Rob Hardy
_____
Theodore Roosevelt and the Masculine/Feminine Complex
My wife and I were waiting in line to speak to our son’s math teacher
at parent–teacher conferences when I noticed the poster on the wall
of the middle school cafetorium:
Do
what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.
—Theodore
Roosevelt
I pointed out to my wife that the exhortation
comes from Roosevelt’s Autobiography, where he is actually
quoting someone named Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia,
who was in turn quoting an anonymous bit of homespun folk wisdom. I told
her I found it interesting how Roosevelt gave certain ideas like this,
that were not necessarily his own, the force of a personality. He embodied
a certain idea of America, I said.
*
In the centennial year of Roosevelt’s
1904 election to the presidency, the Library of America issued a new edition
of Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders and also An Autobiography
(2004), as well as a companion volume of his Letters and Speeches
(2004). David McCullough, whose 1981 biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt,
Mornings on Horseback, remains extremely valuable, claims that Roosevelt’s
Autobiography is “particularly interesting to read with
a view to all that it left out.” For example, McCullough observes,
“not only does he make no mention of Alice Lee or their marriage,
he neglects to mention his sisters by name and devotes all of three sentences
to his mother.” The feminine influence on his life is almost entirely
elided.
As I read through Roosevelt’s Autobiography,
I was curious to see if I could uncover any traces of that influence.
Surely the influence was there. Writing about his own son, Roosevelt told
a correspondent: “I know perfectly well that all my training him
will only amount to one element in the many that will go to determine
who he is in the future. As you say . . . , the mother has much more to
do than the father with the children’s future.” My investigation
of this pervasive presence began with Roosevelt’s childhood reading,
and focused on his fondness for a children’s magazine called Our
Young Folks.
“As a small child,” Roosevelt
notes in his Autobiography, “I had Our Young Folks,
which I firmly believed to be the best magazine in the world—a
belief, I may add, which I have kept to this day unchanged, for I seriously
doubt if any magazine for young or old has ever surpassed it. Both my
wife and I have the bound volumes of Our Young Folks which we
have preserved from our youth.”
An illustrated magazine for boys and girls,
Our Young Folks began publication in January 1865, when little
“Teedie” Roosevelt was five years old. The magazine was published
by Ticknor and Fields and edited by John Townsend Trowbridge, Lucy Larcom,
and Abigail Dodge (“Gail Hamilton”). Over the course of its
eight-year run, Our Young Folks featured stories and poems by
some of the most popular authors of the day, including Louisa May Alcott,
Charles Dickens (“A Holiday Romance,” 1868), Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Horatio Alger, Jr., Edward Lear, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward
Everett Hale, and Mary Mapes Dodge.
Thinking back over his reading, Theodore
Roosevelt remembered a special fondness for stories for boys—like
“Cast Away in the Cold,” by Arctic explorer Dr. Isaac Israel
Hayes—that he considered “first-class, good healthy stories,
interesting in the first place, and in the next place teaching manliness,
decency, and good conduct.” He particularly enjoyed the contributions
of Captain Mayne Reid, whose stories combined hunting and natural history
with lessons in sturdy self-reliance. Of course, this is just the sort
of thing one would expect to have appealed to a young Theodore Roosevelt,
the future Rough Rider, big game hunter, and conservationist. But Roosevelt
made an interesting admission: he also enjoyed reading the stories for
girls.
“At the cost of being deemed effeminate,”
he wrote, “I will add that I greatly liked the girls’ stories—‘Pussy
Willow’ and ‘A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,’
just as I worshipped Little Men and Little Women and
An Old-Fashioned Girl.”
We find other boys of Roosevelt’s
generation confiding a similar fondness for Little Women. For
example, Roosevelt’s younger contemporary, William Lyon Phelps,
recorded in his diary for July 13, 1879 (he was fourteen), that he had
just finished reading Little Men, and had already read Little
Women. But Phelps, like Roosevelt, was careful to balance his acknowledged
reading of Louisa May Alcott with solid evidence of more masculine enthusiasms.
