Fluent Essays

Please see attached Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Chapter 1: “The Birth of the Self-Made Man.” Your response should be a minimum 2 page, double spaced, file upload. A full credit paper will be well written, with correct spelling and grammar. It will be logically organized, with smooth prose. It will be cogently argued, ideally with evidence from your research to back it up. It will be analytical, deftly analyzing the assigned reading in relation to the prompt. Please become familiar with the rubric so you know what I am expecting. I also urge you to exceed the page minimum, dont be afraid to write more than 2 pages.  Prompt:  According to Michael Kimmel, how did the economic changes of the 19th century change notions of manhood and masculinity? What effect did these changes have on politics?  CHAPTER1 TheBirthOfthe Self-MadeMan Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests-in one word, so anti-poetic-as the life of a man in the United States. -Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (1832} 0n April 16, 1787, a few weeks before the opening of the Constitu­tional Convention, the first professionally produced play in Amer­ ican history opened in New York. The Contrast, a five-act comedy by Royall Tyler, centered around two men-one, a disingenuous wom­ anizing fop, and the other, a courageous American army officer-and the woman for whose affections they competed.1 Tyler parodied the dandys pretensions at the same time that he disdained the superfi­ cial vanities of women, contrasting both with an ideal of chaste and noble love. A patriotic play, The Contrast offered a kind of Declara­ tion of Independence of Manners and Morals a decade after the orig­ inal Declaration had spelled out political and economic rights and responsibilities. The Contrast posed the most challenging question before the newlyindependent nation: What kind of nation were we going to be? 13 14 MANHOOD IN AMERICA The sharply drawn differences between the two leading male charac­ ters, Billy Dimple and Colonel Manly, allowed the playwright to set (in names worthy of Dickens) the Old World against the New. Dim­ ple was a feminized fop, an Anglophilic, mannered rogue who trav­ eled to England and returned a dandy. The ruddy youth, who washed his face at the cistern every morning, and swore ... eternal love and constancy, was now metamorphose~ into a flippant, pallid, polite beau, who devotes the morning to his toilet, reads a few pages of Chesterfields letters [ on the art of seduction], and then minces out to put the infamous principles in practice on every woman he meets. 2 His rival, the virtuous Colonel Manly, is a former military of­ ficer, modeled after George Washington, fresh from the victory over the British-a man loyal to his troops and to honor and duty. Dimple and Manly compete for the hand of Maria, daughter of Mr. Van Rough, a successful urban businessman who is looking to solidify his newly prosperous economic position with a marriage to the well-po­ sitioned Dimple. Van Roughs motto is Money makes the mare go; keep your eye upon the main chance. 3 While audiences were quick to see the political choices before them-pitting ill-gained wealth and dubious morality against hard work and civic virtue-Tyler was also presenting another contrast, the answer to a different set of questions: What kind of men would populate this new nation? What vision of manhood would be pro­ moted? What would it mean to be a man in the newly independent United States? Dimple, Manly, and Van Rough offered the audience a contrast among three types of men, three versions of manhood; each embodied different relationships to his work, to his family, to his na­ tion. The signal work in the history of American theater is also one of the earliest meditations on American manhood. When we first meet Maria Van Rough in the play s opening scene, she is disconsolate, extolling the manly virtues that her fiance, Dim­ ple, lacks: The manly virtue of courage, that fortitude which steels the heart against the keenest misfortunes, which inteiweaves the laurel of glory amidst the instruments of torture and death, displays something so THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 15 noble, so exalted, that in despite of the prejudices of education I can­ not but admire it, even in a savage. Maria sees Dimple as a depraved wretch, whose only virtue is a polished exterior; who is actuated by the unmanly ambition of con­ quering the defenseless; whose heart, insensible to the emotions of patriotism, dilates at the plaudits of every unthinking girl; whose lau­ rels are the sighs and tears of the miserable victims of his specious behavior.4 Enter Colonel Manly. When he and Maria meet by accident in the second act, they