Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

“Between 1880 and 1910, then, middle-class men were especially interested in manhood. Economic changes were undermining Victorian ideals of self-restrained manliness. Working class and immigrant men, as well as middle-class women, were challenging white middle-class men’s beliefs that they were the ones who should control the nation’s destiny. […] All this activity suggests that men were actively, even enthusiastically, engaging in the process of remaking manhood.”

Social, political, and economic changes at the beginning of the 20th century impacted the lives of white middle-class Anglo-Saxon men, whose once secure position of privilege and authority was beginning to be undermined and compromised by obstacles to their continued supremacy. As a response, both consciously and unconsciously, they began to eschew those Victorian-era expectations and precedents that no longer served them in their efforts to maintain their advantages.

“Just as manliness was the highest form of manhood, so civilization was the highest form of humanity. Manliness was the achievement of the perfect man, just as civilization was the achievement of a perfect race. […] Scientific theories corroborated this belief that racial difference, civilization, and manliness all advanced together. Biologists believed that as human races slowly ascended the evolutionary ladder, men and women evolved increasingly differentiated lives and natures. The most advanced races were the ones who had evolved the most perfect manliness and womanliness.”

The designation of being considered civilized was one believed to be exclusive to white individuals of European descent. Civilization itself was seen as a manifestation of the highest level of evolutionary attainment, which was only thought to be possible through the natural advancement of white people, men in particular, as they fulfilled what they thought was their eventual destiny. These beliefs were supported and reinforced by the scientists of the time and accepted throughout white society as evident and indisputable.

“Moreover, the evolutionary millennialism embedded in discourses of civilization provided more satisfying ways for middle-class men to contain their class-based challenges to their manly social authority. […] In the light of ‘civilization,’ however, these economic setbacks could appear temporary and insignificant. Middle-class whites’ racial destiny was to approach civilized perfection, so eventually they or their children would inherit the earth, anyway. […] Thus, the class-based challenges to the power of middle-class manhood seemed to disappear behind civilization’s promise that the hard-working, meritorious, virile Anglo-Saxon man was inexorably moving toward racial dominance and the highest evolutionary advancement.”

While white middle-class men became frustrated as economic and socio-political obstacles began to create what they saw as hindrances to their personal advancement, they were comforted by the notion that the opportunity to reach their true goal and fulfill their noblest aspiration, which was to contribute to the advancement of their race, was a foregone conclusion. Although they may not amass the amount of wealth they hoped to, or retain the same measure of local political power their fathers once held, the most important pursuit they could possibly undertake was still available to them.

“In sum, when late nineteenth-century Americans began to synthesize new formulations of gender, hegemonic discourses of civilization explained concisely the precise relation between the male body, male identity, and male authority. White male bodies had evolved through centuries of Darwinistic survival of the fittest. They were the authors and agents of civilized advancement, the chosen people of evolution and the cutting edge of millennial progress. Who better to make decisions for the rest of humankind? It was imperative to all civilization that white males assume the power to ensure the continued millennial advancement of white civilization.”

There was no doubt in the minds of white middle-class Anglo-Saxon men that they were the living example of the pinnacle of evolutionary attainment. This belief was indisputably reinforced by contemporary academia, centuries of social expectations, calcified customs and practices, and the biased comparisons that they made between themselves and people of other races, ethnicities, and cultures. This belief was so pervasive that with the exception of small groups of activists who advocated for equality and social justice, white American society collectively embraced this belief as intrinsic to their worldview.

“This passionate masculine nature was considered simultaneously the source of men’s greatest danger and of men’s greatest power. Succumbing to overwhelming emotion or sexual passion would sap a man’s force, rendering him weak or degenerate. Therefore, middle-class parents taught their sons to build a strong, manly ‘character,’ as they would build a muscle, through repetitive exercises of control over impulse. The middle class saw this ability to control powerful masculine passions through strong character and a powerful will as a primary source of men’s strength and authority. By gaining the manly strength to control himself, a man gained the authority, as well as the duty, to protect and direct those less manly than himself—whether his wife, his children, his employees, or his racial ‘inferiors.’”