Accordingly, in his Autobiography, Phelps followed the diary excerpt about
reading Little Men with an entry about going out into the woods
with his rifle and a hatchet, felling two trees, and shooting a ground
sparrow, a downy woodpecker, a warbler, a bluebird, and an English sparrow.
“Had perfectly splendid fun,”
young Phelps concluded.
*
Harvey Mansfield, in the March 2005 issue
of The New Criterion, asserts that Roosevelt’s “manliness”
is central to his politics. The philosophical roots of this version of
manliness Mansfield locates in the pragmatism of William James, which
emphasized the power of the will and the commitment to “tough-mindedness”
in the construction of an active masculine life. Mansfield rather admires
Roosevelt’s “assertive manliness,” finding in it a bracing
contrast to the “sensitive males of our time who shall be and deserve
to be nameless.”
Similarly, but in less positive terms,
Sarah Watts in her book Rough Rider in the White House (2003)
focuses her attention on the “aggressively insurgent manhood”
of Roosevelt’s generation. She sees Roosevelt’s construction
of masculinity as a reaction against a “feminine” side of
his own nature that had the potential to expose him as soft and weak.
Roosevelt, she argues, acknowledged his “dark and feminine self”
and incorporated it into his “vision of manhood” by deploying
“his Rough Rider self in a lifelong assault against it.” As
the journalist William Allen White observed, there lurked in Roosevelt
“the shadow of some inner femininity deeply suppressed.”
A comparable observation was made of Roosevelt’s
father, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. The elder Roosevelt’s friend Howard
Potter wrote of him that he was “a singular compound of feminine
and masculine qualities, lovable as a woman, and as strong as a man.”
The younger Roosevelt himself later remarked: “I was fortunate enough
in having a father whom I have always been able to regard as an ideal
man . . . [H]e really did combine the strength and courage and will and
energy of the strongest man with the tenderness, cleanliness, and purity
of a woman.” Robust and benevolent, Theodore, Sr., was his son’s
idol, the man who drove him to toughen his body and who taught him that
“we are not placed here to live exclusively for ourselves.”
In his view, the “ideal man” combined both masculine and feminine
qualities.
Let me make it clear that when I use the
word “feminine” I am following the familiar practice of the
nineteenth century, which divided men and women, masculine and feminine,
into two separate spheres. The common nineteenth-century understanding
of these separate spheres is neatly summed up by the English novelist
E. Lynn Linton in an article reprinted in America in 1886: “As things
have hitherto been in the world, men have been the leaders and women the
aids; men have been the fighters in the open and women the healers in
the tents. To men has been apportioned the rough, rude, hardening work,
to women the softening and refining care of details; to men command, to
women influence. To men have been given, by nature and sex, heroic qualities
and the larger crimes and vices; to women gentle virtues and smaller faults,
and the restraining influence which comes by the very fact of their innocence,
their goodness, their purity, their unselfishness.” Society, Linton
said, was “purified and refined by [women’s] sweetness, their
devotion, their charm—in a word, by their feminineness, working
in its assigned sphere.” Theodore Roosevelt himself would remain
a firm believer in this Victorian doctrine of “separate spheres,”
even while he came to recognize masculine and feminine qualities combined
within his own personality.
In his Autobiography, Roosevelt
follows his admission that he enjoyed reading stories for girls with an
immediate qualification. “This enjoyment of the gentler side of
life,” he writes, “did not prevent me from reveling in such
tales of adventure as Ballantyne’s stories, or Marryat’s Midshipman
Easy.” Domesticity and adventure, feminine gentleness and rough-and-tumble
masculinity, stood side by side on Roosevelt’s childhood bookshelf,
and in the persistent dualities of his adult personality. As an adult,
he was both hunter and conservationist, outdoorsman and book-lover, warrior
and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was willing to make a candid admission
of his feminine side, but he was prepared to fight anyone who might take
such an admission as a sign of weakness.