are smitten, but Manly s virtue precludes any action on his part. 5 As the play builds to the inevitable confrontation be­ tween Dimple and Manly, Tyler provides brief exchanges between the two men (and their manservants) to maintain the audiences interest. In one exchange they parry over the question of whether aristocratic wealth saps virility. Manly warns that no one shall convince me that a nation, to become great, must first become dissipated. Luxury is surely the bane of a nation: Luxury! which enervates both soul and body, . . . which renders a people weak at home and accessible to bribery, corruption and force from abroad. Dimple responds by describing the pleasures of seduction. There is not much pleasure when a man of the world and a finished co­ quette meet, who perfectly know each other; but how delicious it is to excite the emotions of joy, hope, expectation, and delight in me bosom of a lovely girl who believes every tittle of what you say to be serious! (We learn later that Dimples disquisition was more than theoretical, as he has seduced all three of the play s leading women.) Manlys retort is angry and virtuous. The man who, under preten­ sions of marriage, can plant thorns in the bosom of an innocent, un­ suspecting girl is more detestable than a common robber, in the same proportion as private violence is more despicable than open force. 6 Finally, Dimple is exposed as a phony and denounced by all. Even in defeat, though, he asks that those assembled consider the con­ trast between a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received the polish of Europe and an unpolished, untravelled American. Manly gets Marias hand and also has the last word, closing the play ~Q;l ~ 16 M.ANHOOD IN AMERICA with what he has learned, that probity, virtue, honour, though they should not have received the polish of Europe, will secure to an hon­ est American the good graces of his fair countrywomen. 7 Marias father, Mr. Van Rough, presents still another masculine ar­ chetype; indeed, each of the three-Dimple, Manly, and Van Rough-embodies one of the three dominant ideals of American manhood available at the tum of the nineteenth century. 8 Despite the play s focus on the other two, it is Van Rough who would come to dominate the new country in a new century. Dimple represents what I will call the Genteel Patriarch. Though Tylers critical characteriza­ tion sets Dimple out as a flamboyant fop, the Genteel Patriarch was a powerful ideal through the early part of the nineteenth century. It was, of course, an ideal inherited from Europe. At his best, the Gen­ ~eel Patriarch represents a dignified a~tocratic ~anhood, committ~d to the British upper-class codeof honor and to well-rounded charac- ter, with exquisite tastes and manners and refined sensibilities. To the ,~Genteel Patriarch, manhood meant property ownership and a bene~ olent patriarchal authority at home, including the moral instructio.n oihIS sons. A Christian entleman, the Genteel Patriarch embodied love, kin ness, duty, and compassion, exhibited through philan-- thropic work, church activities, and deep involvement with his f!..m- ily. For an illustration of the Genteel Patriarch, think of Thomas._ Jefferson at Monticello, George Washington, John Adams, or James M~dison. - Colonel Manly embodies a second type of manhood-the Heroic Artisan.9 This archetype was also inherited from Europe, despite Royall Tylers attempt to Americanize him. ~pdepen~ent, virtuous, and hon­ est, the Heroic · stiffl formal in his manners with women, stalwart and lo al to his male comrades. On the famil farm or in h. urban era-ts shop, he was an honest toiler, unafraid of hard wor prou of his craftsmanship and self-reliance. With a leather apron cov-~ ering his open shirt and his sleeves rolled up, Boston silversmith Paul Revere, standing proudly at his forge, well illustrates this type. The newcomer to this scene is Mr. Van Rough, the wealthy entre­ preneur, whose newly acquired financial fortune leads to his social aspirations of marrying his daughter to the well-placed aristocratic Dimple. VanRough represents the Self-Made Man, a model of man- THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 17 h~d- that derives identity entirely from a mans activities in the pub- r,1-P,,., 1 ei.