in
the moral life of man is . . . between the easy-going and the
strenuous mood.” "The capacity of the strenuous mood,”

he continued, "lies so deep down among our natural human
possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or tradi-
tional grounds for believing in God, man would postulate one
simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the

game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest."41

 

40Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought,
0p. cit., pp. 194-195.

 

41William James, The Will to Believe and Other
Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green,
8 Co., 1927), pp. 2T1, 213.

 

 

28

The quest for the strenuous life emerged as a distinct
and identifiable phenomenon in American life in the late nine-
teenth century. It reflected a cultural dynamism which was
particularly characteristic of upper and middle class Ameri-
can life at the turn of the century. It expressed itself in
the boom in sports and outdoor recreation, in the new concern
for nature and the American wilderness, in the war with Spain
and America's venture into imperialism, and in the infusion
generally of the theme of masculinity into many areas of life.
The manly image in America to which boys and young men aspired
to at the turn of the century was that of the strenuous life.

The masculine image promoted by the strenuous life in
the 1890's and early 1900's required a proper boyhood on which
to build. The existing image of American boyhood was more
than adequate for this. It had deep roots in the American
experience, and it, too, had been created to counter the
masculine confusion produced by the concern for "overcivili-
zation" and the feminine threat to manliness: To the American
mind of the late nineteenth century the world of boyhood was
the ideal male world--the only time and place in which true
and natural masculine lives could be led, and in which a non-
ambiguous allegiance to the masculine virtues was possible. The
image of American boyhood was a fitting precursor to the image

of dynamic manhood fostered by the strenuous life.

Chapter II
The Image of American Boyhood

The manly image in America in 1900 derived in part from
the nineteenth century image of American boyhood. Essentially
the image was that of "the barefoot boy." Ever since Whittier's
"Barefoot boy, with cheek of tan!" poem of the 1850's, the
American imagination had lent itself to the construction of
the image. This nineteenth century American boy was basically
a good-hearted, though mischievous, inhabitant of rural, small
town America. He was brave, fair in games and fights, re-
spectful and polite toward the ladies, adventuresome, super-
stitious, and ill-at-ease in Sunday school. His closeness
to nature was fundamental to the experience of American boy-
hood.1 The image was given a considerable boost by Mark
Twain, whose "bad boy" creations of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn seemed to establish, apparently for all time, an identi-
fiable and distinct image of American boyhood--one which

seemed to be the only real boyhood of America.

1Henry Steele Commager, TheuAmerican Mind: An Inter-

pretation of American Thought and Character Since the l880's

(New Haven: Yale—Unlversity Press, 1959): pp. 35- 362 Also

see Chapter XI, "Small- Town Boy," in Page Smith, As a City
Upon a Hill: The Town in American History (New York: Alfred A.
nop pp. e un o eing a Boy" in Robert
U. Johnson, Remembered YeSterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 8 Co.,
1923), pp. 36748 Henry A. Shute, The Real Diaronf a Real Boy
(Boston: The Everett Press, 1902); Albert Britt, An Amerita
That Was (Barre, Massachusetts: Barre Publishers, I964); Lewis
Atherton, Main Street on the Middle Border (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1954); and CIyde B. Dav1s (ed.), Eyes of
Boyhood (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott Co., 1953).

 

 

29

30

Although Twain's books on American boyhood proved to be
the most memorable, they were but part of a long list of what
one literary critic has called "the boy-book" genre of
nineteenth century American literature.2 In addition to

Twain's works, the list includes: The Story ofga Bad Boy by

 

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Charles Dudley Warner's Being a Boy,

 

Edward Eggleston's The_Hoosier Schoolboy, George W. Peck's Peck's

 

Bad Boy and His Pa, William Dean Howells' A Boy's Town, William

 

 

Allen White's The Court of Boyville, Hamlin Garland's Boy Life

 

on the Prairie, and the Whilgmville Stories of Stephen Crane.

 

 

Varying degrees of realism, romanticism, and nostalgia characterized
these works, but most contributed to the building of a distinctly
American image of boyhood. Why so many writers were turning

to boy life as a subject is a question which is difficult to

answer. Perhaps this literary preoccupation with boyhood
represented one response of American writers to the indus-

trialized and urbanized world of the Gilded Age. Boyhood, for

many, seemed to be identified with the virtues of an older,

simpler, America--the writings on boyhood seemed to be an

expression of an older innocence.

2Jim Hunter, "Mark Twain and the Boy-Book in 19th-
Century America," College English, XXIV (March, 1963), pp. 430-
438. Also useful on this topic is Dorothea Morse, "Study of
Juvenile Writings of Eight American Authors of the Second Half
of the Nineteenth Century" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Illinois, 1952), and Ima Honaker Herron, The
Small Town in American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke Ufiiversity
Press, 1939).

 

 

31

The image of American boyhood in the late nineteenth
century evoked memories of a carefree existence in the
congenial environment of rural, small town America: lounging in
the bough of an apple tree on lazy summer afternoons; trudging
worn and familiar paths in bare feet with fishing pole in hand;
Splashing wildly in the good times at "the old swimmin' hole;"
swapping marbles, tadpoles, crickets, knives, tin soldiers,
pieces of glass and string; plotting bold and daring adventures
in the hay loft, such as stealing watermelons or sabotaging
the town's Fourth of July celebration; and practicing the acts
and stunts one would perform when one ran off to join the
circus. These were the delights of American boyhood--they
represented a freedom and a joyousness of spirit which were
appropriate for the thriving democratic society of the New
World. Just as America had always seemed to be, to Americans,
the very best place on earth, so, too, did boyhood in America
seem to be a very Special kind of boyhood.

The celebration of American boyhood in its rural setting
reached a sentimental extreme in the poetry of Indiana's
James Whitcomb Riley. The turn of the century saw an out-
pouring of Riley's verse which sang the praises of "the bare-
foot boy" and the life of the Hoosiers. The immense pOpularity
of Riley undoubtedly stemmed in part from the fact that his
verse struck a responsive chord in the memory of most of his fellow
countrymen--in the memory of vanishing rural America. The dedication

in one of Riley's books is to "all Americans who were ever boys,

32

to all at least who had the good luck to be country boys, and

3 The timeliness of his poetry is evident in

to go barefoot."
the fact that the memorization of lines by James Whitcomb Riley
became for decades almost a standard exercise of schoolchildren.
The poignancy of Riley's verse was such that it even captured
forever the heart of fellow Hoosier Theodore Dreiser, whose
literary naturalism depicted a far different world from that of
Riley's, but who also shared the barefoot memories of Indiana.4
Riley was by no means the only poet of the period to sing
sentimentally and nostalgically of boyhood on the farm. Young
people in the 1890's were often reminded of "how sweet life

was and good, in the days of Barefoothood," as James Buckham's

poem testified in The_Youth:§gCompanion in 1895:

 

Oh the soft, cool morning dew,
Ere the days of sock or shoe!

Oh the showering as you pass,

Of the sparkling Spears of grass!
Miles and miles of cobweb lace,
Morning freshness on your face--
Who'd forget them, if he could,5
Dear old days of Barefoothood!

Boyhood reminiscences frequently lamented the fact that

urbanization was destroying the idyllic American boyhood of

 

3Quoted in Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska, A History
of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (New York: Harcourt, Brace 8 Co.,
1946)} p. 63.

4Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1885-1915 (New York:
E.P. Button 6 Co., 1952), pp. 69-72.

5James Buckham, "Barefoothood," The Youth's Companion,
LXVIII (July 18, 1895), p. 348.

 

 

 

33

rural, small town America. In "Looking Back at Boyhood,"

which appeared in The Youth's Companion in 1892, Donald G.

 

Mitchell pitied "those young folks who pass their early years
without having any home knowledge of gardens or orchards.
City schools and city pavements are all very well; but I think
if my childish feet had not known of every-day trampings through
.garden alleys or on wood walks, and of climbings in haylofts
or among apple boughs when fruit began to turn, half of the
joys of boyhood, as I look back at them, would be plucked
away."6
Not only in fiction, poetry, and autobiographical remi-
niscences, but also in popular historical sketches were the
joys of American boyhood evoked. Reflecting an old tradition,
one of the interesting features of the news stories on the
war heroes of 1898 was the emphasis placed on the subject's
boyhood. Information on Admiral Dewey's boyhood, for example,
seemed to mark "the hero of Manila Bay" as having enjoyed a

true and authentic American boyhood. "By the older people of

his native town," observed a writer for Leslie's Weekly,

 

"George Dewey is remembered as a harum-scarum lad. There was
nothing too hazardous for him to undertake. He could swim

better than most boys of his age, and found pleasure in

 

6Donald C. Mitchell, "Looking Back at Boyhood," The
Youth's Companion, LXV (April 21, 1892), p. 202.

 

34

climbing such trees as contained the earliest apples and the

choicest cherries. It is observed," the writer continued,

"that young Dewey was not over-particular whose orchard

he visited, either. At winter Sports he was regarded as

one of the best in the village."7
One of the war's first heroes was Richmond Pearson

Hobson, who sank an American boat, the Merrimac, in the

entrance of the Santiago harbor in an attempt to block the

Spanish fleet. Hobson's name was soon on the lips of every-

one at home, and how reassuring it was to know that his

had been a typically American boyhood. The editor of the

Alabama Beacon, an old playmate of Hobson's, described the

 

scene at the Hobson home:

The premises are shaded with handsome forest
trees, large magnolias, noble chestnut-and
hickory-trees, which were the delight of all

the neighboring boys when their ripe treasures
yielded their abundance in the early days of
October. Oaks from whose branches we hung our
swings for athletic exercises, a large orchard where
we ate our fill of apples, peaches, and scupper-
nong grapes, and down in the pasture--greatest
joy of a11--a little brook which by dint of
constant clearing out and building of dams we
made into a swimming-pool, in which "Rich"
Hobson and his young playmates first learned

to swim and dive until the water was too muddy

7"The Hero of Manila," Leslie's Weekly, LXXXVI (May
26, 1898), p. 335.

 

35

for us to stay in it longer . . . My home

and their home were the joint property of

our boyhood. Not a tree in either place

did we fail to climb or a rat-nest or

rabbit-hole we did not explore.

Perhaps William Allen White expressed the feelings of

all of those who shared the common bond of a nineteenth
century boyhood when he wrote of his own youthful experience:
"The home, the barn, the river, and the school made this Willie
White. The school only taught him superficial things--to read,
write, and figure, and to take care of himself on the play-
}ground. But those other ancient institutions of learning
taught him wisdom, the rules of life, and the skills which had

9

survival value in the world of boyhood." "The town of Boy-

ville," White wrote, "is free and independent; governed only by
the ancient laws, made by the boys of the elder days ."10
This sense of an autonomous community of boyhood is evi-

dent in many of the boy-books. In A Boy's Town William Dean

 

Howells declared that "everywhere and always the world of boys
is outside of the laws that govern_grown-up communities, and

it has unwritten usages, which are handed down from old to

 

8H.G. Benners, "About Richmond Pearson Hobson,"
Leslie's Weekly, LXXXVII (July 28, 1898), p. 75.

 

9William Allen White, The Autobiography of William
Allen White (New York: Macmillan Co., 19467] p. 47.

10William Allen White, The Court of Boyville (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1910), p. xxviii.

 

 

 

36

young, and perpetuated on the same level of years, and are

lived into and lived out of, but are binding, through all

personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys between

six and twelve years old. No boy," Howells added, "can violate

them without losing his standing among the other boys, and

he cannot enter into their world without coming under them."

He concluded, "It is a great pity that fathers and mothers

cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it is only

by accident that they catch some glimpse of what goes on

in it.”11
The code of boyhood was a stern code. The first great

law was that you suffered silently the torment inflicted by

another boy, unless you could right the wrong by whipping him.

"To tell the teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor

to any one outside of the boys' world, was to prove yourself

a cry-baby, without honor or self-respect, and unfit to go with

the other fellows." Every new boy in town faced a fight with

the old residents in order to determine his proper place in

the tribal hierarchy. "There was no reason for this, except

that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other means

of making his acquaintance." Although the boys' world was a

11William Dean Howells, A Boy'ngown (New York: Harper
6 Brothers, 1890), p. 67. '_—

 

37

rough and frequently dangerous world, still there were certain

unwritten laws which governed behavior there and reflected

something of a sense of fair play.12
Not only could adults seldom penetrate the world of

boyhood, but also they were unable to be in harmony with

nature in the same way that boys were. It was particularly

the close contact with nature which made for a truly American

boyhood in the nineteenth century. On this point the realistic

writing in most of the boy-books usually gave way, sooner

or later, to the Romantic concept of Childhood's closeness to

nature. "Nature teaches those children who will hearken to her

words," B.O. Flower asserted in a tribute to Whittier, whom

he dubbed the "little barefoot dreamer boy," "and she is never

13 It was this view of

false in word or note or picture."
nature which Charles Dudley Warner portrayed in writing of the

subject of Being a Boy:

 

There was the lovely but narrow valley, with
its rapid mountain stream; there were the
(great hills which he climbed only to see
other hills stretching away to a broken and
tempting horizon; there were the rocky pas-
tures, and the wide sweeps of forest through
which the winter tempests howled, upon which

 

lzIbid., pp. 68-78. For a consideration of the group
psychology of boyhood see J. Adams Puffer, The Boy and His Gang
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1912)}

13B.O. Flower, "A Barefoot Boy Who Was Also a Dreamer,"
The Arena, XV (May, 1896), p. 966.

 

 

38

hung the haze of summer heat, over which

the great shadows of summer clouds traveled;

there were the clouds themselves, .

and there were days when the sky was ineffably

blue and distant, . . . Can you say how

these things fed the imagination of the boy, who

had few books and no contact with the_great

world? Do you think any city lad could have

written "Thanatopsis" at eighteen?14

Even Howells deviated from his realism in A Boy's Town

to proclaim: "Life has a good many innocent joys for the
human animal, but surely none so ecstatic as the boy feels
when his bare foot first touches the breast of our mother earth
in the spring. Something thrills through him then from the
heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her,
and cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees."
Howells continued in this Romantic mode: "His blood leaps
as wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into
their arms in June; there is something even finer and sweeter
in the rapture of the earlier bliss." And finally: "It is
all like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time
when the earth and her sons shall be reconciled in a death-
less love, and they shall not be thankless, nor She a step-

15

mother any more." One critical analysis of this passage

l4Charles Dudley Warner, Bein a B0 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, Riverside Press Edition, , pp. 164-165.
15

Howells, op. cit., pp. 83-84.

39

emphasizes that it is incongruous within the context of
Howells' book, that it is "a startling lapse" on the part
of the author, but that of the boy-book writers only Twain
manages "to avoid sentimentality or sententiousness on this

subject."16

This fact suggests just how powerful the Romantic
view of nature was in the nineteenth century American mind, and
how closely linked it was to the image of boyhood.

Realism and not Romanticism was the dominant tone in
American writing in the late nineteenth century, however.
The boy-books of the period reflected the new direction in
literature, and the realistic treatments of boyhood did not
weaken the identification of boys with nature, but rather

strengthened it. The great artistic achievement in this

regard was Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. With this book the

 

world of American boyhood was inextricably linked to Twain's
memorable depiction of nature, and Huck's affinity for it, in
a language that was concrete, visual, and rich in descriptive
detail. Years later Twain repeated his achievement in that
section of his autobiography in which he wrote vividly and
movingly of his boyhood days on his uncle's farm in Missouri.
By 1899 Hamlin Garland was writing realistically of boy

life on the prairie. One cannot imagine Garland's western youths

 

16Hunter, op. cit., pp. 435-436.

40

experiencing the same ecstatic sensations which nature sent
reverberating through the bodies and souls of Howells' bare—

foot boys. Yet the straightforward narrative of Boy_Life on

 

the Prairie made it clear that boys could respond with feeling

 

to the natural environment of the prairie, despite the harsh
realities of existence there. The book was admittedly not
an autobiography and Garland stated that the incidents in it
"were the experiences of other boys," but he added that they
"might have been mine. They were all typical of the time
and place."17
The identification of boyhood with nature fitted in
appropriately with the impulse for the strenuous life in
the 1890's. In the nineties Ernest Thompson Seton was

stirring the blood of American boys with his authoritative

writings on wildlife. The young readers of The Youth's Companion

 

and St. Nicholas were inspired to share in the excitement of

 

life in the great outdoors. Writing of "A South American

Hunt" Herbert H. Smith exclaimed in an issue of St;_Nioholas

 

in 1892: "But what a wilderness! Suppose I could select a

score of the St. Nicholas boys--the real boys, who love a gun

17Hamlin Garland, Boy Lifegonuthg_Prairie (New York:
Macmillan Co., revised edition, I906), p. vi.

 

41

and fishing rod, and glory in a long tramp--to ramble with
them over those great, breezy, sunshiny hills and down
through the tangled forest?"18

Smith's reference to "the real boys" touched on a theme
vital to the image of boyhood in America in the late nineteenth
century. Mark Twain had suggested the theme in his two
short stories of the 1860's: "Story of the Good Little Boy"
and "Story of the Bad Little Boy." Then in the first of the

boy-books, The Story of agBad Boy (1869) by Thomas Bailey

 

Aldrich, the author explained to the reader: "I call my

story the story of a bad boy, partly to distinguish myself

from those faultless young gentlemen who generally figure in

narratives of this kind, and partly because I really was not

a cherub. I may truthfully say I was an amiable, impulsive

lad, blessed with fine digestive powers, and no hypocrite.

I didn't want to be an angel and with the angels stand .

In Short, I was a real human boy, ."19
The point which both Twain and Aldrich were making in

the 1860's, and which became an integral part of the image

of American boyhood in the late nineteenth century, was that

18Herbert H. Smith, "A South American Hunt," St. Nicho-
las, XIX (February, 1892), p. 261.

 

19Thomas Bailey Aldrich, The Story of a Bad Boy
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., RiverSlde Press Edition, 1911),

pp.7-8.

 

42

the "bad boy" was the only Egal_boy. He was the apprOpriate
subject for the writers of the boy-books, and not the other
familiar figure of juvenile literature of the period--the
"model boy." The "model boy," who dominated the Sunday school
books which Twain ridiculed, was the neat, scrubbed, well-
dressed youth Tom Sawyer loathed. He was, as one critic has
written, a wooden stereotype--"the anathema of real boyhood,
the botched work of women and schoolmasters." The "bad boy,"
on the other hand, "was real and alive in the affections of
his countrymen between 1870 and the turn of the century.

His is the central, easily recognizable image in all the many
backward glances, wistful and envious, at boy-life then

20 Because the "bad boy"

finding their way into print.”
was actually a "real" boy, George W. Peck wrote of him in

the preface of Peck's Bad_Boy:

 

The counterpart of this boy is located in
every city, village and country hamlet
throughout the land. He is wide awake,
full of vinegar and is ready to crawl
under the canvas of a circus or repeat

20John Hinz, "Huck and Pluck: 'Bad' Boys in American
Fiction, " South Atlantic Quarterly, LI (January, 1952), pp. 123-
124,121. The value of boy fiction is also explored in Louis
D. Rubin, Jr. "Tom Sawyer and the Use of Novels, " American
Quarterly, IX (Summer, 1957), pp. 209-216. Also useful are
warren Beck, "Huckleberry Finn versus The Cash Boy," Education,
XLIX (September, 1928), pp. 1-13; and Asher Brynes, "Boy-Men
and Man-Boys," Yale Review, XXXVIII (Winter, 1949), pp. 223-233.

 

 

 

43

a hundred verses of the New Testament in
Sunday School. He knows where every melon
patch in the neighborhood is located, and
at what hours the dog is chained up. He
will tie an oyster can to a dog's tail to
give the dog exercise, or will fight at the
dr0p of the hat tglprotect the smaller boy
or a school girl.

As Peck's preface described him, the "bad boy" of the
period seemed to be a mischievous barefoot boy. The boy
character created by Peck, however, did not quite fit the
image the author himself had suggested. "Peck's Bad Boy,"
who became a byword of the era, was an insufferable little
pest who continually harassed his rather stupid and weak-
willed father. His methods were often vulgar and cruel.
Because of the severity of his practical jokes, and also
because he was a city boy, "Peck's Bad Boy" actually was not
typical of the nineteenth century American "bad boy." The
authentic "bad boys" were those who shared the more common
experiences of American boyhood--Twain's Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn, Howells' "my boy," and Aldrich's Tom Bailey.22

The ”bad boys" of American fiction were particularly
sensitive about the feminine influence in their lives. They

shuddered at the thought that their mothers might make of them

"model boys." A boy "had to be pretty careful," Howells wrote,

21George Peck, Peckls §§4,§QXLEQ§,H15 Pa (Chicago:
Thompson 8 Thomas, 1900), p. xxiv.

22

 

Hinz, op. cit., pp. 122-129.

44

”how he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society.
A fellow who brushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came
into the parlor when there was company, was not well seen
among the fellows; he was regarded in some degree as a girl-
boy. . . ."23 Young Jack Dudley in Edward Eggleston's

The Hoosier School-Boy shrank from the same term of opprobrium,

 

"girl-boy," when another youth discovered Jack performing a

task usually considered as woman's work. "Foolish men and boys,"

Eggleston commented, "are like savages,--very much ashamed

to be found doing a woman's work."24
The role of the mother in the boy's world was, however,

an almost inescapable fact of life. This was apparently true

of an early nineteenth century boyhood as well as of a late

nineteenth century one. In his account of boy life before

the Civil War Howells stated that "the mother represented

the family sovereignty; the father was seldom seen, and he

counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. It

was the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing

or swimming, and she was held a good mother or not according

as she habitually said yes or no. There was no other stan-

dard of goodness for mothers in the boy's world, and could

"25

be none. Writing of late nineteenth century

 

23Howells, op. cit., p. 76.

24Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School—Boy (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), pp. 17-21.

 

ZSHowells, op. cit., p. 75.

45

boyhood, William Allen White observed that "only the boy's
home, and often only his mother at home, counteracted the
influence of the environment of his youth outside his home.
Even inside his home his mother sometimes was the boy's one
civilizing agent."26
The adult world of the nineteenth century sought to

foster in the young a sacred respect for parents, especially

mothers. In Uncle Henry's Letters to the Farm Boy in 1897

 

Henry Wallace noted that it was a "world-wide fact that
there is a very close and intimate relation between a boy's
success in life and the filial affection which he shows to
his parents and especially to his mother." Wallace then
proceeded to give the farm boy advice on the defense of
motherhood:

Some boy will wish you to join him in some-
thing of which you know your mother would
not approve. He will sometimes sneer at

you and call you "mother's boy," and say

you are "tied to your mother's apron strings."
I would not advise you to knock that boy
down, because the sneer is directed at you
and you can afford to let it pass, but if

he says anything against your mother you

have my permission to give him a sound
drubbing. Do not let any boy of your age

or size say a word disrespectful of your
mother. Let her religious convictions, her
ideas of duty and propriety, her faults even,
be too sacrgd to be found fault with by
mortal man. 7

 

26William Allen White, Boys--Then and Now (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1926), pp. 10-11.

 

Z7Henry Wallace, Uncle Henry's Letters to the Farm
Boy (New York: Macmillan Co., 1911), pp. 9-11.

 

46

This undoubtedly represented the code for the defense
of motherhood of many an American boy. Yet for boys, the
problem was that mothers themselves couldgo too far. This
was the case when, at the turn of the century, countless
numbers of small boys in America were turned into "Little
Lord Fauntleroys" by their mothers. In dress and appearance
they seemed to be carbon copies of Frances Hodgson Burnett's
famous creation, and indeed they were. The illustrations

in Little Lord Fauntleroy, which appeared in 1886, were

 

based on a photograph of the author's son Vivian, who was

also the model for the character itself.28

Fauntleroy, who
was such a good little boy, who always called his mother
"Dearest," and who devoted so much time and energy to making
his mother happy, quickly became the ideal boy image of
American motherhood. The result was that many a boy suffered
the agony and the torment of having to wear curls for a
considerable period of his boyhood, and this frequently
fostered youthful rebellion.

The cultivated goodness of "Little Lord Fauntleroy" was

in striking contrast to the mischief and chicanery of the

era's "bad boys." Also the virtuous boy heroes of the famous

~ AA A A; “*4 fl

28Max J. Herzberg and others (eds.), The Reader's
Encyclopedia of American Literature (New York: ThomasTY.
Crowell Co., 1962), p.T125; Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The
United States, 1900-1925, Vol. I: The Turn of the CEntury
(New’YOrk: Chafles Scribner's Sons, l926), p. 278.

 

 

 

 

 

47

Horatio Alger books, which celebrated the great American
success theme of "rags to riches," did not fit the "bad boy"
image. The Alger heroes were no-nonsense, hard-working poor
boys, who, usually through some stroke of luck or great good
fortune, achieved wealth and middle class respectability.
They were always honest, decent, manly youths, not given

to such "bad boy" diversions as tying tin cans to dogs'
tails or raiding the local watermelon patch. Still, many
Alger heroes were originally barefoot boys--country lads

who left the farm or village to make their way in the city.
The image of the popular Alger hero was firmly implanted

29 It

in the American mind in the late nineteenth century.
undoubtedly made the manly image of boyhood, which it joy-
ously celebrated, attractive to countless numbers of adolescent
boys. Surely many a boy reader at the turn of the century
found it an easy transition to go from an Alger novel to a

Frank Merriwell story which glorified the new manly image of

the Sports hero.

29For an analysis of the Alger novels, see the intro—
duction by William Coyle to Adrift in New York and The World
Before Him (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1966).

 

 

48

II

The manly image of American boyhood was an ideal which
was promoted with_great intensity in the 1890's and early

1900's. "American boys," wrote C.A. Stephens in The Youth's

 

Companion, "very rarely lose entire self—control even when ex-

 

cessively exasperated and very angry. It is asserted that
there is no country in the world--un1ess it may be China--
where schoolboys agree so well as in the United States."
Stephens argued that European schoolboys fight more than
American boys, and that European writers "defend this readi-
ness to fight as a Sign of desirable energy in their boys."
Stephens marked it as "a symptom of brutality,” as well. He
concluded that "after a long acquaintance with schoolboys in
the United States, I am convinced that, as a rule, they avoid
fights not from lack of animal courage but because of less
excitable temperaments, and greater power of self-control."30
The superiority of American over European boys was also

one of the themes of Thomas Davidson's article, "The Ideal

Training of an American Boy," which appeared in The Forum in

 

1894. The author warned of the danger to American boys from

overexposure abroad. "There is nothing," he said, "which so

30C.A. Stephens, "A Terrible Temper," The Youth's
Companion, LXIV (June 25, 1891), p. 363.

 

 

49

Sharply distinguishes American boys from all others as their

freshness and purity of life, and these qualities are likely

to suffer from contact with European--especially French

and German--boys. A Europeanized American is nearly always

a moral eunuch."31
Theodore Roosevelt, as the nation's chief bearer of the

heroic image of American manhood, fittingly outlined the

manly standard for American boys in an article for St.gNicholas

 

in 1900, "The American Boy";

Of course what we have a right to expect of the
American boy is that he shall turn out to be a
good American man. Now, the chances are strong
that he won't be much of a man unless he is a
good deal of a boy. He must not be a coward

or a weakling, a bully, a Shirk, or a prig.

He must work hard and play hard. He must be
clean-minded and clean-lived, and able to hold
his own under all circumstances and against

all comers. It is only on these conditions
that he will grow into the kind of American
man of whom America can be really proud.32

"The boy can best become a good man," Roosevelt said,
"by being a good boy--not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain
good boy. . . . "Good," in the largest sense, should include
whatever is fine, straightforward, clean, brave, and manly."

Roosevelt insisted that the best boys and the best men that

31Thomas Davidson, "The Ideal Training of an American
Boy," The Forum, XVII (July, 1894), p. 577.

32Theodore Roosevelt, "What We Can Expect of the
American Boy," St. Nicholas, XXVII (May, 1900), p. 571.

 

 

50

he knew were "fearless and stalwart, hated and feared by all

that is wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting to wrong-

doing, and equally incapable of being aught but tender to

the weak and helpless. A healthy-minded boy Should feel

hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indig-

nation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys, or

tortures animals." Roosevelt concluded that "one prime

reason for abhorring cowards is because every good boy

should have it in him to thrash the objectionable boy as

the need arises."33
This, then, was the manly image which American boys

were exhorted to aSpire to at the turn of the century. It

was a demanding but an appropriate image because the nine-

teenth century image of American boyhood suggested that

boy life in America was a very special kind of boyhood.

Most American boys, it seemed, were real_boys and for this

reason they could become real men. J.T. Trowbridge expressed

 

this faith in 1889:

There was never any better stuff in the
world for the shaping of men than there
is in the American boy of today.

. With all his failings, which are
many and manifest, he has courage, gayety,
endurance, readiness of wit and potency
of will. Give direction to these

51

forces, deepen his conscience and elevate
his point of view, and the future of the
American boy, the future of America itself,
1s secure.

Throughout the late nineteenth century Sports in America
had come to provide an excellent way of facilitating the
process of growth and development from boyhood to manhood.
The baseball diamond and the football field offered Splendid
opportunities for "barefoot boys" to make the transition to
heroic manhood. By 1900 the strenuous life had become the
gospel for American boys. In counselling them, Roosevelt
exhorted: "In short, in life, as in a football game, the
principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don't foul and
don't Shirk, but hit the line hard!"35

Behind this principle lay not only the authority of

Roosevelt's strenuous life philosophy, but also the tradition

stemming from the muscular Christianity of Tom Brown's School

 

Day§_in England. The values of muscular Christianity, incul-
cated in English youth in the Victorian period, were also em-
bodied in the strenuous ideal evolving in the United States.

In late nineteenth century America boys and young men aspired

to be, like their English cousins, "muscular Christians."

A ##A##M‘A“ “A

34J.T. Trowbridge, "The American Boy," NortthmericangRe-
View, CXLVIII (February, 1889), p. 225.

35Roosevelt, "What We Can Expect of the American Boy,"
op. cit., p. 574. Novelist Frank Norris declared that "one good
f1ght will do more for a boy than a year of schooling. . . . it
wakes in him that fine, reckless arrogance, that splendid,
brutal, bullying, Spirit that is the Anglo-Saxon's birthright.
Quoted in Ernest Marchand, Frank Norrisng Study (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1942), p. 132}

 

 

Chapter III

Muscular Christianity

The strenuous life espoused the manliness of "muscular
Christianity," a tradition which celebrated the Christian
gentleman as vigorous, athletic, and manly. The doctrine of
muscular Christianity had developed in England in the early
Victorian period and was closely identified with English
public school life in the second half of the nineteenth
century.1 In the 1890's and early 1900's it was nurtured by
the missionary movement, and by other religious activities
which encouraged young men to mold themselves along "muscular
Christian" lines. The manliness idealized by muscular
Christianity was also nurtured by the developing cult of
sports and games in the schools of England and America. To
many Americans, the brand of manliness valued by muscular
Christianity was viewed as a requisite for life in the
strenuous age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The times, it seemed, demanded a virile, heroic
Christianity.

Advocates of Christian muscularity saw it as a needed

corrective to the feminine influence in religion. The

 

1Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind,
1830-1870 (New Haven: 'Yale University Press, 1957), pp. 201-
206; John W. Derry, A Short History of 19th Century England:
1793-1868 (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 209-
210.

 

 

 

52

53

Reverend Josiah Strong, one of the foremost spokesman for the

manly ideal, expressed this sentiment in his The Times and

 

Young Men:

 

There is not enough of effort, of struggle,
in the typical church life of today to win young
men to the church. A flowery bed of ease does
not appeal to a fellow who has any manhood in
him. The prevailing type of religion is too
utterly comfortable to attract young men who love
the heroic. Eliminate heroism from religion and
it becomes weak, effeminate. Is there no signifi-
cance in the fact that two-thirds of the church-
membership to-day are females, that for every
young man in the church there are two young women?
Why is it that the angels of modern art are almost
invariably feminine, while those of the Scriptures
are masculine? Is it because religion has come to
suggest more of beauty than of strength, more of
gentleness than of heroism?2

Strong then challenged young men to a life of heroic
Christian service, because "it is not the typical church-
member whom you are called to follow. Your leader is the
supreme hero of the ages, and he calls every follower to
heroism, . . . If the church is not what it ought to be,
which is true enough, then, having become a genuine Christian
yourself, enter the church and help to make it more genuinely
Christian." The question of one's manhood was most important
for a life of such service, as Strong proclaimed: "The
practical question for you is whether you are man_enough to
become a genuine Christian-~man enough to give up the meanness

of selfishness for the general good." Not only in missionary

 

2Josiah Strong, The Times and Young Men (New York:
The Baker 6 Taylor Co., 1901), pp. 179-180.

 

54

activity abroad, he said, but also at home, "right here, in
the midst of ease and luxury and selfishness; here, in the
midst of municipal corruption, and industrial hate, and social
discontent, there is a call for the 'strenuous life,‘ a call
for the 'living sacrifice' which 'dies daily;' and the living
sacrifice may be even more heroic than the dying sacrifice."3
Appeals such as this reflected the missionary Spirit of
the age, which sought to reform American society at home and,
at the same time, Christianize and uplift the presumed infe-
rior and backward peoples of the world. Indeed, it was in
the field of foreign missions that the ideal of strenuous
Christian service was most revered. The missionary movement
in the United States was sparked by the revivalism of Dwight
L. Moody, the leading evangelist of the day, and by the
activities of the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign
Missions. This organization, which was founded in 1888, took
the lead in promoting missionary activity abroad, recruiting
missionaries and popularizing the movement in the churches
and colleges across the land. The results were apparent in
the growing number of people who chose to follow this strenuous
way of life. From 1890 to 1917 thousands of American

missionaries went out to the far-flung areas of the globe to

bring Christianity and Western ways to those peoples who had

 

3Ibid., pp. 181-183.

55

remained relatively untouched by them in the past.4

The missionary of the period was praised as the finest
example of the tradition of muscular Christianity. He
represented the ideal of the heroic Christian, whose courage
and moral fervor would triumph in the struggle for righteous-
ness in the world. Judson Smith, writing of foreign
missionaries in 1896, declared: "For strength and clearness
of mind, for balanced judgment, for practical sense, for
industry and efficiency, for power in leadership and organi-
zation, for success in dealing with men, for magnanimity and
courage, for patience and heroic self denial, they are the
peers of the best men of their generation."5 The Secretary
of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions observed that
"the missionary, like the soldier, must take risks. From
Paul down missionaries have not hesitated to face them. . .the
work must go on. Devoted missionaries have accepted the risk

in the past, and they will accept it in the future."6

 

4Paul A. Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats:
The American Protestant MissionaryTMovement in China, 1890-
1952 (Princeton, N.J.:TPrinceton University Press,71958),

pp. 52-67.