The stories for girls in Our Young
Folks sought, above all, to teach their young readers the importance
of protecting the weak and the duty of each individual to live his or
her life for others. These were, in large part, the same lessons Theodore
Roosevelt learned from his father, lessons that would later become crucial
to Roosevelt’s own political life. In his view, it was a political
duty to protect the weak, but it was important to do so without showing
weakness oneself—to speak softly and carry a big stick. “The
men who have stood highest in our country, as in the history of all countries,”
Roosevelt later wrote, “are those who scorned injustice, who were
incapable of oppressing the weak, or of permitting their country, with
their consent, to oppress the weak, but who did not hesitate to draw the
sword when to leave it undrawn meant inability to arrest triumphant wrong.”
Above all, it was important to live for others: to protect the public
interest against the private interests of corporations, to serve one’s
country regardless of the personal costs that that might involve.
One of the most common words used by nineteenth-century
women to describe their role in society was “influence.” Although
they wielded no direct political power, they could, it was often asserted,
have an enormous influence on the men who did. The “girls’
stories” in Our Young Folks provided the women who wrote
them with a means of exerting that influence on their young readers, both
girls and boys, and it is evident that from early on Theodore Roosevelt
felt that influence.
*
The first issue of Our Young Folks,
appearing in January 1865, opened with a story by Harriet Beecher Stowe
called “Hum, the Son of Buzz,” which is concerned with an
injured hummingbird who is taken in by the narrator and carefully nursed
back to health. She feeds him with a tablespoon (from which he eats with
“a Christian-like decorum”) and makes a little bed for him
in her sewing box. As Hum’s health improves, the narrator often
has to engage in “a sort of maternal struggle to make him go to
bed in his box.” Like other nineteenth-century women writers (for
example, Sarah Trimmer and Susan Fenimore Cooper), Stowe routinely anthropomorphizes
birds, and sees in her relationship with nature an extension of feminine
domesticity. In this way, Stowe advances the suggestion that women are
always and everywhere homemakers and caregivers, even in relation to the
natural world.
It is revealing that “Hum, the Son
of Buzz” should be followed, in the first issue of Our Young
Folks, by the first installment of Captain Mayne Reid’s novel,
Afloat in the Forest, in which two adventurous boys float down the Amazon
on a raft.
The recurrent theme of woman as nature’s
caregiver is also taken up in Louisa May Alcott’s one contribution
to Our Young Folks, the story “Nelly’s Hospital,”
which was published in the April 1865 issue. The story presents the situation
of a little girl, Nelly, whose older brother is home on leave after being
wounded in the Civil War. Having heard his stories of the army hospital,
Nelly decides to start her own hospital—for wounded animals. She
sets up the hospital in a barn and turns a small wagon into an ambulance.
Her first patient is a fly rescued from a spider’s web. As she carries
out her plan, little Nelly is assisted by Tony, the gardener’s son,
who has “grown up with [plants] as if they were brothers and sisters.”
She is also assisted by her wounded brother, Will, who gives her lessons
in natural history and trains her in the use of a microscope. He finds
that this cheers him up and speeds his convalescence.
Nelly’s hospital gives the little
girl an opportunity to extend not only her caregiving, but also her Christian
ethics, to the natural world. When she comes upon a wounded snake, she
reflects on whether she should take him into her hospital.
“He is a rebel. I wonder if I ought
to help him,” thought Nelly, watching the reptile writhe with pain.
“Will said there were sick rebels in his hospital, and one was very
kind to him. It says, too, in my little book, ‘Love your enemies.’
I think snakes are mine, but I guess I’ll try and love him because
God made him.” Most remarkably, at this point the snake in the garden,
woman’s primordial enemy and the biblical symbol of man’s
fallen state, becomes the special object of Nelly’s care.