~ lie sphere, measured by accumulated wealth and status, by geo- ltii.ct+, graphic and social mobility. At the time, this economic fonune would have to be translated into permanent ~ocial standing-Van Rough must try to become Mr. Smooth. Since a mans fonune is as easily unmade as it is made, the Self-Made Man is uncomfortably linked to the volatile marketplace, and he depends upon continued mobility. Of course, Self-Made Men were not unique to America; as the natural outcome of capitalist economic life, they were known as nouveaux richesin revolutionary France (and also known as noblesse de robe, as well as other, less pleasant, terms, in the preceding century), and they had their counterparts in every European country. But in Amer- ica, the land of immigrants and democratic ideals, the land without hereditary titles, they were present from the start, and they came to dominate much sooner than in Europe. In the growing commercial and, soon, industrial society of the newly independent America, the Self-Made Man seemed to be born at the same time as his country. A man on the go, he was, as one lawyer put it in 1838, made for action, and the bustling scenes of moving life, and not the poetry or romance of existence. 10 Mobile, c?mpetitive, aggressive in business, the Self-Made Man was also tern- & Ifht~~ peramentally restless, chronicall insecure, and desperate to achieve 11¼.c:t.., a so i grounding for a masculine identity. · Royall Tyler hoped that the republican virtue of the Heroic Artisan would triumph over the foppish Genteel Patriarch, just as democratic America defeated the aristocratic British. But it was not to be: It was the relatively minor character, Van Rough, who would emerge tri­ umphant in the nineteenth century, and the mobility and insecurity of the Self-Made Man came to dominate the American definition of manhood. This book is the story of American manhood-how it has changed over time and yet how certain principles have remained the same. I believe some of its most important characteristics owe their existence to the timing of the Revolution-the emergence of the Self-Made Men at that time and their great success in the new American democ­ racy have a lot to do with what it is that defines a real man even today. https://geo-ltii.ct 18 MANHOOD IN AMERICA Lets look at the Self-Made Mans first appearance on the historical stage, which will help us limn the shifts in the definitions of man­ hood in the first half of the nineteenth century. An old standard rooted in the life of the community and the qualities of a mans char­ acter gave way to a new standard based on individual achievement, a shift in emphasis from seIVice to community and cultivation of the spirit to improvement of the individual and concern with his body. 11 From a doctrine of usefulness and seIVice to the preoccupation with the sel( American manhood got off to a somewhat disturbing start. Part of this start, the American Revolution, brought a revolt of the sons against the father-in this case, the Sons of Liberty against Fa­ ther England.12 And this introduced a new source of tension in the act of resolving an old one. The relatively casual coexistence of the Genteel Patriarch and the Heroic Artisan had been made possible by the colonies relationship with England. Many Genteel Patriarchs looked to England not just for political and economic props but also for cultural prescriptions for behavior. Patriarchs had the right to lead their country by virtue of their title. The American colonies had few noblemen, like Sir William Randolph, but they had plenty of substi- . tutes, from upper-class political elites to Dutch landed gentry in New York and the large plantation owners in Virginia and around Chesa­ peake Bay. There was little tension between them and the laborers who worked for or near them. The real problem was that as long as the colonies remained in British hands, it seemed to all that manly autonomy and self-control were impossible. Being a man meant being in charge of ones own life, liberty, and property. Being a man meant also not being a boy. A man was independent, self-controlled, responsible; a boy was dependent, irresponsible, and lacked control. And language reflected these ideas. The term man­ hoodwas synonymous with adulthood. Just as black slaves were boys, the white colonists felt enslaved by the English father, infan­ tilized, and thus emasculated. The American Revolution resolved this tension because, in the te~ oft~ei i~ meta hor of the da , it freed the sons from th~ tyrann of a Declaration of In e en ence was a declaration of manly adulthood, a manhood that was counterposed I https://England.12 THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 19 to the British version against which American men were revoltin . Jefferson and his coauthors accuse the king of dissolving their repre­ sentative assemblies because they had opposed with manly firm- - ~ ness, his invasions on the rights of the people. (Of course, th~ rebellion of the sons did not eliminate the need for patriarchal au­ th~rity. George Washington was immediately hailed as the Father of our Country, and many wished he would become king.) By contrast, British manhood and, by extension, aristocratic con­ ceptions of manhood (which would soon