Especially in the Victorian period, the ideals of self-mastery and the ability to exercise restraint were lauded as virtuous behaviors necessary for a respectable man to possess. Having developed these character traits, it was presumed that it could be extrapolated to their interactions with others. Further, this attainment was seen as a kind of qualification that imbued white men who possessed it with rights and dominion over others regardless of whether his motives were benevolent or predatory.

“Wells depicted lynch mobs as vile, unmanly, and cowardly, hiding their own rampant lusts with sanctimonious calls for chastity, and excusing their brutal murders by invoking the honor of harlots. Wells argued that Southern white men, including those who formed the lynch mobs, were enthusiastic supporters of rape and sexual abuse—as long as the victims were black. [...] Hypocrisy, licentiousness, and unrestrained passion—sexual lust and blood lust—characterized Southern white men, as Wells depicted them. Thus, in her account, the Southern lynch mob did not embody white manliness restraining black lust; it embodied white men’s lust running amok, destroying true black manliness.”

By challenging white Southern men according to the very standards white middle-class men upheld for themselves, Wells was hoping to invoke a sense of awareness of the discrepancy between their aspirations and their actions. Though white men were supposed to exemplify restraint, decorum, and mastery over their passions and impulses, they not only engaged in carnal, lustful behavior in their predatory treatment of women of color, but they also reveled in the opportunity to take pleasure and satisfaction from the ghoulishly festive atmosphere of their unlawful, gruesome executions.

“In the short run, Wells’ strategy of depicting lynching as uncivilized and unmanly was brilliantly effective, but in the long run it contained a fatal flaw. The ideologies of manliness upon which she had based so much of her British campaign were gradually losing persuasiveness, as we have seen. And as civilized manliness lost power, whites grew increasingly interested in a different figure that also combined racial supremacy with powerful manhood—not ‘the white man,’ who embodied civilized manliness, but ‘the natural man,’ who embodied primitive masculinity.”

Wells’s arguments to end lynching were stronger in a Victorian context than they were in the changing times in which she was writing. Shaming white American males for participating in or condoning the brutal behavior of lynching did not have the intended effect because men had begun to embrace the primitive, violent qualities that were associated with the practice of self. While Northern white men may have begun to openly reject lynching as an important practice, the behaviors essential to the practice itself we’re actually growing in popularity and esteem.

“Lynching, prizefighting, and the figure of the natural man reflected and reinforced the growing idea that an innate, uncivilized savagery lay simmering in the hearts of modern men. They suggest that by the 1890s, American men were increasingly attracted to the idea of a natural or primitive masculinity which was very different from civilized, self-restrained Victorian manliness. […] Thus, while some Americans were looking to the racially advanced superiority of ‘the white man’ to uphold long-standing ideologies of upright civilized ‘manliness,’ some Americans were interested in quite a different type or manhood. […] Here was a strength based not on manly self-control but on masculine ‘instinct.’ It was a violent strength—the strength of a “savage” or “carnivore.” This power, unlike that of high-minded ‘manliness,’ was weakened by civilization’s restraining discipline. Just as ‘the white man’ was the embodiment of ‘civilized manliness,’ the ‘natural man’ was the embodiment of ‘primitive masculinity.’”

Unsettled by the notion that their domestic, civilized lifestyles were creating a weakness and complacency hidden beneath the decorum and elevated ideals they strove to uphold, white men began to perceive an appeal in reigniting their primitive traits through an intentional kind of regression. Increasingly, white men were intrigued by the prospect of embracing less refined and genteel values by reconnecting with their primitive ancestors and venturing into hobbies and lifestyles that incorporated a more rugged component.

“Like many of his contemporaries, he never questioned the idea that manhood was and ought to be powerful, but he grew uncomfortable with Victorian ideologies of self-restrained manliness. Moreover, he shared the widespread belief that excessive civilization was threatening young American men with weakness and neurasthentic breakdown. […] By adopting his methods, Hall believed, educators could raise boys to be strong and virile, immune from civilization’s effeminizing tendencies. The key to building powerful virility in American men, as Hall saw it, was to encourage primitive savagery in American boys.”