As Nelly’s example spreads throughout
the neighborhood, “rough boys” of the neighborhood agree not
to “stone birds,” as they were accustomed to do simply for
entertainment. As a result, the local bird population increases. In this
account, the positive influence of one little girl spreads outward from
her household, extending into her neighborhood and the natural world.
Nelly clearly exemplifies the nineteenth-century
image of woman as a helper and caregiver who inspires others by her Christian
example. As Our Young Folks editor Lucy Larcom declared: “[A girl’s]
real power, the divine dowry of womanhood, is that of receiving and giving
inspiration. In this a girl often surpasses her brother; and it is for
her to hold firmly and faithfully to her holiest instincts, so that when
he lets his standard droop, she may, through her spiritual strength, be
a standard-bearer for him.” Expressing a similar view in The
American Woman’s Home, written with her sister Catharine Beecher,
Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasized women’s special duty to minister
to the less fortunate: “[T]his is the divine labor to which the
pitying Saviour calls all his true followers: to lift up the fallen, to
sustain the weak, to protect the tempted, to bind up the broken-hearted,
and especially to rescue the sinful. This is the peculiar privilege of
woman in the sacred retreat of a ‘Christian home.’ And it
is for such self-denying ministries that she is to train all who are under
her care and influence, both by her teaching and by her example.”
The protection of the weak is a recurring
theme in the pages of Our Young Folks, which began publication
in the last months of the Civil War, as the nation came to the end of
its long conflict regarding the institution of slavery. In the June 1865
issue, editor J. T. Trowbridge contributed a story in which a father spoke
to his children about the lessons of that conflict. “Children,”
he tells them, “there are two principles at work in the world: one
is that of liberty and love to all men; the other is that of force, and
the tyranny of the strong over the weak.”
In its efforts to strike at the roots of
this tyrannical behavior in young children, especially young boys, Our
Young Folks makes the humane treatment of animals a special mission.
Throughout 1865, Harriet Beecher Stowe ran a series of stories about dogs,
intended to teach her young readers that animals are “a sacred trust
to us from our Heavenly Father.” In the September 1865 installment,
“Aunt Esther’s Rules,” she particularly addresses the
boy readers of Our Young Folks: “I can’t help hoping
that, in these stories about different pets, I have made some friends
among the boys, and that they will remember what I have said, and resolve
always to defend the weak, and not permit any cruelty where it is in their
power to prevent it.” Like Nelly, whose example prevents the neighborhood’s
“rough boys” from stoning birds, Stowe hopes to implant some
of her feminine gentleness in the hearts of her male readers, who are
understood to have a boyish tendency toward cruelty.
In many ways, this concern for the ethical
treatment of animals seems to have emerged as a logical corollary of the
antislavery movement. In her Letters from New-York, originally
written for the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1841, Lydia
Maria Child speaks out against the killing of stray dogs in the city:
Twelve or fifteen hundred of these animals have been killed
this summer; in the hottest weather at the rate of three hundred a day.
The safety of the city doubtless requires their expulsion; but the manner
of it strikes me as exceedingly cruel and demoralizing. The poor
creatures are knocked down on the pavement, and beat to death. Sometimes
they are horribly maimed, and run howling and limping away. The company
of dog-killers themselves are a frightful sight, with their bloody clubs,
and spattered garments. I always run from the window when I hear them;
for they remind me of the Reign of Terror. Whether such brutal scenes
do not prepare the minds of the young to take part in bloody riots and
revolutions is a serious question.
As such statements would suggest, Child
believed that, in nature, “everything is interlinked.” Accordingly,
the cruelty of slavery was symptomatic of man’s general “discord
with the harmony of nature,” which also found expression in other
forms of cruelty and other uses of force. “Would that Force,”
she declared, “were banished to the unholy region, whence it came,
and that men would learn to trust more fully in the law of kindness.”