 

 

5Judson Smith, "Foreign Missions in the Light of Fact,"
North American Review, CLXII (January, 1896), p. 26.

 

6Arthur Judson Brown, "The War and Our Devoted Mis-
sionaries," The Missionary Review of the World, XXVII (April,
1904), p. 243.

 

56

In likening the missionary to the soldier the author was
employing a familar comparison. The missionary movement was
often popularized in military terms. Ex-President Benjamin
Harrison, for example, depicted the members of the World's
Student Christian Federation as a mighty Christian army in

his introduction to John R. Mott's Strategic Points in the

 

World's Conquest:

 

We see the stalwart youth of our country, or of
the world, beating out the armor they are to wear
and forging the swords they are to wield. The
armor will be tough and strong and the swords
bright and keen; and these eager young soldiers
will readjust boundaries. . . .Give them leaders
chosen from their own ranks, and their own corps
badge; and out of this cadet corps will come the
great captains who will fight it out on the lines
of truth until the world's rebellion against God
has been put down and the vanquished are given gn
unstinted share in the heritage of the victors.

The missionary movement was closely related to the impe-
rialist impulse.8 Writers often employed the idea of the
Christian mission in justifying imperialism and war. One of
the leading advocates of expansion was Strong, whose Our
Country preached the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and lent
Christian sanction to the imperialist movement. In Strong's

view the Anglo-Saxon, as the representative of the two great

7Benjamin Harrison in the Introduction to John R.
Mott, Strategic Points in the World's Conquest (New York:
FlemingH. RevélllCo., 1897), pp. 5-6.

 

8Varg, 0p. cit., pp. 81-83.

57

ideas of civil liberty and spiritual Christianity, was pos-
sessed of a divine mission to spread those blessings throughout
the world. The role of the United States, Strong asserted,

was vital to this task, the accomplishment of which would

9 Alfred T. Mahan

hasten the coming of the kingdom of Christ.
argued the proposition that "war, . . .is justified as an
element of human progress, necessitated by a condition of
mankind obviously far removed from Christian perfection, and,
because of this imperfection, susceptible of remedy." In
discussing "War From the Christian Standpoint" before the
Church Congress held in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1900,
Mahan employed a rather lengthy Biblical argument in support of

his view.10

In the wake of the Spanish-American War such an
argument was reassuring to many Americans, as was the assertion

in The Century Magazine that "the fighting fury of the old

 

Hebrews--of their champions, kings, prophets, and poets,--has

dominated the mind and the habit of Christian civilization."11

4 ‘-—AA—A‘+A A.“ A MAAH

9Josiah Strong, Our Copntpygflplts Possible Future and
Its Present Crisis (New York: The Baker 3 Taylor Co., rev. ed.,

9 PP- '
Alfred T. Mahan, Some Neglected Aspects of War

 

10
(Boston: Little, Brown, a Co.,1907), pp. 971114.

11"Christianity and War," The Century,Megazine,
LVIII (July, 1899), p. 481.

 

58

Both the missionary and the soldier, therefore, were
viewed as the key figures in the advance of civilization.

An editorial in TheéIndependent in 1900, in seeking to define

 

the proper role of each, placed the missionary in the vanguard

of imperialism:
. . .in the path that he blazes will follow the
army. . . .The army will follow, however, not as
a scourge, not in conquest. It will follow only
as the police power of civilization. That, in
the coming centuries, is to be its supreme func-
tion, . . .The faith of Christendom is not Spread
by the sword, but by the missionary. The army of
Christendom fo¥%ows the missionary, it does not
go before him.

The missionary ideal was inherent in the strenuous life
philosophy of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt praised the
missionary Spirit of strenuous endeavor, declaring that "every
earnest and zealous believer, every man or woman who is a doer
of the work and not a hearer only, is a lifelong missionary
in his or her field of labor--. . ." In an address before the
General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1902, Roosevelt
lauded those who "are doing strong men's work as they bring
the light of civilization into the world's dark places." The
occasion provided still another Opportunity for a character-
istic statement of the Strenuous theme: "The criticism of

those who live softly, remote from the strife, is of little

value; but it would be difficult to overestimate the value

12"The Army Follows the Missionary: Yes!" The
Independent, LII (June 28, 1900), p. 1571.

 

59

of the missionary work of those who go out to share the
hardship, and, while sharing it, not to talk about but to
wage war against the myriad forms of brutality."13
Imbued with the missionary spirit of the age, the
Rooseveltian strenuous life was also Significantly influ-
enced by the Tom Brown tradition of schoolboy manliness
and athleticism. Although muscular Christianity in England
had been associated particularly with Charles Kingsley, the

noted clergyman, novelist, and poet, it was Thomas Hughes's

novel, Tom Brown's School Days, which most effectively

 

Spread this gospel among nineteenth century Englishmen and
Americans. The manliness idealized by the muscular Chris-

tianity of the fictional Tom Brown became the goal of

 

American boys as well as English ones, and it contributed
greatly to Roosevelt's formulation of ”the strenuous

life."

II

Tom Brown's School Days, which first appeared in 1858,

 

had an enormous influence in America as well as in England.

A .L

13"President Roosevelt at the General Assembly,"
The Outlook, LXXI (May 31, 1902), pp. 338-339.

 

60
In it, Hughes fused the muscular Christianity of Kingsley14
with the educational ideals of Thomas Arnold, Hughes's old
headmaster at Rugby, and added his own zest for sports and
games to create a model of school life for boys. Hughes's
athleticism far exceeded that of Arnold's, but it harmonized
nicely with Arnold's teaching of self-discipline and with

his emphasis on building character and training dynamic
Christian gentlemen. Arnold led the way in the reform of

the public school system in England in the nineteenth century,
and Hughes saw to it that the headmaster's ideals were
enshrined in the hearts of Englishmen.15

Hughes's novel was also a celebration of the English

squirearchy. Hughes declared of the class of country Squires

14Although Kingsley apparently detested the phrase,
"muscular Christianity," he nonetheless preached that brand
of Christianity which the slogan described, calling for "a
healthful and manful Christianity; one which does not exalt
the feminine virtues to the exclusion of the masculine."
Regarding education, ”the question is not what to teach,"
he said, "but how to educate; how to train not scholars, but
men; bold, energetic, methodic, liberal-minded, magnanimous."
Quoted in Margaret Farrand Thorp, Charles Kin sle , 1819-1875
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniverS1ty Press, I937), pp. I72,
101. Also see Una POpe- Hennessy, Canon Charles Kingsley. A
Biography (New York: Macmillan CO. I949), p. 8. For an
American note on Kingsley' s influence see his obituaryV in

 

A ._.A _‘ ‘—__A _.~_- A‘ _.

(March 6,1875), pp. 113 -Il4.

15See Asa Briggs, "Thomas Hughes and the Public
Schools" in Victorian People (New York: Harper 8 Row,
Colophon Edit1on, I963), pp. 140-167.

61

represented by the Browns that for centuries "they have been

subduing the earth in most English counties, and leaving their

mark in American forests and Australian uplands. Wherever

the fleets and armies of England have won renown, there

stalwart sons of the Brown's have done yeomen's work." They

are, he said, "a fighting family." The values of the squire-

archy were clearly evident in the aspirations expressed by

Tom's father, on the occasion of Tom's departure for Rugby:

"I don't care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma,

no more than does his mother. . . . If he'll only turn out

a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman,

and a Christian, that's all I want, . . ." AS for Tom, his

ambition at Rugby was to be "A l at cricket and football,

and all the other games, . . . and to please the Doctor;

and I want to carry away just as much Latin and Greek as will

take me through Oxford respectably." Then he added thought-

fully: "I want to leave behind me, . . . the name of a fellow

who never bullied a little boy, or turned his back on a

big one."16
At Rugby Tom achieved that manliness which muscular

Christianity advocated. The hardy values absorbed through

athletics and team play were tempered by Dr. Arnold's moral

guidance and inculcation of Christian principles. The goal

l6Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School_Days (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin 6 Co., The’Riverside Press, 1896), pp.l, 3,
68-69, 302.

 

62

of Christian manhood was achieved through inner struggles
as well as physical ones, and a boy was taught to subject
his soul to rigorous Christian examination. Thus the boys
who emerged from Rugby were blessed with a manly, Christian
faith that enabled them to face bravely the struggles and
disappointments of life. Central to the Rugby ideal, and
to the muscular Christianity movement, was the role of
fighting. Hughes expressed it this way:

After all, what would life be without
fighting, I should like to know? From
the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly
understood, is the business, the real,
highest, honestest business of every son
of man. Every one who is worth his salt
has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they
evil thoughts and habits in himself or
spiritual wickedness in high places, or
Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom,
or Harry, who will not let him live his life
in quiet till he has thrashed them.

. . I am as sorry as any man to see folk
fighting the wrong people and the wrong
things, but I'd a deal sooner see them
doing that than they should have no fight
in them. 7

The London Specpator declared of Hughes in 1899 that

 

"he, more than any other man, made the modern schoolboy.

He convinced schoolboys that it was possible to be manly, and
truthful, and pure, and even religious, and yet remain
healthy schoolboys still, with muscles in their frames

longing for exercise, and ferment in their hearts, and vague

17Ibid., pp. 272-273.

63

aspirations in their brains, . . ." The boys who fell under

the Hughes influence, The Spectator further Observed, held

 

the manly virtues to be respectable, and "each in his degree
strove to found conduct on them. That was, in substance,
the teaching of the whole school of 'muscular Christians'

to which Mr. Hughes always belonged, but he, and he alone,
made it palatable, or indeed in favourable cases delightful,
to average schoolboys, . . ." Furthermore, "there is no
recoil in after life from the teaching of Tom Brown. The
result has been at least two generations of men much more
manly, sincere, and actively good than the generations which

went before them, ."18

III

Writers Often cited Tom Brown's School Days as a guide

 

for American boyhood. Roosevelt listed it in 1900 as one of

those books "which I hope every boy still reads."19 It was

Roosevelt himself who helped popularize the Rugby schoolboy

 

18"The Influence of 'Tom Brown'," The Spectator,
LXXXIII (July 1, 1899), p. 9. Also see Hamilton Wright
Mabie, "Some Famous Schools: Eton College," The Outlook,
LIX (August 6, 1898), p. 851. Victorian criticism oflthe
athletic tradition is traced in Bruce E. Haley, "Sports and
the Victorian World," Western Humanities Review, XXII
(Spring, 1968), pp. 115-125.

 

 

 

19Theodore Roosevelt, "What We Can Expect of the
American Boy," St. Nicholas, XXVII (May, 1900), p. 573.

 

64

tradition of Christian manliness in America. His view of
a boy of character might have come from the pages of Tom

Brown:

 

He must not steal, he must not be intem-
perate, he must not be vicious in any way;
he must not be mean or brutal; he must not
bully the weak. In fact, he must refrain
from whatever is evil. But besides refraining
from evil, he must do good. He must be brave
and energetic; he must be resolute and per-
severing. The Bible always inculcates the
need of the positive no less than the nega-
tive virtues, although certain peOple who
profess to teach Christianity are apt to
dwell wholly on the negative.

Alike for the nation and the individual,
the one indispensable requisite is character--
character that does and dares as well as
endures, character that is active in the
performance of virtue no less than firm in
the refusal to do aught that is vicious or
degraded.20

Roosevelt's emphasis on the active performance of
virtue was basic to his approach to life, and it reflected
the teachings of muscular Christianity. This was clearly
evident in what Jacob Riis described as Roosevelt's
creed, discovered in_a speech to the Bible Society, in
which Roosevelt stated: "If we read the Bible aright,

We read a book which teaches us to go forth and do the
work of the Lord in the world as we find it; to try to
make things better in the world, even if only a little

better, because we have lived in it. That kind of work can

 

20Theodore Roosevelt, "Character and Success," The
Outlook, LXIV (March 31, 1900), pp. 726-727.

65

be done only by the man who is neither a weakling nor a
coward; by the man who in the fullest sense of the word
is a true Christian, like Greatheart, Bunyan's hero."21
To a great extent Roosevelt the reformer was actually
Roosevelt the muscular Christian, setting about to do on
earth the work of the Lord in the fashion of the boys of
Rugby--vigorous, determined, unflinching, fair. One of the
reasons why other professional politicians found him so
disturbing was the fact that Roosevelt seemed actually to
adhere to this schoolboy ethic. Owen Wister said of him,
"the game that he plays is'square.' And this instinct to
be 'square,' when it goes with a clean, out-of—door sporting
and shoulder-hitting nature, wins all hearts at sight,
except of course the hearts of politicians." Wister de-
scribed Roosevelt as "in one word, the all roundgentleman.
When you find an all round gentleman who is public spirited
and patriotic, you have the very best thing our American
soil can produce; and the American people confess this in
their approval of Mr. Roosevelt."22
It was the image of the dynamic Christian gentleman,

built on the tradition of muscular Christianity and Roose-

velt's own strenuous life philosophy, which Roosevelt carried

 

21Quoted in Jacob Riis, "The Story of Theodore Roose-
velt's Life," The Cosmopolitan, XXXII (February, 1902), p. 410.

 

22Owen Wister, "Theodore Roosevelt: The Sportsman
and Man," Outing, XXXVIII (June, 1901), pp. 244, 247.

66

into the presidency. This was the image which depicted
Roosevelt as a young St. George boldly leading his people
forward to slay the dragons of the twentieth century. It
was the image etched by Jacob R115:

A man with a healthy belief in God and in
his fellow-man, who stands in the life of
the people for honesty, square dealing and
high courage; his mark that of a clean,
strong man who fights for the right and
wins; at forty-three, with such ideals,

upon the top-rung of the ladder of honorable
ambition, with a career behind him as
scholar, statesman, soldier, that comprises
the strenuous work of a dozen lives; the
youngest of our Presidents and the young man's
President, type and hero of the doers of

our day, of those who hold the future in
their hands. . . . Theodore Roosevelt, it
has been truly said, is great on lines along
which each and every one of us can be great
if he wills and dares. *

Riis declared that this was Roosevelt's great message
to the young men of the time. It was a message which appealed
to the strenuous and muscular Christian outlook of the late
nineteenth century. Charles F. Thwing, the president of
Western Reserve University, in sampling the letters of young
men regarding "the preaching they want," stated in 1895 that
"in a material age, . . . the cry is for sermons to be other
than material. 'That which shows the beauty of the religion
of Jesus;' 'The plain application of the gospel in regard
to right and wrong;' 'The gospel, pure and simple;' 'Vig-

orous, robust, muscular, practical Christianity;' 'Preaching

67

Christ;' 'That which Shows the character and manliness of
Christ'--these are the phrases which the young men use to
voice their demands."24
The religious "demands" of young men were met by mini-
sters who sounded the trumpet of muscular Christianity. It

was not uncommon for ministers to draw sermons from the teach-

ings of Thomas Hughes, particularly from his The Manliness of

 

Christ. In that book Hughes depicted Christ as "the true model
of the courage and manliness of boyhood and youth and early
manhood." This image of Christ as a manly man helped to

make Christianity palatable to the strenuous-minded youth of
the late nineteenth century. Manliness was an integral part
of the moral effort against evil, a conflict central to the
struggle to achieve the Christian goal of perfection of
character. This was the gospel preached by Hughes,25 and
echoed by many Others. It was appropriate, for example, for
the Reverend David James Burrell of New York to acknowledge
the widespread influence of Hughes by preaching an entire ser-
mon on "Tom Brown of Rugby," on the occasion of Hughes's death

in 1896.26

 

24Charles F. Thwing, "Young Men, and the Preaching
they Want," The Century Magazine, XLIX (February, 1895), p. 639.

 

25Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin 6 Co., n.d.), pp. 52, S-OT

 

26David James Burrell, "For Christ's Crown" and Other
Sermons (New York: American Tract Sociéty, 1896), pp. 244-253.

 

68

Sermons of the period frequently dealt with the strenuous
themes of courage and heroism. In a sermon at Cornell Univer-
sity in 1900 Congregationalist minister Lyman Abbott declared,
"I sometimes think that no crime is greater than the crime
of cowardice and no virtue more needed than the virtue Of
heroism. . . . no man does great service to his age and gen-
eration who has not the heroism that dares suffer defeat and

27

dares to die for a principle." Henry Van Dyke's Sermons

to Young Men included one on "Courage" in which bravery was

 

extolled as a virtue in friend and foe alike:

in man bravery is always fine. We
salute it in our enemies. A daring foe is
respected, and though we must fight against
him we can still honour his courage, and
almost forget the conflict in our admiration
for his noble bearing. . . . The enemy who
slinks and plots and conceals. . .is des-
picable, serpentine, and contemptible. But
he who stands up boldly against his antagonist
in any conflict, physical, social, or spiritual,
and deals fair blows, and uses honest argu-
ments, and faces the issues of warfare, is a
man to love even across the chasm of strife.
An outspoken infidel is far nobler than a
disguised skeptic. A brave, frank, manly
foe is infinitelg better than a false, weak,
timorous friend. 8

 

27Lyman Abbott, "A Call to Battle," The Outlook,
LXXI (May 24, 1902), p. 272.

 

28Henry Van Dyke, Sermons to Young Men (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898), pp. 54-55.

 

69

Sermons such as these, couched in muscular Christian
terms, abounded in the era of the strenuous life. The image
of Christian manhood fighting the good fight was posed as the
highest manly ideal in American society. A professor at
West Point, writing that "we want our officers to be a high
type of men as well as highly trained soldiers," declared
in 1902 that "the world justly recognizes as highest the
Christian type of manhood; . . ." Furthermore, he said,

"the Christian ideal is more ennobling than a simply religious
spirit. The Christian man is nobler than the merely religious
man. Christianity is broader than creed. Religion employs
only a part of our nature, while Christianity uses the

whole. Christianity is the perfection of character of

which the religious feeling is an element." He insisted that
"the highest and most exalted examples that we have to

follow are those which approach most nearly to the Christian
type of perfect manhood."29

The achieving of "the Christian type of perfect man-
hood" required a committment to a strenuous existence--both
physical and spiritual. After Roosevelt gave currency to the
phrase, "the strenuous life," William De Witt Hyde applied it
as a title to a poem on the rigors of the Christian struggle
to perfect oneself and society. "The Strenuous Life" appeared

in The Outlook in 1903:

 

 

298.E. Tillman, "The True Soldier," The Outlook, LXX
(April 19, 1902), pp. 963- 964, 968.

 

70

O Lord, we most of all give thanks
That this thy world is incomplete;
That battle calls our marshaled ranks,

That work awaits our hands and feet;

That Thou has not yet finished man,
That we are in the making still;

As friends who share the Maker's plan,
As sons who know the Father's will.

Beyond the present sin and shame,

Wrong's bitter, cruel, scorching blight,
We see the end at which we aim--

The blessed kingdom of the Right.

What though its coming long delay!

With haughty foes it still must cope!
It gives us that for which to pray,

A field for toil and faith and hope.

Since what we choose is what we are,
And what we love we yet shall be,
The goal may ever shine afar; 30
The will to win it makes us free.

According to The YpupgpMan apdeimgelf by J.S. Kirtley

 

e£_el., "there is one Single task before the young man: to
make himself the most perfect specimen of a man, in all the
elements that enter essentially into right character, and,
while doing it, to help others as powerfully as possible to

do the same thing."31

The age imposed on young men the
moral obligation to make themselves into dynamic Christian

gentlemen, and one means by which young men were trained to

30William De Witt Hyde, "The Strenuous Life," The
Outlook, LXXIV (May 9, 1903), p. 119.

31J.S. Kirtley and Others, The Young Man_and Himself
(Naperville, Illinois: J.L. Nichols E Co., 1902), p. 17.

 

71

meet the challenge of Christian manhood was through the
activities of the Y.M.C.A. The Young Men's Christian
Association, organized in England in 1844 and implanted in
America in 1851, was an Offspring of evangelical Protestantism
and was designed to foster Christian ideals in young men
and boys. Eventually developing into a world-wide move-
ment, the Y.M.C.A. experienced phenomenal growth in the late
nineteenth century and became a great layman's organization.
By the 1890's a network of local associations in the cities
and towns of America were conducting diverse programs of
education, physical training, and welfare work. In all of
North America the Y.M.C.A. in 1895 reported 263,000 members.
Three years later the Spanish-American War acted as a great
stimulus to the expansion of the movement.32
During the war with Spain Anna Northend Benjamin, in
praising the work of the Y.M.C.A., posed a basic question
for nineteenth century Americans: "The query is made every
day in the minds of thousands, IS our army strong, well
disciplined, and brave? How does it compare in these respects
with the armies of other civilized countries? How many ask,

Is it a moral, is it a Christian army?" Writing in The

32C. Howard Hopkins, Historypofflphe Y. M. C. A. in Nopth

America (New York: Association Press, 1951), pp 3- 8, 409,
411- 412, 418, 452- 456, 681. Also useful is Sherwood Eddy, A

A“A__‘_A

72

Outlook, Benjamin then proceeded to report on the fine
Christian work being done in the army camps. In addition

to the Army Christian Commission and Y.M.C.A. workers, she
singled out for praise General 0.0. Howard and the noted
revivalists Dwight L. Moody and Ira Sankey, all of whom had
participated in religious services held for soldiers in a
Tampa camp. "Hundreds," she was pleased to report, "have
not been ashamed to acknowledge their Christianity, . . ."33
Americans could breath a sigh of relief, knowing that their
army indeed was, or would be, a moral, Christian army. In
addition, at the close of the war, they could praise their
army for possessing those virtues valued by muscular Chris-
tianity. This was apparent, for example, in the remarks

of Albert Shaw in an article on "The Army and Navy Y.M.C.A.,"
in which he observed that "the very best thing about our
soldiers in the recent war has been the fact that they have
shown the plucky, high-spirited, independent qualities that

. . 34
characterize our young American manhood."

 

33Anna Northend Benjamin, "Christian Work in Our
Camps," The Outlook, LIX (July 2, 1898), pp. 566, 567. See
also "Religious Influences in the Soldiers' Camps," The
Literary Digest, XVII (July 2, 1898), pp. 17-18. T’—

 

 

34Albert Shaw, "The Army and Navy 'Y.M.C.A.'," The
American Monthly Review of Reviews, XVIII (November, 1898),
p. 537.

 

73

It was in the area of physical education that the

Y.M.C.A. most nearly expressed the ideals of muscular Chris-
tianity. Dedicated to improving the body as well as the
mind and spirit, the Association developed a vigorous body-
building, health, and athletic program. Under the leader-
ship Of the physician Luther Gulick, the Y.M.C.A. promoted
a philosophy of physical education based on Gulick's tri-
angular concept, in which body, mind, and spirit Should be
developed proportionately in order to achieve the essential
unity of the whole man. In the 1890's trained instructors
began spreading the gospel of "the Triangle" in the many
Y.M.C.A. gymnasiums in the country, and the Association
significantly influenced the developing codes of sportsmanship
and fair play in athletic contests and games. In Short,
the Y.M.C.A. played a major role in the rise of sports in
America in the second half of the nineteenth century.
This may be underscored by the fact that it was a Y.M.C.A.
instructor, James Naismith, who is credited with having
invented the game of basketball in 1891.35

One Of the places where the Y.M.C.A. found especially

fertile soil on which to grow, was the college campus.36

_ ~_—‘Lk ‘A—‘A -‘4—._A‘ ‘-__— ._‘_‘—‘__—

35Hopkins, op. cit., pp. 245-270.

36Ibid., pp. 271-308, 625-639. Also see Henry T.
Fowler, "A PHase of Modern College Life," Harpepf§_New Monthly
Magazine, XCII (April, 1896), pp. 688-695.

 

 

74

The American college and university was viewed by many as
perhaps the most important institution for training Christian

gentlemen. In his Within College Walls, published in 1893,

 

Charles F. Thwing stated the case clearly:

. it is to be said that it were well
for the college to emphasize more strongly
not simply a Christian profession, but
also aggressive Christian manhood and
manliness in the person of its professors,
with a view to the training of Christian
manhood and manliness in the person of its
students. . . . The college should be
Christian because Christianity is, on
naturalistic grounds, the survival of the
fittest in religion, and because, on other
grounds, it is a divinely given system of
truth for the control of conduct. It
should be Christian because Christianity
represents the finest type of manhood and
of character.37

Thwing emphasized the role of the college teacher as
being vital to the training of Christian manhood. He praised
Arnold of Rugby as the ideal teacher and acknowledged
Arnold's wide influence, asserting that "none have done
a nobler work for humanity in the formation of character."
With Arnold as the great example, he declared that "the
professor Should be a man who lives such a vigorous and
earnest moral life that his scholars will be attracted
toward it; . . ." Furthermore, he said, "it is the man

more than the teacher, which makes the college. . . . For

37Charles F. Thwing, Within ACollege Walls (New York.
The Baker 8 Taylor CO. , 1893), pp. 39- 40.

 

75

to the student the manhood of the professor is more signif-
icant than his scholarship."38
It was in intercollegiate athletics that the college
role of training Christian manhood was unmistakably muscular
Christian in emphasis. The values of "Tom Brown of Rugby"
were perpetuated on the playing fields of American schools.
This was particularly true of football. Thwing explained
it this way: "Pluck, enthusiasm, self-restraint are ele-
ments of the heart which are trained in foot-ball. Most
precious elements they are, too. They are the elements
which are constitutionally characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon.
football for six weeks in the fall may do much, if
properly conducted, in aiding the college in the securing
of its supreme and ultimate purposes in training true young

39 Football contributed greatly to the building

manhood.”
of the image of the young, dynamic Christian gentleman,
schooled in the Rugby tradition. This was nowhere more

apparent than in the Speech of an old college alumnus to

A A ——A A _‘ -_L A.‘ ‘ __._ —; A _ _‘ A—‘d

38Ibid., pp. 37-38, 46, 50. For a view of the college
as a thoroughly Christianizing influence see William De Witt
Hyde, The College Man and the Colle e Woman (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin 87Co., 1906). Hyde stated tEat "the college, like the
Christian home, is so organized that mere non-resistance,

mere acceptance of the influences that surround you, tends
to make one agentleman and a Christian." p. 126.

39Char1es F. Thwing, "Foot-Ball: A Game Of Hearts,"
The Independent, L (November 3, 1898), p. 1261.

 

 

76

a football team: "My sons, you are gentlemen, and Should
play football as gentlemen, and not as heathen mercenaries,
hired to draw blood. Let tactics, brawn,--made hard by
days of self-denial,--courage and endurance win; but don't
be rowdies. Don't disgrace your ancestors by striking

'below the belt;' not by kicking a man when he is down.

You are not Roman gladiators, but Christian under-graduates."4O

Ministers and teachers were encouraged to take an active
interest in Sports, and to inculcate in boys and young men
the muscular Christian values derived from fair athletic
competition. Sports writer Caspar Whitney stated the case
for athletics in terms of the old Rugby ideal:

Let these ministers and teachers make them-
selves familiar with the principles of
honor and manliness which ought to govern
all athletic contests, and then instill
these principles into the boys and young
men. . . . a boy who learns by his athletic
life to do everything he can honorably to
win, but to submit cheerfully to defeat
will carry the same spirit in all his
recreation and work in after life. After
all, we all know that lying and dishonesty
are largely matters of habit. But so are
courage, manliness, and high-mindedness. 1

 

40"The Football Team," The Youth's Companion,
LXVII (February 22, 1894), p. 84.

 

41"The Minister and Athletics: Mr. Caspar Whitney's
Views,” The Outlook, LV (January, 1897), p. 183.

 

77

Whitney's remarks were representative of the strenuous
trend in American Sports in the latenineteenth century.
The roots of that trend lay in the athletic tradition of
"Tom Brown of Rugby." Although muscular Christianity,
which had fathered Tom Brown and the Rugby ideal, would
lose its vitality with the decline Of Victorianism, many
of its values were enshrined, apparently forever, in the

world of organized Sport.

Chapter IV

The Strenuous Ideal in Organized Sport

According to a Harper's Weekly article in 1895, "ball

 

matches, football games, tennis tournaments, bicycle races,
regattas, have become a part of our national life, and are
watched with eagerness and discussed with enthusiasm and
understanding by all manner of peOple, from the day-laborer to
the millionaire." Moreover, "this widespread interest in
athletic sports has passed beyond the bounds of a mere 'fad,'
and has grown into a settled fashion, the permanency of

which can no longer be doubted." Evaluating the benefits of
athletics, the writer concluded that "there is no better
witness to the intrinsic sanity of our race--or, if you

choose, of the Zeitgeist that animates our generation--than

 

the widespread and steadily growing interest in amateur

sports."1

By the nineties the era of modern Sport had
arrived, and organized sports in America reflected something
of the temper of the age of the late nineteenth century.
Nowhere was the strenuous life more clearly displayed than in
the realm of Sport.

Sports and outdoor recreation had grown spectacularly

since the Civil War in reSponse to urbanization, industrial-

1Henry Smith Williams, "The Educational Value and
Health-Giving Value Of Athletics," Harpepfs Weeklz, XXXIX
(February 16, 1895), p. 165.

 

78

79

ization, and the rise of leisure in America,2 and most
Americans probably shared the enthusiasm of the Harper's
Weekly writer for athletics. The general view which pre-
vailed was that Sports represented a positive good amidst
the complexities and evils which had accompanied the rise of
the city and the growth of an industrial society.

This was in striking contrast to earlier American
attitudes regarding Sport. In the seventeenth century Puritan
society had generally frowned upon recreation and play,
cautioning and regulating against such activities; it had
enshrined the gospel of work as the highest ideal of life in
the New World wilderneSS--necessary for the survival of a
pioneer society. The next century witnessed a gradual less-
ening of restraints, only to be followed in the early years
of the nineteenth century by another period of repression of

popular amusements. Amid the boundless new opportunities

2On this subject see Frederic L. Paxson, "The Rise
of Sport, " in The Great Demobilization and other Essays (Madi-
son: University Opriscon51n Press, 1941), pp. 94- 117; John
Rickards Betts, "The Technological Revolution and the Rise
of Sport, 1850-1900," Mississippi Valley Historical Review,
XL (September, 1953), pp. 231-256; Foster RheaTDulles, A His-
tory of Recreation. America Learns to Play (2nd ed. rev.;
New YOfk’:’AppIeton- Century -Crofts, 1965), chapters 8, 9, 11-
14; John Allen Krout, Annals of American Sport (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1929), passim; Allen Nevins, The
Emergence of Modern America, 1865- I878 (New York: Macmlllan
CO. , 1927), chapter 8; Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the
City, 1878-1898 (New York: Macmillan Co. ,1933), chapterT9;
Harold UT'Faulkner, The Quest for Social Justice, 1898- 1914
(New York: Macmillan Co. , 1937), chapter 12.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

80

of nineteenth century American economic life there was a
renewed emphasis on the gospel of work, one that was over-
whelmingly endorsed by the religious leaders of the country.
Still, despite the fact that the first half of the century
was a time of official restraint in terms of recreation and
play, the changing conditions of American life were respon-
sible for the beginnings of the rise of Spectator sports and
other forms of recreation and amusement. Industrialism and
urbanization radically altered the outlook of Americans in
regard to sport, causing them to place new value on outdoor
exercise and activity.3
Even in the Sports-crazed late nineteenth century,
however, there were dissenting voices. Perhaps the most
corrosive critic of Sport, and the society of which it was
a part, was Thorstein Veblen. Veblen viewed Sports primarily
as predatory activities of "the leisure class." He observed
that force and fraud, two elements which characterized bar-
baric prowess, "are similarly present in modern warfare, in
the pecuniary occupations, and in sports and games."
"Strategy or cunning," he said, "is an element invariably
present in games, as also in warlike pursuits and in the chase.
In all of these employments strategy tends to deve10p into

finesse and chicanery. Chicanery, falsehood, browbeating,

 

3Dulles, op. cit., pp. 3-147.

81

hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of
any athletic contest and in gamesgenerally."4

Although Veblen's analysis of Sport was out of harmony
with the prevailing views of the time, the very fact that he

devoted so much Space to it in his The Theory of the Leisure

 

Class was indicative of the strong claim sport made on the

 

American imagination in the late nineteenth century. The
nation was Sports-minded, and most Americans probably agreed
with the author of an article entitled "Sport's Place in the
Nation's Well-Being" when he declared that "one is certainly
well-nigh convinced that either real Sport or artificial
Sport is the only tonic, the only medicine, which keeps men
going, once they are civilized." He expressed the prevailing
view that Sports were necessary for a man to successfully
withstand the strain of city life:
, Sport is merely artificial work,

artificial adventure, artificial colo-

nizing, artificial war. It is shooting at

a mark because there are no enemies to

shoot at; it is keeping the muscles hard

and the nerves steady, and the head, heart

and body under control by a subterfuge,

now that the real necessity is gone. And
though there are certainly higher and

4Thorstein Veblen, The Theor of the Leisure Class
(New York: The New American E15rary, Mentor Edltion, 1953i,

pp. 180, 181.

82

better tests of patience and self-control
and courage than are required at football,
or golf, or hunting, there is certainly
no better preparation to bear those tests
than the schooling one gets by playing
these same games.

II

Sport fostered the masculine virtues. This was the main
point made by advocates of the strenuous life in defense of
athletics in late nineteenth century America. The theme of
masculinity was apparent at every level of the thought of
the period, ranging all the way from popular writing on
sports to the essays and speeches of the nation's most
SOphisticated intellectuals, many of whom expressed concern

for national virility. The Youth'sgCgmpanion.reported that

 

"there is, beyond question, a tendency in football to promote

6

manliness of bearing, courage, and 'push'." Gifford Pinchot,

writing of the kind of boy suited to be a forester, declared

that "especially he should be manly,"7 and Owen Wister said

SPrice Collier, "Sport's Place in the Nation's Well-
Being," Outing, XXXII (July, 1898), p. 384. Also see H.W.
Foster, "Phy51ca1 Education vs. Degeneracy," The Independent,
LII (August 2, 1900), pp. 1835-1837.