As a psychologist and academic, the social changes Hall perceived and found discouraging were within his realm of influence as a function of his position. Hall’s theory relied upon the cooperation of teachers in creating academic environments that were not overly restrictive and demanding, but instead made allowances for the foundational childhood experiences Hall believed would ensure a successful development toward a self-actualized man.

“While a man might be civilized as an adult, Hall insisted, as a boy he had been primitive. Boys, he insisted, had access to all the primitive strength lacking to civilized men. By elaborating on this insight, Hall developed an intricate, influential pedagogy based upon the premise that boys could avoid neurasthenic breakdown and become powerful civilized men by taking full advantage of their boyhood access to the primitive.”

The current plague of neurasthenia hindering the ability of adult Anglo-Saxon men to cope with the rigors of existing under the pressure of the demands associated with living as the most advanced members of their civilized society was a difficult one to battle. Hall believed, however, that if he could begin in childhood and prepare boys and young men for civilization, he could equip future generations with the tools to embody civilized manhood without succumbing to the burden of civilized life.

“By encouraging small boys to embrace their primitive passions instead of repressing them, educators could ‘inoculate’ boys with the primitive strength they would need to avoid developing neurasthenia. As adults they could be safely civilized, refined, and cultured—but only if they had fully lived and outgrown a temporary case of savagery as small boys.”

Hall frequently refers to this notion of inoculation or vaccination in his writings. It was essential that teachers and parents provide the kind of structure necessary to allow boys and young men to complete the essential processes in the right order and with the correct amount of time to ensure this inoculation process was adequate to avoid neurasthenia, or worse: the squandering of a young man’s finite energy by his detour into a world of sexual deviance before he could mature enough to reach his civilized potential.

“Recapitulation theory held that an organism’s last developmental stages were the most advanced, because evolution’s most recent beneficial adaptations were simply added on to the end of the growth process. By slowly and fully reliving this plethora of racially inherited stages, mongrel white adolescents could make the highest stages of all their racial ancestors fully their own. At the same time, they could move their racial inheritance to an even higher plane through their own advanced education. […] But only white American mongrels could evolve into the super-man. The lower races simply did not have the white races’ advanced final stages, so their adolescence was far shorter and there was no point prolonging it.”

As their educators, Hall believed it was the responsibility of teachers to recognize that adolescence in particular was an essentially turbulent and tumultuous time for young men. It was a risky and dangerous period during which it was possible to improperly channel their instincts and energies but through which, if done correctly, adolescent boys and young men might reach a level of intellectual and emotional understanding of their racial history, which would prepare them for adulthood and propel them into greater excellence. Comparatively, Hall believes people of color have experienced far less evolution or advancement in total, as they and their ancestors had not progressed very far past the original primitive stages of man. Therefore, he did not feel the efforts and attentions afforded to young white men should be afforded to young men of color.

“Like overpressured children, these primitive adults were able to learn highly civilized skills. Yet because adolescent races had not evolved to a mature evolutionary stage, they lacked the moral and intellectual capacity to use these skills. […] It was thus crucial that civilized men protect the world’s primitive races, just as enlightened educators protected adolescent boys.”

Later in his teaching career, Hall shifted his focus to the development of a paternalistic approach to helping people of color reach their potential. He styled himself as a kind of protector, creating parameters through which he could ensure people of color would not overtax themselves as they progressed toward a higher revolutionary state. He fashioned himself as a defender of people of color, criticizing imperialists who, through their colonization, tended to enslave the native populations they subjugated rather than treating them as a benevolent parent might.

“The dominant soul—the clear strong accurate brain, the perfect service of a healthy body—these do not belong to sex—but to race!”

In this direct quote by Gilman, she identifies race as the most significant factor in determining the true nature and ultimate potentiality of a human being, not their sex traits or gender characteristics. Although white Anglo-Saxon men possessed many traits Gilman found abhorrent, she yet aligned herself and other white women with them and highlighted their similarities even as she criticized them to justify women’s worthiness and entitlement to equal opportunities for intellectual pursuits outside the home.