As someone who earlier in her career had edited the children’s magazine
Juvenile Miscellany (1826–34), and who would later contribute
to Our Young Folks (1865–66), Child was typical of nineteenth-century
reformers who saw cruelty and the use of force as the root of most social
evils.
After the abolition of slavery and the
end of the Civil War, cruelty to animals began to receive more concentrated
attention as a persistent symptom of man’s inhumanity. In 1868,
after an incident in Boston in which two horses were literally raced to
death, George T. Angell brought together a number of community leaders
to form the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
(mspca), the first organization of its kind in the country. The mspca
lobbied hard for laws against the inhumane treatment of animals and, among
other things, sponsored the publication of children’s books that
preached sympathy and kindness toward animals. The most famous of these
was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), which Angell, making
a clear connection between abolitionism and animal rights, called “the
Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse."*
Insisting on what he took to be the underlying
logic of his position, Angell is often quoted as saying, “I am sometimes
asked, ‘Why do you spend so much of your time and money talking
about kindness to animals when there is so much cruelty to men?’
I answer, ‘I am working at the roots.’” His opposition
to cruelty in all its forms led him to oppose the Spanish-–American
War—Roosevelt’s war—as “piratical.” For
his part, Roosevelt believed that “it is incumbent upon every true
man to be gentle and tender with the weak—with women and young children,
and with dumb animals”—but he had no use for what he considered
sentimental pacifism. War was often justified, he believed, precisely
in the interests of protecting the weak. In a speech at London’s
Guildhall in 1910, Roosevelt warned: “Weakness, timidity, and sentimentality
may cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of
all broken reeds sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness
can lean.”
*
In his book The Feminine Fifties
(published in 1940), Fred Lewis Pattee asserted that, in the 1850s, “emotionalism
[was] in the saddle.” Considering the example of Walt Whitman, he
claimed: “No era was it for thinking; all was feeling. Reason by
itself never would have brought the Civil War . . . And completely was
Whitman in tune: all was he of heart and little of head. He voiced the
soprano fifties that smothered intellect with emotion.” Emotionalism,
in Pattee’s estimation, was above all “a feminine endowment,”
though it could be shared by men like Walt Whitman.
*
In a brief chapter of his Autobiography
(1939) devoted to the treatment of animals, William Lyon Phelps argues
that the humane treatment of animals is a sign of advanced civilization
and intellectual maturity, but cautions against allowing children to become
“over-sentimentalized”:
This attitude is well indicated by the familiar anecdote
of the small boy looking at the picture of the Christian martyrs delivered
to the lions: “Oh, look, Mama, that dear little lion in the corner
isn’t getting anything!” When I was a child, I woke up one
night, and wept when I thought of the warm comfort of my bed and my kitten
on the hard kitchen oilcloth. In the same way, those who condemn quail,
partridge, and duck-shooting are, I think, over-sentimental. The only
consistent attitude would be that of the vegetarian to abstain from fish,
flesh, and fowl. And even then it would require only a slight stretch
of the imagination to sympathize with potatoes which possibly suffer horribly
when torn up by the roots.
This reductio ad absurdum of the
animal rights position hints at a masculine discomfort with sentiment
and with the politics of sentiment. The novelist Ouida, though, also expressed
her doubts about women’s suffrage when she wrote in the North
American Review (1885) that female legislators would pass tyrannical
legislation “in their moments of panic” and “in their
hysterical hours,” because “women are more tyrannical and
self-absorbed than men.” The result of women’s suffrage, she
concludes, “will scarcely be other than the emasculation and the
confusion of the world of politics.”