6"The Football Question," The#YgutthgCompanion,
LXVIII (March 14, 1895), p. 130.

7Gifford Pinchot, "Forestry as a Profession," The
Youth's Companion, LXXI (October 14, 1897), p. 476.

 

 

 

83

of a group of cowboys he had met in the West that "they are
of the manly, simple, humorous American type which I hold
to be the best and bravest we possess and our hope in the

future."8

"All of our teachers and preachers of virtue,"
Roosevelt asserted, ”. . . Should try to educate our young
men to the understanding that they must be manly as well as

moral."9

William James urged that "we must make new energies
and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military
mind so faithfully clings." James sought a means which
"would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the
manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of
seeing disappear in peace."10
The craze for intercollegiate athletics which swept the
nation during the period received much criticism, but the
critics were overwhelmed by the defenders and exponents of
Sport. Typical of the reaction to criticism which insisted

that the preoccupation with college athletics was contrary

to the real purposes of education was that of CaSpar Whitney,

8Fanny Kemble Wister (ed.), Owen Wister Out West:
His Journals and Letters (University of Chicago Press, 1998),
p. 246.

 

 

9Theodore Roosevelt, "The New York Police Force,"
The Youth's Companion, LXXI (May 13, 1897), p. 224.

10William James, Memories and Studies (New York:
Longmans, Green, 8 Co., 1 , pp. ,

 

84

sports columnist for Harperjs Weekly. Whitney justified the

 

popular enthusiasm for sport by celebrating the masculine
virtues in Rooseveltian fashion:

. Of course the heroes among the under-
graduates are the "men of brawn." Was it
ever otherwise since the world began?

Games, athletic endeavor of any kind, have
always created more instant enthusiasm
among spectators than success, in college
or out of it, where the mental faculties
alone are concerned. Vigor, health, bravery,
appeal to uS as no mental attainment can.

No amount of culture nor of refinement
nor of intellectual force can atone for lack of
those virile virtues essential to the per-
petuation and the well-being of mankind.11

That participation in Sports effectively prepared a boy
for manhood became a truism of the age. "Athletic success

is well worth having," The Yputh's Companion counselled, "not

“Awéé

only because it trains the body, but because its experiences

"12

help to make the boy a man. St. Nicholas advised American

 

boys to: "Go in for athletics! Go in for training! The
training of today means not only strength of body, but strength
of character; it involves purity, temperance, unselfishness,
perseverance, and a host of other good qualities every boy

13

Should possess." "Baseball," Walter Camp wrote in Century

11Caspar Whitney, "Amateur Sport" column, Harper's
Weekly, XLIII (March 4, 1899), p. 227.

12"How to Succeed at College," Thngouth'S Companion,
LXV (May 19, 1892), p. 258.

13Samuel Scoville, Jr., "Training For Boys," St.
Nicholas, XXVI (June, 1899), p. 644.

 

 

 

85

Magazine, "is for every boy a good, wholesome sport. It
brings him out of the close confinement of the school-room.
It takes the Stoop from his Shoulders and puts hard, honest
muscle all over his frame. It rests his eyes, strengthens
his lungs, and teaches him self-reliance and courage. Every
mother ought to rejoice when her boy says he is on his

14

school or college nine." According to Caspar Whitney, sport

”is the dominating force in the moulding of the boy's character."15

In 1890 in Harper'ngoung People the captain of the Princeton

 

football team wrote of the value of football:

It makes a boy a true boy, and prepares

him to be a man in the best sense of the
term. It implants and develops in him
courage; it strengthens him in his every
joint and muscle, and lays the foundation

of an iron constitution that will be of
inestimable service to him after he has
become a man. It also makes him self-
reliant, sturdy, and quick-witted, for

the head now plays as important a part on
the football field as the body. There is no
more gratifying scene to me than a crowd of
youngsters playing football. I always feel
that the community in which they live will be
the stronger and mpge useful as a direct
consequence of it.

14Walter Camp, "Base-Ball for the Spectator," The
Century Magazine, XXXVIII (October, 1889), p. 831.

15Caspar Whitney, "Amateur Sport" column, Harper's
Weekly, XXXVII (November 4, 1893), p. 1067. On another occasion
WfiTffiey observed that "the boy who is honest and sportsmanlike
in his baseball and football is the one who will be honest in
his profession." Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (June 24, 1893), p. 609.

16Edgar A. Poe, "Foot-Ball," Harper'sYoung People,
XII (November 25, 1890), p. 62.

 

 

 

 

86

The martial spirit pervaded football. "For football
is very like a small war," wrote J. Hamblen Sears in Harper's

Round Table, "and the training of a team is not so different

 

from the training of an army as are many other things. A
brave man who cannot or does not obey orders in a regiment
is well known to be not only useless himself, but a serious
cause for the loss of discipline and efficiency on the part
of all the other men of the regiment. It is precisely the

."17 Of football at West Point and

same with football,
Annapolis, Caspar Whitney said, "if there is any game fitted
to the training of the soldier, it is this one." Whitney
declared that "the game is a mimic battle-field, on which

the player must reconnoitre, skirmish, advance, attack, and
retreat in good order; he must exercise strategy; be prepared
to meet emergencies with coolness and judgment under trying
circumstances; be trustworthy, observant, vigilant; have
courage, pluck, fortitude, daring, and a spirit of self-
sacrifice to duty. . ." The football player must "combine

sobriety, common-sense, health, strength, activity, and

esprit de corps to a marked degree; have a well-balanced
"l8

 

manhood, a healthy mind in a sound body.

 

17J. Hamblen Sears, "A Few Words About Football,"
Harper's Round Table, II (November, 1898), pp. 33-34.

 

18Caspar Whitney, "The Athletic Development at West
Point and Annapolis," Harper's Weekly, XXXVI (May 21, 1892),
p. 496.

 

87

As were many other kinds of strenuous endeavor, football
was viewed in the evolutionary terms of the "survival of the
fittest." The result was to both intensify the popular
mania for sport and to stimulate a public outcry against
the brutality of certain sports, notably boxing and football.

The Youth's Companion in 1894 referred to the qualities

 

necessary for playing football as "the soldier's virtues"
and to thegame itself as possessing "some of the brutality
of war." The author then observed that several members of
the Princeton football team "played according to the law of
natural selection-—on1y the fittest survive."19
Accordingly the football field became the great school
for instilling in young men the values of the strenuous
life. It served as a training ground for a generation of
college youth who would carry the strenuous ideal in Sports
into the conduct of their adult lives. The experience of
football in the 1880's and 1890's undoubtedly contributed
to a Spirit of strenuous endeavor among many of those men
who eagerly sought service in the Spanish-American War. The

intensity of the college football movement was a key to the

temper of the times. Perhaps the best example of this

19"The Football Team," The Youth's Com anion, LXVII
(February 22, 1894), p. 84. Writing on "The Maklng of a Perfect
Man," an M.D. declared that "the healthy youth who wishes to
be equipped for the struggle of life Should be a boxer, a

wrestler, a football player, a baseball player, or a crew
man." Munsey's Magazine, XXV (April, 1901), p. 101.

 

88

intensity of the football Spirit was reported by Richard
Harding Davis, who covered the Thanksgiving Day game between
Princeton and Yale in 1893. Thegame, which was described

at the time as "the greatest contest from first to last ever

20

played on an American field," saw Princeton defeat Yale

6-0. Davis described the scene in the Princeton dressing
room after the game:

One of the Princeton coaches came into the
room out of this mob, and holding up his arm
for Silence, said, "Boys, I want you to Sing
the doxology." And standing as they were,
naked and covered with mud and blood and
perspiration, the eleven men who had won the
championship sang the doxology from the
beginning to the end as solemnly and as
seriously, and, I am sure, as sincerely, as
they ever did in their lives, while outside
the no less thankful fellow-Students yelled
and cheered, and beat at the doors and windows,
and howled for them to come out and Show them-
selves. This may strike some pe0p1e as a
very sacrilegious performance, and as a most
imprOper one, but the spirit in which it was
done has a great deal to do with the question,
and any one who has seen a defeated team

lying on the benches of their dressing-room
sobbing, like hysterical schoolegirls, can
understand how great and how serious is the joy
of victory to the men who conquer.

The rage for college football was fostered by the Spirit
of muscular Christianity which stemmed from Rugby and "Tom

Brown's School Days" in England. The football player in late

L A—HkAA _L¥ A AfluflflA.—L__u_‘

20Caspar Whitney, "Amateur Sport" column, Harper's
Weekly, XXXVII (December 9, 1893), p. 1184.

21Richard Harding Davis, "The Thanksgiving—Day Game,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (December 9, 1893), p. 1171.

 

89

nineteenth century America was continually reminded of the
moral aspects of athletics. Charles Kendall Adams pointed
to the fact that a great change had taken place in college

life Since the advent of athletics. Writing in The Forum in

 

1890, Adams declared that "there is vastly less of riotous
disorder in our colleges than there was a generation ago."
The reason for this, he observed, lay "very largely, if not
chiefly, in the moral power of regularly-prescribed gymnastic
exercise and athletic Sports." What is obvious after a close
inspection of the game of football, he said, "is the fact
that it calls into active effort the mental and moral, no

22 "The

less than the bodily, faculties of the players."

true spirit in football," said a writer in Outing, "is

absolute integrity and fairness in players and playing, and

the dash and determination which can be built on that basis."23
Although the exponents of football and other inter-

collegiate sports emphasized the moral aSpects of athletics,

there were numerous critics who presented a mass of evidence

to the contrary. The brutality of football and the growing

professionalism in the Sport did not support the contention

that the "moral" side of the game was flourishing. "The

22Charles Kendall Adams, "Moral Aspects of College
Life," The Forum, VIII (February, 1890), pp. 672, 674.

23Harmon S. Graves, "Army and Navy Football: The True
Spirit of Play," Outing, XXXVII (January, 1901), p. 453.

 

90

deaths caused directly by football-playing," one report
read, "are as numerous in proportion to the numbers engaged

as in a skirmish in real war."24

Andrew D. White, the former
president of Cornell, said that "the Sight of a confused mass
of educated young men making batter-rams of their bodies,
plunging their heads into each other's stomachs, piling
upon each other's ribs, or maiming each other for life,
--sometimes indeed, . . . killing each other, --in the presence
of a great mass of Screaming, betting bystanders, many among
them utterly disreputable, is to me a brutal monstrosity."25
Even Caspar Whitney, one of the foremost advocates of
the game, was forced to admit in 1895 that, "when I consider
the condition of affairs this moment over the whole country
in football alone I am compelled to acknowledge that it is
a criticism of the severest kind on the morality of the

."26 Charles Eliot Norton did not

young men of America, .
equivocate in his statement on the subject: "The manners
and morals displayed in intercollegiate contests in athletic
sports in all parts of the country fall little Short of a

national disgrace, . . ." They result, he said, "not only

24"Brutal Football,” The Youth's Companion, LXXI
(December 2, 1897), p. 610.

25Andrew D. White, "How to Choose a College," The
Youth's Companion, LXIV (August 27, 1891), p. 462.

26Caspar Whitney, "Amateur Sport" column, Harper's
Weekly, XXXIX (November 23, 1895), p. 1124.

 

 

91

from the character of the contestants, but from that of the
community at large from which they are drawn, and which
encourages the barbaric instincts of youth by its indifference
to fair play, and by the excess of its hysteric applause of
victory won by any means, fair or foul. The intercollegiate
game has become an evil not only in college life, but in
the life of the nation itself, . ."27
Many college presidents maintained that football was
worthwhile, but insisted that reforms were necessary for

the sport to survive in American colleges.28

Despite
efforts to eliminate the brutality and the abuses of the
game in the 1890's, the football controversy continued and
the furor reached new heights in the early years of the
twentieth century. "It is a fact that modern life demands
courage," Ira Hollis wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1902,
"and that football develops it; nevertheless it is foolish
to risk life and limb in a game because it teaches physical
courage." The author also took issue with the view that
football was particularly valuable in training men for

29

military service. Serious injuries and deaths in the sport

27Charles Eliot Norton, "Some ASpects of Civilization
in America," ThegFgrum, XX (February, 1896), pp. 645-646.

28"Are Foot-Ball Games Educative or Brutalizing,"
The Forum, XVI (January, 1894), pp. 647-654.

29Ira N. Hollis, "Intercollegiate Athletics,"
Atlantic Monthly, XC (October, 1902), p. 540.

V

 

 

 

92

reached such ominous proportions in 1905 that President
Roosevelt threatened to abolish football if the colleges did
not institute the necessary reforms in the game.

AS a result of Roosevelt's action, which included a
White House conference with athletic representatives from
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, reforms were made in the game
which established football as a relatively safe sport.
Roosevelt was an advocate of the strenuous ideal in football,
and he did not object to the roughness of the game, but he

30

was firmly opposed to the brutality and foul play. "The

sports especially dear to a vigorous and manly nation,"

Roosevelt had written several years earlier, "are always

those in which there is a certain slight element of risk."31

Although it may have seemed otherwise at times, Roosevelt
always maintained a sensible view of athletics, and he fre-

quently expressed his views on the necessity of keeping the

role of sport in proper perspective.32

+g“—‘ A‘ A _‘

30Frederick Rudolph, The Amprigan College and_Uni-
versity: A History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,91962), pp. 374-
. u o p s c apter on "The Rise of Football" is an excel-
lent treatment of the development of the game and its relation
to its college setting in America. Also see Allison Danzig,
The History of American Football (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1956).

31Theodore Roosevelt, "Value of an Athletic Training,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (December 23, 1893), p. 1236.

32Ibid; Theodore Roosevelt, ”Professionalism in
Sports," North American Review, CLI (August, 1890), pp. 187-
191.

 

 

 

 

93

Although the future of the game was seriously in doubt
in 1905, football survived the controversy to become the
major college Sport in the twentieth century. Even by 1900
it was apparent that football occupied a special place in
sports, as Harmon S. Graves indicated when he said in 1901
that "football is unquestionably the representative American
college game. It has been wholly developed by college men,
and they have naturally furnished its highest exponents."33
It is not surprising that a game such as football develOped
when it did--in the strenuous age of the late nineteenth
century. Many Americans in the era of Theodore Roosevelt
adhered to the view eXpressed in Outing magazine in 1900: ,
"Football is the expression of the strength of the Anglo-
Saxon. It is the dominant spirit of a dominant race, and to
this it owes its p0pularity and its hopes of permanence."34

Football contributed greatly to the heroic image of
American manhood which was celebrated at the turn of the
century under the vogue of the strenuous life. The football
player was elevated to the status of national hero in American

society. An example of this hero-making process was the poem

"The Foot-ball Heroes," which appeared in Leslie's Weekly in

 

1899:

 

33Graves, op. cit., p. 453. Also see Walter Camp,
"Football up to Date," The Century Magazine, LXXIX (November,
1909), pp. 61-73.

 

34W. Cameron Forbes, "The Football Coache's Relation
to the Players," Outing, XXXVII (December, 1900), p. 339.

94

Princeton, and Yale, and Harvard,
And every brave college team
From the hills of old New England
To the soft Suwanee's stream,
Here's to your brawn and sinew,
To your hearts so stout and true.
Oh, where would our Deweys and Roosevelts be
If they tried to tackle you?
And they are but Shining examples
Of the lads we all love and admire,
Ready with muscles of iron
For the scrimmage of blood and fire;
Ready to tackle the foeman
Alike upon land and on sea,
Columbia, these are thy jewels,
Thy heroes of battles to be!35

The newspaper sports page, which was just then coming
into its own, covered intercollegiate athletics fully and
completely, and made the names of outstanding football players
known in households throughout the country. Not only did the
football players become public idols, but also the great
coaches of the game achieved fame. Walter Camp of Yale was
the first famous football coach. "There is only one man in
New Haven," Richard Harding Davis wrote in the 1890's, "of
more importance than Walter Camp, and I have forgotten his
36

name. I think he is the president of the university."

Camp took the lead in promoting intercollegiate athletics.

 

35John Paul Bocock, "The Foot-ball Heroes," Leslie's
Weekly, LXXXVIII (January 5, 1899), p. 7.

36Richard Harding Davis, "A Day With the Yale Team,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (November 18, 1893), p. 1110.

 

95

The great success of his Yale teams established him as the
leading authority on the game of football, and his
numerous articles on the subject helped to popularize the
sport.

It was at Yale that the mighty Frank Merriwell
performed his heroic deeds, both on and off the athletic
field. Merriwell, the fictional creation of Gilbert M.
Patten, captured the imagination of American youth in
the 1890's and early 1900's. Writing as "Burt L. Standish,"
Patten made the name of Frank Merriwell synonymous with
the Strenuous ideal in sport. There was no Sport at
which Frank did not excel, and no big game he could not
win for Yale when the chips were down. His heroic feats
on the gridiron and on the baseball diamond (as a pitcher
he could throw a ball that curved twice) became legend.
Morality was also a part of the Merriwell legend. He
was the model of the clean-living sportsman, setting the
example which would be emulated by countless numbers of
American boys for years to come. Frank was manly. He
possessed all of those virtues of manliness which Roose-
velt and his contemporaries so heartily admired. As the
great fictional exemplar of the strenuous life, Frank Merri-
well had a tremendous impact upon the generation which
read him. Counted among his admirers were such diverse

figures as Jack Dempsey, Fredric March, Woodrow Wilson,

96
Babe Ruth, Al Smith, and Wendell Willkie.37
Frank Merriwell demonstrated that clean living was
vital to success in sports. He did not smoke, drink, or
swear, and he performed heroically in games where others who
did could never match him in stamina and ability. Injuries
in football did not deter him. In the last seconds of one
of the "big games" against Harvard, Frank, despite great
pain, recovered a fumble and raced down the field toward
the goal line. "Had Frank been at his best," Patten reminds
the reader, "he would have crossed the Harvard line without
again being touched, . . ." Because of his injuries, how-
ever, he was not at his best, and he was tackled on the ten
yard line by Hollender of Harvard. Instead of going down
though, Frank kept his balance and, with legs churning,
plunged forward: "He felt hands clinging to him, and, with
all the fierceness he could summon, he strove to break
away and go on. His lips were covered with a bloody foam,
and there was a frightful glare in his eyes. He strained
and strove to get a little farther, and he actually dragged
Hollender along the ground till he broke the fellow's hold.
Then he reeled across Harvard's line and fell." The game

won, Frank had to be carried from the field, placed in

3 37Robert H. Boyle, S ort--Mirror of American Life
(Boston: Little, Brown, 6 Co., I953i, pp. 241-246; RusseI B.
Nye, "The Juvenile Approach to American Culture, 1870-1930,"

New Voices in American Studies, ed. R.B. Brown, D.M. Winkle-
man, 89H} Allen (Purdue University Studies, 1966), pp. 75-76.

 

97

bed, and treated by a doctor. After he had recovered
sufficiently to talk, his jubilant teammates crowded around
his bed, congratulating him and praising his heroism in
winning the game. His modesty, however, prevailed as
always, and he replied: "No, not We all did it. Think
how the boys fought! It was splendid! And that was the
best eleven Harvard ever put on the field. Oh, what a
glorious Thanksgiving!"38
Winning the big game was Frank's forte. In baseball he
made the Yale varsity team as a freshman, and in the game
against Harvard his ability as a pitcher was put to the
test. Not only did he pitch his team out of serious trouble,
but in the last of the ninth inning he hit a long ball
into left field, thereby providing an opportunity to win
the game on the basis of his Speed and skill as a base

runner. He rounded third and headed toward home plate in

a desperate attempt to beat the throw to the catcher:

Boyle, op. cit., pp. 264-265.

98

"Slide!"
That word Frank heard above all the commotion.
He did slide. Forward he scooted in a cloud
of dust. The catcher got the ball and put it
onto Frank--an instant too late!
A sudden Silence.
"Safe home!" rang the voice of the umpire
Then another roar, louder, wilder, full of
unbounded joy! The Yale cheer! The band drowned
by all the uproar! The sight of sturdy lads in
blue, delirious with delight, hugging a dust-
covered youth, lifting him to their Shoulders,
and bearing him away in triumph. Merriwell had
won his own game, and his record was made. It
was a glorious finish!39
Winning in the Frank Merriwell tradition inspired many
American boys in sports in the twentieth century. The
strenuous concept ofgiving one's all in games, but within
the context of a Spirit of fair play was the great legacy of
the Merriwell series. One played fiercely in Sports, but
one played fairly. Above all, one did not give up when the
going got rough. On this point the author of the Merriwell
stories Spoke in Rooseveltian terms: "Do not quit. Above
all things else, do not be a quitter. The boys who have a
large amount of stick-to-it-iveness invariably develop into
men who persist against all obstacles and succeed in the
struggle of life. They rise above their companions and
surroundings, and are pointed out as successful men."
"Quitters," Patten said, "become ordinary men, followers of

their more persistent and determined fellows." Furthermore,

39Gilbert M. Patten, Frank Merriwell at Yale (Phila-
delphia: David McKay, ca., 19 , pp. - .

99

he observed that quitters "never rise to hold positions of
trust and influence. At least, if one ever does rise through
chance to hold such a position, it almost invariably happens
that sometime his original weakness causes him to fail and
fall. He is not a stayer."40
The Merriwell series, which began in 1896, was a cele-
bration of American college life as much as it was a testi-
mony to the virtues of the athletic competitor. As such,
it was representative of a literary genre which flourished
between 1890 and World War I which depicted the glamour of

college student life. Out of these years came, in addition

to Patten's Frank Merriwell, Owen Johnson's Stover at Yale

 

and George Fitch's Siwash stories. The period produced an
image of college life which lingered far into the twentieth
century. It evoked memories of carefree student days amidst
the congenial atmosphere of ivy-covered walls and familiar
campus walkways, of soft autumn afternoons and glee club
concerts, of the singing of the Whiffenpoof song with a glass
of beer at Mory's, of dying "for dear old Rutgers," of

reading Kipling and Stevenson, of fraternity functions, Spring

41

dances, and pep rallies. It was this image of college life

40Quoted in Nye, op. cit., p. 77.

41Ernest Earnest, Academic Procession: An Informal
History of the American College,_1636;1953 iInd1anapoI1s:
Hobbs-Merrill Co., 1953), pp. 230-235. Also see John O. Lyons,
The College Novel in America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

UniverS1ty Press, 1962).

 

100

which evoked the sentimental nostalgias of alma mater, As

 

M.A. de Wolfe Howe, Jr., remarked, a college man's memories

would probably be, more often than not, those "not of lec-

tures and the wisdom of the ages, but of the spring and

autumn evenings on the campus, the winter nights of informal

supper and song in jolly rooms, the old good-fellowship of

bygone days."42
It was as a part of this image of college life that the

competitive spirit of intercollegiate athletics was p0pular-

ized, and the manly image which this Spirit promoted was

tempered by an allegiance to the turn of the century values

of the strenuous life. The Strenuous ideal in organized

sport received its most enthusiastic following in inter-

collegiate athletics. "So long as college athletics build

up the physique of our youth," Walter Camp wrote in 1893,

"so long as they teach self-control, temperance, and courage,

so long as money considerations and dishonesty do not enter

into them, they will form a valuable feature of college life."43

Advocates of Sport stressed the idea that the manly image

fostered by athletics provided a general uplifting of the

moral tone of student life. J.H. Sears said in TheAYouthLS

 

Companion that ”the athletic men, standing as they do before

 

42M.A. de Wolfe Howe, Jr., "Curious College Customs,"
The Youth's Companion, LXVI (May 25, 1893), p.266.

43Walter Camp, "College Athletics," The Century
Magazine, XLVI (June, 1893), p. 210.

 

 

101

their college mates, are in a measure examples to the body
of the students. Their regularity, their temperance, their
zeal andgood standing in studies serve to increase the
morality and the temperance of the entire university."44
Crucial to the manly image in sport at the turn of the
century were the developing concepts of sportsmanship.
Writers on the subject attempted to define the code of the

"sportsman” and sought to make it conform to the gentlemanly

ideal in American society. Harper's Round#Table declared

 

that "a true 'Sportsman' is always a gentleman by instinct,
if not by birth and education, and he engages in sport for

45

sport's sake only." Commenting on the football Situation,

Walter Camp observed that "rules will not make a gentle-

46 Caspar Whitney, the foremost

manly game. But men may."
Sports writer of the period, attempted to define "the sporting
spirit" in this fashion: "Be it understood that, shorn

of the outward and visible signs of Sport, the Sportsman is
Simply a fair-minded, manly-acting, outspoken, courteous

gentleman--and I mean gentleman in the sense that implies

natural instinct, not clothes and general outward appearance.

44J.H. Sears, "Athletic Training at Harvard," The
Youth's Companion, LXVI (June 15, 1893), p. 306.

45"Interscholastic Sport" column, Harper's Round
Table, XVII (November 5, 1895), p. 17.

46Wa1ter Camp, "Football. Review of Season of 1894,"
Outing, XXVII (October, 1895), p.88.

 

 

102

Many a good sportsman I have known in cowhide boots and with
a somewhat limited vocabulary." Whitney pointed to "four
attributes essential to sportsmanship--first, sport for
sport's sake; second, fair play; third, playing the game
out; fourth, courtesy to a worthy adversary."47
In an article entitled "The Sporting Spirit. Ancient
and Modern," which appeared in Outing in 1900, George
Hibbard stressed the strenuous ideal in his analysis of the
sporting Spirit: "Play the game out! There it is--p1ay
it out. Do notgive up because things go awry, but try to
set them right, for that is not only the more dignified
course, but the true way of the Sporting spirit. The man
who 'sulks' is false to others and false to himself, and the
Sporting spirit forbids all falsity and weakness." Hibbard
also emphasized the necessity for a fair fight in a Sporting
contest. "The chances must be equal," he said, "and then,
and then only, all may be done for victory. This great
principle runs through the requirements of all the range of

Sport." Hibbard also linked the strenuous theme in sports

to the national strenuosity displayed in the Spanish-American

47Caspar Whitney, "The Way of the Sportsman" column,
Outing, XXXVI (June, 1900), p. 315. John Corbin also commented
on the topic in "The Modern Chivalry," The Atlantichgnthly,
LXXXIX (May, 1902), pp. 601-611. He declared that "the bare
struggle for existence exacts strength and masterhood, but
to live in the fair name of a Sportsman it is necessary to
rise to Spiritual heights." Of athletic sports, he said:
". . . like the chivalry of old, they afford the most generally

available school for the humanities of living." p. 604.

103

War: "It now may be admitted this was a 'sporting' war.
And in the answers to the questions that have been left--
the questions of imperialism and expansion--the sporting
Spirit in these days is having a great deal to say, for

there is a great deal of the spirit of Sport in the Spirit

of Jingoism."48

III

Sport was useful in explaining the temper of the times,
it seemed. The most popular sport in America was baseball,
and Mark Twain said that it was "the very symbol, the out-
ward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush
and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth

century." Baseball, as the great "national game," offered

48George Hibbard, "The Sporting Spirit. Ancient and
Modern," Outing, XXXVI (September, 1900), pp. 599-601. The
results of years of Sporting activity in America were summed
up by Price Collier in 1901. He observed that "we have gone
a long way toward the goal of manliness in our sports and
pastimes. . . . Not only may those who are professionally
interested and those who are participants in playing games
feel encouraged, but every man who loves his country wisely
will welcome any proof that men are more manly than they
were. . . . It iS something gained that thousands of our boys
are being taught to play with all their might, to play fair,
and to win if they can. A lad who has had ten years of such
training can scarcely fail to retain something of that same
spirit when he comes to take part in the real contests of
life." "The Ethics of Ancient and Modern Athletics," The
Forum, XXXII (November, 1901), p. 318. _——

104

countless numbers of Americans opportunities for expressing
the values of the strenuous life. As one historian of the
game has observed, baseball provided "all the vicarious,
atavistic satisfactions of combat, even though it be in the
form of a sham battle between two groups of paid performers."49

By 1900 professional baseball was firmly established as an

aspect of the American scene. This was the era of Casey at

 

the Bat, Slide, Kelley, Slide!, and Spalding[s#Official

 

 

 

Base Ball Guide. The heroes of the period included Cy Young,

 

John McGraw, and Honus Wagner.

Baseball captured the interest of Americans of all ages.
Helen M. North, in writing of the Sport for young people,
observed in 1890 that "from the small boy of the neighbor-
hood 'nine' to the mature man who eagerly watches the game
in which the infirmities of age alone prevent him from
participating, the masculine American is thoroughly interested
in the game of base-ball." "The feminine American, too," she

50

added, "begins to grow interested." "Baseball," the his-

torian Frederic L. Paxson wrote, "succeeded as an organized
Spectator Sport, but it did also what neither racing nor boxing
could do; it turned the city lot into a playground and the small

boy into an enthusiastic player,"51

49Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 347.

50Helen M. North, "About Base-Balls and Base-Ball,"
The Youth's Companion, LXIII (March 20, 1890), p. 154.

51

 

 

Paxson, 0p. cit., p. 103.

105

The active role taken by American youth in the game
of baseball represented the ideal kind of sporting activity
of which Theodore Roosevelt approved. Participation,
Roosevelt emphasized, was the important thing in Sports.
Commenting on baseball as a spectator game, he said that
"the only good resulting from seeing a battle between two
paid professional nines is the emulation excited in the
minds of the younger portion of the onlookers to try their

own hands at the bat."52

Roosevelt was critical of pro-
fessionalism in sports. "Our object," he said, "is to get
as many of our people as possible to take part in manly,
_hea1thy, vigorous pastimes, which will benefit the whole
nation; it is not to produce a limited class of athletes

who Shall make it the business of their lives to do battle
with one another for the popular amusement." Roosevelt was
concerned that the American people adopt the proper approach
to sports. He pointed out to his countrymen that "the
existence of a caste ongladiators in the midst of a popu-
lation which does not itself participate in any manly sports
is usually, as it was at Rome, a symptom of national deca-

dence."53

52Roosevelt, "Value of an Athletic Training," g2.
cit., p. 1236.

53Roosevelt, Professionalism in Sports," op. cit.,
pp. 190-191.

106

Roosevelt encouraged especially those sports which
developed "such qualities as courage, resolution, and
endurance," and these he believed, largely fell outside the
realm of organized athletics. "The best of all sports for
this purpose," he said, "are those which follow the Mace-
donian rather than the Greek model: big-game hunting,
mountaineering, the chase with horse and hound, and wilderness
life with all its keen, hardy pleasures. The hunter and
mountaineer lead healthier liveS--in time of need they would
make better soldierS--than the trained athlete."54

For some, the values of the strenuous life were realized
primarily within the realm of organized sport. For others,
such as Roosevelt, the strenuous ideal was achieved through
contact with the wilderness. The outdoor movement which
swept the nation at the turn of the century invited the
exercise of the strenuous life. It was in "the great out-

doors" that many Americans sought to cultivate the values

embodied in Roosevelt's philosophy.

Chapter V

The Vigorous Life of the Great Outdoors

"This rise of outdoor sports,” wrote Caspar Whitney in
1900, ”is not a craze that will presently subside and leave
us cooped up indoors again with our flannels and our grog and
doctor's prescriptions. . . . We have gone outdoors to engage
in this stimulating, muscle building play because our Anglo-
Saxon instincts draw us toward it and we are outdoors to stay."1
The outdoor movement which gripped America at the turn of the
century was of such intensity that it indeed seemed that Ameri-
cans who could afford to do so were "outdoors to stay." Every-
where people of the urban middle and upper class were leaving

the confines of the office, factory, and home, for recreation

and activity in "the great outdoors."2 "We love the Open air

 

1Caspar Whitney, "Outdoor Sports--What They Are Doing
For Us," The Independent, LII (June 7, 1900), p. 1362. In a
similar vein Dallas L. Sharp declared that "this so-called na-
ture movement is peculiarly American. No such general, wide-
spread turning to the out-of-doors is seen anywhere else; no
other such body of nature literature as ours, no other people so
close to nature in sympathy and understanding, because there is
no other people of the same degree of culture that is living so

 

 

close to the real, wild out-of-doors.” See ”Our Uplift Through
Outdoor Life," The World's Work, VIII (July, 1904), p. 5044.
2

For a comprehensive study of the outdoor movement see
Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban
America (New York: OxfOrd University Press, 1969)T' Examples of
the many contemporary articles on various aspects of the subject
are: Francis W. Halsey, "The Rise of the Nature Writers," The
American Monthly Review of Reviews, XXVI (November, 1902),—pp.
567-571; Henry Litchfield“WESt, "American Out-Door Literature,"
The Forum, XXIX (July, 1900), pp. 632-640; "Out of Doors," The
Century—Magazine, LVIII (June, 1899), p. 321; Ed. W. Sandys,
"Camps and Camp1ng," Outin , XXX (July, 1897), pp. 373-379; and
Frederick McCormick, "Outgoing Ways," Outing, XXXVI (August,
1900), pp. 525-528.

 

 

 

 

107

108

for itself, and are contented with it," declared a writer

in the Atlantic Monthly. "This sweet, fresh renewal that

 

comes from contact with nature is felt even by people who

have little imagination or sensibility, who abhor solitude,

and certainly would not choose the country as an abiding-place.
In summer the whole population flocks to the mountains and

salt water, and they are not quite the same there as at home."3
Urban Americans were flocking to "the great outdoors" for
reasons of recreation, health, and spiritual renewal, and

also because many, especially the exponents of the strenu-

ous cult, found in the outdoor movement the antidote for
"overcivilization."

It is not surprising that "overcivilization" aroused
widespread concern in middle and upper class America in the
late nineteenth century. An intellectual current of the per-
iod was one that has been termed "the cataclysmic vision,"
forecasting social catastrophe and the doom of civilization.
This view represented one intellectual response to the rapid
transformation of American society which occurred after the
Civil War. The impact of the changes wrought by industrialism,
urbanization, immigration, and labor organization unsettled
American life. The strains and tensions imposed by this rapid

transformation of society and the accompanying social evils

 

3Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., ”The American Out of Doors,"
Atlantic Monthly, LXXI (April, 1893), pp. 455-456.