come to include the Gen­ teel Patriarch) were denounced as feminized, lacking manly resolve and virtue, and therefore, ruling arbitrarily. Critiques of monarchy and aristocracy were tainted with a critique of aristocratic luxury as effeminate.John Adams posed the question about how to prevent the creation of a new aristocracy in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in De­ cember 1819. Will you tell me how to prevent riches becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent lux­ ury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?13 Works of fiction and essays exploited the Lockean theme of Amer­ ica as the state of nature in which individual morality could emerge, a contrast between virtue born of nature and vice born of luxury and refinement. In the preface to Edgar Huntley, the first work of fiction written by an American specifically about the American experience, novelist Charles Brockden Brown claimed that he had replaced the puerile superstitions and exploded manner, Gothic castles and · chimeras of the European novel with the incidents of Indian hostil­ ity and the perils of the Western wilderness. And Washington Irving echoed these themes a few decades later, writing that [w] e send our youth abroad to grow luxurious and effeminate in Europe; it appears to me, that a previous tour on the Prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness, simplicity and self-dependence, most in uni­ son with our political institutions. !!,1politics and in culture, in b_Q$.h fi£tion and fact, American men faced a choice between effeminacy_ a?1d manliness, between aristocra~x and repuhHcanism.~4 To retrieve their manhood from its British guardians, the Sons of Liberty carried out a symbolic patricide. Having left the British 20 MANHOOD IN AMERICA parent as a child, America miraculously becomes capable of its own nurturing; independence transforms the son into his own parent, a child into an adult. 15 The American man was now free to invent himself. The birth of the nation was also the birth of a New Man, who, as Hector St. John de Crevecoeur put it in his marvelous Let­ ters from an American Farmer (1782), leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man who acts upon new principles .... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men. 16 At first, the American new man at the tum of the nineteenth cen­ tury cautiously tried to fit in, either as a Genteel Patriarch, Heroic Ar­ tisan, or even Van Roughian Self-Made Man. In the early American magazines, for example, heroism was defined by a mans usefulness and service, his recognition of responsibilities. Between 1810 and 1820, the term breadwinnerwas coined to denote this responsible family man. The breadwinner ideal would remain one of the. central characteristics of American manhood until the present day. At its mo­ ment of origin, it meant that a mans great aim was to fill his sta­ tion with dignity, and to be useful to his fell ow beings; in another magazine, a mans death was lamentable because of his desire of usefulness-his wish to be one of those by whom society is enlight­ ened and made better. 17 This is well illustrated in The Farmers Friend, an advice book writ­ ten by the Reverend Enos Hitchcock in 1793. In recounting the story of the well-named Charles Worthy, Hitchcock describes the Heroic Artisan as young farmer and recounts his gradual rise as he diligently pursues his calling. Worthy, Hitchcock writes, never felt so happy as when conscious of industriously following his occupation .... In order to merit the esteem of others, we must become acquainted with the duties of our particular professions, occupations, or stations in life, and discharge the duties of them in the most useful and agree­ able manner. Virtue inheres in the work virtuously performed, the calling followed, not in the financial rewards that accrue to the virtu­ ous worker. Ben]amin Franklin, perhaps the first American prototype of the Self-Made Man, underscored this theme. In order to secure THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 21 my credit and character as a tradesman, he wrote in his Autobiogra­ phy,first published in 1 791, I took care not only to be in realityin­ dustrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. To Franklin, as to many other early Self-Made Men, image may not have been everything, but it was of importance. 18 But patricide has significant costs, including the loneliness of the fatherless son and the burden of adult responsibilities placed upon . his shoulders. 