E. Lynn Linton, a woman who, like Ouida,
did not favor women’s suffrage, argued that essential feminine qualities,
such as “pity and delicacy,” were dangerous when expressed
in the political sphere. “Excellent as restraining influences,”
she wrote, “as governing powers they would be, and are, destructive
of all true manhood . . . Rough and cruel and ghastly things must be done
in the world, and pity for the individual must not be suffered to interfere
with the general good—for the most part brought about by the sacrifice
of any individual.” For Linton, the problem is women’s overidentification
with others—the “individualizing faculty” of women that
resists the sacrifice of an individual for the general good. Women, in
other words, see individuals, while men, presumably, see general principles
which often outweigh the good identified with the individual.
At the root of this uneasiness over women’s
participation in politics was a worry about their emotionalism. Men of
Roosevelt’s generation like Pattee and Phelps were wary of the politicizing
of sentiment, the increasingly emphatic “emotionalism” that,
in Pattee’s words, always comes before revolution. This concern
was also shared by some women, like Ouida and Linton, who argued that
women were either too self-absorbed (Ouida) or too absorbed in the individual
other (Linton) to govern effectively. But an influential counterargument
was made by numerous women writers who argued that the particular gift
of women was, in fact, that of self-sacrifice.
Lucy Larcom, for example, one of the editors
of Our Young Folks, included in her memoir A New England
Girlhood this advice for young girls who aspired to be poets: “Don’t
sentimentalize! Write more of what you see than of what you feel, and
let your feelings realize themselves to others in the shape of worthy
actions.” She complained of the banality of sentimental fiction,
and remarked: “There are so many more books of fiction written nowadays,
I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have
any brains left for every-day use.”
For Larcom, the danger of sentimentality
was precisely that it could lead women to become too self-absorbed—to
focus inward (on “what you feel”), rather than outward (on
“what you see”). “One result of my infantile novel-reading,”
she recalled, “was that I did not like to look at my own face in
a mirror, because it was so unlike that of heroines always pictured with
‘high white foreheads’ and ‘cheeks of a perfect oval.’
Mine was round, ruddy, and laughing with health; and, though I practiced
at the glass a good deal, I could not lengthen it by puckering down my
lips.” Too much novel-reading resulted in an unhealthy self-absorption.
Larcom admitted that she began to be called a “book worm,”
a title that she “did not at all relish.”
“It was fortunate for me,”
Larcom noted, “that I liked to be out of doors a great deal . .
.” In a manner that would have resonated with Theodore Roosevelt,
Larcom sought to balance a tendency toward bookishness with a healthy
experience of the outdoors as a means of getting outside of herself.
Expressing similar convictions, Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Little Pussy Willow, the serial that Roosevelt
especially enjoyed in Our Young Folks, contrasts the healthy
and self-sacrificing country girl, Pussy Willow, with the wealthy and
self-absorbed city girl, Emily Proudie. Emily, the tight-corsetted hot-house
plant, is sent by her doctor to live in the country to improve her health.
Her contact with the country air, and with the example of Pussy Willow,
makes a better woman of her. By coming out into the open air, Emily comes
out of herself. As an antidote to the self-absorbed emotionalism of girls
like Emily Proudie, Stowe preached the discipline of self-sacrifice as
a means of directing one’s sympathies outward for the common good.
Larcom instructed the readers of A
New England Girlhood?—the “dear girls, for whom these
pages were written”—that “the meaning of life is education,”
and that “education is growth, the development of our best possibilities
from within outward.” Education was not merely a matter of reading
novels and gazing into the mirror—it required engagement with others
and with the larger world. “The real satisfaction of living is,
and must forever be, the education of all for each, and of each for all.”
This philosophy of education is often reflected in Our Young Folks.
In a poem that appeared in the April 1865 issue, for example, Larcom writes:
One heart encircles all
that live,
And blesses great and small,
And
meet it is that each should give
His
little to the all.
For Larcom, the young Christian ladies
who worked with her in the Lowell mills provided an example of “belonging
to the Whole.” Their feminine employment provided her with a metaphor
for collective action. In her view, “Every little thread must take
its place as warp or woof, and keep in it steadily. Left to itself, it
would be only a loose, useless filament. Trying to wander in an independent
or a disconnected way among the other threads, it would make of the whole
web an inextricable snarl. Yet each little thread must be as firmly spun
as if it were the only one, or the result would be a worthless fabric.”