 

109

gave rise to political and social protest movements by the
end of the century, and they also gave rise to the pessimism
of cataclysmic thought.4

Intellectual America in the 1890's became preoccupied with

works such as Max Nordau's Degeneration and Brooks Adams's Law

 

of Civilization and Decay. Nordau declared that many European

 

literary figures and artists were degenerate, and suggested
that the social order was rapidly losing its vitality. Degen-
eration was translated into English in 1895 and the American

press was deluged with reviews and discussions of the book.5

In the same year The Law of Civilization and Decay appeared,

 

formulating a theory of history that in some respects antici-

pated Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Adams traced

 

the rise and fall of civilizations on the basis of the scien-
tific principle of the law of force and energy. Human socie-

ties, according to Adams, experienced various phases of

 

4Frederic C. Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters: Cata-
clysmic Thought in America, 188551918 (New York: The'Free
Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 3-32, 158-187.

 

 

5John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture
in the 1890's," The Origins of Modern Consciousness, ed. John
Weiss (Detroit: wayne State’University Press, 1965), p. 38.
For a contemporary examination of the question, see Charles L.
Dana, "Are We Degenerating?" The Forum, XVIX (June, 1895),
pp. 458-465. To a great extent "degeneration" and "overcivil-
ization" were reactions to the decadence movement of the nine-
ties. On this tOpic, and for discussions of leading figures
of the movement such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, see
Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York: Macmillan Co.,
1941) and Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959).

 

 

 

 

110

centralization through the expenditure and accumulation of
energy, but "a race must, sooner or later, reach the limit
of its martial energy, when it must enter on the phase of
economic competition." It was this economic phase, Adams
Said, which posed the danger of decay: "In this last stage of
consolidation, the economic, and perhaps, the scientific intel-
lect is propagated, while the imagination fades, and the emo-
tional, the martial, and the artistic types of manhood de-
cay. ."6
This was obviously intended as a message for late nine-
teenth century American civilization, and Adams's book was
widely discussed in intellectual circles.7 Perhaps more typ-
ical of the widespread concern regarding the threat of "over-
civilization," however, was an article by Henry Childs Merwin,

entitled "On Being Civilized Too Much," in the June, 1897,

issue of the Atlantic Monthly:

 

There are in all of us certain natural impulses,
or instincts, which furnish in large measure the
Springs of human conduct; and these impulses, or
instincts, as they may be called with some exag-
geration, are apt to be dulled and weakened by
civilization. . . . Pursue the process a little
further, and soon you will have a creature who
is what we call over-SOphisticated and effete,

 

6Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943;7Preface, 2nd ed.), pp. 60, 61.

 

7See, for example, Theodore Roosevelt's review of
Adams's book in The Forum, XXII (January, 1897), pp. 575-
589. Roosevelt,511ke Adams, was concerned for the future
of civilization, but he rejected Adams's pessimism.

 

111

In fact, however, every step in civilization

is made at the expense of some savage strength

or virtue.

The sensible people, the well-educated, respect-

able people of the day are almost sure to be on

the wrong Side of every great moral question when

it first arises.

Leave the close air of the office, the library,

or the club and go out into the streets and the

highway. Consult the teamster, the farmer, the

wood-chOpper, the shepherd, or the drover.

From his loins, and not from those of the dilet-

tante, will spring the man of the future. 8

The call to break out of the stuffy confines of the city

and return to nature became the standard prescription of those
who would treat the maladies of the "overcivilized" man.
Closely related to this phenomenon was the American view of
wilderness, which was then in a state of transition. Tradi-
tionally the wilderness had been viewed as an alien area to
be conquered and civilized. Now, near the end of the nine-
teenth century, perceiving the end of the frontier and the
increasing, often vague, discontent with civilization, Ameri-
cans came to appreciate the wilderness as a place to be pre-
served and enjoyed. There developed a remarkable preoccupa-
tion in the 1890's and early 1900's with that which was primi-
tive and savage. Out of this transition of American thought

and feeling at the turn of the century came a variety of

developments related to the strenuous life: the Boy Scout

 

8Henry Childs Merwin, "On Being Civilized Too Much,"
Atlantic Monthly, LXXIX (June, 1897), pp. 838, 839, 842,
846.

 

112

movement, the conservation movement, the new emphasis on "out-
door life" in American magazines, the rise of the "nature

writers" such as John Burroughs and John Muir, as well as a

turning to the cult of the primitive.9

John Muir wrote of this new attitude toward nature:

The tendency nowadays to wander in wildernesses
is delightful to see. Thousands of tired, nerve-
shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find
out that going to the mountains is going home; that
wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks
and reservations are useful not only as fountains
of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains
of life. Awakening from the stupefying effects
of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy
of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix
and enrich their own little ongoings with those of
Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.10

The "back to nature" movement was vigorously promoted
in the nation's leading periodicals. Americans were exhorted
to turn away from civilization and seek spiritual renewal in
the great outdoors. "Nature is a middle ground between God
and man; it is the playground of the Soul," declared The Out-

lOok. "There is no better approach to truth than going into

 

 

9Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New
Haven: Yale University Press,91967), pp. 141-160. Also see
Nash's "The American Cult of the Primitive," American Quarterly,
XVIII (Fall, 1966), pp. 517-537.

 

 

10John Muir, ”The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations
of the West," Atlantic Monthly, LXXXI (January, 1898), pp. 15-
16. On Muir as a conservationist and founder of the Sierra
Club, see Holway R. Jones, John Muir and the Sierra Club: The
Battle for Yosemite (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965). The
view of conservation as scientific management is presented in
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The
Progressive ConservatiOn7M0vement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard
UnIVersity Press, 1959).

 

 

 

 

 

113

the fields with the open mind and the quick imagination; no
better way of throwing off the cares of life and renewing that
spirit of freshness which is the most precious possession of
men who deal with problems and questions of all sorts."11

George S. Evans, writing in Overland Monthly, struck a similar

 

note: "You think of the civilization you have left behind.
Seen through the eyes of the wilderness, how stupid and inane
it all seems. The mad eagerness of money-seeking men, the
sham pleasures of conventional society, the insistence upon
the importance of being in earnest over trifleS, pall on you
when you think of them.” Evans also celebrated the strenuous
experience of wilderness life: "Whenever the light of civil-
ization falls Upon you with a blighting power, and work and
pleasure become stale and flat, go to the wilderness. The
wilderness will take hold on you. It will give you good red
blood; it will turn you from a weakling into a man."12
The wilderness, many believed, could also help turn boys
into men. Shortly after the turn of the century Ernest Thomp-
son Seton and Daniel Carter Beard promoted the idea of teaching

outdoor skills to city boys. Seton's Woodcraft Indians and

Beard's Sons of Daniel Boone and Boy Pioneers paved the way

 

11"Back to Nature," The OuthOka LXXIV (June 6: 1903),
pp. 305, 306.

 

12George S. Evans, "The Wilderness," Overland Monthly,
XLIII (January, 1904), pp. 32, 33.

 

114

for the organization of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.
The movement Spread rapidly, based on the premise that "the
boys in our modern life, and especially in our cities and vil-
lages, do not have the chance, as did the boys of the past

to become strong, self-reliant, resourceful and helpful,
and to get acquainted with nature and outdoor life, without

Special guidance and training."13

The Boy Scout movement was
a product of urban America, and it suggested that boys must
be made immune to the dangers of "overcivilization." In the
first Scout Handbook Seton pointed to the ”degeneracy" which
had accompanied industrialization and urbanization. American
boys, he said, could counteract this trend thrOUgh the contact
with outdoor life which Scouting provided.l4 Many of the values
of the strenuous life were institutionalized in the Boy Scouts
of America, and generation after generation of American boys
aspired to deve10p those values as a means of achieving man-
liness.

Seton's reference to "degeneracy" in the Boy Scout Hand-
book reflected another aspect of the concern regarding "over-
civilization." This involved the effects of industrialization

and urbanization on health. Articles such as "Nervousness:

The National Disease of America"15 constantly reminded the

 

13Quoted from a scouting pamphlet in Schmitt, gp.
cit., p. 109.

14Quoted in Nash, op, cit., pp_ 147-148.

15Edward Wakefield, "Nervousness: The National Dis-
ease of America," McClure's Magazine, II (February, 1894),
pp. 302-307.

 

115

public of the state of the national health. In 1895 the Health
Commissioner of New York declared that "in no nation at any
time have the demands on the nervous forces been as great as

in these United States.” He pointed to Signs of increased ner-
vous disorders in children (partly as a result of being around
nervous parents), and urged that exercise be made an integral

part of school life.16

The spokesmen for the strenuous life
were ever ready to boast of the healthful aspects of outdoor
sport, as did Alexander Hunter when he proclaimed in Harper's
Weekly: "It is an established fact that a sportsman is a rare
patient of the doctor. His tonic is the Open air, his 'nerve
restorative' drawn from the spicy odors of the wood and field,
and his general 'tone' and temperament seem to be in accord-
l7

ance with the sunny, patient forces of nature."

From Forest and Stream came this advice to American men:

 

"Hie thee to the fields and the woods and the streams, 0 man!
that thou mayest get a little tan on thy cheeks and sufficient
muscle in thine arm to hug thy wife with seemly and becoming
vigor. Of what use is a pale jellyfish of a creature to any
woman on the tOp of the earth?" The author declared that most
men had a one-sided view of the world: "--it is of bricks and

mortar, smoke and grime, money-chasing; recreation taken among

 

16Cyrus Edson, "Nervous Exhaustion in Children," The
Youth's Companion, LXVIII (February 7, 1895), p. 67.

 

17Alexander Hunter, "The Increase of Sportsmen,”
Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (February 18, 1893), p. 167.

 

116

the rustling of silks and satins, perhaps, or tinsel, amid
fetid odors from gas and all other abominations." He then
offered the outdoor life as an attractive alternative, cata-
loguing the delights of nature in America. "Go study these,"
he exclaimed. "Drink inspiration from the breast of nature,
and breathe in health at every pore from the wholesome, bal-
sam-laden breezes."l8

Health and recreation were major factors behind the deve-
lopment of playgrounds and public parks in late nineteenth cen-
tury America. In 1891 Brander Matthews observed that "half a
century ago there was scarcely a town in these United States
which had anything that could fairly be called a public park.

Today there are not only parks attached to almost every
city in the union; there are also state parks and national

19 Observers in the 1890's pointed to a revolution in

parks."
urban life as a result of the parks and playgrounds movement
and the new emphasis on sports. Julian Ralph wrote of the ef-
fect of outdoor life and exercise on New Yorkers, emphasizing
particularly the boys of well-to-do families:
At first it was the boys who exhibited the
good effects of the social revolution. Time
was, and not very long ago, when the sturdy -

boys of the metropolis were found in the great-
est numbers in the public schools and the

 

18A.A. Lesueur, "How to Camp Out," Forest and Stream,
XXXVIII (May 12, 1892), p. 444.

 

19Brander Matthews, "Concerning Out-Door Books," The
Cosmopolitan, XI (June, 1891), p. 253.

 

117

districts inhabited by persons in middling cir-
cumstances. The boys in the well-to-do families
were apt to be spare, narrow-chested, and of
such appearance that the more rugged city chil-
dren called them by contemptuous nicknames, all
implying that they were girlish. Such puny lads
are not now anything like being numerous enough
to represent a class. The once derided ”moth-
er's apron-strings" have been woven into tennis
nets, and the hands of the "girl-boys" now grip
baseball and cricket bats. Three months of
country life with "city improvements," and nine
months of 'cycling, boxing, sprinting, and gym-
nastics, have given them muscle and lungs, until
the juvenile crowd in town accept it as an axiom
that a well-dressed lad is worth avoiging when
persecution or mischief is intended.

Ralph's emphasis on the physical transformation of upper
and middle class youth reflected the fact that it was the lei-
sure class which led the way in sports and recreation. "With-
in the last score of years," observed a minister in 1900, "we
have passed into a new social order. A leisure class has
arisen which has time to play. The old prejudice against plea-
sure as being intrinsically evil has broken down nearly every-
where. The Puritan Sabbath has been definitely renounced."21

Following the example of the leisure class the great mass of

the American people also turned increasingly to the new forms

 

20Julian Ralph, "The Spread of Out-Door Life," Har-
per's Weekly, XXXVI (August 27, 1892), p. 830. Also useffiT
on this topic are: Jacob Riis, "Small Parks and Public-School
Play-Grounds," Harper's Weekly, XLI (September 11, 1897), p.
903; "Public Parks and Playgrounds: A Symposium," The Arena,
X (July, 1894), pp. 274-288; and Frank Chapman, "A City Play-
ground," St. Nicholas, XVIII (June, 1891), pp. 609-616.

 

 

 

 

21Rev. S.D. McConnell, "The Moral Side of Golf," The
Outlook, LXV (June 2, 1900), p. 300.

118

of outdoor recreation, as Caspar Whitney indicated: "We may
turn up our noses generally at those who in this country
profess to lead the fashions, but in the matter of showing
the way to healthy, vigorous outdoor play they have set a
fine example and one that has taken a firm hold among the
people. We owe them hunting, yachting, polo, tennis, golf
and a lot more."22
The new zest for outdoor life was reflected in the rise
of the country club in America. The country club, Gustav
Kobbe said, "exists because the American who does business
in a city, or lives there, has been seized with an uncon-
trollable and most commendable desire to be outdoors; and
it promises to be a safety-valve of an overworked Nation."
Writing three years after the Spanish-American War, the
author declared that "if Waterloo was won on the Rugby grid-
iron, it is not impossible that Santiago was captured at
the American country club. For the growth of outdoor amuse-
ment and the consequent increasing physical snap and vigor

of American men and women has been one of the striking

22Caspar Whitney, "Outdoor Sports--What They Are
Doing For Us," op. cit., p. 1362.

119

phenomena of the past decadeon23

In the 1890's Americans of both sexes were engaging in
sports and outdoor activities, and of these various outdoor
attractions none was more popular than cycling. The bicycle
craze of the nineties was a most remarkable phenomenon. "When
the social and economic history of the nineteenth century comes
to be written," stated a writer in The Forum, "the historian can-

not ignore the invention and development of the bicycle."24 From

 

The Century_Magazine came the view that "the bicycle has, in

 

fact, become a necessary part of modern life, and could not be
abandoned without turning the social progress of the world back-
ward." The democratizing influence of the bicycle seemed obvi-
ous: "The bicycle is indeed the great leveler. It puts the

poor man on a level with the rich, enabling him to 'sing the

song of the Open road' as freely as the millionaire, ."25

 

23Gustav Kobbé, "The Country Club and Its Influence
Upon American Social Life," The Outlook, LXVIII (June 1, 1901),
pp. 256, 255. Frank S. Arnett declared that the country club
"has come into existence only Since we have learned to play."
In his view, "the country club has practically changed the en-
tire social life of America. . . . It has been chiefly respon-
sible for the development of gentlemanly Sport." "American
Country Clubs," Munsay's Magazine, XXVII (July, 1902), pp. 481,
482. Also see Caspar Whitney, "The Evolution of the Country
Club," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XC (December, 1894), pp.
16-32; and Wh11neyrs "The Golfer's Canuest of America," Har-
per's New Monthly Magazine, XCV (October, 1897), pp. 695-713.

 

 

 

 

24Henry J. Garrigues, "Woman and the Bicycle," The
Forum, XX (January, 1896), P. 578.

25"The Reign of the Bicycle," The Century Magazine,
XLIX (December, 1894), p. 306.

 

120

Everywhere peOple were taking to the bicycle. Under the

auspices of the League of American Wheelmen, founded in 1880,
riding clubs were organized throughout the land. From city
streets to country lanes cycling enthusiasts were ever active,
finding "in the bicycle a new pleasure in life, a means for
seeing more of the world, a source of better health through
open-air exercise, a bond of comradeship, a method of rapid
locomotion either for business or pleasure, and many other
enjoyments and advantages which they will not relinquish."
It was estimated that a quarter of a million bicycles were sold
in the United States in 1894 and that there were a million bicy-
cle riders in the land.26 In 1897 the League of American Wheel-
men had a membership of 150,000.27

Not only did the bicycle improve physical health, but it

was also credited with having a comparable moral effect. Syl-

vester Baxter wrote in The Arena that "the clean, outdoor life,

 

amid the tonic influences of fresh air, sunshine, and the plea-
sant Sights of nature, remove thousands of young men from the
danger of debasing associations. Temperance is also promoted;
no wheelman can safely use intoxicants, for a cool, clear head
and steady nerves are absolutely essential." Sylvester also

pointed to the beneficent effect of the bicycle Upon women:

 

26Ibid.

 

27A.H. Godfrey, "Cycling Clubs and Their Spheres of
Action,” Outing, XXX (July, 1897), p. 341.

121

"The bicycle has given, as nothing else has, the means for a
healthful exercise combined with delightful recreation, so much
needed by the sex. It has gone far towards emancipating them
from slavish conventionality in both dress and conduct. It
has taught them the advantage of sensible and healthful attire,
It has given them an independence in action approaching
that possessed by their brothers."28
Isaac B. Potter declared that "after a close study of the
question for five years, I am ready to express my belief that
the use of the bicycle will do more to improve the physical
condition of American women, and therefore of the American peo-
ple, than any other agency yet devised." Potter noted that
women, as well as men, Shared the outdoor impulse: "The aver-
age woman loves to be out of doors; she enjoys the change of
scene, the gentle exercise, the delightful companionship of
congenial friends, and the exhilarating benefits of contact
with the pure air and bright sunlight, which the knowledge of
cycling brings within her reach. To the woman, as to the man,
these features, possessed by no other form of sport, comprise
the foundation on which the popularity of the bicycle will

rest."29

 

28Sylvester Baxter, "Economic and Social Influences
of the Bicycle," The Arena, VI (October, 1892), p. 583.

 

29Isaac B. Potter, "The Bicycle Outlook," The Century
Magazine, LII (September, 1896), p. 786.

 

122

Perhaps the most passionate plea for cycling came from

Elizabeth Robins Pennell, who, in an article for St. Nicholas,

 

encouraged young peOple to take to the bicycle to escape from
the city. By jumping on one's bicycle after school, She said,
"off you can go, Slowly and carefully at first, where street-
cars and wagons block the way; but before very long you will
have ridden past the rows of houses, past the Shops, past the
factories; and paved streets will have become country roads;
and you will breathe pure, sweet air; and on all sides you will
see, instead of bricks and mortar, the fresh green of trees and
pastures; and you will carry yourself along at a speed that
will be a pleasure in itself."30
This expression of the exuberance of breaking out of the
stuffy confines of the city and cycling into the countryside
epitomized the outdoor impulse that seized Americans at the
turn of the century. Furthermore, the outdoors beckoned to
American intellectuals as it did to the great mass of urban
Americans. Historian John Higham has observed that William
James and Frederick Jackson Turner "were never so happy as when

."31 Even Henry Adams

they were camping in the wilderness,
was moved by the wilderness eXperience. Having accompanied

explorer and mountain-climber Clarence King on an eXpedition

 

30Elizabeth Robins Pennell, "Cycling," St. Nicholas,
XVII (July, 1890), p. 733.

 

31Higham, op. cit., p. 43.

123

into the Wyoming territory in the early 1870's, Adams wrote:

"To stand on the top of a lofty mountain with a haughty smile

at civilization and a proud consciousness of my own savage free-
doms was a gratifying experience . . . I never felt so lively

and so much in the humor for enjoyment."32

II

Glorification of the great outdoors became the specialty
of a new series of magazines founded in the period. The age
saw the rise of the various periodicals devoted to field sports
and outdoor life, magazines which have continued to delight
American Sportsmen in the twentieth century. The list included,

in addition to Forest and Stream, Sports Afield, Outdoor Life,

 

 

Field and Stream and Outing. Outing was perhaps the most
33

 

influential outdoor magazine at the turn of the century. In
1900 its new editor, Caspar Whitney, outlined the magazine's
editorial policy: "Outing will seek, first of all, to nourish

the out-of—door spirit which has Spread so happily throughout

 

the present generation of Americans. It will strive to bring
its readers closer to nature, . . . It hopes to bring into
3

2Quoted in Hans Huth, Nature and the American: Three
Centuries of Changing Attitudes (Berkely: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1957), p. 152.

 

33John Rickards Betts, "Sporting Journalism in Nine-
teenth-Century America," American Quarterly, V (Spring, 1953),
p. 48.

 

124

the work-a-day lives of its readers the smell of the forests,
the song of the sea, and the spell of the wilderness." Whitney
declared that Outing would stand for conservation and sports-
manship, and then he added: "We believe in the strenuous life."34
Whitney with many of his contemporaries found the pursuit
of the strenuous life to be realized best through grappling with
nature, rather than through the discipline of organized sport.
Whitney's celebration of "the sporting spirit" was couched
in outdoor terms: ”It is the Sporting Spirit which prompts ad-
venture, makes one'S blood tingle with expectancy on facing
dangerous big game, and that sends men up and over desperately
defended trenches. It is the moral uplifting which comes from
fair play even to the beasts of the forests and the birds of
the air. It is the exhilaration of a contest of wits--yours
against your quarry's. It is the thrill of honorable contest.
It is living."35
This view of "the sporting spirit" reflected a passion
for field sportS--the kind of outdoor activity which Roosevelt

always relished. Such enthusiasm was shared by many Americans.

Emerson Hough said that "the field sports of America have done

 

34Caspar Whitney, "What Outing Stands For," Outing,
XXXVI (April, 1900), pp. 91-92.

35Caspar Whitney, "The Sporting Spirit," Outing, XXXVI
(June, 1900), p. 315.

125

much to make the American character what it is, ."36 A1-
exander Hunter echoed Roosevelt's sentiments when he said:
”Above all athletics are hunting and fishing. . . . A tramp

through the heather all day with gun and dog, or a scramble
down the rocky cliff of a granite-walled mountain stream with
rod and reel, is more beneficial than the frenzied rush of a
football game or the arduous pull of a boat-race."37
The strenuous theme was an integral part of the popular-
ization of field sports in the 1880's and 1890's. This was
nowhere more apparent than in the glorification of hunting,
institutionalized by wealthy Eastern hunters through the organ-
ization of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1887. Hunting, a
necessary activity of pioneer life, now acquired a new rationale.

Roosevelt, the founder of the Boone and Crockett Club, defined

the role of the hunt in this fashion in his The Wilderness

 

Hunter:

In hunting, the finding and killing of the game
is after all but a part of the whole. The free,
self-reliant, adventurous life, with its rugged
and stalwart democracy; the wild surroundings,
the grand beauty of the scenery, the chance to
study the ways and habits of the woodland crea-
tureS--all these unite to give to the career of
the wilderness hunter its peculiar charm. The
chase is among the best of all national pastimes;
it cultivates that vigorous manliness for the
lack of which in a nation, as in an individual

 

36Emerson Hough, "If the Prince Came West Again,"
Harper's Weekly, XLIII (April 15, 1899), p. 370.

 

37Alexander Hunter, op. cit., p. 167.

126

the possession of no other qualities can possibly
atone.38

The Boone and Crockett Club played a leading role in
the outdoor movement. The members encouraged big game hunt-
ing, worked diligently for conservation, and promoted the

study of wildlife. The Books of the Boone and Crockett Club,

 

edited by Roosevlt and George Bird Grinnell, were outstanding
collections of writings on life in the great outdoors. The
manly image which the club promoted was that fostered by the
strenuous life. Roosevelt and Grinnell wrote, that "hunting
big game in the wilderness is, above all things, a sport for
a vigorous and masterful peOple. The rifle-bearing hunter,
whether he goes on foot or on horseback, whether he voyages
in a canoe or travels with a dog-Sled, must be sound of body
and firm of mind, and must possess energy, resolution, man-
liness, self-reliance, and capacity for hardy self—help."39
The strenuous lives led by the Boone and Crockett men ex-

emplified the highest ideals of sportsmanship, as Roosevelt

indicated in an ”Amateur Sport" column in Harper's Weekly:

 

”The club is emphatically an association of men who believe
that the hardier and manlier the Sport is the more attrac-

.tive it is, and who do not think that there is any place in

 

38Theodore Roosevelt, The Wilderness Hunta£_(New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1893), p. xiii.

 

39Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell (eds.)
American Big-Game Hunting (New York: Forest and Stream Pub-
liShing Co.,-I893), p. 14.

 

127

the ranks of true sportsmen either for the game-butcher, on

the one hand, or, on the other, for the man who wishes to do

all his shooting in preserves, and to Shirk rOUgh hard work."40
The question of what constituted a "true sportsman"

loomed large in the articulation of the new rationale for

hunting. Caspar Whitney often addressed himself to this topic

in his column for Harper's Weekly and as editor of Outing. In

 

an attack on ”crusting," or the killing of animals trapped in
the snow, Whitney declared that "the same qualities that make
the 'cruster' are found also in the man who plays foul on the
football field, who abuses his horse or dog, or who as manager
or captain of a college team permits the playing of an ineli-
gible man." He observed that in his outdoor trips around the
country he could not "call to mind a sportsman of my acquaint-
ance who had not as a boy and man 'played fair' first and
last. I can remember, on the other hand," he said, ”men who
as boys had not played fair, and as men fell far short of be-
ing sportsmen. If ever I wanted to know a man thoroughly I

.,,41

should go afield with him. The Youth's Companion

 

declared that hunting "may have its useful and legitimate end.
But to kill for the mere sake of killing, or as a test of

marksmanship, or for reputation, is a crime against nature.

 

40Theodore Roosevelt, ”The Boone and Crockett Club,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVII (March 18, 1893), p. 267.

 

41Caspar Whitney, ”An Ignoble 'Sport'," Harper's
Weekly, XXXVII (December 16, 1893), p. 1211.

128

Happily it is going out of fashion. The true sportsman al-
ways condemns it, for he is usually a true gentleman."42
It was the human motivation for hunting that most con-

cerned Frederic Remington, writing about a bear hunt in the
Rocky Mountains. "One never heard of a bear," he said, "which
travelled all the way from New Mexico to Chicago to kill a man,
and yet a man will go three thousand miles to kill a bear--
not for love, or fear, or hate, or meat; for what, then?"
For Remington, a noted exemplar of the strenuous life, "the
spirit of the thing is not hunting but the chase of the bear,
taking one's mind back to the buffalo, or the nobles of the
Middle Ages, who made their 'image of war' with bigger game
than red foxes."43
AS an aspect of the strenuous life, hunting, particularly
the hunting of big game, provided an excellent way for the

martial virtues to be developed and tested in peacetime, while

the human encounter with the primitive environment was

 

42"Sportsmen's Shows," The Youth's Companion, LXXIV
(March 29, 1900), p. 158.

 

43Frederic Remington, "Bear- Chasing in the Rocky
Mountains, " Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XCI (July, 1895),
pp. 251, 247. For other examples of writings on hunting in
the period see Julian Ralph, "Plain Truths About Hunting,"
St. Nicholas, XVIII (August, 1891), pp. 755-759; Theodore
ROOseVEIt, "Buffalo Hunting," St. Nicholas, XVII (December,
1889), pp. 136-143; E.O. Stanard,79r., "HUnting Big Game,"
Harper's Weekly, XLIII (April 15, 1899), pp. 367-369; Walter
McClintocK, "Goat-Hunting in the Rockies," Harper's Weekly,
XLIII (April 15,1899), pp. 385- 386, "Caspar Whitney's Trip
to the Barren Lands, " Har er' S Weekly, XXXIX (April 20,1895),
p. 382, and George Bird GrinneII, "The Present Distribution of
Big Game in America, " Outing, XXXVII (December, 1900), pp. 251- 259.

 

 

 

 

 

129

congenial to the prevailing Darwinian mood. Thus, Caspar
Whitney wrote of the rigours of his first hunt for musk-ox:
". . . I speedily realized that it was to be a survival of
the fittest on this eXpedition, and if I got a musk-ox it

44

would be of my own getting." In The Forest Stewart Edward

 

White wrote of the human strUggle against nature: "The man

in the woods matches himself against the forces of nature.

In the towns he is warmed and fed and clothed so spontaneously

and easily that after a time he perforce begins to doubt him-

self, to wonder whether his powers are not atrOphied from

disuse. And so, with his naked soul, he fronts the wilder-

ness. It is a test, a measuring of strength, a proving of

his essential pluck and resourcefulness and manhood, an as-

surance of man's highest potency, the ability to endure and

to take care of himself."45
Man against nature was a major theme of American litera-

ture at the turn of the century. The young literary natural-

istS--Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London--drew

heavily from the strenuous impulse of the outdoor movement,

with London reigning supreme over the cult of the primitive

in the early years of the twentieth century. London's

 

44Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen
Wister, Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1904), p. 21.

 

4SStewart Edward White, The Forest (New York: The
Outlook Co., 1903), p. 5.

 

130

celebration of the "superman" image in his outdoor adventure
stories was thoroughly Darwinian in tone, and represented the
extreme in strenuosity. Variations on the outdoor theme
were played by such writers as Stewart Edward White, James
Oliver Curwood, and Zane Grey, who followed in London's foot-
steps to become masters of the red-blooded adventure and wild-
erness novels which were so p0pular in the early decades of
the new century.46
This literary genre flourished against the back-drOp of
the real-life adventure of the age--the pitting of man against
the elemental forces of nature. Everywhere around the world
men were frantically pursuing the strenuous life in the struggle
with nature, as if civilization threatened to deprive them of
the experience forever. Joshua Slocum sailed alone around the
world in the 1890's, testing man's ability to dare and endure.
Men were facing the rigours of life in "the wild north" as
they sought riches and adventure in the Klondike. Big game
hunting in Africa was opening up to hunters and adventurers.
Mountain climbers were intent on conquering the world's high-

est peaks and polar exploration was being conducted with

 

46For discussion of this fiction see chapter 12,
"The Wilderness Novel," in Schmitt, op. cit., pp. 125-140.

131

vigor.47

Part of the appeal of imperialism was the attraction
of new and strange parts of the world where nature had to be
reckoned with through strenuous living. War correspondents
found that the strenuous life involved struggles with nature

as well as confrontation with the enemy. In America the steady
advance of civilization was encroaching upon the last of the

great wilderness areas; to many, the West seemed to be the

last great natural arena for the pursuit of the strenuous life.

III

Theodore Roosevelt was the most famous outdoor enthusiast
of the period, and he did much to popularize the "back to nature”
movement. Embodied in his appeal for an active outdoor move-
ment was his plea for a ”life of strenuous endeavor." The
vigorous life of the great outdoors was one answer to the cru-
cial problem of "overcivilization"-~the prOSpect of a dete-
iorating manliness posed by the effects of a life of ease fos-

tered by a commercial culture. Roosevelt reiterated this

 

47Robert E. Peary declared in 1899: ”I am after the
Pole because it is the Pole; because it has a value as a test
of intelligence,"persistence, endurance, determined will, and,
perhaps, courage, qualities characteristic of the highest type
of manhood; . . ." See "Moving on the North Pole.--Outlines of
My Arctic Campaign," McClure's Magazine, XII (March, 1899), p.
418. Hugh Robert Milliviewed polar research as "a survival,
or rather an evolution, of knight-errantry, and our Childe
Rolands challenge the 'Dark Tower of the North' as dauntlessly
as ever their forbears wound Slug-horn at gate of enchanted
castle." ”The Race to the North Pole: The Expeditions of
Nansen and Jackson," McClure's Magazine, I (July, 1893), p. 147.

 

 

132

concern throughout his career. In an article for The Forum

 

in 1894, in which he encouraged active participation in pol-
itics, he warned that "a peaceful and commerical civilization
is always in danger of suffering the loss of the virile fight-
ing qualities without which no nation, however cultured, how-
ever refined, however thrifty and prosperous, can ever amount
to anything."48 His address to the Naval War College in 1897
struck a Similar note: ". . . a rich nation which is slothful,
timid, or unwieldy is an easy prey for any people which still
retains those most valuable of all qualities, the soldierly
virtues."49

Although the great outdoors beckoned to Roosevelt and
others as a strenuous test of manliness, most Americans who
participated in the "back to nature" movement sought relaxation
rather than strenuosity; and as for the advocates of the
strenuous life, including Roosevelt, they did not reject the
city for a permanent life in the wilderness.50 Moreover,

Roosevelt's preaching of "the strenuous life," and his ex-

ploits as a hunter often obscured the fact that at heart he

 

48Theodore Roosevelt, "The Manly Virtues and Prac-
tical Politics," The Forum, XVII (July, 1894), p. 555.

 

49Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals and Other ES-
says Social and Political (New YOrk: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1897),
p. 248

 

SOSchmitt, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

133

was a naturalist with a deep knowledge of wildlife and natural
history. Nature writer John Burroughs said that Roosevelt's
"training as a big-game hunter stood him in good stead, but
back of that were his naturalist's instincts, and his genuine
love of all forms of wild life." Burroughs accompanied Roose-
velt on a trip to Yellowstone Park in 1903, and he said of
him: "The President wanted all the freedom and solitude pos-
sible while in the Park, . . . He craved once more to be alone
with nature; he was evidently hungry for the wild and the ab-
origina1,--a hunger that seems to come upon him regularly at
least once a year, and drives him forth on his hunting trips
for big game in the West."51

It was to the West that Roosevelt had repaired nearly
twenty years earlier to test his own manliness. In the grim
and lonely environment of the Dakota Badlands he had person-
ally met the arduous test of the strenous life, and had
emerged from the eXperience a more disciplined and confident
man. Other young men of his background also found the stren-
uosity of Western life appealing. The hardy life of the West
particularly attracted Americans in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. There the exercise of the strenuous life was marked by
a sense of urgency, because it was becoming obvious in the

1890's that the old West was rapidly disappearing.

 

51

John Burroughs, Cam in a Tram in With Roosevelt
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin E Co., I907), pp. 40, 29.

Chapter VI

The Hardy Life of the West

The closing of the frontier in America formed an impor-
tant part of the historical context of the strenuous life.
Americans in the 1890's faced a future no other American
generation had faced--a future devoid of a beckoning fron-
tier. The census report of 1890 declared that a traceable
frontier line no longer existed within the continental limits
of the United States. In the light of this knowledge,
Americans developed rather mournful attitudes. They also
came to celebrate the hardy life of the West as a dominant
American value. To those, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who
felt in the late nineteenth century that there was real dan-
ger in "overcivilization," the hardy life of the West possessed
a poignant appea1--it offered a last chance to participate
in the great masculine adventure of conquering the continent.

"The West was suddenly a subject in 1891," wrote Thomas

Beer in The Mauve Decade, pointing to the numerous stories

 

and sketches of western life which appeared in the magazines
of the day.1 The West remained "a subject" from then on, as
the American quest began for the discovery of those eternal
truths which were presumably hidden in the frontier heritage
of the country. The historical elegy to the frontier was

delivered in 1893 by Frederick Jackson Turner before the

1Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade (New York: Random
House, Vintage Edition, , p. .