19 American mens chief fear at the time was that the Jt::,Jin£i overthrown effeminate aristocracy would return to haunt them. ~~ r-s Samuel Adams articulated this fear in an article in the Massachusettsl€4r-Gj Sentinelin January 1785. Did we consult the history of Athens and 1 1dv(~l Rome, we should find that so long as they continued their frugality and simplicity of manners, they shone with superlative glory; but no sooner were effeminate refinements introduced amongst them, than they visibly fell from whatever was elevated and magnanimous, and became feeble and timid, dependent, slavish and false. In other words, aristocratic luxury and effeminacy threatened the Revolutions moral edge. The post-Revolutionary American man had to be con- stantly vigilant against such temptation, eternally distancing himself from feminized indulgence. 20 A few years later, Benjamin Rush saw the threat to the newly emerging republican manhood as coming from both sides-from ef­ feminate aristocrats as well as from lazy laborers. In his ½.ddress to the Ministers of the Gospel of Every Denomination in the United States upon Subjects Interesting to Morals (1788), Rush advocated that American men tum themselves into republican machines. He called for the elimination of fairs, racehorses, cockfighting, and clubs of all kinds, argued that all forms of play be banned on Sundays, and that all intoxicating spirits, including liquor and wine, the parents of idleness and extravagance, be prohibited. But Adams and Rush, like Royall Tyler, were wrong. Neither effemi­ nate aristocrats nor lazy laborers were the real threats. Billy Dimples time was slowly passing, and Colonel Manly could never be as domi­ nant as Cincinnatus. Instead, the economic boom of the new coun­ trys first decades produced the triumph of the Self-Made Men, the Van Roughs, men who were neither aristocratic fops nor virtuous drones-far from it. These Self-Made Men built America. 22 MANHOOD IN AMERICA Between 1800 and 1840 the United States experienced a market revolution. Freed from colonial dependence, mercantile capitalism remade the nation. America undertook the construction of a national transportation system and developed extensive overseas and domes­ tic commerce. Between 1793 and 1807 American exports tripled, while between 1800 and 1840 the total amount of free labor outside the farm sector rose from 17 to 3 7 percent. 21 The fiscal and banking system expanded rapidly; from eighty-nine banks in 1811 to 246 five years later and 788 by 1837. The economic boom meant westward expansion as well as dramatic urban growth. Such dramatic economic changes were accompanied by political, social, and ideological shifts. Historian Nancy Cott notes that the pe­ riod 1780-1830 witnessed a demographic transition to modem pat­ terns of childbirth and childcare, development of uniform legal codes and procedures, expansion of primary education, the beginning of the democratization of the political process, and the invention of a new language of political and social thought. Democracy was ex­ panding, and with it, by the end of the first half of the century, Amer­ ica was converted to acquisitiveness, a conversion that would have dramatic consequences for the meanings of manhood in industrializ­ ing America. In the third decade of the century, between 1825 and 1835, a bourgeoisie worthy of the name came into being in the Northeast, a self-consciously self-made middle class.22 The emerging capitalist market in the early nineteenth century both freed individual men and destabilized them. No longer were men bound to the land, to their estates, to Mother England, or to the tyrannical father, King George. No longer did their manhood rest on their craft traditions, guild memberships, or participation in the vir­ tuous republic of the New England small town. America was entering ,Q a new age, and men were free to create their own destinies, to find --- +-- th~ own ways, to rise as high as they could, to write their own bi- o~aphies. God had made man a moral free agent, acfording to re­ vivalist minister Charles Finney in a celebrated sermon in 1830. The American Adam could fashion himself in his own image. This ~ew in­ dividual freedom was as socially and psychologically unsettling as it was exciting and promising. To derive ones identity, and especially \ \ https://class.22 THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 23 ones identity as a man, from marketplace successes was a risky proposition. Yet that is precisely what defined the - n · success in the mar et, individual achievement, mobility, wealth. America ex- s.df--n-,4 pressed political autonomy; the Self-Made Man embodied economic Vl-Jq ._ autonomy.This was the manhood of the rising middle class. The flip side of this economic autonom is anxie , restlessness ess. Man ood is no longer fixed in land or small-scale property owner­ ship or dutiful service. Success must be earned, manhood must be proved-and proved constantly. Contemporary observers of early nineteenth