As this metaphor makes clear, Larcom considered individualism important,
but only insofar as it contributed to the strength of the Whole. Self-reliance
must be balanced by self-sacrifice.
Sharing this assessment, Harriet Beecher
Stowe emphasized that the origins of self-sacrifice were to be found in
the home. In The American Woman’s Home, she observed that
“the distinctive feature of the family is self-sacrificing labor
of the stronger and wiser members to raise the weaker and more ignorant
to equal advantages.” She concludes from this that “the family
state, then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom,
and in it woman is its chief minister. Her great mission is self-denial,
in training the members to self-sacrificing labors for the weak and ignorant.”
In this era, women and men may have been
seen to occupy different spheres (“I do not believe that equality
of right means identity of function,” Roosevelt told Harriet Taylor
Upton in 1908), but the ideology of self-sacrifice was the same. As Harriet
Beecher Stowe had written in The American Woman’s Home:
“The father undergoes toil and self-denial to provide a home, and
then the mother becomes a self-sacrificing laborer to train its inmates.”
Masculine and feminine self-sacrifice were reciprocal gestures, each made
within its proper sphere. Reflecting on this general assumption, instead
of drawing on the feminine example of mill girls to illustrate collective
action, as did Lucy Larcom, Roosevelt drew on his own masculine experience
of the unselfish cowboys on his Dakota ranch, who combined rugged individualism
with an ability to work together for the common good. “Everybody
worked,” he wrote in his Autobiography, “everybody
was willing to help everybody else, and yet nobody asked any favors.”
Many of these cowboys later became the
core of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. And indeed, for this future president,
war was the ultimate opportunity for sacrificing oneself to promote the
common good. In Sarah Watts’s interpretation: “For Roosevelt,
acts of sacrifice spurred men to reach deep into their psyches for new
definitions of an authentic self, what he described to Minnesota state
fairgoers in 1901 as the ‘daring, endurance, [and] desire for victory
[that] make up the essential manliness of the American character.”
War enabled a man to prove his individual worth while sacrificing his
individual life for the common good.
Another of Lucy Larcom’s favorite
metaphors for an ideal feminine life was the brook that ran serenely between
its “soft banks” and eventually lost itself in “Love’s
wide ocean.” For Roosevelt, the ideal masculine life was one lost
in the tide of battle.
*
In discussing Roosevelt’s style of
raising his son Ted, Sarah Watts quotes from a letter that Roosevelt sent
to his friend Edward Sanford Martin in 1900. Watts uses the letter to
show that “Roosevelt understood his father’s regime of fear,
and . . . used the same disciplinary techniques on his own sons.”
She emphasizes the passages in the letter where Roosevelt speaks of training
Ted to be a fighter. Roosevelt writes, emphatically: “Now, do you
want to know the real underlying feeling which has made me fight myself
and want Ted to fight? Well, I summed it up to Ted once or twice when
I told him, apropos of lessons of virtue, that he could be just as virtuous
as he wished if only he was prepared to fight.”
What is mostly elided from Watts’s
selective account of this letter are the acknowledgments Roosevelt makes
of his own, and of his father’s, gentler side. “I am not naturally
at all a fighter,” Roosevelt says. “So far as any man is capable
of analyzing his own impulses and desires, mine incline me to amiable
domesticity and the avoidance of effort and struggle and any kind of roughness
and to the practice of home virtues.” The clear implication is that
Roosevelt worked at proving his masculinity, because his nature normally
inclined him to gentler pursuits. Indeed, as he evidently recognized,
“My ordinary companions in college would, I think, have had a tendency
to look down upon me for doing Sunday School work if I had not been a
corking boxer, a good runner, and a genial member of the Porcellian Club.”