134

135

Chicago meeting of the American Historical Association.
Turner's argument that the frontier experience was primarily
responsible for shaping the American character was accom-
panied by the somber announcement that "the frontier has
gone, and with its going has closed the first period of
American history."2

To many in the 1890's it was obvious that with the
settling of the last frontier something of profound signif-
icance was happening to America. Frank Norris observed in
1902 that "the Frontier has become so much an integral part
of our conception of things that it will be long before we
shall all understand that it is gone." He added that "the
Frontier has become conscious of itself, acts the part for
the Eastern visitor; and this self-consciousness is a sign,
surer than all the others, of the decadence of a type, the
passing of an epoch."3 Perhaps most Americans Simply
Shared the disturbed feelings of Emerson Hough when he
remarked: "It is unpleasant to be asked to believe that

there is no longer any West."4

. A x AAA—k _ _ 5‘ AA‘__‘ A.-_A

z 0 o o .
Freder1ck Jackson Turner, The Fronaier 1alamar1can

4.4;

History (New York: Henry Holt 8 Co., 1920), p. 38.

3Frank Norris, "The Frontier Gone at Last," The
World's Work, III (February, 1902), pp. 1728, 1729.

 

4Emerson Hough, "If the Prince Came West Again,"
Harper's Weekly, XLIII (April 15, 1899), p. 370.

 

136

The role of the West in American life, therefore,
acquired a new and special meaning for the generation of
Americans which came of age at the turn of the century.

This was especially true for those young men of the Eastern
upper and middle class who went west to experience the
rigours of frontier life--notably Roosevelt, Frederic Reming-

ton, and Owen Wister. In The_Eastern Establiahment and the

 

Western Experience, G. Edward White traces the response of

 

these men to life in the West and analyzes their roles as
Eastern spokesmen for the West in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. White concludes that the cele-
bration of western life by Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister
was in large part responsible for transforming the image of
the West from that of a wild, uncivilized place to that of
a region which was, in the finest sense, "American," thereby
reconciling the counter images of East and West through
the establishment of a nationalistic consensus of values.5
Despite the apparent success of the image-makers in
reconciling East and West, the new emphasis on the West
inevitably made both easterners and westerners aware of

differences between the two sections. William R. Lighton

5G. Edward White, The Eaatern_E§tabli§hment and the
Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theddore
Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (NewiHaven: Yale‘UniverSity Press,
1968), pp. 1841202.A1So see chapter 3, "Discoverers of the
Wild West, " and chapter 5, "Americans Move Outdoors," in
Earl Pomeroy, In Search of the Golden West: The Tourist in

Western America (New YOrk: AIfred A. Knopf, 91957)“

 

 

 

137

commented in Outlook in 1903 that "the Easterner is now
quite willing to admit the word 'West' to his vocabulary
without close scrutiny of its credentials. Along with the
word he adopts a shadowy notion that Western men, manners,
and morals are somehow radically distinct from those of
other communities--that Western affairs must always wear

a unique complexion."6 Spokesmen for the West found the
quality of western life superior to that of the East.
Reflecting Turner's environmentalism, the Reverend James
B. Funsten, BishOp of Boise, found "a distinct type of Ameri-
can manhood and womanhood" developing west of the Rockies:

The probability is that the American who
lives in this region will not suffer from
the enervating influences that come from
overcrowded districts. He will have plenty
of room in which to get his full development.
. He will not have the depressing influ-
ence of extreme poverty; he will drink in
the love of freedom that comes with the
glorious Skies and the mighty mountains, the
wideness of the plains and the pureness
of the air. The opportunity for successful
and remunerative labor will make him strong,
resolute, and hopeful. His sons and daughters
will be no unworthy exponents of the best
physical type of American.7

Funsten's remarks appeared in The Qullook during the

 

first year of Roosevelt's presidency, and the author used

6William R. Lighton, "Where IS the West?" The Oualook,
LXXIV (July 18, 1903), p. 702.

7James B. Funsten, "The Making of an American on the
West Side of the Rockies," The Outlook, LXXI (June 14, 1902),
p. 453.

 

 

138

the example of the early western experience of the new
president to fortify his argument. "Who can estimate the
influence of the environments of the far West in the molding
for his high position of President Roosevelt, . . .? The
Rough Riders who followed him up San Juan Hill were but

the embodiment of forces that carried him to his high
position. Others will, in the future, be elevated to posi-

tions of importance by just such forces."8

11

The western environment had indeed played an important
role in the making of Theodore Roosevelt, or at least Roose—
velt believed that it had. He felt that the hardy life he had
led in the Badlands in the early 1880's prepared him for the
Strenuous career which led him eventually to the White House.
According to John Burroughs, Roosevelt had remarked in 1903
"that his ranch life had been the making of him. It had built
him up and hardened him physically," and it had also made him
aware of "the wealth of manly character" possessed by west-
erners. "Had he not gone West, he said, he never would have
raised the Rough Riders regiment; and had he not raised that

regiment and gone to the Cuban War, he would not have been made

Ibid.

 

139

governor of New York; and had not this happened, the poli-
ticians would not unwittingly have made his rise to the
Presidency so inevitable."9
For Roosevelt the western experience provided a test
of manhood for which he had long prepared. His early life
had been a constant struggle against poor health and he had
worked diligently to build up his frail body. Much of the
psychological impetus for Roosevelt's strenuous existence
had been instilled by his father, who had challenged his
twelve year old son to maka his body. Roosevelt said of
his father that he "was the best man I ever knew” and that
he was "the only man of whom I was ever really afraid." To
a great extent his father was the one man he sought to emu-

late throughout his life. "I never knew," Roosevelt wrote

in his Autobiography, "any one who got greater joy out of

 

living than did my father, or any one who more whole-
heartedly performed every duty; and no one whom I have
ever met approached his combination of enjoyment of life

10 This was the model of living

and performance of duty."
which the younger Roosevelt applied to his own life and
career. Crushed by his father's death in 1878, he wrote:

A ___A____ J‘ L.

9

John Burroughs, Campin 8 Trampin With Roosevelt

(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin E Co., R1vers1de Ed1tion, 1967),
pp. 14-15.
10

Theodore Roosevelt, An Auaqalagraphy (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1913), pp. 8, 10, 12.

 

140

"I owe everything I have or am to Father. He did every-
thing for me, and I nothing for him." "I realize more and
more each day," he said, "that I am as much inferior to
Father morally and mentally as physically."11
Roosevelt had responded to his father's challenge by
plunging into a rigorous physical fitness program. A regi-
men of daily exercise gradually improved his health and
toughened his body. The boredom of the gymnasium work-outs
was lightened by long hikes, riding, and hunting. The
young Roosevelt made exercise a pleasant business, throwing
himself into the various activities with an energy and
enthusiasm which marked everything he did. His nearsight-
edness and lack of Skill as an athlete were compensated for
by his "pluck," as his boxing Opponents at Harvard soon
discovered. At Harvard he boxed as a lightweight, reveling
in the fierce battles in the ring in which he pitted him-
self against tough and determined fighters.12
The Roosevelt who went west in 1884 was ready for the

hardy life of the frontier. He welcomed the test of strenuous

living in the Dakota Badlands, but in a sense his sojourn

._ _‘ A A.- A*‘ _‘_ A —- _# .__A _‘ __—A~‘_‘.___

11Quoted in Carleton Putnam, Theodore Roosevelt: The

 

Formative Years (New York: Charles Scr1 ner S ons, ,
pp. 150, 151.
12

Ibid., pp. 71-80, 142-146; Henry F. Pringle,
Theodore Roosevelt: aggfiogra hy (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Harvest Edition, 1956;, pp. 11-13, 24-25.

 

141

in the West represented an escape. He went west at a time
when his political future was in doubt, and at a moment
when he was suffering from the almost Simultaneous deaths
of his mother and his first wife, Alice Lee.

That the West was the place for Roosevelt after these
personal crises was evident soon after his arrival in the
Badlands. To his Sister, Anna, he wrote: "The country is
growing on me, more and more; it has a curious, fantastic
beauty of its own, . . ." In a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge
in August of 1884 he said: "I heartily enjoy this life,
with its perfect freedom, for I am very fond of hunting, and
there are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over
these rolling, limitless prairies, rifle in hand, or winding
my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque

."13 This exuberant

deserts of the so-called Bad Lands,
response to western life was just as strong years later

when Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography of his days in the
West: "We knew toil and hardship and hunger and thirst;

and we saw men die violent deaths as they worked among the
horses and cattle, or fought in evil feuds with one another;
but we felt the beat of the hardy life in our veins, and

ours was the glory of work and the joy of living."14

13Elting E. Morison, (ed.), The Letters_gf_lhaoaore
Roosevelt, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
I951), I, pp. 74, 80.

14

 

Roosevelt, An Aulabiograph_, op. cit., pp. 103-104.

 

142

Initially cutting a rather ridiculous figure as a
"tenderfoot" or "dude," Roosevelt doggedly set out to prove
himself a westerner. Plunging into the work of the range
with his characteristic grit and determination, he constantly
amazed those around him, including seasoned ranch hands who
at first ridiculed or scorned him as a foolish young East-
erner. Roosevelt was eager to demonstrate that he could
endure the hardships of a frontier existence, and he quickly
adapted to ranch life, mastering many of the Skills necessary
for living in the wilderness. Gradually he earned the
respect of the inhabitants of the Badlands.15

His stay in the Dakotas was marked by some adventures
which were of the "Wild West" variety. On one occasion
Roosevelt had an altercation with a bully in a hotel bar,

16

knocked to the floor and disarmed him. On another occasion,

he and two of his men pursued and captured three thieves,
and then Roosevelt marched alone with the prisoners over
rugged terrain, through two days of bad weather, to deliver

them to the authorities in Dickinson, North Dakota. It was

15See Edward and Frederick Schapsmeier, "Theodore
Roosevelt's Cowboy Years," Jouraal‘oflthe West, V (July, 1966),
pp. 398-408; Pringle, op. cit., pp. 64-74; For detailed accounts
of Roosevelt's life in the West, see Putnam, op. cit., and
Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1921). Also usefuI 1S W1II1am T. Dantz, "Theodore

Roosevelt--Cowboy and Ranchman," Har er's Weekly, XLVIII
(August 6, 1904), pp. 1212-1215, 1221.

16

 

Roosevelt, An Aulobiography, op. cit., pp. 135-136.

 

143

an arduous journey, with Roosevelt walking forty miles with-

out sleep. When Roosevelt arrived in Dickinson, Dr. Victor

Hugo Stickney treated the "bedraggled" man, whose appearance

he later described in a reminiscence: "He wore_g1asses,

for one thing, which in itself was immoral out in that

country, and his fringed buckskin jacket and chaps were

covered with sticky gumbo mud. He was all teeth and eyes.

His clothes were in rags. He was scratched, bruised and

hungry, butgritty and determined as a bull dog."17
Exploits such as these, as well as his performance as

a cowboy and wilderness hunter, insured Roosevelt of a

respectable reputation as a westerner, and they satisfied

his inner need to test his physical courage. Also, his

sojourn in the West finally settled the issue regarding his

health which had plagued him since childhood. As his friend

William Sewall wrote, "He went to Dakota a frail young man

suffering from asthma and stomach trouble. When he got

back into the world again he was as husky as almost any man

I have ever seen who wasn't dependent on his arms for liveli-

hood."18

Roosevelt returned to the East, after the blizzard
of 1886-87 had wiped out his ranching investment, to face
an uncertain future. He returned, however, instilled with

a new confidence and sure of his manhood.

A- _ A_ A A. A A A .4 A w _A - A A 4 *‘

17Quoted in Putnam, op. cit., p. 568.

18Quoted in Schapsmeier. 0p. cit., p. 403.

144

It was Roosevelt's western experience that transformed
his zest for outdoor life into a cult of strenuosity and
manliness. As his writings indicate, he found the Badlands
environment harsh and forbidding and life there isolated and
lonely. Roosevelt viewed existence in that grim environment
as a struggle for survival, and he attributed to westerners
those masculine qualities necessary for survival. His
image of the West was a thoroughly masculine one, and it
became a major frame of reference for his life and thought.19

Thus began Roosevelt's celebration of the West and of

those hardy souls who endured and conquered in the struggle

of the wilderness. In an article for Harpar's Weekly in

 

1886 on "Who Should Go West," he declared that "in reality
a wild, new country calls for the existence of all the
robuster and more virile virtues on the part of those who
would try to live therein. The far West is the place of
all others where the weak will most surely and quickly be
pushed to the wall." He pointed to the fact that many
young men from the East had recently turned to ranching,
and that many of them were physically unprepared for the
rigors of western life. ”To be able to follow the business

at all," he said, "the man must be made of fairly Stern stuff.

. “A A .__4_A_ _‘.—_‘ _‘_;;__.A _— _.

19White, op. cit., pp. 79-93. Also see John A.
Barsness, "Theodore Roosevelt as Cowboy: The Virginian as
Jacksonian Man," American Quarterly, XXI (Fall, 1969), pp.
608-619. 997 7“ 9‘

 

145

He must be Stout and hardy; he must be quick to learn, and
have a fair share of dogged resolution; and he must rapidly
accustom himself to habits of complete self-reliance."
He declared that "a ranch is not the place for any man who
is either feeble, or irresolute, or unaccustomed to out-door
life."20
There was, however, Roosevelt said, a certain breed of
young Easterner who could meet the strenuous test of western
life: "active, energetic young men" who possessed "stout
hearts and sound bodies." Roosevelt observed that "in
almost every Eastern family there will be one or two members
who are square pegs in round holes; they have a genuine
taste for adventure and rough work, and a genuine willing-
ness to endure hardship, coupled with an intense loathing
for the decorous hopelessness of the office or the counting-
room." He added that "for such men, of bold, free spirit,
yet with balance and self-control, the West is the place of
all others, . . ."21

The hardy life of the West was the subject of several

books by Roosevelt: Ranch Lifa_aadltha Hunting-Trail, The

 

Wilderness Hunter, Hunting TIiP§le.§ Raachman, and his

 

 

multi-volume history, ThelWinning of £h§_H9$t- In these

 

20Theodore Roosevelt, "Who Should Go West," Harper's
Weekly, XXX (January 2, 1886), p. 7.

lebid.

 

146

he depicted the West as an arena for Strenuous and heroic
endeavor and developed the corresponding masculine image of

the westerner. "Ranching," he wrote in RanghlLife and The

 

Hunting-Trail, "is an occupation like those of vigorous,

 

primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with
the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth

century, ."22

Reflecting the growing American awareness
of the passing of the frontier, Roosevelt's writings were
tinged with sadness over the prospect of a vanishing way of
life which to him represented the ideal manly existence.
"For we ourselves, and the life that we lead," he wrote
wistfully as a Dakota cattleman, "will shortly pass away
from the plains as completely as the red and white hunters
who have vanished from before our herds. The free, open-air
life of the ranchman, the pleasantest and healthiest life

in America, is from its very nature ephemeral. The broad
and boundless prairies have already been bounded and will

23

soon be made narrow."

Roosevelt's Tha_Winnlng aflthelWest (1889-96) anticipated

 

Turner on the role of the frontier in American history, and
it articulated his strenuous life philosophy within the

historical context of the passing of the frontier West and

22Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting-
Trail (New York: The Century Co., , p. .
23

Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Tripslof a Raachman
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1902), p. 19.

 

147

the burgeoning martial Spirit of the 1890's. Both of these
deve10pments in the broad outline of American history
converged in Roosevelt's life and career, and both were
factors in the formulation of the cult of manliness which
he eSpoused. On the level of personal experience this was
nowhere more apparent than when Roosevelt went to war in

1898 as a "Rough Rider" of the cattleman's West.

III

Roosevelt was also among those responsible for building
the heroic image of the cowboy. "They are smaller and less
muscular," he said, "than the wielders of ax and pick; but
they are as hardy and self-reliant as any men who ever
breathed--with bronzed, set faces, and keen eyes that look
all the world straight in the face without flinching as
they flash out from under the broad-brimmed hats." In a
passage, which first appeared in print in 1888, Roosevelt
etched the image of the cowboy which Owen Wister and others
would complete in the 1890's and early 1900's:

To appreciate properly his fine, manly
qualities, the wild rough-rider of the
plains should be seen in his own home.
There he passes his days, there he does

his life-work, there, when he meets death,
he faces it as he has faced many other
evils, with quiet, uncomplaining fortitude.
Brave, hospitable, hardy, and adventurous,
he is the grim pioneer of our race; he

prepares the way for the civilization from
before whose face he must himself disappear.

148

Hard and dangerous though his existence is,
it has yet a wild attraction that strongly
draws to it his bold, free Spirit. He lives
in the lonely lands where mighty rivers twist
in long reaches between the barren bluffs;
where the prairies stretch out into billowy
plains of waving grass, girt only by the

blue horizon,--p1ains aCross whose endless
breadth he can steer his course for days

and weeks and see neither man to Speak to
nor hill to break the level; where the

glory and the burning splendor of the sunsets
kindle the blue vault of heaven and the

level brown earth till they mirge together

in an ocean of flaming fire.2 '

The rise of the cowboy as the dominant western hero in
American culture was evident in the late eighties. John
Baumann was remarkably perceptive in his analysis of the
phenomemon in 1887: "The cowboy has at the present day
become a personage; nay, more, he is rapidly becoming a
mythical one. Distance is doing for him what lapse of time
did for the heroes of antiquity. His admirers are investing
him with all manner of romantic qualities; they descant
upon his manifold virtues and his pardonable weaknesses as
if he were a demi-god, and I have no doubt that before long
there will be ample material for any philosophic inquirer
who may wish to enlighten the world as to the cause and

25

meaning of the cowboy myth." Baumann himself had con-

tributed to the development of the masculine image of the

24Roosevelt, Ranghlllfa and tha»Huating-Trail,_op.lcit.

 

pp. 9, 100.

25John Baumann, "On a Western Ranche," The Fort-
nightly Review, XLVII (April, 1887), p. 516.

 

149

cowboy. A year earlier he had written in Lipplncolfi's

 

Magazine that "a cow-boy's life, with its hardships,
isolation, and dangers, develops all the sterner manly
qualities in a high degree. To a lithe and Sinewy figure

he joins courage, stoic indifference to suffering, and a
dogged industry when work has to be done. For these qualities
it would be difficult to find his equal."26

By 1898 a writer in Harperlisoanleable observed

 

that "every boy whose imagination is in healthy working
order desires at some period of this Golden Age to be a
cowboy." That the cowboy had been elevated to the status
of hero was reflected in the author's story of one Logan
Mulhall, a young and daring Oklahoma cowboy who had met an
early death and who was to be honored by a statue to be
erected in his memory--a lasting tribute to his heroic
exploits. The physical descriptions of young Mulhall fitted
perfectly the masculine image of the cowboy as hero: "By
the time he was fourteen years old he was a magnificent
specimen physically, being nearly six feet in height, and

with broad shoulders to match. His face, tanned by wind

_~ __A __. A A ._A _._‘ _‘

26John Baumann, "Experiences of a Cow-Boy,"
Lippincott's Magaalne, XXXVIII (September, 1886), p. 313.
On the passing of thE cowboy, see Julian Ralph, "A Talk With
a Cowboy," Harper'sMWeekly, XXXVI (April 16, 1892), pp. 375-
376; and Arthur Chapman, "The Cowboy of Today," The World's
Work, VIII (September, 1904), pp. 5272-5278.

 

 

 

150

and sun, was of a deep copper-color, and with a blanket
over his Shoulders he would have been taken for an Indian.
His hair was long and black, and his eyes were blue and
piercing."27
The neo-romantic depiction of the cowboy in the 1890's
drew upon the martial Spirit of the period together with

the prevailing Darwinian concept. Owen Wister in an article

for Harper's New Monthlngagazine, "The Evolution of the

 

Cow-Puncher," likened the cowboy to the Knight of the Round
Table, seeing him as the lineal descendent of the old Saxon
warrior type: ". . . in personal daring and in Skill as to
the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the
same Saxon of different environments, . . ." Wister wrote
that, "No soldier of fortune ever adventured with bolder
carelessness, no fiercer blood ever stained a border." To
underscore his racist premise he pointed to the ordeal of
frontier life and the likelihood of survival by the non-Saxon
peoples: "But to survive in the clean cattle country requires
spirit of adventure, courage, and self-sufficiency; you will
not find many Poles or Huns or Russian Jews in that district,
." The Anglo-Saxon, on the other hand, "is still forever

homesick for out-of-doors."28

L- ‘g Au.‘ A.—-_ _!

27John N. Hilliard, "A Boy Who Managed a Ranch,"
Harper's Round Table, I (January, 1898), pp. 114, 116.

28Owen Wister, "The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher,"
Harper's New Monthly_Magazine, XCI (September, 1895), pp.
604, 606, 614.

 

 

151

The views of Wister were echoed by other writers. One
author declared that the point of view of the cowboy "is that
of the man on horseback. He represents the aristocracy of

the plains, ."29

In writing of the settlement of the
West, Emerson Hough stressed the evolutionary struggle,
glorifying "the aristocracy of survival." "People may pass
away," he said, "monarchies may fall, but above them there
will stand the only aristocracy fit to survive; not a false
democracy which nominates all men as equal, but the aris-
tocracy of survival. . . .never shall there utterly perish
the strong blood which got its survival by fitness, and its
education by continuous conflict with mighty things."30
Such notions were still being expressed at the end of the
first decade of the twentieth century. In 1909 a writer

in gellierfs Weekly said that cowboys were made "from the

 

best and strongest of the men whose restless spirit had led
them to the range. Those who were too weak or vicious or
small were winnowed out, . . ." He noted that "their life
was hard. It developed high qualities of courage, quick

31

minds, and iron bodies." In the Overland#Mgnthly Matthew

 

29William T. Larned, "The Passing of the Cow-Puncher,"
Lippincott's Magazine, LXVI (August, 1895), p. 268.

30Emerson Hough, "Settlement of the West," The_Century

 

 

Magazine, LXIII (January, 1902), p. 367.

31Frederick R. Bechdolt, "The Field Agent of Settle-
ment--The Cowboy's Contribution to American Civilization,"
Collier's Weekly, XLIII (September 18, 1909), p. 19.

 

152

J. Herron declared that the evolution of the American cow-
man ”was a case where the Anglo—Saxon and the Aztec met and

mingled."32

IV

The environmental explanation for the cowboy's manliness
and superior character implied, or sometimes directly expressed
criticism of civilization. The cowboy was viewed as a child
of nature, possessing an innocence and virtue which civil-
ized man was incapable of sustaining. Frederic Remington
was emphatic about this: "In my association with these men
of the frontier I have come to greatly reSpect their moral
fibre and their character. Modern civilization, in the
process of educating men beyond their capacity, often
succeeds in vulgarizing them, but these natural men possess
minds which, though lacking all embellishment, are chaste
and simple, and utterly devoid of a certain flippancy which
passes for smartness in situations where life is not so
real. . . . They are not complicated, these children of

nature, and they never think one thing and say another."33

32Matthew J. Herron, "The Passing of the Cowman,"
Overland Monthly, LV (February, 1910), p. 195.

33Frederic Remington, "A Rodeo at Los Ojos," Harper's
New Monthly Magazine, LXXXVIII (March, 1894), pp. 523-521.

 

 

153

Roosevelt said that on the frontier and in the wilderness
"life is reduced to its elemental conditions. The passions
and emotions of these grim hunters of the mountains and

these wild rough-riders of the plains are simpler and stronger
than those of people dwelling in more complicated states of

34
Roosevelt, concerned as he was about "over-

society."
civilization," found a great source of national strength in
the frontier experience. "As our civilization grows older
and more complex," he said, ". . . we need a greater and not
a less development of the fundamental frontier virtues."35
"Overcivilization" was anathema to the spokesmen for
the hardy life of the West. Emerson Hough, one of the
important publicizers of the cowboy and the West, found little
in civilization to recommend it, celebrating, instead, the
hardy ways of America's pioneer past. "It was exceeding
sweet to be a savage," he said. "It is pleasant to dwell
upon the independent character of Western life, and to go back
to the glories of that land and day . . .These days, vivid,
adventurous, heroic, will have no counterpart upon the earth

36

again." In his The Story of the Cowboy in 1897, Hough

 

34Theodore Roosevelt, "In Cowboy-Land," The Century
Magazine, XLVI (June, 1893), p. 276.

35Theodore Roosevelt, "The Pioneer Spirit and American
Problems," The Outlook, XCVI (September 3, 1910), p. 56.

36Emerson Hough, "The Settlement of the West," The
Century Magazine, LXIII (November, 1901), p. 91.

 

 

 

154

dennounced civilized society. "In the cities," he began,
"men are much alike, and, for the most part, built upon
rather a poor pattern of a man. The polish of generations
wears out fibre and cuts down grain, so that eventually we
have a finished product with little left of it except the
finish. In modern life the test of survival is much a
question of the money a man is able to make." According to
Hough, the prospect for America was a gloomy one. He
declared that “in this country, as in the history of all
other countries, there must go on the slow story told by
the ages, of more and more wealth, more and more artificiality,
more and more degeneration." Only in the stories of the
"strong times" of the past, Hough believed, could "good
human nature, dragged by the hand of the spirit of complex
civilization," find inspiration, for "mankind has always
loved the strong, because it is only the strong which is

fit to be loved."37

For Hough this meant that Americans
should turn constantly to the heroic tales of the nation's
frontier past.

The disease of "overcivilization" was described in Horace
Porter's analysis of "The Philosophy of Courage," which com-

pared the life of the city boy with that of the frontier

youth:

37

Emerson Hough, The Stor of the Cowboy (New York:
D. Appleton-Century Co., 19365, pp. 237-233.

155

Take two youngsters born with equal degrees
of courage; let one remain in a quiet city,
playing the milkSOp in a modern Capua,
leading an unambitious, namby-pamby life,
surrounded by all the safeguards of civili-
zation, while the other goes out on the
frontier, runs his chances in encounters
with wild animals, finds that to make his
way he must take his life in his hand, and
assert his rights, if necessary, with deadly
weapons, and knows he will be drummed out
of the community if he is once caught
showing the white feather. In the one
particular trait of personal courage the
frontiersman will undoubtedly become the
superior of the lad who has remained at
home.

Perhaps it was the threat of ”overcivilization" that
caused many young Easterners, such as Roosevelt, Remington,
and Wister, to wander the West in the late nineteenth century
in search of the masculine roles denied them in the urban-
industrial society of the East. G. Edward White suggests
that the anxieties surrounding the Eastern adolescence of
Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister, were intimately connected
with "the imaginative response" of each man to the West.

Each of these men, White observes, "had experienced prior to
his departure (for the West) a sense of frustration, dis—
appointment, or personal tragedy, and sought in the West a
moratorium, a momentary stay against confusion, or a chance
to begin life from a new perspective." White finds their
exuberant response to the West closely tied to the adolescent

anxieties regarding "each man's relations with his parents

38Horace Porter, "The Philosophy of Courage," The
Century Magazine, XXXVI (June, 1888), p. 253.

 

156

and each man's search for an attractive occupational role."
The adolescence of Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister, was
set against the changing economic and social background of
post-Civil War America, and as the youthful representatives
of the old wealth and prestige of the nonindustrial age, they
found themselves bewildered by the choice of occupational
roles open to them in the newly emerging industrial order.39
The cry of ”overcivilization" in the period, therefore, per-
haps also reflected this sense of frustration felt by young
members of the Eastern Establishment over their prospective
roles in the civilized society of the East.

Certainly young men did go West in great numbers in the
late nineteenth century to experience frontier life. In 1881
Louis C. Bradford observed that "there is a peculiar fascin-
ation in this wild life of the cow-boys which tempts many young
men of culture and refinement, reared in the enjoyment of
every luxury in the East, but of adventurous dispositions,
40

to come and live with these rude spirits on the frontier."

A year later George R. Buckman referred to "the exodus of

39White, op. cit., pp. 52-74.

40Louis C. Bradford, "Among the Cow-Boys," Lippincott's

 

Magazine, XXVII (June, 1881), p. 568. See also Lewis Atherton,
The Cattle Kings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961),
pp. 13-15: George L. Burton, "With the Colorado Cow-Punchers

on a Round-Up," Outing, XXXVI (May, 1900), pp. 152-156; Thomas
Holmes, "A Cowboy's Life," Chautau uan, XIX (September, 1894),
pp. 730-732; and Joseph Nimmo, Jr., ”The American Cowboy,"
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, LXXIII (November, 1886), pp.
880-884.

 

 

157

young collegians and professional men from the overcrowded
East," observing that many of them took up ranching in the
West. "It may safely be said," Buckman remarked, "that
nine-tenths of those engaged in the stock-business in the
Far West are gentlemen. Here is a fascinating, health-
restoring, and profitable occupation for the great army of
broken-down students and professional men, and in crowds
are they turning their backs upon the jostling world to
secure new life and vigor upon these upland plains."41
Not only did the West offer outdoor excitement through
ranching, but the fact that it was a hunter's paradise in
the nineteenth century lured many Eastern sportsmen into
the vast wilderness areas of the West. The hunting of
big game afforded splendid opportunities for the exercise
of the strenuous life, and game was plentiful in the Ameri-
can West. Many of the adventures recounted in the various
books of the Boone and Crockett Club were based on Western
hunting expeditions. Most of those who went on such trips
probably agreed with the sentiments expressed by W.S. Rains-
ford, who, in encouraging young men to go West for recreation,

said that "there is no land where nature recreates a man as

41George R. Buckman, "Ranches and Rancheros of the
Far West," Lippincottingagazine, XXIX (May, 1882), p. 435.
In a study of Eastern Investment in the cattle industry, one
historian asserts that many young Easterners in the West were
misfits sent there by their families for redemption. See Gene
M. Gressley, Bankers and_§attlemen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1966), pp. 68-69.

 

 

158

she does there. You literally renew your youth. The

climate is invigorating beyond words. For nervously exhausted

men, for weary brains, there is simply nothing to touch it."42

Roosevelt celebrated the Western hunter in a series of books

and articles, and hunting was the activity he enjoyed most

during his stay in the West.43

Richard Harding Davis, on a tour of the West, was struck
by the fact that he often encountered on his trip friends
and acquaintances he had known in the East. Davis, speculating
on the whereabouts of all those men who had suddenly disap-
peared from his acquaintanceship in the East, found an answer

on his tour: "I know now what becomes of them; they all go

44

West." Even Davis felt compelled to make the journey West,

although he did not respond to the environment in the exu-
berant way of Roosevelt, Remington, and Wister. The strenuous

life of Stephen Crane also included a trip to the West, where

42Archibald Rogers, W.S. Rainsford and others, The
Out of Door Library: Hunting (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1896), pp. 52-53. 1.

43"The hunter is the arch-type of freedom," Roosevelt
said. He declared that "certainly there can be no healthier
or more exciting pastime than that of following game with
horse and hound over the great Western plains."' Hunting in
the mountains of the American West offered the test of endur-
ance Roosevelt urgently sought. "All mountain game yields
noble sport," he said, "because of the nerve, daring, and
physical hardihood implied in its successful pursuit." Ranch
Life and the Hunting-Trail, 0p. cit., pp. 83, 145, 186.

44Richard Harding Davis, The West From a Car-Window
(New York: Harper 8 Bros., 1892), pp. 226:230.

 

 

 

159

adventure and danger, so vital to Crane's artistic vision,
was still an everyday occurrence. Crane's sojourn in the
West furnished material for two of his finest short stories--
"The Blue Hotel" and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky."
Strenuous lives also were led in the West by those
roving artists and illustrators of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries who were intent on capturing
visually the last stirring days of American frontier life.
The magazines of the period devoted considerable space to
their illustrations which memorably depicted the Old West,
and their paintings increasingly drew critical attention.
The_genre was dominated by Remington, but there were also
other Easterners whose work was of equal merit--Char1es
Schreyvogel, H.W. Hansen, William Leigh, Henry F. Farney,
and Rufus Zogbaum. Westerner Charles Russell also entered
the field. All of these men in their paintings, illustra-
tions, and sometimes bronze works, celebrated the strenu-
osity of Western life.45
While the artists and illustrators of the West were
depicting life on the vanishing American frontier, writers
were emerging who perfected, in their fiction, the heroic

image of the cowboy. The 1890's and early 1900's witnessed

45For a thorough discussion of this topic, and of
earlier artists working in the West, see Robert Taft, Artists
and Illustrators of the Old#West,_185911900 (New York:
Charles scribner's Sons,’I953).

 

160

the rise of the cowboy in literature with the appearance of
the work of Owen Wister, Alfred Henry Lewis, Eugene Manlove
Rhodes, Andy Adams, Emerson Hough, and a few years later--

Zane Grey.46

The most important of these, from the stand-
point of the cowboy as folk hero, was Wister. In 1885
Wister had gone to Wyoming on the advice of his doctor, and,
as he said, "this accidental sight of the cattle-country

47

settled my career." His first Western story appeared in

1892. The cowboy hero was the subject of the novel Lin McLean,

 

published in 1898, and TheJimmyjohn Boss in 1900. Then in

 

1902 The Virginian, Wister's classic, appeared. "The Vir-

 

ginian" immediately became the prototype of the Western hero
in America, the subject of innumerable novels, short stories,
and screenplays.

In 1895, in a review of Wister's stories, Roosevelt
celebrated the new author as an American Kipling, and in the
process severely criticized those émigré novelists whose
works were devoid of muscularity: "What pale, anaemic figures

they are, these creations of the émigré novelists, when put

46For a historical account of these writers, see
chapters 9 8 10 of Joe B. Frantz and Julian E. Choate, Jr.,
The American Cowbo : The Myth and the Realit (Norman: Univer-

31ty o a oma ress, . n exce ent critical analysis
of Western fiction is James K. Folsom, The American Western
Novel (New Haven: College and University ress, .

47

Owen Wister, Roosevelt:Thg_§torygofgagFrigndship,
1880-1919 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1930), p. 28.