“Only civilized women could become so dangerously oversexed; thus, only civilized races were imperiled by this sexually caused racial decay. Savage and barbarous women, too, were economically dependent on men; yet savage races avoided racial decadence because they were too poor and primitive for their women to withdraw completely from productive labor. Savage women still had to work outside the home, producing goods to allow their race to survive, and this ‘race activity’ kept their ‘sex activity’ within tolerable bounds.”

Although she was a feminist, Gilman did not see herself as responsible for advocating for the rights of women of color. In her mind, races other than her own had not involved to a level of sophistication that civilization was a feature of their culture and lifestyle; therefore it was not within her purview, nor was it her responsibility, to intervene on their behalf.

“Because of her sexuo-economic dependence, first enforced by the primitive rapist, woman had evolved into a weak, parasitic creature. She was permanently dependent on her powers of sexual attraction and therefore lower than a prostitute, whose debasement was at least temporary. She was cut off from the forces of natural selection and sheltered from the race activity which would normally have made her evolve characteristics such as strength, skill, endurance, and courage.”

Gilman was resentful of the position she saw women occupying as a result of the subjugation to men that had begun in the garden of Eden and hindered women’s ability to advance to their full racial potential. As a result, women had failed to develop into the high minded, elevated creatures they might have become had they been given an egalitarian opportunity to do so. Women had become, essentially, what men have made them. Gilman proposed a society in which women would have the ability to rise beyond their current circumstances and take their rightful place in the revolutionary.

“Yet on a very basic level, Gilman was merely proposing to replace one kind of exclusion with another. White women’s inclusion in civilization, under her scheme, was predicated on the exclusion of nonwhite men and women. According to Gilman, the key to understanding the legitimacy of women’s claim for sexual equality was to understand that Anglo-Saxon women were, first and foremost, members of a superior race, and therefore equally able to participate in an advanced civilization. Civilized women had more in common with civilized men than with primitive women of ‘lower’ races. Therefore, white women must be able to participate in all the ‘racial’ activities so necessary to the millennial quest for human evolutionary advancement.”

Gilman did not believe she was entitled to equal treatment because she was a woman; she believed she was entitled to equal treatment because she was white. She resented and rejected the sex differentiation into which women had been forced as a result of the authority that men had cleaned and wheeled it over them for so many generations. Her rationale was based in her racial identity, not in her gender identity, and she felt no kinship or solidarity with women of color.

“In The Winning of the West, an ambitious, four-volume history of the late eighteenth-century American frontier, Roosevelt depicts the American West as a crucible in which the white American race was forged through masculine racial conflict. By applying Darwinistic principles to the Western tradition, Roosevelt constructed the frontier as a site of origins of the American race, whose manhood and national worth were proven by their ability to stamp out competing, savage races.”

Roosevelt’s identity as an American man, and by extension his understanding of other men as Americans, was rooted in the narrative of the West and anchored in the assurance he felt that white men were destined to have dominion over the American landscape and that their interactions with Indigenous peoples were merely further confirmation through their success that this role was one they were meant to fulfill.

“TR believed that manly racial competition determined which race was superior and deserved to control the earth’s resources. A race which grew decadent, then, was a race which had lost the masculine strength necessary to prevail in this Darwinistic racial struggle. Civilized advancement required much more than mere masculine strength, of course; it also required advanced manliness. Intelligence, altruism, and morality were essential traits, possessed by all civilized races and men. Yet, as important as these refined traits were, they were not enough, by themselves, to safeguard civilization’s advance and prevent a racial decline. […] If American men lost their primal fighting virtues, a more manful race would strip them of their authority, land, and resources. […] This concept of overcivilized decadence led Roosevelt to construct American imperialism as a conservative way to retain the race’s frontier-forged manhood, instead of what it really was—a belligerent grab for a radically new type of nationalistic power.”

Roosevelt believed it was not enough to simply rest upon the achievements of prior generations in their conquering of the American West and subjugation and eradication of Indigenous American people, he was convinced that the spirit of imperialism—the desire to continue to pursue dominance and establish a white, and particularly American presence throughout the world—was a racial imperative. Failure to answer the obligatory racial call to continue to satisfy the urge to conquer would lead, in his mind, to a dangerous complacency that had the potential to render white Americans not only weakened in their moral character and fighting spirit, but weakened in their defenses, an eventual target for those who might be compelled to engage in an upheaval of what Roosevelt considered the natural order.