Because he was himself the object of bullying
as a child, Roosevelt understood very well the need to protect the weak.
In his letter to Martin, he declared: “I loathe cruelty and injustice.
To see a boy or man torture something helpless whether in the shape of
a small boy or little girl or dumb animal makes me rage. So far as I know
my children have never been cruel, though I have had to check a certain
amount of bullying. Ted is a little fellow, under the usual size, and
wears spectacles, so that strange boys are rather inclined to jump on
him first. When in addition to this I have trained him so that he objects
strongly to torturing cats or hurting little girls, you can see that there
are chances for life to be unpleasant for him when among other boys.”
Roosevelt, who was himself an undersized
and spectacled child, felt the need to train himself to be a fighter in
order to protect himself against bullying, and he wanted Ted, also undersized
and spectacled, to have the same training. Toughness, combined with a
readiness to fight, provides a necessary means of self-defense for a sensitive
and emotional nature. Roosevelt told Martin: “When [Ted’s]
aunt goes to see him at school, he flings his arms around her neck and
is overjoyed with her companionship and has the greatest difficulty to
keep from crying when she goes away. Now there are certain of his companions
who would be inclined to think him a mollycoddle for betraying such emotion
over a female relative; but they won’t think him a mollycoddle if
he shows an instantaneous readiness to resent hostile criticism on the
subject.”
Less than two months later, Roosevelt was
writing to Ted himself about a hunting expedition in which he had killed
a cougar using Ted’s knife: “I ran in and stabbed him behind
the shoulder, thrusting the knife you loaned me right into his heart.
I have always wanted to kill a cougar as I did this one, with dogs and
the knife.”
*
Theodore Roosevelt continues to fascinate
us, in part, because he embodies some of the enduring contradictions of
the American character, in which belligerence and compassion seem at times
strangely intertwined. Roosevelt brought this combination of impulses
into sharp focus when, in 1899, he told a correspondent: “I am as
intolerant of brutality and cruelty to the weak as I am intolerant of
weakness and effeminacy.”
To Edward Sanford Martin, Roosevelt admits
that the “brute” attracts less contempt than the “mollycoddle,”
although he deserves more. In the end, it seems that Roosevelt spent his
life attempting, with mixed success, to steer a course between these two
extremes, seeking to balance powerfully conflicting elements in his own
nature. “One of the prime needs,” he wrote in his Autobiography,
“is to remember that almost every duty is composed of two seemingly
conflicting elements, and that overinsistence on one, to the exclusion
of the other, may defeat its own end.” For Roosevelt, true manliness
was understood to be the middle course between brutishness and effeminacy.
In his Nobel Prize speech in 1910, he declared: “We despise and
abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public
life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is
worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or
see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist
if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without
regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of a heartless and all-absorbing
commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless
ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.”
Aware of the potential massive risks of
being deemed effeminate, Roosevelt appeared to some people to overcompensate
with behavior verging on brutishness. Mark Twain considered him “clearly
insane . . . and insanest upon war and its supreme glories.” His
former Harvard professor William James spoke of his “flood of abstract
bellicose emotions.” A letter to
The New York Times in 1909 complained of “the slaughterings
in Africa by Mr. Roosevelt” and argued that “hunting for ‘big
game’ may be the sport of Kings, but not of men worthy of the name.”
On that 1909 safari, Roosevelt killed nine endangered white rhinos, the
first of which he shot in its sleep.
* Roosevelt’s successor as President, three-hundred pound William
Howard Taft, came in for criticism from Angell for his treatment of horses.
During the 1908 Presidential campaign, Angell told the New York Times:
“It is outrageous cruelty to animals for a big 300-pound man
like Taft to ride a horse about the country . . . Something should certainly
be done about it. No man weighing 300 pounds has any business on a horse’s
back. If he must ride let him use an automobile or an elephant.”
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