 

 

161

side by side with the men, the grim stalwart men, who stride
through Mr. Wister's pages." The review, which appeared in

Harper's Weekly, provided a classic statement of the strenuous

 

philosophy by Roosevelt:

It is this note of manliness which is domi-
nant through the writings of Mr. Wister.
Beauty, refinement, grace, are excellent
qualities in a man, as in a nation, but they
come second, and very far second, to the great
virile virtues, the virtues of courage, energy,
and daring; the virtues which beseem a master-
ful race--a race fit to fell forests, to
build roads, to found commonwealths, to
conquer continents, to overthrow armed
enemies. . . . we welcome eagerly a man
who deals with the elemental and basic
qualities, a man who is free from any touch
of valetudinarianism, and who has nothing
morbid in his make-up. . . . He does not
shrink from the blood and sweat of the
conflict, nor does he grow unhealthy and
think that in the conflict there is nothing
else. . . . His tales are clean and fresh
and strong, and healthy with an out-of-
doors healthiness; they quicken our pulses
and our hearts beat quickly for having
read them.

These remarks reflected the dominant concern for
manliness which characterized the strenuous life. Pre-
occupation with the question of the state of the national
virility was fostered by the concurrent passing of the
frontier and rise of urban-industrial America. The question
was made even more compelling by the sharp extension of

feminine influence and power in American society in the

48Theodore Roosevelt, "A Teller of Tales of Strong
Men," Harper's Weekly, XXXIX (December 21, 1895), p. 1216.

 

162

late nineteenth century. Even in the male domain of the
West, women were usurping masculine ways. In the dime
novel literature of the day the "Wild Woman of the West"

took her place alongside the western heroes Buffalo Bill

49

and Buck Taylor. The celebration of Hurricane Nell and

Calamity Jane signified that even in the Wild West the

feminine threat to manliness was a fact of life.

49See Henry Nash Smith, VirgingLand:_Thp Amerigan
West as Symbol and M th (New York: Random House,_Vintage
1t10n, , pp. -135, and William Wasserstrom, Heiress
of All the Ages: Sex and Sentiment in the Genteel Tradition
(Minneapolis: Univer51ty of Minnesota Press, I959), pp. 39-51.

 

 

Chapter VII

The Feminine Threat to Manliness

The strenuous cult, self-consciously a defense of
masculinity, conflicted with the women's rights movement
and the new assertiveness of women, epitomized by the "New
Woman" and the "Gibson Girl" of the 1890's,1 and a national
discussion of the differences between the sexes and their

proper respective roles in society. Robert Grant, writing

in Scribner's in 1895, observed the exasperation of American

 

men over the woman question: "A great many men, who are sane
and reasonable in other matters, allow themselves, on the

slightest provocation, to be worked up into a fever over

‘—‘_— _“_ #‘ _—‘_‘_.

1On this general topic see Eleanor Flexner, Century
of Struggle: The Woman's Ri hts Movement in the United States
(Cam5r1dge: BeIEnap Press, 19595; A1Ieen S. Krad1tor, The
Ideas of the Woman Suffra e Movement, 1890-1920 (New Y6rk}
Columbia’Univers1ty Press, ; 1 1am asserstrom, Heiress
of All the Ages: Sex and Sentiment in the Genteel_Tradit10n
(Minneapolis: ’Ufiiver51ty of Minnesota Press ,61959); Fairfax
Downey, Portrait of an Era as Drawn by Charles Dana Gibson
(New York: Charles Scr1bner' 5 Sons, 1936); "The Titaness, "
Chapter I in Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade (New York: Alfred
A Knopf, 1926); Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States,
1900-1925, 6 vols. (New York: CHarIes Scr15ner's Sons, I926-

I9355, I; and chapters 1 and 2 in Lloyd Morris, Postscri t
° ' ' York Random

 

 

“___4-_‘_#

House, 1947)T’AISO see the Ehapters on women in America in
Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the Ci_y, 1878-1898 (New
York: Macmillan Co., 1933) and Harold U'.'Faquner, The Quest
For Social Justice, 1898-1914 (New York. Macmillan Co ., I931).

 

 

163

164

the aspirations of woman. They decline to listen to argu-

ment, grow red in the face, and saw the air with their

hands, if they do not pound on the table, to express their

views on the subject--"2 The growing feminization of

American culture produced a counter reaction in the form

of a new and spirited advocacy of masculinity, which con-

tributed to the development of the idea of the strenuous life.
The women's rights movement was bringing about a revo-

lutionary change in the position of women in late nineteenth

century America. Everywhere women were on the march.

Through the activities of their various clubs and organizations

they sought to remove the legal and social restrictions

under which they lived. They also sought to reform some

areas of the men's world and increasingly encroached upon it.

Aside from the question of "rights" it was this latter

2Robert Grant, "The Art of Living: The Case of Woman,"
Scribner' 5 Magazine, XVIII (October, 1895), p. 465. For a
variety of contemporary views on various aspects of the woman
question, see the chapter "The American Girl" in A. Maurice
Low, America at Home (London: George Newnes, Limited, n.d.);
chapter 4, "An Appreciation of the American Woman," in James
F. Muirhead, The Land of Contrasts (Boston, New York, 8
London: Lamson, Wolfe—E Co. , 1898); Francis Parkman, "The
Woman Question, " North American Review, CXXIX (October, 1879),
pp. 303- 321, and CXXX (January, 1880), pp. 16- 30; Kate G.
Wells, "Transitional American Women, " Atlantic Monthly, XLVI
(December, 1880), pp. 817-823; Ella W. W1nston, "Fo15Ies of
the New Woman," The Forum, XXI (April, 1896), pp. 186-192;
Richard Harding Dav1s, "The Origin of a Type of American
Girl, " Monthly Illustrator, III- IV (January, 1895), pp. 3- 8,
Caroline T1Cknor, "The Steel- -Engraving Lady and the Gibson
Girl, " Atlantic Monthly, LXXXVIII (July, 1901), pp. 105-108;
and William M. Salter__"What is the Real Emancipation of
Women?” Atlantic Monthly, LXXXIX (January, 1902), pp. 28- 35.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

165

deve10pment which particularly aroused male alarm. It
seemed that women were becoming more masculine.

"Woman," Goldwin Smith wrote in 1890, "has made her
way to the smoking room and has mounted the bicycle. She
began to adopt male attire, and nothing but her own taste
stopped her. After all, Nature has made two sexes. Nobody
thinks it a compliment to a man to be called effeminate;
why should we think that to become masculine is the highest
ideal of woman?"3 A professor at Rutgers Female College
complained that young women "practice boyish manners and
boyish mischief. They imitate the college yell and wear
the college gown." Reporting on this deve10pment in The_

Independent one writer declared that "the invasion of man's

 

domain by women is not a matter of social evolution and
progress, but a temporary anomaly against which a strong
reaction has already set in."4

Aside from the activities and achievements of the organ-
ized feminist movement, the influence of women was asserting

itself in more subtle, but no less powerful ways. The

Sunday-school morality of women set the tone of church life

3Goldwin Smith, "Woman's Place in the State," The
Forum, VIII (January, 1890), p. 524.

4Henry T. Finck, "Are Womanly Women Doomed," The
Independent, LIII (January 31, 1901), pp. 267, 268.

 

166

in America. Women teachers, in addition to filling the

instructional ranks in primary education, were securing

many positions in the high schools.5 The significance of

this development was underscored by a writer in the Atlantic

Monthly in 1912, in which the author traced "The Feminizing

of Culture" which had been occurring for a generation: "As

to the feminizing influence of woman teachers on manners

and morals and general attitude toward life, there can be

no real doubt. Boys and girls cannot spend eight or twelve

impressionable years of childhood and youth under the constant

daily influence of women without having the lady-like attitude

toward life strongly emphasized. . . . in this present

assimilation, one cannot help regretting the steady disap—

pearance of the katabolic qualities of the human male."6
In the urban environment boys were seldom outside the

sphere of feminine influence and rule. The social history

of the American family in the nineteenth century recorded a

decline in the authority and influence of the patriarch. Thus,

domestically, "under the new order, the home comes to be run

for the women and children rather than for the man, ."7

4_-__‘.__‘ g A “#A-_‘ AA __

5Ray Ginger, Age of Excess (New York: Macmillan Co.
1965), pp. 324-328; Harry Thurston Peck, Twenty Years of the
Republic, 1885-1905 (New York. Dodd, Mead E Co. ,‘1919), pp.
744-749?

6Earl Barnes, ”The Feminizing of Culture," Atlantic
Monthly, CIX (June, 1912), p. 775.

7Arthur W. Calhoun, A Social Histor of the American
Family, 3 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., I9I95, III,
p. 158. See the chapter, "The Passing of Patriarchism and
Familism."

 

 

 

167

The pressure of a man's work in an urban-industrial society
tended to keep him away from home during most of the day, and
many comfortable middle class men increasingly turned to the
club rather than to the home as a haven for relaxation.

"The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home," wrote
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1903, "is found in his universal
absence from it. It is not only that his work takes him

out (and he sees to it that it does!) but the man who does

not 'have to work' also goes out, for pleasure."8

Clarence Day, in his humorous recollections in Life

 

With Father, admitted that he saw more of his father after

 

he grew up than he had in his childhood.9 Perhaps Day's
portrait of his father as a blustery domestic autocrat, whose
bark was decidedly worse than his bite, was characteristic

of many respectable middle class homes in the late nineteenth
century in which the woman of the house usually got her way.
Although the husband-father continued to be idealized as

the master of the family, it seemed that his influence in

the home, and on children, was much less than it had been

in earlier years of American life.

8Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and its
Influence (New York: McClure, Phillips 0., p.
Also see in Calhoun the chapter entitled "The Precarious Home, "
ibid.

 

 

9Clarence Day, Life With_Father (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1936), p. 221.

 

168

The decline of the father in American society and the
rise of the "emancipated woman" were developments which were
reflected in the literature of the period. It has been

observed, for example, that in many novels of the day the

10 A

study of the heroines of Henry Adams bears this out,11 as

women were strong, while the men were ineffectual.

do studies of other authors in the period. The novel which
perhaps most explicitly revealed this was Robert Grant's

Unleavened Bread, which appeared in 1900. A year earlier

 

Grant had written that "there are some women to-day who
would . . . enter the lists of life on the footing of a
second—class man, proud of their swagger, and with the in-
stincts of the wife and mother sternly repressed. . . . The
danger lies in the failure to recognize the species in the
bustling, chirping, metallic, superficial class of women
which in some numbers, and with the wiry whirr of grass-
hoppers, infests the cities and towns of the republic to-

day-- ."12

L‘AJH

of woman in his portrait of the selfish and social-climbing
Selma, who divorced one husband, outlived a second, and mar-
ried a third, a lawyer, who rose in politics to become a

United States Senator.

Ag—A _‘_ -_L AA_ 4 ##‘b‘ A—‘_‘

10Ginger, op cit., p. 325.

11See Edward N. Saveth, "The Heroines of Henry Adams,"
American Quarterly, VIII (Fall, 1956), pp. 231-242.

12Robert Grant, "Search-Light Letters: Letter to a
Modern Woman with Social Ambitions," Scribner's_Magazine,
XXV (March, 1899), p. 377.

 

 

169

For Selma in Unleayened Bread, ”to be an American

 

meant to be more keenly alive to the responsibility of life
than any other citizen of civilization, and to be an Amer-
ican woman meant to be something finer, cleverer, stronger,
and purer than any other daughter of Eve." In the novel it
was Flossy Williams, another social-climbing female, but

an honest one, who, in an angry exchange, exposed to Selma
the full measure of her selfishness, deceit, and haughty
sense of superiority:

You're one of those American women--I've
always been curious to meet in all her
glory--who believe that they are born in
the complete panoply of flawless womanhood;
that they are by birthright consummate
house-wives, leaders of the world's thought
and ethics, and peerless society queens.
All this by instinct, by heritage, and with-
out education. . . . You don't understand,
that a true lady--a genuine society
queen--represents modesty and sweetness and self-
control, and gentle thoughts and feelings;
that she is evolved by gradual processes from
generation to generation, not ready made
. . But there's hope for me because I'm
conscious of my shortcomings and am trying
to correct them; whereas you are satisfied,
and fail to see the difference between your-
self and the well-bred women whom you envy
and sneer at.

Unleavened Bread was widely read in America; it ranked
14

 

third on the best seller list in 1900, and it provoked

13Robert Grant, Unleavened Bread (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1900), pp. - ,
14

Alice Payne Hackett, 70 Years of Best-Sellers,
1895-1965 (New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 19675, p. 96.

 

170

widespread discussion. Upon reading Grant's novel Brooks
Adams wrote the author: "The fact is, that our social system
is calculated to breed, and does breed, intense selfishness
in all classes of women, from the top to the bottom of the
scale. Selma is growing to form the dominant type of our

female population."15

Theodore Roosevelt, in an address before
the National Congress of Mothers in 1905, urged the women to
read Grant's novel and to "ponder seriously the character of
Selma, and think of the fate that would surely overcome any
nation which developed its average and typical woman along
such lines. Unfortunately, it would be untrue to say that
this type exists only in American novels. That it also exists
in American life is made unpleasantly evident by the statis-
tics as to the dwindling families in some localities. It

is made evident in equally sinister fashion by the census sta-
tistics as to divorce, which are fairly appalling, . . ."
Roosevelt then proceeded to denounce divorce as "a bane to any
nation, a curse to society, a menace to the home, an incite-
ment to married unhappiness, and to immorality, an evil thing

for men, and a still more hideous evil for women."16

A AA A ——A # AM A ALA __._ 4,—- _.‘ A

 

15Quoted in Arthur F. Beringause, Brooks Adams: A
Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), pp. 360-361.
16

Theodore Roosevelt, "The Woman and the Home," in
American Problems, Vol. XVI of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt
(ZD—VOls., National Edition, New Yofk: Charles ScribnerTsISons,
1926), p. 169. On the topic of divorce see William L. O' Neill,
Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1967) and James H’.‘Barnett, Divorce Aand#the4American

Divorce Novel, 1858- 1937 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania ,61939).

 

 

 

 

171

In Henry James's The Bostonians, the Southern hero

 

Basil Ransom discovered at first hand the fervor of the
feminist movement. The masculine dilemma of late nine-
teenth century America was summarized in an impassioned
speech by Ransom:

The whole generation is womanised; the
masculine tone is passing out of the
world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hys-
terical, chattering, canting age, an age
of hollow phrases and false delicacy '

and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled
sensibilities, which, if we don't soon
look out, will usher in the reign of medi-
ocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and
the most pretentious that has ever been.
The masculine character, the ability to
dare and endure, to know and yet not fear
reality, to look the world in the face

and take it for what it is--a very queer
and partly very base mixture--that is what
I'want to preserve, or rather, as I may
say, to recover, . . ."1

By the turn of the century many American men were
bewildered by the radical extension of the feminine influ-
ence in society. Many were thoroughly exasperated by the

"chattering and canting," as an editorial in Theglndependent_

 

indicated in 1901. On the subject of "Why Men Don't Like
Her," referring to the "New Woman," it declared that men,
above all, "are distinctly and thoroughly disgusted with
her everlasting habit of arguing, in season and out of

season, about herself, her 'rights,' her opportunities,

L‘AM——g__‘_~_‘_#._‘A_A—#

17Henry James, The Bostonians (New York: Dial Press,
1945), p. 283.

 

172

her profession, her 'cause,' her 'reform,' her hobby, or
her ism, until the helpless male creature that has to choose
between listening to her or being absolutely rude is well

nigh dead with fatigue."18

The woman question was much
on the minds of Americans of both sexes in 1900, when
Flora McDonald Thompson posed the basic question in the

North American Review: "Considering the new form of super-

 

iority of the American woman at the end of the century--

a superiority which is greater than all the domestic
virtues, a superiority that boasts of feminine independence,
a superiority that immortalizes woman and demoralizes man;
considering this modern superiority of the American woman,
one looks curiously to the future and asks, What of its

effect upon our national character and standing?"19

II

Besieged by suffragettes, the Women's Christian Tem-
perance Union, "New Women" and "Gibson Girls," many American
men found themselves in the rather uncomfortable and

irritating position of having to develop a defense of manhood.

18..Why Men Don't Like Her," Theglndependent, LIII
(April 11, 1901), p. 854.

19Flora McDonald Thompson, "Retrogression of the
American Woman," North American Review, CLXXI (November,
1900), p. 753.

 

 

173

"We hear so much about the rights of women," Harry Thurston
Peck wrote in 1899, "that just for the sake of variety it
ought not to be displeasing to hear a little something said
about the rights of man. When one comes down to the plain
fact of human life on its serious side, it is man who is
the finest and the noblest and the most godlike figure in
the world . . . ." After cataloguing the achievements of
man down through the ages, Peck declared that a woman's place
is that which is marked out for her by man.20
The masculine vs. feminine theme became evident in
various areas of discourse. The achievements of women in
literature and the arts entered the discussion. Charles
Dudley Warner had posed the question in 1890: "Man is a
noble creation, and he has fine and sturdy qualities which
command the admiration of the other sex; but how will it be
when that sex, by reason of superior acquirements, is able to

look down on him intellectually?"21

In the light of this
question, how reassuring it was for men to read ten years
later that "art has masculine emotions, representing the
katabolic, militant Spirit of man." In arguing this, in

support of his thesis that men are more creative than women,

E.A. Randall declared that "women have lacked the masculine

A A—A—— A __A .__4_-‘_ A._‘

20Harry Thurston Peck, "The Woman of To-Day and of
To-Morrow," The Cosmopolitan, XXVII (June, 1899), p. 154.

21Charles Dudley Warner, ”The Subjection of Man,"
Harper's New MonthlyéMagazine, LXXX (May, 1890), p. 973.

 

 

174

emotions necessary for the production of great paint-
ings."22
Although women did not always disagree with such
assertions, they, too, sought to clarify the distinction
between masculine and feminine attributes. A female
professor of philosophy at Randolph-Macon Woman's College

complained in 1901 of the inadequacy of the definition

of womanly. The Century Dictionary, she said, "is in no

 

way embarassed in its definition of manly: It is at no
loss for distinct virtues to mention as characteristic of
a manly man. He is 'humane,' 'charitable,' 'hospitable,'
'independent in spirit or bearing,‘ 'strong,‘ 'brave,‘
'large-minded,‘ etc. There are some characteristics which
the manly man must ng£_have, prominent among them being
'womanish.' When the definition of the adjective womanly
is reached, the paucity of definite characteristics is
distressing."23

In literature there was a masculine reaction against

the decadence of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. Rudyard

22E.A. Randall, "The Artistic Impulse in Man and
Woman," The Arena, XXIV (October, 1900), pp. 415, 420. On
a relatedftopic by a woman, see Edith Brower, "Is the Musical
Idea Masculine," Atlantic_quthly, LXXIII (March, 1894),
pp. 332-339.

23C.S. Parrish, "The Womanly Woman," Theglndgpendent,
LIII (April 4, 1901), p. 775.

 

 

 

175

Kipling was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic as the
foremost exponent of the masculine mode in literature.

Kipling was hailed in the Overland_Monthly as a rare example

 

of an author "who has gained fame and made money not only
without the aid of women, but actually in spite of them."
He was admired because "his is a strenuous and exceedingly
virile conception of things, the conception of the young
man whose heart is too full of the joy of conflict to
feel the necessity for the tenderness and sympathy which
are implied in the very term."24
Kipling's popularity in America was a reflection of
the new masculine assertiveness of the period. Where

Kipling led, Americans followed. In "The Healthful Tone

for American Literature" in The Forum in 1895, Richard

 

Burton observed that "a mere glance at world-literature
proves beyond peradventure that the moving and permanent
forces are those which are healthful, vital, positive,
optimistic." Burton attacked decadence and the "art-for-
art's sake" approach of the aesthetes and called for a

new muscularity in American literature. "Our land," he
said, "entering into its young heyday of national maturity,
must develop a literature to express and reflect its ideals,

or we shall display to the astonished world the spectacle

24Lewis Austin, "Kipling and Women," Overland
Monthly, XLII (October, 1903), pp. 357, 358.

176

of a vigorous people, hardly out of adolescence, whose voice
is not the big, manly instrument suiting its years, but the
thin piping treble of senility. Common sense and patriotism
alike forbid such an absurdity."25
American literature, it was asserted, had always been
largely dominated by the feminine influence, and the Kentucky
author James Lane Allen declared in 1897 for a reassertion of

"the Masculine Principle" in American writing. In an article

in the Atlantic Monghly he protested against the dominance

 

of "the Feminine Principle," touching on the theme of "over-

civilization" in the process: "You American novelists and

short-story writers, as theresult of following the leader-

ship of this principle, have succeeded in producing a

literature of what kind? Of effeminacy, of decadence.

For in the main it is a literature of the over-civilized,

the ultra-refined, the hyper-fastidious; of the fragile,

the trivial, the rarefied, the bloodless. ."26
Frank Norris declared early in his career as a novelist:

"Let us have men who are masculine, men who have other

things to think of besides fooling away their time in ball-

rooms. After all, think of a man who smells of perfume

AAA AM —— #‘Q A A .4 __ A_. # —

25Richard Burton, "The Healthful Tone for American
Literature," The Forum, XIX (April, 1895), pp. 252-253.

26James Lane Allen, "Two Principles in Recent Amer-
ican Fiction," Atlantic Monthly, LXXX (October, 1897), p. 438.

 

 

177

and sachet--one's gorge rises at it! I would rather a man
smell of horse sweat, the nasty salt rime, the bitter,
pungent lather that gathers when the girths gall and the
check strap chafes." However, not only did Norris call
for red-blooded men in American fiction, but also for
red-blooded women: "Give us stories now, give us men,
strong, brutal men, with red-hot blood in 'em, with
unleashed passions rampant in 'em, blood and bones and
viscera in 'em, and women, too, that move and have their
being. . . . It's the Life that we want, the vigorous, real
thing, not the curious weaving of words and the polish of
literary finish. . . . We don't want literature, we want

life."27

 

In a series of novels--MoranwgfgthegLady Letty, Blix,

and A Man's Woman--Norris developed what literary historian

 

Donald Pizer has called "a masculine-feminine ethic, in
which men achieve a correct masculinity with the aid of
women who themselves move from masculinity to femininity."28

In one of these novels, A Man's Woman, Norris pitted Ward

 

Bennett, a brutish Arctic explorer, against Lloyd Searight,
a determined and strong-willed nurse whose creed was "to do

things." In Lloyd's view "she was stronger than other

27Quoted in Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris

 

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 89)

28Ibid., pp. 110-111.

178

women; she was carrying out a splendid work.” Yet despite

her masculine power, in her introspective moments she

could cry: "I am no better, no stronger than the others.

What does it all amount to when I know that, after all,

I am just a woman-- . . ." She thought of Ward "at his

very best--how he had always seemed to her the type of

the perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great

projects with an energy anddetermination almost superhuman,
she had been proud of hisgiant's strength, the vast

span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest,

the sense of enormous physical power suggested by his every

29

movement." A Man'ngoman explores the clash of masculine

 

and feminine wills, out of which Lloyd discovers that it is
the natural role of woman to submit to the man, while

Ward learns that masculinity consists of much more than

mere brute strength. As Pizer writes, the novel "is devoted
to the process by which a strong-willed woman learns to

win love by surrendering and a strong-willed man learns to

temper strength with understanding."30

.n-AAflMH,_‘-_-A__.—

29Frank Norris, A Man's Woman (New York: Doubleday
5 McClure Co., 1900), pp. 57, 58, I72-l73.

30Pizer, op. cit., p. 107.

179

The character of Ward Bennett in A Man's Woman was

representative of the cult of the strong man which devel-

Oped in American fiction at the turn of the century.31

"The world wants men," exclaimed Lloyd in that novel,
”great, strong, harsh, brutal men--men with purposes, who
let nothing, nothing, nothing stand in their way." When
Lloyd's safety is threatened by a runaway horse, Bennett
kills the horse with a single, powerful blow from a hammer.
Lloyd's reaction to this "fearful thing done there in the
road" is a significant commentary on the strong man theme:

the savagery of the whole affair
stuck in Lloyd's imagination. There was a
primitiveness, a certain hideous sim-
plicity in the way Bennett had met the
situation that filled her with wonder and
even a little terror and mistrust of him.
The vast, brutal directness of the deed
was out of place and incongrous at this
end-of—the-century time. It ignored two
thousand years of civilization. It was
a harsh, clanging, brazen note, powerful,
uncomplicated, which came jangling in,
discordant and inharmonious with the tune
of the age. It savoured of the days when

31For a literary analysis of this theme in the light
of Norris' works, see chapter 3, "The Cult of the Strong Man, "
in Ernest Marchand, Frank Norri§:#A Study (Standford, Califor-
nia: Standford University Press, 1942), pp. 97-129. On the
general topic of naturalism in literature, see Lars Ahnebrink,

The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction (New York:

RusseII 6 Russell, The. 1961).

 

180

men fought the brutes with their hands or

with their clubs. But also it was an indi-

cation of a force and a power of mind that

stopped at nothing to attain its ends, .

disdainful of hesitation, holding delicacy 32

and finessing in measureless contempt, . . .
Led by Norris and Jack London, this school of Darwinistic
fiction emphasized the primitivistic, atavistic side of man.

The image of the strong man in literature seemed to be

appropriate for the age of Darwin and imperialism, and it
was undoubtedly reassuring to many to see the masculine
image bolstered in fiction. The age also witnessed new
celebrations of manhood in the nation's leading periodicals
and magazines. Women, as well as men, joined in this

celebration of the masculine theme. "Are we not weary,"

wrote Ellen Burns Sherman in The Critic in 1896, "oh so

 

weary! of hearing about the new woman? Yes, we are; and
where--all this time-~15 the new man?" It was high time,

she said, "that some one should give the new man his due

and gratefully recognize in him the fulfillment of prophecy--
for he not only sees visions and helps to bring them to

pass, but he is himself a second prophecy of a still higher

33 Still, women claimed a large share of

type of manhood."
the credit in the making of men. "Idleness and luxury,"

observed Sara Grand in 1894, "are making men flabby, and

32Norris, op. cit., pp. 82, 102, 105-106.

33Ellen Burns Sherman, "The New Man," The Critic,
XXVIII (May 23, 1896), pp. 364, 365.

 

181

the man at the head of affairs is beginning to ask seriously
if a great war might not help them to pull themselves
together." She concluded, however, that "women need not

be disheartened. Now is the time," she said, "to cultivate
a cheerful frame of mind, and remember that if there is
little h0pe for the present generation, they can spank
proper principles into the next in the nursery."34

"The present generation" did find hope. By 1900 a

war had helped men, or so it seemed, "to pull themselves

 

together," and America's imperialist venture had afforded
Theodore Roosevelt the opportunity of injecting the idea of
the strenuous life into the national values. The national
impulse for the strenuous life, evident for over a decade
in American life, had been motivated, in part, by the femi-
nine threat to manliness in the late nineteenth century.

Roosevelt had written in The Century in the 1880's that

 

"it is . . . unfortunately true . . . that the general
tendency among people of culture and high education has been
to neglect and even look down upon the rougher and manlier
virtues, so that an advanced state of intellectual development

is too often associated with a certain effeminacy of character."35

34Sara Grand, "The Man of the Moment," North American
Review, CLVIII (May, 1894), pp. 626, 627.

35Theodore Roosevelt, "Machine Politics in New York
City," The Century Magazine, XXXIII (November, 1886), p. 76.

 

 

182

The strenuous life was offered as a masculine antidote
to combat effeminacy. Frank Norris Spoke for the new
strenuous generation when he declared that "the United
States in this year of grace of nineteen hundred and two
does not want and does not need Scholars, but Men-~Men made
in the mould of the Leonard Woods and the Theodore Roose—
velts, . . ."36 The view that effeminacy represented an
unhealthy tendency in American life was evident in much
of the widespread criticism of the novels of Henry James.
Writing of James in 1902 Rafford Pyke declared that "his
themes grew more and more unwholesome; so that now his
writings exhibit all the stigmata of degeneracy, ."37

On the subject of "What Men Like in Men," Pyke
declared that "every man who i§_a man would readily agree
that he dislikes a 'Sissy', . . ." He then generously

attributed a host of ideals and virtues to men and emphasized

their necessity in relations among men:

36Frank Norris, The Responsibilities_pf the Novelist
and Other LiterarygEssays (Néw'Yorkz—Douhleday, Pageifi Co.,
1903), p. 265. From one of Norris' stories came the remark,
"that the same qualities that make a good football man would
make a good soldier; and a good soldier, sir, is a man good
enough to be any girl's hquand.” Quoted in Marchand, op. cit.,

p. 132.

 

37Rafford Pyke, "What Men Like in Men," The Cosmo-
politan, XXXIII (August, 1902), p. 403.

183

First of all, a man must be what other men
call "square"--which implies that he must
have a sense of honor. This means so much
in the relations of men with men. From
women they do not expect it, at least in the
fullest sense, --a man's sense; but it is
the very corner-stone of friendship among
men. . . . Fair play and the rigor of the
game is a masculine ideal; and men will
trust and like and honor those who live
up to its strict requirements. The foun-
dation of it all is justice--the most
masculine of virtues, and the only one
in which no woman ever had a share. Some
women have been generous, and many have been
brave and wise and self-denying, but there
has never lived a woman who was absolutely
just. Justice, even-handed, clear-eyed,
supreme over prejudice and passion-—this
is God's gift to man alone, and man alone
can feel how splendid and sublime a thing
it is.

The masculine virtues fostered by the strenuous life
attracted women, as well as men. Lavinia Hart observed in

Cosmopolitan that ”strength is that attribute of man which

 

most keenly appeals to woman. The untrained, untutored
woman loves him for brute strength. The woman of culture

and refinement loves him for strength of intellect and

38Ibid., pp. 403, 405. Edward A. Ross declared in
his Sin and Society: ”Men rather than women are the natural
foes of wrong. Men burn at the spectacle of injustice, women
at the sight of suffering. 'White,‘ 'decent,' 'fair play,‘
'square deal,’ voice maSculine conscience. Men feel instinct-
ively that the pith of society is orderly struggle, competition
tempered by rules of forbearance. The impulse of simple-
minded men to put down 'foul play' and 'dirty work' is a
precious safeguard of social order. But the impulses of simple—
minded women are not so trustworthy." Sin anngociety (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1907), p. 94.

 

184

character, and that tenderness which in man is the acme of

mental and moral and physical Strength and poise." It was

apparent that her ideal was conceived in terms of the image

of heroic manhood which the strenuous life promoted.

Writing of "the man who would win a woman," she declared

that he must be "a man of the heroic temperament, a man

who dares; a man who has character sufficient to have con-

victions, and courage sufficient to embody and emblazon them

in his life; a man who is master of others, because he

first is master of himself. Only such a man wholly wins

the woman he wants; and only such a one can make her

wholly happy."39
Because of the feminine threat to manliness a new

concern was evidenced for the American boy. Boys had to

be saved from effeminacy. Because they would someday face

the test of manhood themselves, it was felt that boys

should be subjected to a strong masculine influence in

their lives--that they Should be nurtured on the values

of the strenuous life. The necessity for this was empha-

sized by Harry Thurston Peck, who stressed the importance

of the role of the father in inculcating the masculine

virtues:

39Lavinia Hart, "The Way to Win a Woman," The Cosmo-
politan, XXXV (August, 1903), pp. 400, 403.

 

185

For the life of a man differs from the life
of a woman in this respect, that at some
time or other, sooner or later, the time
must come when he shall stand alone relying
on his own strength, to conquer if he is
sound and brave, to fall if he be weak and
cowardly. . . . He must meet the test and
fight the fight alone. And in that hour of
trial, the truest safeguard is not so much
inherent principle; it is not religious
precept; it is most of all the long-exerted,
silent, irresistible influence of those
early years when his father, not merely

as father, but as a comrade and a friend,
led him to feel in his very soul, that truth
and honor and decency are fairer and finer
for their own sake than falsehood and dishonor
and uncleanness.40

The celebration of the manly relationship between father
and son typified the masculine self-consciousness of the period.
A male anxiety to prove oneself--"to meet the test and fight
the fight alone"--was generated by the feminine threat to
manliness. This was eSpecially apparent in the appeal of
jingoism in the 1890's. With women encroaching upon most
spheres of the male domain, the martial spirit loomed as the
last citadel of manliness. To many men in the decade of
the nineties, war provided the one remaining haven from the

massive feminine assault upon male dominance in society.

40Harry Thurston Peck, "What a Father Can Do For His
Son," The Cosmopolitan, XXXIII (October, 1902), p. 707.

 

Chapter VIII

The Martial Spirit

A militaristic strain pervaded the doctrine of the stren-
uous life throughout the nineties. It was the heyday of flag-
waving, boys' brigades, patriotic societies, national debates
on preparedness, rumors of wars, and finally "the splendid
little war" itself. America, plagued by domestic discontent,
found a certain relief in the martial spirit. For an Ameri-
can in the 1890's it was reassuring to know that despite the
depression, the labor disorders, the influx of immigrants,
and the Populist uprising, the American people could rally
round the flag and show the world that national muscularity
was not lacking. The martial spirit of the period provided
for the ultimate expression of the values of the strenuous
life. Existing impulses for strenuous endeavor were tempered
by the war spirit of the nineties to produce a full-fledged
cult of manliness.

The Civil War remained a powerful factor contributing
to the strenuous impulse. The impact of the war on those
who had participated in it was deep and enduring, as count-
less letters, diaries, and speeches of the period testify.
Charles Francis AdamS, Jr. always insisted that the war made
a man of him. Of his army career he maintained that "edu-
cationally and every other way, it was the most fortunate

event in my life . . . Think of my life without that

186

187

expaerience!”l Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. spoke for a whole
generation when he said that it had been set apart by the war:
"Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were
touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset
that life is a profound and passionate thing. . . . we have
seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the
snowy heights of honor, . . ."2 Ambrose Bierce emerged from
the blood bath to spend the rest of his life pursuing in fic-
tion an apparent obsession with death, which stemmed in part,
it seems, from his grim experiences in the war.3

For many participants, both military and civilian, the
spirit of strenuous service demanded by the Civil War became
an elusive ideal in the long period of peace which followed.4
To a great extent, through this preoccupation with the haunt-
ing question of the role of the martial spirit in peacetime,

the Civil War generation provided much of the intellectual

 

1Quoted in Edward C. Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams,
Jr.: The Patrician at Bay (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
19655, pp. 23, 31.

 

 

2Quoted in Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee From Olym-
pus: Justice Holmes and His Family (Boston: Little,IBrown, 6
Co., 1945), p. 197.