“Roosevelt believed that ‘Negroes’ were the most primitive of races—‘a perfectly stupid race.’ As he had written in The Winning of The West, he always believed their very presence in the United States was a tragic but irreversible historical error. Black Americans were somewhat less backward than ‘Negroes’ anywhere else in the world because they had extensive contact with civilization in the United States. […] The disparity in racial capacity between black and white threatened the nation with race war, since the ‘fundamental…fact of the conflict between race and race’ at such different evolutionary points inevitably led men into racial violence. TR deplored such racial violence as uncivilized […] Yet, […] Roosevelt assumed racial violence was all but inevitable when men of such dissimilar races lived together. Thus Roosevelt saw the ‘Negro Problem’ as a question of male power. The men of the masterful white American race had an irresistible evolutionary imperative to assert control over any race of inferior men in their midst.”

The paternalistic attitude Roosevelt adopted toward the Indigenous men he encountered on safari is in sharp contrast to the way he perceived individuals of African descent in the United States. Bederman makes no mention of Roosevelt’s personal perspectives on slavery, but it can be presumed from the attitude depicted here that Roosevelt’s primary objection to the institution of slavery had been that it had inevitably resulted in a population of Black Americans with whom Roosevelt assumed white Americans would always be at odds and with whom he felt conflict was inevitable because he believed interactions between people of different races always reached a point of violent conflict to determine dominance.

“By traveling to the ancient past and sharing the bloody pastimes of his primitive ancestors, TR hoped to reexperience their pure, essential masculinity. Where other men of his time fantasized about primal, savage rapists, Roosevelt’s fantasies of primal masculine violence were about, not sex, but fights to the death between superior and inferior species. […] In this primitive epoch ‘the white man’ could measure the power of his civilized manhood against both men and beasts who were as savage and fierce as the ones his own caveman ancestors had encountered.”

Roosevelt rejected some of the more overt and lustful appropriations of man as a sexual creature by nature, instead seeking to act out his innate manly prowess through the killing of animals and, as he had in the American West, immersing himself in a landscape he saw as untamed. There, he could prove his mettle with zeal against animals who are truly wild and reaffirm his presumptions about his own racial superiority by comparing his lifestyle to the lives of the porters and guides, who he perceived as intellectually and technologically inferior and lacking the sophistication that was as much of a source of pride for him as his masculine virility.

“He is the most resourceful, powerful, courageous man imaginable. Combining the ultimate in Anglo-Saxon manliness with the most primal masculinity, Tarzan is violent yet chivalrous; moral yet passionate. […] Tarzan’s perfect masculinity stems from two factors—his white racial supremacy, inherited from his civilized Anglo-Saxon parents, and his savage jungle childhood with the primitive apes.”

As a fictional character, Tarzan is a vehicle through which the contemporary ideals of the perfect man can be expressed through this amalgamation of all the most desired traits of an early 20th century white man. He is a collection of dichotomies all somehow rational under the parameters created by the scenario in the novel.

“Yet although Tarzan stops being a savage rapist, he never becomes entirely civilized. The potential for murderous violence always remains an intrinsic part of his perfect masculinity. […] Unrestrained masculine sexuality might not yet be acceptable in a middle-class representation of perfect primal masculinity, but barely restrained masculine violence was becoming essential. […] The readers recognized that under the terms of the discourse, the perfectly masculine primal man must not only be a flawless physical specimen like Tarzan but sexually irresistible, too. Moreover, they felt that Tarzan’s perfect, ape-reared masculinity was incompatible with refined civilization, and they wanted Tarzan to abandon his identity as urbane Frenchman and return to the jungle.”

Tarzan became an immensely popular novel, and there was an intense response of disapproval on the part of readers when, at the close of the novel, Tarzan does not end up marrying his love interest, Jane. Although he is a fictional character, readers were intolerant of the notion that he should not inevitably be reunited with the woman of his dreams upon the fulfillment of his true potential since Tarzan embodies all of the essential qualities of a man in a configuration demonstrating maximum desirability.