A LIFE OF LOUD DESPERATION:

The manliness of Theodore Roosevelt (Harvey Mansfield, March 2005, New Criterion)

The most obvious feature of Theodore Roosevelt’s life and thought is the one least celebrated today, his manliness. Somehow America in the twentieth century went from the explosion of assertive manliness that was TR to the sensitive males of our time who shall be and deserve to be nameless.

TR appeals to some conservatives today for his espousal of big government and national greatness, and all conservatives rather relish his political incorrectness. As a reforming progressive he used to appeal to liberals, but nowadays liberals are put off by the political incorrectness that conservatives rather sneakily enjoy. Conservatives keep their admiration under wraps because they fear the reaction of women should they celebrate his manliness. Liberals have delivered themselves, in some cases with discernible reluctance (I am thinking of President Clinton), to the feminists. Yet they too are concealing an embarrassment. Nothing was more obvious than Roosevelt’s manliness because he made such a point of it not only in his own case but also as necessary for human progress. It was being a progressive that made him so eager to be manly. Here is gristle to chew for liberals and conservatives, both of whom—except for the feminists—have abandoned manliness mostly out of policy rather than abhorrence. With the Library of America’s publication of his Letters and Speeches and The Rough Riders, An Autobiography, let’s see how Roosevelt’s manliness was at the center of his politics.

We can begin from the pragmatism of William James, who was one of Roosevelt’s professors at Harvard. Pragmatism too is favored by both conservatives and liberals today, particularly those conservatives like President Bush the First because they distrust “the vision thing,” and liberals like Richard Rorty because they believe in the vision thing but do not want to defend it with reasons. But pragmatism as James presented it was very much a philosophy for the tough-minded, the manly, as opposed to optimistic rationalists with tender temperaments. Roosevelt and James did not get on together. When Roosevelt praised the “strenuous life,” James said that he was “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence.” And though Roosevelt took James’s course at Harvard, he was not a disciple of James, who might have fallen into the category of “educated men of weak fibre” whom Roosevelt was pleased to excoriate. The point of James’s criticism was his distaste for the Spanish-American war, which Roosevelt liked so much. Yet the two agreed on manliness. Roosevelt, had he taken note of pragmatism, would have been happy to begin from James’s notion of “tough-minded.”

Roosevelt’s first thought would have been to make James’s tough-minded philosophers tougher by emphasizing determination and will-power over opinions about the universe. “In this life we get nothing save by effort,” he said, dismissing God and nature by which we have the faculties that make possible our kind of effort. Roosevelt was a sickly, asthmatic child who, by the advice of his father and with constant exercise, made himself fit not only for survival but for feats of manly aggression. His father’s advice had been to lengthen the reach of his mind by strengthening his body, using sheer will-power. Roosevelt did just that. He went in for boxing, a skill that enabled him to knock people around, that must have fed his love of rivalry, and that could easily have encouraged him to exaggerate the power of will-power. He spoke frequently of “character,” but by this he meant just one character, the energetic character—forgetting other forms of determination to set one’s own course in life. He concentrated not so much on the mind as on the instrument of the mind.

Today, following James and TR, we are in the habit of calling someone tough-minded if he looks at things empirically—meaning not wishing them to be better than they are—and weak-minded if he reasons or rationalizes things as he wants them to be. Of course, if temperament controls the mind (as James argued), you are more in control when you are tough rather than tender or weak or wishful or wistful; so under that condition the advantage goes to manliness. And it also goes to men rather than women, because will-power in this view requires a stronger, more athletic body.

Thus, according to TR, manliness is in the main a construction, an individual construction of one’s own will-power. To make the construction, a man should engage in “the manly art of self-defense” against other men, but he should also seek encounters with nature in the form of dangerous animals. He must hunt. “Teddy” got his nickname from all the bears he shot, all the cubs he made orphans. A New Yorker by birth, he went to the Wild West, and became a Westerner by deliberate intent, or sheer will-power. He became a cowboy by impressing the other cowboys, a loner among loners certified with their stamp of approval. In this way the individual construction becomes social: after you have proved yourself. The theorists today who say masculinity is a social construction often give the impression that there’s nothing to it; society waves a wand and a nerd is made manly. No, it takes effort to become manly, as Teddy Roosevelt says. The more manliness is constructed, the more effort it takes. The more we admire effort like TR’s rather than the beautiful nature and noble ease of Homer’s Achilles, the more we admire will-power manliness and the more we depend on it.

Will-power manliness can also appear to have an air of desperation or can be said to be desperate underneath despite an air of confidence on the surface.