 

 

3Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Lit-
erature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford’University
Press, 1962), pp. 617-634.

 

 

4George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern
Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper
S’ROw,’196S), pp. 217-238.

 

188

stimulus for the strenuous life of the generation which fol-
lowed. The pronouncements of an Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
who had been "touched with fire" in his youth were taken to
heart and expressed in both thought and deed by the young men
who came of age in the 1880's and 1890's. It was the experi-
ence of the generation of Civil War veterans which provided
the example for exemplars of the strenuous life near the end
of the century, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Harding
Davis, Stephen Crane, Owen Wister, Frederic Remington, and
others.

Holmes was perhaps the foremost spokesman for the
strenuous theme prior to Roosevelt. Having personally ex-
perienced the agonies and horrors of war, his hatred for it
was deep. Nevertheless, he sought to maintain in peacetime
the heroic ideal of martial heroism.5 Holmes's distinguished
career was marked by a number of public pronouncements con-
cerning the impact of the war on his generation. In these
he sought to give meaning to the eXperience, as the famous
Memorial Day Addresses of 1884 and 1895 eloquently testify.
In 1895 Holmes's Boston speech drew praise from Roosevelt.
"War, when you are at it," Holmes declared, "is horrible and
dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its
message was divine. . . . In this smug, over-safe corner of

the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable

 

51b1d., pp. 218-222.

189

rOthine is no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little
space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed stream—
ing of the world, and in order that we may be ready for dan-
ger."6

This was the voice of the older, Civil War generation
speaking, and the message was one which many of the young men
of America accepted. Roosevelt's own articulation of "the
strenuous life" undoubtly drew from the war theme of the ear-
lier generation. Holmes even anticipated Roosevelt in an
address to the New York State Bar Association, a few months
prior to Roosevelt's "The Strenuous Life" speech in Chicago.
He told his audience: "The place for a man who is complete in
all his powers is in the fight. The professor, the man of
letters, gives up one-half of life that his protected talent
may grow and flower in peace. But to make up your mind at
your peril upon a living question, for purposes of action,
calls upon your whole nature."7

A unique View of the role of the martial spirit by a mem-
ber of the war generation came in William James's essay of 1910,
"The Moral Equivalent of War." It seems that James, who had
remained out of the war, sought throughout much of his career

8

a moral equivalent of the Civil War. In this essay James,

 

6Quoted in Bowen, op. cit., p. 337.

71bid., p. 295.

8Fredrickson, op. cit., pp. 229-238.

190

a11:hough declaring himself a pacifist, celebrated ”only the
‘higher aspects of militaristic sentiment.” He declared that
"the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race
through war, are absolute and permanent human goods." In his
view the martial spirit must be maintained in peacetime in
order to preserve peace. "Martial virtues must be the endur-
ing cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of
private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the
rock upon which states are built ."9
The solution which James offered to the problem of find-
ing "a moral equivalent of war" anticipated the Civilian Con—
servation Corps of New Deal days and the Peace Corps and Vista
of the New Frontier and Great Society era. James argued that,
"instead of military conscription a conscription of the whole
youthful population to form for a certain number of years a
part of the army enlisted against Nature." "To coal and iron
mines," James declared, "to freight trains, to fishing fleets
in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-
washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and
stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded
youths be drafted off, according to their choice, . . .” ”They

would tread the earth more proudly," he added, and "they would

 

9William James, Memories and Studies (New York:

Longmans, Green, 6 Co., 19125, pp. 275, 287-288.

191

be better fathers and teachers of the following generation."10

James indicated that his search for "a moral equivalent
of war" was motivated by the experience of the Civil War. He
referred to the heritage of the war at the beginning of his
essay, suggesting its powerful claim on the memory of most
Americans: "Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and
legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own t0gether,
a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood
poured out."11
AS a small boy during the conflict, Theodore Roosevelt

grew up with a consciousness of the war, a feeling for the
experience which rivalled that of many members of the earlier
generation who had participated in it. In an address at a
veteran's reunion in Vermont in 1901, Roosevelt spoke of the
war as a great national experience which aroused a "community
of interest,” derived from a "community of devotion to a
lofty ideal:"

The great Civil War rendered precisely this

service. It drew into the field a very large

prOportion of the adult male population, and

it lasted so long that its lessons were thor-

oughly driven home. In our other wars the

same lessons, or nearly the same lessons, have

been taught, but upon so much smaller a scale

that the effect is in no shape or way compara-

ble. . . In our modern life there are only a
few occupations where risk has to be feared, and

 

10Ibid., pp. 290-291.

11Ibid., pp. 267-268.

192

there are many occupations where no exhausting
labor has to be faced; and so there are plenty
of us who can be benefited by a little actual
experience with the rough side of things. It
was a good thing, a very good thing, to have a
great mass of our peOple learn what it was to
face death and endpge toil together, and all
on an exact level.

The link between the memory of the Civil War and the
rising martial spirit in late nineteenth century America con-
sisted of more than mere rhetoric. One manifestation of the
nationalistic impulse was a patriotic fervor North and South,
oriented towards a reconciliation of the two sections, and
reflected in the rise of patriotic societies such as the Grand
Army of the Republic, the Daughters of the American Revolution,
the Society of Colonial Wars, the Colonial Dames, the Sons of
the Revolution, and the Society of the War of 1812. Veterans
of the Blue and the Gray began appearing together in meetings
and began sharing the same speakers' platforms in the 1880's,
to dramatize the reconciliation of the sections. Americans
from both the North and the South also enthusiastically sup-
ported the host of centennial celebrations held in the last
quarter of the century. These jubilees tended to foster
national unity by focusing on the nation's historic past prior

13

to the Civil War. In 1890 E. Benjamin Andrews, the president

 

12Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and
Addresses (New York: The Century Co., 1904), pp. 268-269.

 

 

13Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-
1898 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1933), pp. 409-412;6Mer1e Curti,
The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1946), pp. 187-193.

 

 

193

of Iirown University, observed that it was strange to find "a
feeljtng that it is still uncertain whether these States will
Inanmanently continue a single nation. Yet many at this moment
sfllare that feeling. . . . The sectional Spirit which killed
Ronue is powerfully at work among us. Hardly ever, even before
cnxr war, was it more manifest than now." Andrews then proceed-
exi to define the role of the public schools in inculcating

jpatroitism. "Peace needs its love of country," he said, as

well as war."14

The martial spirit thrived on the legacy of the Civil
War, and, in the 1890's, it flourished as an aspect of the
new imperialist impulse. In that decade American jingoism
was the prevailing note in the conduct of foreign affairs.

In 1891 the United States threatened to go to war against
Chile over the "Baltimore" affair, and in 1895 threatened
England with war over the Venezuelan boundary dispute. In
that year an insurrection in Cuba also touched off a chain of
events which led to the war with Spain in 1898.

The Darwinian argument used to justify imperialism was
also used in celebrating the martial spirit. Alfred T. Mahan,
the influential advocate of navalism, declared in 1897 that
"conflict is the condition of all life, material and spirit-

ual; and it is to the soldier's experience that the spiritual

14E. Benjamin Andrews, "Patriotism and the Public

Schools," The Arena, III (December, 1890), pp. 74, 75.

194

life goes for its most vivid metaphors and its loftiest inspi-
rations. Whatever else the twentieth century may bring us, it
\Mlll not, from anything now current in the thought of the nine-
teenth, receive a nobler ideal."15 In 1899 Harriet Bradbury
in writing on ”War as a Necessity of Evolution" declared that,
"The noblest qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race were developed
in the stress of conflict, the heroism of self—sacrifice,
devotion to an ideal of honor dearer than life, and in the
pursuit of which, pain and danger become mere words."16
"Overcivilization" and peace were threats to manliness
and factors which contributed to the decline of the martial
virtues. "We are told," Carl Schurz said after the "Maine"
disaster, "that a nation needs a war from time to time to
prevent it from becoming effeminate, to shake it up from
demoralizing materialism, and to elevate the popular heart by
awakening heroic emotions and the spirit of patriotic self-

. . l7
sacrlflce."

Schurz, and other critics of the war spirit,
found this point of view very disturbing. It was a notion
preached by Roosevelt and others throughout the 1890's. The

president of the Naval War college had declared in 1896 that

 

lSAlfred T. Mahan, "A Twentieth-Century Outlook,"
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XCV (September, 1897), p. 533.

6Harriet B. Bradbury, "War as a Necessity of Evo-
lution," The Arena, XXI (January, 1899), p. 94.

 

l7Carl Schurz, "About War," Harper's Weekly, XLII
(March 5, 1898), p. 219.

 

195

"the corrupt ease, the luxurious immorality of life, toward
which a total absence of war always leads nations, has in it
something more degrading for the human race than simple sav-

H18

agery. At the close of the war with Spain Maurice Thompson

wrote in The Independent that "the greatest danger that a long

 

period of profound peace offers to a nation is that of effemi-
nate tendencies in young men. This is especially true in a
country where the advancement of civilized methods of living
has reached the point now touched by it in the United States."19
The subject of war and the nature of war was much under
discussion in American periodicals. A survey of the contents
of leading magazines of the day reveals such article titles
as "War and Civilization," "Christianity and War," "War as a
Factor in Civilization," "The Natural History of Warfare,"
"Philosophy and Morals of War," "War As a Moral Medicine,"
"War as a Necessity of Evolution," and "The Benefits of War."
In these and other articles war was celebrated and condemned.
One of the most extreme statements in praise of the martial

Spirit and war was that of Rear-Admiral S.B. Luce in the

North American Review. "The truth is," wrote Luce, "that war

 

is an ordinance of God." In his View war did have a positive

role in the history of mankind: "War is the malady of nations;

 

l8H.C. Taylor, "Study of War," North American Review
CLXII (February, 1896), p. 183.

 

19Maurice Thompson, "Vigorous Men, A Vigorous Nation,"
The Independent, L (September 1, 1898), pp. 610—611.

 

196

the disease is terrible while it lasts, but purifying in its
results. It tries a nation and chastens it, as sickness or
adversity tries and chastens the individual. There is a wisdom
that comes only of suffering, whether to the family or to the
aggregation of families--the nation. Man is perfected through
suffering." Luce summed up his argument by declaring that "in
the economy of nature, or the providence of God, war is sent,
not necessarily for the punishment of national sins, nor yet
for national aggrandizement; but, rather, for the forming of
national character, the shaping of a peOple's destiny, and the
spreading of civilization."20
Christianity was brought to the defense of war. Undoubt-
edly many Americans, ill-at-ease over the war with Spain and
'the subsequent American acquistion of the Philippines, were

reassured to read the words of the Dean of Canterbury in the

North American Review "that war, in any just and holy cause,

 

is not only defensible, but is a positive duty." The Rev-
erend F.W. Farrar declared that, "There has scarcely been any
war in which some of the finest elements of virtue have not
been educed. What splendor of self-sacrifice, what unflinching
battle-brunt of heroism, what sense of the absolute supremacy
of duty, does war call forth, even in the humblest and most

ignorant soldiers." The Reverend Farrar concluded that "a

 

20S.B. Luce, "The Benefits of War," North American
Review, CLIII (December, 1891), pp. 683, 672.

 

197

war waged in the cause of truth and right, though it may be

a very terrible necessity, yet in human history still con-

tinues to be at times a necessary duty, even for the most

Christian nation, and is in no way at conflict with the obli-

gations by which every true Christian is eternally bound."21
The debate over the martial spirit raged back and forth

during the years of imperialism. In 1897 an editorial in

Harper's Weekly discussed "the apprehension so frequently ex-

 

pressed of the revival of the martial spirit in the American
peOple." The author insisted that there could be no revival

of the "warlike spirit," because there had never been a dis-
tinct manifestation of such in the American past; instead "the
commercial spirit" had always been dominant in America, and

"the warlike spirit in our era is aroused with great difficulty,
and when aroused is with still greater difficulty maintained."
The writer attempted to place the "warlike spirit" in proper
perspective:

The warlike spirit proper-~the love of fighting

for its own sake or for a merely predatory object--
exists only among uncivilized races; and even
among these it is something far above the brutal
thing it seems, so that out of it spring a rare
nobility of sentiment and simple amenities and
courtesies--the beginnings of that broad human
sympathy which, though developed at first under

the disguise of aversion, becomes finally the
ground of social solidarity. Apart from this
latent quality--this human interest which is lodged
in all human strifes, and which distinguishes the

 

21F.W. Farrar, "Imperialism and Christianity," North
American Review, CLXXI (September, 1900), pp. 291, 292, 295.

 

198

warlike man from the predatory beast--the war-
like spirit, pure and simple, would have no
worth or meaning.
There were certainly many who disagreed with the writer

in Harper's Weekly, and the events of the next few years seemed

 

to refute the contention that the "warlike spirit" could not
and would not flourish in America. In less than a year after

the Harper's Weekly editorial appeared the United States plunged

 

into war with Spain. This was followed by three years of bloody
guerrilla war in the Philippines, and seven years of the martial
adventure of Roosevelt's "Big Stick” diplomacy. Goldwin Smith,
pointing to the rise of such brutal sports as football and
prizefighting and to the imperialist binge, observed in 1900
that "the present ideal is the 'strenuous life;' that is, the

23 Many Americans were

life of combativeness and aggression."
disillusioned with the belligerent course the nation was taking.

W.P. Trent wrote in the Sewanee Review: "We know perfectly

 

well that very few of our soldiers are heroes, and that war,
save in the upper grades of the two services, is a brutal trade.

Yet we keep up our illusions by the tall talk about patriotism

H24

and the 'strenuous life;' In the light of the events

 

22H.M.A., "Warlike Spirit," Harper's Weekly, XLI
(August 28, 1897), p. 858.

 

23Goldwin Smith, ”War As a Moral Medicine," Atlantic
Monthly, LXXXVI (December, 1900), p. 735.

24W.P. Trent, "War and Civilization," Sewanee Review,
VIII (October, 1900), p. 388.

 

199

at the turn of the century, the view of Max Nordeau seemed

to be far more persuasive than that of the Harper's Weekly

 

view that the "warlike spirit proper . . . exists only among
uncivilized races." Nordeau argued that,

The emotion which sustains the warlike ten-
dencies of cultured men is stronger than reli-
gion, which preaches love to one's neighbor,
stronger than philosophy, which teaches the
irrationality of brute force; stronger than
morals and right, which civilized man pretends
to rec0gnize as the leading powers of his life.
This feeling is rughless egotism, which lusts
merely for self-gratification, and remains un-
touched by the concept that the neighbor also
has rights which deserve respect. All the cul-

ture of to-day is calculated to strengthen this
egotism, not to weaken it.

II

The new patriotism especially affected American youth.
In addition to the widespread activities of the various patri-
otic societies and the nationalist emphasis provided by the
centennial celebrations, there was a concerted effort made
to teach patriotism in the public schools. The period was
marked by a mania for flag-flying and the idea of allegiance
to the flag became a cult. In 1897 the American Flag Asso-
ciation was organized to promote reverence for the "stars and

stripes." From the pulpit clergymen sounded the call of the

 

25Max Nordeau, ”Philosophy and Morals of War,"
North American Review, CLXIX (December, 1899), p. 797,

 

200

new patriotism, and churches, along with the schools, formed

boys' military drill brigades.26 That patriotism had become

a national pastime was reflected in an observation by General

0.0. Howard in 1897: "At the mention of the names of our

heroes, patriotic fervor thrills every assembly, regardless

of political affinities; the ”star-spangled banner," seen or

sung, brings tearful joy to the eyes of the aged, love and

confidence to manhood, fresh enthusiasm to childhood and youth."27
The martial spirit of the 1890's fostered the strenuous

cult of manliness, and this was perhaps most apparent in the

new emphasis placed on military training for boys. The manly

image of American boyhood which existed in the late nineteenth

century was given a martial air in the 1890's. "The military

instinct is innate in the American boy," declared Harper's

Weekly. On the subject of "Military Instruction for Boys,"

the writer insisted that "the early lesson of the soldier would

then become an integral part of the boy's life, and he would

28

not be likely to outgrow it.” Declared Harper's Round Table:

 

 

26Wallace Evan Davies, Patriotism on Parade: The Story
of Veteran's and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783;1900
(Cambfidge: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 218-222, 339-
342. Also see chapter I of James C. Malin, Confounded Rot About
Napoleon (Lawrence, Kansas: James C. Malin, 1961).

 

 

 

27Oliver 0. Howard, "A Plea for the Army," The Forum,
XXIII (August, 1897), p. 641.

 

28Barnet Phillips, "Military Instruction for Boys,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVIII (July 21, 1894), p. 690.

 

201

"In every boy's heart--I am sure in every American boy's heart--
there lies a love for martial things. The sound of a fife and
drum, the Sight of a soldier's uniform, stir him and set his

blood a-tingling."29 St. Nicholas reported that Sir Walter

 

Besant's deepest impression of his visit to the United States
was the devotion of American youth to their flag; "that nowhere
except among British soldiers had he seen such affection and
respect for a national emblem; and that a nation which as a
whole felt as we seemed to feel about our Colors from the time
we left our mother's knees, was one that could withstand the
world in arms."30
In 1893 the C.A.R. launched a nation-wide movement to
promote military instruction in the public schools. The idea
received an endorsement from ex-president Benjamin Harrison,
who discussed the value of military training for boys in an
"open letter" to the public: "A military drill develops the
whole man, head, chest, arms, and legs, proportionately; and
so promotes symmetry, and corrects the excesses of other forms
of exercise. It teaches quickness of eye and ear, hand and
foot; qualifies men to step and act in unison; teaches sub-
ordination; and, best of all, qualifies a man to serve his

country. The flag now generally floats above the school-house

29Richard Barry, "The Boy Soldier in Camp," Harper's
Round Table, XVII (November 5, 1895), p. 12.

 

30Charles Sydney Clark, "Honors to the Flag in Camp
and Armory," St. Nicholas, XXIV (July, 1897), p. 762.

 

202

and what more appropriate than that the boys should be

31

instructed in the defense of it." In 1896 Whidden Graham

stated in Munsey's Magazine that the military movement in

 

the schools "promises to become a really important factor in
American life." In addition to the physical benefits, he said,
"the boys are taught to be brave, honorable, and manly; that
they must be obedient, courteous, and respectful, that they
must protect the weak, be helpful to their comrades, and above
all else be truthful and patriotic."32
The G.A.R. conducted a tireless campaign and achieved
considerable success, particularly in the East and Midwest.
Schools in the large cities were most inclined to adopt the
idea of military training for boys, and New York led the way.
Large numbers of American boys were learning military discipline
and skills in the mid-nineties, and the G.A.R. pressed Congress
to pass a bill which would authorize a national program of

33

military instruction for the nation's schools. "This

measure," the Dial editorialized in 1896, is a natural

 

 

31Benjamin Harrison, "Military Instruction in Schools
and Colleges: An Open Letter by Ex-President Harrison," The
Century Magazine, XLVII (January, 1894), p. 469.

 

32Whidden Graham, "Our Schoolboy Soldiers," Munsey's
Magazine, XV (July, 1896), pp. 459, 462-465. See also Henry
Drummond, "Manliness in Boys--By a New Process," McClure's
Magazine, 11 (December, 1893), pp. 68-77, and "MilitaryiTrain-
1ng 1n Schools," Harper's Weekly, XXXIX (February 9, 1895),
p. 127.

 

 

33Davies, op. cit., p. 342.

203

consequence of the tall talk about war that has been heard

so frequently of late in the Capital at Washington, and made

so much of by sensational newspapers almost everywhere."

The Dlal attacked what seemed to be a marked militaristic

trend in American life.34
The movement to institute military training in the

schools provoked a heated controversy. Many observers

denounced it as a dangerous step toward the development of

a militarist society. B.O. Flower, editor of ThelAgena,

 

declared that "the introduction of military training into
the common schools of America marked the triumph of the
military spirit of despotic Europe over the long-cherished
traditions of the republic." Flower accused those behind
the movement of "fostering the savage in the young."35
Benjamin Trueblood expressed a fear that such activities
might lead eventually to the creation of a large Standing
army. "Why," he asked, "at this late period in our history,
Should we begin a course of action growing out of groundless
fear and suspicion, and thus put ourselves on a plane with

those nations whose military drill in the schools would

”unfortunately keep alive that excessive admiration of the

34np1aying with Fire," Dial, XX (May 16. 1896), pp-
293-295. See also A.B. Ronne, "The Spirit of Militarism,"
Popular Science Monthly, XLVII (June, 1895), pp. 234-239.

35B.O. Flower, "Fostering the Savage in the Young,"
The Arena, X (August, 1894), pp. 422-432.

 

 

204

soldier ideal which has been anything but a blessing to

mankind. We ought to educate for peace and the future, and

not the past and war."36

Many were distressed at the role the churches began
to play in the military movement for youth. "Comparatively
few people," B.O. Flower observed in 1894, "are aware of
the military activity within the city churches of America
to—day." This, it seemed, was carrying "muscular Christianity"
too far. Flower expressed concern for the impact of such
activity on the formative years of youth, and pointed to
the psychological danger involved:

. . , the child who is drilled in the
manual of arms has constantly before him
the hour when he may draw the trigger which
means death to a fellow-man; he comes to
love the sound of the drum beat, and learns
to long for a chance to shoulder the mur-
derous gun. He turns to the lives of
Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon; dreams

of fame through slaughter, of power through
devastation and destruction, fill his mind,
and by coming to believe it is legitimate
to kill his fellow-men when ordered to by

a superior officer, the highest gpd finest
elements in his mind are numbed.

The sentiments of Flower were echoed by W.D. Le Sueur

in an article entitled "War and Civilization," which appeared

* ___.‘_‘_ _A#_‘*_A_A _‘ AA—A—A .-—

36Benjamin F. Trueblood, "Military Drill in the
Schools," The Century Magazine, XLVIII (June, 1894), pp. 318-
319.

 

37Flower, op. cit., pp. 426, 430.

205

111 Popular Science Monlhly in 1896. Le Sueur also warned

 

of a possible cause and effect relationship inherent in
the rising martial spirit in America. Referring to the
patriotic and military activities of American youth, he said:

Whether all this is for the best may well
be doubted. It is difficult to put a gun
into a boy's hand and drill him without
creating in his mind a desire to kill some-
body. 'Do we or do we not wish to cultivate
this spirit in the rising generation?

There is no doubt that the ease or diffi-
culty with which a country is led into

war depends very largely upon the dispo-
sitions of its population. If their
thoughts run on war; if they have been
accustomed by a semi-military training in
the Schools to make little of the horrors
of war, and perhaps less of its crimes;

if they have taken in the idea which
continually haunts the military mind that
might makes right, there can be no doubt
that, in agiven contingency, when a spirit
of moderation and justice would smooth over
an international difficulty, the voice of
such a people will be given for war.38

Two years later the United States went to war against
Spain in conformity with Le Sueur's analysis of the martial
Spirit. Roosevelt might have been writing of the American
soldier, as well as the American sailor, when he said after
the war that ”every one alike, from the highest to the

lowest, was eager for the war, and was, in heart, mind,

38W.D. Le Sueur, "War and Civilization," Popular

Science Monthly, XLVIII (April, 1896), p. 769.

 

206

arui body, of the very type which makes the best kind of

39

:fighting man." Perhaps the boy cadet of 1894 did become

 

tflie spirited American fighting man of 1898.

39Theodore Roosevelt, "Military Preparedness and
Unpreparedness," The Century Magazine, LIX (November, 1899),
p. 150.

Chapter IX
War:l898

The men who marched to war in 1898 had been imbued
‘with the rationale of the strenuous ideal, and to the men
of the middle and upper class the Spanish-American War
provided a splendid opportunity to achieve it. The values
of the strenuous life had been inculcated in them through
participation in Sports and vigorous outdoor activities,
through the preachings of muscular Christian sermons, and
through the reading of Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Harding
Davis and Rudyard Kipling. Just as they were called upon
by patriotism and idealism to free Cuba from Spain in 1898,
they were also called upon to put the strenuous ideal to
its severest test. For advocates of the Strenuous cult the
war provided the supreme test of manliness and courage.

War fascinated them. Roosevelt's brand of strenuosity
celebrated war as the highest form of strenuous activity:
"No triumph of peace," he said, "is quite so great as the
supreme triumphs of war. The courage of the soldier, the
courage of the statesman who has to meet the storms which
can only be quelled by soldierly virtues--this stands higher
than any qualities called out merely in times of peace."

He added that "no national life is worth having if the I \\
nation is not willing to stake everything on the supreme \\
arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure,,

I

and tears like water rather than submit to the loss of 7

207

208

luanor and renown."1 Frederic Remington, who accompanied
the Fifth Corps on its expedition to Cuba, referred to the
hardships of the Santiago campaign as satisfying "a life
of longing to see men do the greatest thing which men are
called on to do." ”He who has not seen war," he said, "only
half comprehends the possibilities of his race."2

Although the stories of heroism in the Spanish—American
War were often exaggerated, there is no question but that
the American troops achieved a Splendid record in the field.
Many were veterans of the Indian wars, while others made up
in courage and fortitude what they lacked in experience.
Their performance under fire made the subsequent celebration
of American manhood possible. After the decisive battles

at Santiago Harper's Weekly declared that "the patriotism

 

of America is such that, when the direful occasion comes,
the citizen becomes an energetic, courageous, and intel-
ligent soldier, the like of whose associated qualities
cannot be found in European armies." Certainly "this eager
courage to carry the flag into the heart of an enemy's

country, to plant it above his sinking ships and his crumbling

AA __ L_A_A_.___ _‘ _‘ ‘

1Quoted in Matthew Josephson, The President Makers:
The Culture of Politics and Leadershi in an A e of EnIi ht-
enment, 1896-1919 (New York: Harcourt, Brace E Co., 19405, p. 75.

2Frederic Remington, "With the Fifth Corps," Harper's
New Monthly Magazine, XCVII (November, 1898), p. 962.

 

 

209

:forts, this rush after the colors to the very death, this
recklessness of life, this wonderful enthusiasm and joy in
battle, are the phenomena of a deep and abiding patriotism,

3.3

"The country is now content to enjoy to the full

this splendid exhibition of American manhood."4
The victories of the American army and navy in 1898

seemed to resolve the much-mooted question of American

courage. In the AtlantlclMonthly in 1893 S.R. Elliott had

 

stated the issue: "The question is often asked, Are people
less brave now, in these advanced times, than formerly,

or is civilization on the whole inimical to the warlike
spirit, and inclined to view with distrust any victories
except those of peace?"5 The war provided a reassuring
answer, as Julian Hawthorne observed: "It proved once
again that there were among us noble, generous, and high-
minded men, young and old, not only ready to give all they
had and were for their country, but who, under the stimulus
put upon them, expanded to a greatness which had not been

apprehended in them, and towered to a stature that surprised

3"American Patriotism in War," Harper's Weekly, XLII
(July 9, 1898), p. 659.

4

 

Harper's Weekly, XLII (July 16, 1898), p. 683.

 

5S.R. Elliott, "The Courage of a Soldier," Atlantic
Monthly, LXXI (February, 1893), p. 237.

210

us, who thought we knew them. But we had not known them.

We never know what is best in us till the need comes that

draws it forth."6

It was the courage and fortitude of the American soldier
which particularly impressed war correspondent John Fox, Jr.,
who reported on the Santiago action: "There is nothing
that daunts the American soldier--defective organization,
deficient equipment, hen-coop life on board of transport,
heat and fever of trOpics, insufficient transportation,
lack of food, lack of protection by artillery fire--nothing
that daunts the American soldier. . .And what a pleasure
it is to have it again proved that there is no better plain
soldier than the American gentleman and volunteer!"7

This celebration of the American gentleman soldier
of the war with Spain represented a triumph for the cult
of manliness in America. The war completed the building
of the heroic image of American manhood, which the strenuous
ideal fostered. The American soldier now emerged as a supe-

rior type, as H.C. Corbin declared after the war: "Compared

with the immense standing armies of Continental Europe, our

 

6Julian Hawthorne, "A Side-Issue of Expansion," The

Forum, XXVII (June, 1899), p. 443. Also see ”Courage in Modern
Warfare," Scientific American, LXXIX (July 9, 1898), p. 18.

7John Fox, Jr., "In Front of Santiago,” Harper's
Weekly, XLII (July 23, 1898), p. 724.

211

armw'is insignificant in point of numbers; but man for man,
in the possession of qualities that go to make the soldier,
-—physique, intelligence, and courage,--it can safely claim
the highest place."8 Maurice Thompson wrote in The Inde-
pendent that ”probably no army and navy since the best days
of the Roman Empire ever equaled ours man for man in the
best results of athletic training. In looking at our
soldiers and sailors I was filled with admiration of their

lithe and muscular forms and their Show of virile health and
intelligence."9
Thompson credited the rise of athletics in late nine-
teenth century America with being reSponsible for "the
brawn, the spirit, the self-confidence, and the quickness"
of the nation's soldiers and sailors. "We have seen," he
said, "that the aristocratic polo-player makes as good a
soldier under the tropic summer's sun as the cowboy and the
trained regular, so far as the main essentials of soldierly

qualifications go. Play has given him self-reliance, courage

and endurance." He added that "athleticism, as a mood of

8H.C. Corbin, "The Army of the United States," The
Forum, XXVI (January, 1899), p. 513. See also "The Yanke6_hs
a Warrior" in Tho_iitorary Digest, XVII (August 13, 1898),
which proclaiméd Americans as "the most intelligent, the

bravest, the fiercest soldiery in the world's history . . ."
p. 184.

9Maurice Thompson, "Vigorous Men, A Vigorous Nation,"
The Independent, L (September 1, 1898), p. 610.

212

(Mgr civilization, has resulted in a great good where we
least expected it. It has given us the 'man behind the
gun,‘ at whom the whole world is Still gazing with admiring
wonder."10
That the heroic image of American manhood was bolstered
by the Spanish-American War is evident in the thought of
Brooks Adams. Adams, who had developed a pessimistic view
of late nineteenth century civilization, was aroused by
the martial spirit of the 1890's and through it adopted a
buoyant and enthusiastic outlook toward America's future.
For Adams the war was an important event. Its meaning for
American manhood lay in the fact that, as with other wars,
it had produced an uncommon breed of men. Adams expressed
his view a few years after the war with Spain: "War may
be terrible, but it is also beneficent, for it has given
us the noblest type of manhood that, I believe, the race

has ever known. It hasgiven us the American soldier."11

A #1; A“ AAA‘h‘hA—‘iA—‘A‘

10Ibid.; An Englishman with the American expedition
in Cuba, wrltlng of the men in the U.S. Army, declared that
"in physique, everyone knows that they touch the highest
standard in the world." John Black Atkins, The War in Cuba
(London: Smith, Elder, E Co., 1899), p. 26.

 

11Quoted in Frederic C. Jaher, Doubters and Dissenters:

 

Cataclysmic Thought in Americal l8§5Ll918 (New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 175.

213

II

Novelist and correspondent John Fox, Jr., aboard a
transport bound for Cuba in June of 1898, reported on the
Spirits of the men who were soon to face the enemy: "And
these soldiers! cooped up as they are like chickens, short
of rations, aboard here for two weeks, restless and Sick
with inactivity--nobody hears a word of grumbling or sees
a sour face. Big fellows, strong fellows, they are--intel-
ligent, quiet, orderly, obedient, good-natured, patient--
patient beyond words. Here and now, in advance, I take off
my hat with profound respect and perfect confidence to 'plug'
and 'doughboy'--Uncle Sam's own boys of horse and of foot."12
This salute to the American troops prior to their engaging
the enemy typified the reporting of the war, which followed
closely the activities of the men who campaigned against
the Spanish.

The bravery of the American regulars and volunteers in
the various engagements was matched by that of the numerous

13

correspondents who covered the war. This was the great

_. ‘._‘__L '_-A——k._‘-A_—k ——A _.._— g

12John Fox, Jr., "With the Troops For Santiago,"
Harper's Weekly, XLII (July 16, 1898), p. 699.

13On the role of the correspondents in the war, see
Charles H. Brown, The Correspondent's War: Journalists in the
Spanish-American War ew or : ar es crl ner S ons,
Also see chapter 15, "Reporting the Spanish-American War," in
F. Lauriston Bullard, FamousoWaroCorreopondents (Boston: Little,
Brown 8 Co., 1914), pp. 409-424.

 

 

 

214

age CHFthe war correspondent. During the decade 1895—1905
cuxrrespondents of leading newspapers dashed around the
vwarld to cover the Sino-Japanese War, the Greco—Turkish War,
the Cuban insurrection and the Spanish-American War, the
IBoer War, the Boxer rebellion, and the Russo-Japanese War.
Nowhere was the strenuous life better exemplified than in
the hardships and adventures of the American war correspondent.
This breed of reporter-adventurer was led by Richard Harding
Davis, and included the young literary naturalists: Stephen
Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London. Richard Harding Davis
said of the prevailing image of the war correspondent as hero:
"The correspondent is the modern knight-errant. That has
been said before, but it is not the less true for that. He
wanders around the face of the globe with a mission, fighting
windmills occasionally, sometimes dragons; and his loyalty
to his paper is as praiseworthy as was the knight's loyalty
to his lady, although he does not look for praise, because
it is unselfish, and calls for great sacrifices and personal
risk, and because it cannot be paid for in money."14

This image became firmly imprinted on the mind of the
public during the Spanish-American War. In a sense the war
correspondents emerged, along with Roosevelt, as the high

priests of the strenuous cult. Their dispatches celebrated

14Richard Harding Davis, "A Newspaperman's Man,"
Harper's Weekly, XXXVI (September 3, 1892), p. 856.

215

'botfli themselves and the American soldier, and they often
seenned to set the example for heroism in war. The report
tar Fox on the fight of the Rough Riders at Las Guasimas
setnned to say more about the role of the correspondents in

the action than the Rough Riders (with the exception of course

of Roosevelt):

There were no laggards in that little struggle.
Marshall, the correspondent, kept with the
advancing line, taking notes as he advanced,
and when shot through the spine kept on
writing his "story" between periods of uncon—
sciouSness and spasms of pain. Caspar Whitney
stood near a Hotchkiss gun and took the fire
as cooly as any regular under General Young.
Colonel Roosevelt picked up a rifle and led
his men on a charge across a space where he
thought they needed encouragement; and

Richard Harding Davis gave the good service

of an officer in the beginning, and after-
wards took the gun of a wounded man and

fought with the rest.15

Perhaps more than any other correspondent, it was
Stephen Crane who truly seemed to meet the test of war.
Crane, who had already captured the imagination of the public
with his The Red Badgo of Cougage, earned a reputation for
coolness and daring under fire. Richard Harding Davis wrote
that "Crane was the coolest man, whether army officer or
civilian, that I saw under fire at any time during the war.
He was most annoyingly cool, with the assurance of a fatalist."