century American life noticed the shift immediately. One of the most popular tracts of the 1830s was Thomas Hunts The Book of Wealth (1836), which went through several printings while proving to its readers that the Bible mandates that men strive for wealth. No man can be obedient to Godswill as revealed in the Bible without, as the general result, be­ coming wealthy, Hunt wrote. The drive for wealth penetrated every­ thing. Nearly all Americans trade and speculate, observed Thomas Nichols in 1837. They are ready to swap horses, swap watches, swap farms; and to buy and sell anything .... Money is the habitual measure of all things. One English traveler in 1844 remarked that Americansused the phrase I calculate as a synonym for I believe or I think. Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind, quipped Ralph Waldo Emerson in an 1847 ode, which commented on the re­ versal of priorities encouraged by the emerging capitalist market. 23 In the early republic, as today, equal opportunity meant equal op­ portunity to either succeed or to fail. True republicanism requires that every man shall have an equal chance-that every man shall be free to become as unequal as he can, was the way one advice man­ ual, How to Behave, expressed it. Some are sinking, others rising, others balancing, some gradually ascending toward the top, others flaminglyleading down, wrote a young Daniel Webster. In his 1837 book TheAmericans,Francis Grund commented on the endless striving,the great scramble in which all are troubled and none are satisfied.t\ man, in America, is not despised for being poor in the outset ... but every year which passes, without adding to his pros- 24 MANHOOD IN AMERICA peritfi is a reproach to his understanding of industry and, he might have added, a stain on his sense of manliness. 24 The contrast with European manhood was a constant theme, and one that European observers noted with special relish. The French­ man Michel Chevalier wrote, after a visit to Jacksonian America, of its universal instability. Here is all circulation, motion, and boiling agitation. . . . Men change their houses, their climate, their trade, their laws, their officers, their constitutions. 25 Even after ten years as a resident of Boston, the Viennese immigrant Francis Grund still couldnt figure it out: There is probably no people on earth with whom business constitutes pleasure, and industry amusement, in an equal degree with the inhabi­ tants of the United States of America. Active participation is not only the principal source of their happiness, and the foundation of their na­ tional greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it. ... Busi­ ness is the very soul of an American: he pursues it, not as a means of procuring for himself and his family the necessary comforts of life, but as the fountain of all human felicity.26 The acclaimed British novelist Charles Dickens expected to be de­ lighted when he visited the United States in 1842 but found himself increasingly disappointed with the American people both for their self-congratulatory myopia and defensiveness and for their energy and restlessness.As he chronicled in his rambling work American Notes for General Circulation (1842), Dickens was awestruck in this great emporium of commerce as much by the national love of trade as by the universal distrust that accompanied it, which Americans carry into every transaction of public life. Dickens told the American people, It has rendered you so fickle, and so given to change, that your incon­ stancy has passed into a proverb; for you no sooner set up an ideal finnly, than you are sure to pull it down and dash it into fragments: and this, because directly you reward a benefactor, or a public servant, you distrust him, merely because he is rewarded; and immediately apply yourselves to find out, either that you have been too bountiful in your acknowledgements, or he remiss in his deserts. 27 THE BIRTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN 25 Dickens found Americans dull and gloomy, without either joy or humor, and found himself oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business among these strange people, rest­ less and locomotive, with an irresistible desire for change. 28 The eras most perceptive visitor-perhaps the most observant visitor in our history-was a young French nobleman, Alexis de Tocqueville. When Tocqueville arrived in America in 1830, he was instantly struck by the dramatically different temperament of the American, a difference he attributed to the difference between aris­ tocracies and democracies. Unlike his European counterpart, Tocqueville observed, the American man was a radical democrat­ equal and alone, masterless and separate, autonomous and defense­ less against the tyranny of …