On one occasion only did Davis succeed in coaxing Crane to

15John Fox, Jr., "With the Rough Riders at Las Guasi-
mas," Harper's Weekly, XLII (July 30, 1898), p. 751.

 

216

txflge cover from the enemy fire, that he had attracted while
striding back and forth along a line of entrenchments.
“Although the heat--it was the lst of July in the tropics--
‘was terrific, Crane wore a long rubber rain-coat and
‘was smoking a pipe. He appeared as cool as though he were
looking down from a box at a theatre."16 Langdon Smith
described a similar incident: "Crane was standing under a
tree calmly rolling a cigarette; some leaves dropped from
the trees, cut away by the bullets; two or three men dropped
within a few feet. Crane is as thin as a lath. If he had
been two or three inches wider or thicker through, he would
undoubtedly have been shot. But he calmly finished rolling
his cigarette and smoked it without moving away from the
spot where the bullets had suddenly become so thick."17

Not only did Crane foster his own personal image as a
daring war correspondent, but his dispatches from Cuba con-
tained some of the best reporting to come out of the war.
Davis stated in 1899 that "the best correSpondent is probably
the man who by his energy and resource sees more of the war,
both afloat and ashore, than do his rivals, and who is able

to make the public see what he saw. If that is a good defi-

 

16Richard Harding Davis, "Our War Correspondents in
Cuba and Puerto Rico," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, XCVIII
(May, 1899), pp. 941, 942; Davis, Notes of’a War Correspondent
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911), p.7126.

17"Some Men Who Have Reported This War," The Cosmo-

politan, XXV (September, 1898), p. 557.

 

217

tuition, Stephen Crane would seem to have distinctly won the
:first place among correspondents in the late disturbance."18
(lrane provided perhaps the most memorable report of the
:famous battle of San Juan Hill. "It will never be forgotten,"
Ihe said, "as long as America has a military history." He
pointed out that the theorists would say that "a line of
intrenched hills held by men armed with a weapon like the
IMauser is not to be taken by a front attack of infantry
unless the trenches have first been heavily shaken by artil-
lery fire. . . .But it was done, and we owe the success to
the splendid gallantry of the American private soldier."

This finest moment for the American troops in the war was

thus described by Crane:

One saw a thin line of black figures moving
across a field. They disappeared in the '
forest. The enemy was keeping up a terrific
fire. Then suddenly somebody yelled, "By God,
there go our boys up the hill!"

There is many a good American who would
give an arm to get the thrill of patriotic
insanity that coursed through us when we
heard that yell.

Yes, they were going up the hill, up the
hill. It was the beSt moment of anybody's
life.

I ,. _. _ Aggflg; AMA¥ A

18Davis, "Our War Correspondents in Cuba and Puerto
Rico," op. cit., p. 941.

218

The army was dusty, dishevelled, its hair matted
to its forehead with sweat, its shirts glued to its
back with the same, and indescribably dirty, thirsty,
hungry, and aweary from it bundles and its marches
and its fights. It sat down on the conquered crest
and felt satisfied. 19
”Well, hell! here we are.
Other correspondents were equally inspired by the Amer-
ican charge at San Juan Hill. War artist Charles Sheldon wrote:
"It was a beautiful sight to see the men following their flags,
the stars and stripes and the yellow regimental flag of one of
the cavalry regiments (note that all the cavalry regiments
were dismounted) streaming up the hill dotted with dead and
wounded, the entrenchments simply hailing Mauser bullets into
them. It was the sort of thing that struck me as heroic in the
men, but foolhardy in the officers that commanded it."20
In addition to the dispatches of the war correSpondents,
American periodicals also carried battle sketches and letters
written by the men who participated in the San Juan action.

"I wish you could have seen us go up that hill at San Juan,"

wrote a corporal in the 2nd U.S. Infantry. "Say, but we went

 

19"Stephen Crane's Vivid Story of the Battle of San
Juan," reprinted in R.W. Stallman and E.R. Hagemann (eds.),
The War Dispatches of Stephen Crane (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 1964), pp. 173, 176, 179-180. Also on Crane
see Edwin H. Cady, "Stephen Crane and the Strenuous Life,"
Journal of English Literary History, XXVIII (December, 1961),
pp. 376-382; and Cady, Stephen Crane (New Haven: College and
University Press, 1962).

 

 

 

20Charles M. Sheldon, "Just Before Santiago's
Surrender," Leslie's Weekly, LXXXVII (August 4, 1898), p. 94.

 

219

up that hill like a lot of devils turned loose. You lose
all feeling; you fear nothing; all you think about is getting

a shot at the Spaniards."21

From the published letter of
an infantry private came this report of the battle: "The
Sixth made a name that day that will go down in history.
To take the hill we are now on we had to cross a meadow a
mile long, strung with barbed-wire fences. Our company
lost over thirty-five per cent. of our men. They fell to
the right and left of me, but I didn't seem to mind it.
The shot and shell seemed like music, but I want no more

of it."22

A generation of Americans, nurtured on the strenuous
concepts of the martial spirit, were facing the actual test
of war, and the fascination with the sound of bullets and
the reactions of men in battle were topics of major interest
in the reporting of the war. John Fox, Jr., wrote that
the bullets "were not as disturbing as I thought they
would be, so much like buzzing insects were they; and at
the trenches the sound of the Mauser bullet was not unmusical.
Really it was not much unlike the last few bars of a meadow-

lark's song when you hear it at sunset and at a dis-

21"Close Shave of a Corporal," Leslie's Weekly,
LXXXVII (October 13, 1898), p. 294.

22"How It Feels in Battle," Leslioelleoekly, LXXXVII
(September 8, 1898), p. 194.

 

 

220

tancze."23 George Edward Graham, with the American fleet
:at Santiago, said that "the balls whistle about you with
:1 nasty whine, as if they deplored not being able to hit
'you, . . . You experience at first a strange feeling of
enjoyment not unmixed with terror. Then you grow animated
and discover a peculiar sort of charm in the danger and in

the game of life or death. You find yourself h0ping the

shells will strike closer to you."24 Wrote John G. Winter,

Jr., of an advance with the Rough Riders, "I was considerably

excited and had the same sensation that I have in hunting

rabbits and birds, ."25 A private who participated in

the San Juan action declared in a letter: "This island

is an Eden, but now certainly a blood—stained one. But one

23John Fox, Jr., "Santiago and Caney," Harper's
Weekly, XLII (August 6, 1898), p. 770. In a story on a New York
Natlonal Guard camp, Vaughn Kester wrote in June of 1898: "A
new generation had arisen since the Civil War. The battles,
if they came, were to be fought by the sons of those who had
fought before. . . . All were eager for the actual scenes and
experiences of war, and the grim reality of battles; but it
was rather an eagerness to prove their worth, a desire to pass
the test, to escape from the last doubt, to become indeed tried
soldiers confident that they could do their part, than any
personal love of strife or conflict." See "Transformation of
Citizen Into Soldier," The_Cosmopolitan, XXV (June, 1898),
pp. 150-151.

24George Edward Graham, "The Brave Yankee Tar!"
Leslie's Weekly, LXXXVII (July 21, 1898), p. 54.

25John G. Winter, Jr., "The Fight of the Rough
Riders," The Outlook, LX (September 3, 1898), p. 20.

 

221

:soon gets used to war and the song of the shell and bullet,
and.I think I might form a taste for it. ."26
Above all, the dispatches and letters from Cuba con-

tributed to the building of the image of the Rough Riders,
Roosevelt's volunteer cavalry unit. ”Never was there a

more representative body of men on American soil;" Fox wrote,
”never was there a body of such varied elements; and yet it
was so easily welded into an effective fighting-machine

that a foreigner would not know that they were not as near

brothers in blood, character, occupation, mutual faith, and

long companionship as any volunteer regiment that ever took

27

the field." This image-making process had begun before

the Rough Riders ever saw action. Indeed, from the moment
of birth the First Volunteer United States Cavalry was
marked for_glory--the American press having popularized the
regiment as a fighting unit composed of the finest specimens
of American patriotic manhood: Western cowboys and Eastern

28

athletes and clubmen. Throughout the war, and after, the

Z6"War History in Private Letters," The Outlook, LIX
(August 20, 1898), p. 969.

27John Fox, Jr., "With the Rough Riders at Las Guas—
imas," op. cit., p. 750.

28The most perceptive study of this topic is the
chapter, "The Rough Riders. Regiment of True Americans, " in
G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western
Experience: The WWest of Remington, Theodore Roosevelt,

. #A .L __ ‘_‘ _A

 

and Owen Wister (New Haven: Yale"Univer51ty Press, 1968),
pp. 6149-170.

 

222

luaroic image of the men of this regiment continued to be
1xromoted. One correspondent declared at the close of the
warn "The most sought-after of all the troops are the
rough riders. All the others fought equally as well and
'were as gallantly led, but there has been something in the
daring of these men that has captured the American heart."29
Roosevelt's Rough Rider experiences afforded him yet 5
another opportunity to celebrate the hardy life and the ‘\

masculine image fostered by it. In The_Rough Rldors, which. \

 

appeared in 1899, T.R. wrote: "They were a splendid set of
men, these southwesterners--tall and sinewy, with resolute,
weather-beaten faces, and eyes that looked a man straight
in the face without flinching." He proclaimed that "in all
the world there could be no better material for soldiers
than that afforded by these grim hunters of the mountains,
these wild rough riders of the plains." Of the Eastern
volunteers he observed that "we drew recruits from Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, and many another college; from clubs like
the Somerset, of Boston, and Knickerbocker, of New York;
and from among the men who belonged neither to club nor to
college, but in whose veins the blood stirred with the same
impulse which once sent the Vikings over sea." The East-

erners proved to be good soldiers, he said, because "they

29Harry P. Mawson, "War-worn Veterans at Camp Wikoff,"
Leslie's Weekly, LXXXVII (September 1, 1898), p. 167.

223

were men who had thoroughly counted on the cost before
entering, and who went into the regiment because they
'belieNed that this offered their best chance for seeing
lurrd and dangerous service." To Roosevelt the Rough Riders
epitomized the strenuous ideal: "All--easterners and west-
erners, northerners and southerners, officers and men,
cowboys and college graduates, wherever they came from and
‘whatever their social position--possessed in common the
traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure.

They were

to a man born adventurers, in the old sense of the word."30

The same had been said of Roosevelt. ”You are an

adventurer," Brooks Adams told Roosevelt in 1896, "and you

have but one thing to sell--your sword."31 Roosevelt

followed this advice in 1898, receiving much publicity in

30Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York:
The New American Library, Signet Bdltlon, 19615, pp. 19, 16,
17, 21.

31Quoted in Arthur F. Beringause, Brooks Adams: A
Biography (New York: Alfred A. KnOpf, 1955), p.

224

the process and emerging from the war a hero.32 .He was

the chief beneficiary of the heroic image of American man-
liood.celebrated as a result of the war with Spain. Writing
of the Rough Riders waiting to be mustered out at the end

of the war correspondent Harry Mawson declared: "And how
they love 'Teddy.' as they call him. All of them worship him.
They declare he was never less than twenty-five feet in front

of the others, and how he escaped a Mauser bullet seems a mir-

acle. Evidently Colonel Roosevelt is a man of destiny."33

32Correspondent Edward Marshall found Roosevelt dra-

matically transformed into a hero in the first battle in Cuba--
the action at Las Guasimas: "Colonel Roosevelt, . . . jumped
up and down, literally, I mean, with emotions evidently
divided between joy and a tendency to run. The barbed-wire
fence on the right of the bridle path was intact at first, but
some of our men cut the strands with their wire clippers.

Perhaps a dozen of Roosevelt's men had passed into the
thicket before he did. Then he stepped across the wire him-
self, and, from that instant, became the most magnificent
soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed-wire strand
had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he
Stepped across it he left behind him in the bridle path all
those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often
caused him to be justly criticised in civic life, and found
on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness,
the calm judgment, the towering heroism, which made him, per-
haps, the mOst admired and best beloved of all Americans in
Cuba." Edward Marshall, The Story_ofgthegRough Riders (New
York: G.W. Dillingham Co., 1899), p. 104.

33Mawson, op. cit., p. 167. One of the most vivid
portraits of Roosevelt 1n action was provided by Howard
Chandler Christy: "At the head of the regiment was Colonel
Roosevelt, and as full of enthusiasm as ever. He shouted, 'Oh,
didn't we have a bully fight back there on the hill!‘ He wore
a dark-blue shirt, with improvised shoulder-straps, and a
blue handkerchief around his neck. The Shoulder-straps were
made of yellow cloth, and the silver leaves looked more like
Spoons than leaves. He had U.S.V. in yellow cloth sewed on
his collar." Christy, "Waiting for a Fight," Leslie's Weekly,
LXXXVII (September 8, 1898), p. 194.

 

 

225

Writing of Roosevelt in The Independent in 1900 the Secre-
tary of the Navy proclaimed that "everybody knows him. Every
college boy swears by him. Every cowboy ties to him. Every

34

soldier and sailor counts him a friend." A. Maurice Low

wrote in The Forum in 1901 that "Roosevelt, the man on

 

horseback, the beau ideal of the cavalry commander, a dashing,
superb figure, one that would have delighted the heart of
Carlyle, was real and vivid enough to catch the emotional

crowd."35

By that time also John Brisben Walker could
write: "Probably no finer illustration of American manhood
has ever occupied the office of the presidency than Theodore

36 "The strenuous life" of Roosevelt had elevated

Roosevelt.”
him to the status of hero, and had helped carry him to the

White House itself.

34
L11 (September 6, 1900), p. 2138.

35A. Maurice Low, "Theodore Roosevelt," ThegForom,
XXXII (November, 1901), p. 260.

36John Brisben Walker, "A Working Man in the Presi-
dency," The Cosmopolitan, XXXII (November, 1901), p. 25.

 

 

226
III

According to Roosevelt "the war with Spain was the
most absolutely righteous foreign war in which any nation

."37 It was

has engaged during the nineteenth century,
also the most glorious experience of Roosevelt's life. He
had met the supreme test of the strenuous life and had
emerged victorious. Roosevelt would always cherish the
memories of the Rough Riders and their charge up Kettle Hill
in the San Juan action, and would frequently recall his own
dashing role in that engagement. "San Juan was the great
day of my life," he said in 1918. On that day he had faced
the enemy bullets and killed a Spaniard with his own hand.38
Never again would he experience the same intensity of life.
Jacob Riis, visiting Roosevelt at Camp Wikoff at the close
of the war, observed him in a revealing moment. Roosevelt,
one evening after taps, looking down the long line of tents,
said wistfully, "0, well! . . . so all things pass away.

But they were beautiful days."39

__ - AAg-LAMAA g #AflA-flng—‘M A“

37Theodore Roosevelt, "Fellow-Feeling as a Political
Factor," The Century Magazine, LIX (January, 1900), p. 466.

 

38Dixon Wecter, The Hero in America (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, , p. .
39

Jacob A. Riis, "Roosevelt and His Men," Thegutlook,
LX (October 1, 1898), p. 293.

 

227

Roosevelt could also Speak with greater authority about

courage after having met the test of war. In Centory Magazine

 

in January, 1900, he wrote, "With most men courage is largely
an acquired habit, and on the first occasions when it is
called for it necessitates the exercise of will-power and
self-control; but by exercise it gradually becomes almost

automatic."40

In the wake of the Spanish-American War
courage became an even more precious virtue to be valued by
Americans. Particularly fond of editorializing on the

subject was The Ootlook: "He who distrusts, holds back, and

 

fears misses the great opportunity and loses the noble
achievement; he who trusts and dares plucks the flower of
victory out of the very jaws of death. In such a world as
this courage is the only safety; the coward is lost."41
On another occasion the magazine extolled health and courage,
and the men who possessed them: "When the brave are in
command, it is easy to die, if death is the only alternative.
Men do not need a better order of life; they need health,

and the courage which comes from health. . . . Here and

there over the field a man of health makes his fight, and

40Roosevelt, "Fellow-Feeling as a Political Factor,"
op. cit., p. 471.

41"Courage the Only Safety," Theopotlook, LX (Sep-
tember 17, 1898), pp. 164-165.

 

228

Straightway men take heart, gather about him, charge with
him, and die heroically by his side. Such men point the
way and reveal the real conditions of life; they are the
truth-tellers."42

The strenuous life characterized both Roosevelt and
America at the turn of the century. Both displayed an ado-
lescent nervousness and anxiety, combined with an impulse for
action that revealed a desperate need to prove themselves--
Roosevelt as a man, and America as a nation. The war of 1898
provided a testing ground for the personal strenuousness of
Roosevelt and the national strenuosity of America. Roosevelt
emerged from the war as the undisputed leader of the cult of
manliness, as the nation discovered itself to be a new world
power--the possessor of a far-flung overseas empire.

Against the background of the changing conditions of
American life in the late nineteenth century, and in response
to those changes, the strenuous life was cultivated as an
alternative to the discontent, uncertainty, and frustration
fostered by the threat of "overcivilization" inherent in the
nation's new urban-industrial society. The result was a
clearly discernible trend of strenuous thought and activity in
American culture--a state of mind and an impulse for action
which seized Americans in the 1890's and culminated in a war

that propelled them into the twentieth century.

42"Health and Courage," The Outlook, LXI (February 25,
1899), p. 446.

 

Chapter X
Epilogue: The Strenuous Years, 1898-1918
I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that
our country calls not for the life of ease
but for the life of strenuous endeavor. The
twentieth century looms before us . . . Above
all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or
physical, within or without the nation,
provided we are certain that the strife is
justified, for it is only through strife,
through hard and dangerous endeavor, that
we shall ultimately win the goal of true
national greatness.
--Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
America's present need is not heroism,
but healing, not nostrums but normalcy, not
revolution but restoration, not agitation
but adjustment, not surgery but serenity,
not the dramatic but the dispassionate, not
experiment but equipoise, not submergence
in internationality but sustainment in tri-
umphant nationality.
--Warren G. Harding, 1920
The Spanish-American War inaugurated two decades of
strenuous activity in the life of the nation, when Americans
made the strenuous life a guiding principle in the conduct
of both domestic and foreign affairs. Three years after the
war with Spain Theodore Roosevelt became President of the
United States, and the Progressive movement, already under-
way at the local level, suddenly burst forth on the national
scene. The Progressives energetically sought to reform
American society and correct the abuses of the new industrialism.
Strenuous lives were led in the crusade for a better America

at home. Similarly, in foreign affairs a new strenuosity

characterized the nation's conduct, as the United States

229

230

attempted to adjust to her new role as an imperial and
world power. From the "Big Stick” diplomacy of Roosevelt
to the great crusade of 1917-18, in which American fighting
men sought to "make the world safe for democracy," the ideal
of the strenuous life expressed itself in the nation's
vigorous involvement in foreign affairs. Woodrow Wilson,
as well as Roosevelt, evoked the strenuous ideal in national
leadership.

Socially and culturally the strenuous life set the tone
of the age. It was an era of muscular Christian emphasis
in American religion, as "the social gospel" preached the
salvation of society as a whole as well as that of the
individual. The strenuous crusade of American Christianity
to improve social conditions at home was matched by the
vigorous missionary activity abroad. In the realm of sport
the strenuous values reigned supreme in the period, as both
amateur and professional sports gained increasing importance
in the national life. The excelling of American athletes
in the new Olympic games highlighted the zest for the
strenuous ideal. The outdoor movement intensified, with
primitivism of the era. The celebration of the hardy life
of the West continued and was infused into the popular
consciousness through the new film westerns, as well as the
rising flood of fiction depicting the cowboy as hero. The

feminine threat to manliness became more explicit in the

231

growing militancy of the women's rights movement. By the
end of the period both the suffragettes and the members of
the Women's Christian Temperance Union saw their chief goals
realized. For those men who cherished the martial spirit,
the adventure of American imperialism and later the war in
Europe offered Opportunities for that appeal.1

But even as the strenuous life persisted in America
between 1898 and 1918, it was stripped of much of its glamour
and romantic appeal. Just as the excitement over the
Spanish-American War was subsiding, the United States embarked
upon a bloody, three-year guerrilla war in the Philippines
in which American tr00ps battled the Filipino Insurrec-
tionists led by Emilio Aguinaldo. Whereas the battle
deaths in the Spanish-American War had been less than 400,
the American casualties in the Filipino War were nearly
4,300, and it eventually took an army roughly four times as
large as that which had defeated the Spanish in Cuba to
pacify the Philippines. This war, which was marked by

atrocity stories on both sides, weighed heavily on the

 

1See Harold U. Faulkner, TheQuest for Social Justice,
1898-1914 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1937), passim. Also vaanble
on the period are the Six volumes of Mark Sulllvan, Our Times,
1900-1925 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926-1935). An
excellent literary history of the first decade of the new
century is Grant C. Knight, The Strenuous Age in American
Literature (Chapel Hill: University of’North Carolina Press,
1954), and for a survey of prose literature for the entire
period see Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (Garden City, New
York: Doubleday & Company, 1956).

 

 

 

 

 

 

232

American conscience and divided public opinion. The realities
of imperialism had a sobering effect upon the American

peOple. If the strenuous life meant the glories of San Juan,
it also entailed the subduing of the freedom-minded Filipinos

in the name of civilization.
In the midst of these events Joseph Dana Miller directed

an attack against militarism and the strenuous life in The

Arena. He questioned the premise that war developed those
virtues celebrated by Roosevelt and others:

Advocates of "the strenuous life" defend
the continuance of war as necessary for the
development of the virtue of physical
courage, or at all events justify war as
furnishing Opportunities for heroism.

But one may doubt if the battlefield
affords the highest examples of physical
courage. The anesthetics of battle smoke
and battle music induce a sort of somnam—
bulistic state in which prodigies of

valor may be performed. . . . Most of the
heroism exhibited on the battlefield is of
the passive sort, disguised somewhat by

the activity of maneuver, the noise of cannon,
and the onslaught of cavalry. There is but
a small indivigual initiative to the great
fighting mass.

"We need," Miller said, "a popular revision of the word
'courage,' . . ." He took a dim view of the heroics in the
war with Spain, and criticized the American military and its
_glorification by the public. "To be true to conscience," he

declared, "is the supremest manly virtue. Such virtue is

A _‘4‘___‘_‘ # __‘

2Joseph Dana Miller, "Militarism or Manhood," lho
Arena, XXIV (October, 1900), p. 384. Also see Ernest Howard
CrosB , "The Military Idea of Manliness," The_lndopenoent,
LIII (April 18, 1901), pp. 873-875.

 

233

impossible to a soldier. It is this that makes militarism
so dangerous to a republic. For the qualities that make a
good soldier are the antitheses of those that make a good
citizen." Miller reserved his choicest words for Roosevelt,
then governor of New York:

Glorification of the military spirit has
become common enough of late, owing to
nearly a half century of immunity from its
horrors. "The strenuous life" has received
more than its meed of praise from the
Splendid savage who two years ago became
governor of the great State of New York.

‘In spite of certain admirable qualities,

the Rough Rider governor is conspicuously
lacking in those higher qualities which
single out the man from among men. Impetuous
as a Seyd of the desert, he seems to many

the highest ideal of manly heroism.

Miller took issue with the popular image of Roosevelt,
charging that, early in his career, "his manhood failed him
at the critical moment, . . ." He referred to Roosevelt's
endorsement, after some hesitation, of James G. Blaine, the
Republican candidate for the presidency in 1884. On that
occasion Roosevelt had demonstrated that he was a regular
party man. Finally, Miller was highly critical of Roosevelt's
boasting of having killed a man in the San Juan action: "This
Roosevelt does in his account of the battle of San Juan, with
all the indifference of a nature that loves carnage for its

own sake."4

. . _- __— _A A __ A ._.‘ fl

3Ibid., pp. 385, 386-388, 390, 391.

41bid., p. 391.

234

As for Roosevelt, such criticisms never caused him to
abandon the strenuous life. Although the responsibilities
of the presidency had a sobering effect upon him and he
eventually earned a reputation as a peacemaker in foreign
affairs, he would always cling to the strenuous ideal,
particularly in his private life. Immediately upon stepping
down from the presidency he journeyed to Africa to hunt
big-game, viewing the trip as his "last chance for something
in the nature of a great adventure."5 A few years later he
would almost lose his life on an expedition in the Brazilian
jungle. When the United States entered World War I he tried,
without success, to be assigned his own division to lead to
France. Roosevelt's friendly contemporaries, in analyzing
the strenuous impulse in his own life, were themselves some-
times disturbed by it. John Burroughs wrote in his journal
that "Roosevelt would be a really great man if he could be
shorn of that lock of hair in which that strong dash of the

6

bully resides." And Robert Underwood Johnson concluded in

his Remembered Yesterdays: "it seems to me that one of the

 

. L . . . ___‘ _Lgflfi‘ A _AA A; g A A_ ._‘ A “LgA

5Quoted in George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore
Roosevelt, 1900-l912 (New York: Harper 8 Row, TorchEook
Edition, 1962), p. 224.

6Quoted in Clara Barrus (ed.), The Heart of Burrou h's
Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 19285, p. 298.

 

235

most fascinating, as well as the most dangerous, things in
the character of Roosevelt was that he retained in many ways
the point of view of a young man."7
In 1918, writing of his son, Quentin, who had been killed
in an air battle over the German lines, Roosevelt paid tribute
to all those whose lives are molded by the strenuous ideal:
Only those are fit to live who do not
fear to die; and none are fit to die who
have shrunk from the joy of life. Both
life and death are parts of the same Great
Adventure. Never yet was worthy adventure
worthily carried through by the man who
put his personal safety first. Pride is
the portion only of those who know bitter
sorrow or the foreboding of bitter sorrow.

But all of us who give service, and stand
ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers.

8
Six months later Roosevelt was dead. His passing symbolized
the end of "the strenuous life" as an American byword, just
as his life had symbolized its thrust in American history in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By that
time also the First World War was over, and it was the war
which ended the strenuous era of Roosevelt and Wilson.

Like so many other currents in American life, the ideal

of strenuous service and sacrifice, preached by Roosevelt's

generation, was shattered in the trenches of Europe and by

A‘A—‘A—“_‘—AA‘A—‘Ag ___.‘_A_.~___

7Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered_Yesterdays
(Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1923), p. 387.

 

8Quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt:

A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace 6 World, Harvest Edition,
I955}, p. 121.

236

the treaty fight at home. The war and the resulting disil-
lusionment cast a pall upon the strenuous life. The manliness
celebrated by the strenuous life gave way to the code of the
Hemingway hero, one who found himself "always embarrassed
by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression
in vain,"9 and who embraced natural action as a way of life
for its healthy exercise of the senses and its pursuit within
the context of the unspoken ritual. In a sense, the Hemingway
hero was an advocate of the strenuous life who had encountered
the violence, pain, and death of the twentieth century. The
exuberant aggressiveness of the strenuous life was replaced
in the 1920's with a defensive attitude which manifested
courage and stoicism in order to meet the traumas and dangers
of the modern world.

The dynamics of the prewar strenuous life had been
rooted in the moral impulse which characterized Progressivism
and Rooseveltian-Wilsonian internationalism, and the values
of the postwar period were antithetical to that kind of
strenuosity. The business and machine civilization of the
1920's did not nurture the strenuous values shared by the
previous_generation. Also, the intellectual assumptions of
the strenuous cultists were repudiated by many in the post-

war period. In Civilizatign_ingthgugnitedgfitates (1922),

 

a famous collection of essays on American culture by thirty

9Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 195 , p. .

237

intellectuals, editor Harold Stearns discovered three main
themes running through the book: "First, That in almost
every branch of American life there is a sharp dichotomy
between preaching and practice; . . . Second, That whatever
else American civilization is, it is not Anglo-Saxon, .
Third, That the most moving and pathetic fact in the social
life of America to-day is emotional and aesthetic starvation,

." Stearns concluded that "we have no heritages or
traditions to which to cling except those that have already
withered in our hands and turned to dust."10 Many regarded
the strenuous life as one of those heritages or traditions
which had led the nation into cultural bankruptcy.

"The strenuous life" provides a fitting epithet for
the years 1898-1918. It serves as a valuable key in
explaining the temper of the times. Perhaps it can be said
that "the strenuous life" was an expression of national
adolescence in the life of the nation. Since, as many then
believed, nations could be manly as well as individuals, it
epitomized the national struggle for maturity in the era of
Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps, too, "the strenuous life" can
be viewed as a bravado eXpression of "American innocence"
which could not survive the onslaught of the twentieth

century, even though it had launched the United States on

10Harold E. Stearns (ed.), Civilization in_the United
States (New York: Harcourt, Brace G Co., 1922), Preface,
pp. V1-vii.

 

238

the path of power at the beginning of the century. At any
rate, with the close of the First World War and the dawning
of the twenties a new era was being ushered in, and the

strenuous years of the Rooseveltian era were over.

B IBL IOGRAPHICAL ESSAY ‘

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

The principal source material for this study was
unearthed from the popular periodicals of the American 1890's
and early 1900's. The leading periodicals consulted were

Atlantic Monthly, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Harper's

 

Weekly, The Century, The Forum, Leslie's Weekly, Scribner's,

 

 

 

 

 

The Arena, The Independent, Outing, Cosmopolitan, The

 

 

 

 

Literary Digest, The Outlook, North American Review, McClure's,

 

 

 

The World's Work, Review of Reviews, Munsey's, The Overland

 

 

 

Monthly, The Youth's Companion, St. Nicholas, Harper's Young

 

 

 

People, Harper's Round Table, The Nineteenth Century, Forest

 

and Stream, Lippincott's, Collier's Weekly, Chautauquan, The

 

 

 

 

Critic, Sewanee Review, Dial, and POpular Science Monthly.

 

 

 

Extensive research in these magazines yielded a rich vein of
material on the strenuous life and related topics.

There are a number of important secondary works which
have contributed to the formulation of the author's ideas, and
to the attempt to place the Rooseveltian strenuous life in

historical perspective. George M. Fredrickson, The Inner

 

Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union

 

(1965) interprets the strenuous life as an extension into
peacetime of the Civil War ideal of service and sacrifice.

G. Edward White's The Eastern Establishment and the Western

 

Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt,

 

239

240

and Owen Wister (1968) is especially valuable for its

 

insights into the psychological makeup of the Eastern upper
middle class in the late nineteenth century and their zest
for the strenuous life in the West. Of major importance

also is Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (1967),

 

which traces the changing attitudes of Americans toward the
wilderness environment at the turn of the century. Nash's
chapter, "The Wilderness Cult," relates especially to the
strenuous theme. In a similar vein, and more comprehensive
for the period under consideration, is Peter J. Schmitt,

Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1969).

 

The theme of "overcivilization" is the topic of a chapter

in Larzer Ziff's literary history, The American 1890's:

 

Life and Times of a Lost Generation (1966). Richard

 

Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (rev. edn.,

 

1955) presents the Darwinian rationale for the strenuous
life. An excellent analysis of the imperialist thought of
the Roosevelt—Lodge-Hay circle is provided by Howard K. Beale

in Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power

 

(1956). Beale also skillfully relates Roosevelt's concept of
the strenuous life to his leadership and conduct in foreign
affairs. Roosevelt's phi1050phy may be best approached

through the essays in American Ideals (1897) and The Strenuous

 

 

Life (1900).
An overall survey of American life and culture in the

period is provided by two outstanding general histories:

241

Arthur Schlesinger, The Rise of the City, 1878-1898 (1933)

 

and Harold U. Faulkner, The Quest for Social Justice, 1898-

 

1914 (1931). Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States,

 

1900-1925 (6 vols., 1926-1935) is especially valuable as a

 

social record of early twentieth century America. The
strenuous theme in literature after the turn of the century

is analyzed in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (1942) and

 

Grant C. Knight, The Strenuous Age in American Literature

 

(1954).
Of scholarly articles on various aspects of the topic,
the most important is John Higham, "The Reorientation of

American Culture in the 1890's" in The Origins of Modern

 

Consciousness, ed. John Weiss (1965). A suggestive essay

 

is Edwin H. Cady, "'The Strenuous Life' as a Theme in

American Cultural History," New Voices in American Studies,

 

ed. R. B. Brown et a1. (1966). In the same volume is Russel

B. Nye, "The Juvenile Approach to American Culture, 1870-1930,"
an excellent article on the Horatio Alger, Frank Merriwell,

and Tom Swift stories. On the literature of American boyhood,
also see Jim Hunter, "Mark Twain and the Boy-Book in 19th-

Century America," College English, XXIV (March, 1963), and

 

John Hinz, "Huck and Pluck: 'Bad' Boys in American Fiction,"

South Atlantic Quarterly, LI (January, 1952). Useful on

 

sports is David Riesman and Reuel Denny, "Football in America:

A Study in Culture Diffusion," American Quarterly, III

 

(Winter, 1951); John Rickards Betts, "The Technological

242

Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850-1900," Mississippi

 

Valley Historical Review, XL (September, 1953); and Betts's

 

"Sporting Journalism in Nineteenth-Century America,"

American Quarterly, V (Spring, 1953). John P. Mallan, "The

 

Warrior Critique of the Business Civilization,” American

Quarterly, VIII (Fall, 1956) deals with an aspect of the

 

expansionist argument developed by "the little imperialist
elite" of the 1890's. Also useful is Edward and Frederick
Schapsmeier, "Theodore Roosevelt's Cowboy Years," Journal

of the West, V (July, 1966).

 

Finally, two unpublished doctoral dissertations have
been of value, particularly for their bibliographical
listings: Dorothea Morse, "Study of Juvenile Writings of
Eight American Authors of the Second Half of the Nineteenth
Century" (University of Illinois, 1952), and Frank T. Phipps,
"The Image of War in America, 1891-1917: A Study of a
Literary Theme and Its Cultural Analogues" (Ohio State
University, 1953).

The war in Vietnam and America's domestic violence of
the sixties and seventies have provoked new examinations of
concepts of manliness. See especially Lucy Komisar, "Violence

and the Masculine Mystique," The Washington Monthly, II

 

(July, 1970).

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