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.[1]
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. Some would interpret TR’s manliness as too emphatic to be true, because true manliness has more quiet in its confidence, less stridency in its assertiveness. Yet if all we know is based on social construction, meaning that all we know is contingently based on how society is now—and so manliness is impermanent and will pass away in our gender-neutral society—then it is reasonable to feel anxiety instead of confidence. And it might be reasonable to cover up one’s anxiety with loud bluffing, like TR, because some kind of society is better than nothing.
For all that TR may have absorbed from Charles Darwin and William James in favor of will-power and thus against the reliability and reassurance that nature might provide to human designs, he was certainly, we would say today, an environmentalist. He believed as we do that nature left alone is valuable to humans. Though he believed in will-power, he also believed in a nature that deserves to be preserved despite our will-power. He did not use the neutral word “environment,” an evasion that does not disclose what the environment surrounds or in what measure it nurtures or harms what it surrounds. He liked to speak of “the Strenuous Life” lived outdoors and testing oneself in situations of challenge and risk.
Whereas environmentalists today do their best to exclude human intervention in nature—“nature” for them means what is non-human—and thus to confine human beings to the role of concerned and caring observers, Roosevelt wanted us to live with nature and react to it. He loved birds but he didn’t object to shooting them. We should, within limits, be hunters, for hunting adds “no small value to the national character.” Nature does need to be protected from depletion, and there must be game wardens, “men of courage, resolution and hardihood”—not lecturers full of moral urgency passing out lists of small prohibitions as one meets in the National Parks today. TR’s program of conservation was like William James’s moral equivalent of war, quite contrary to environmentalism today, which desires universal peace, seeks no moral equivalent of war, and on its fringe (did you know that TR invented the phrase “lunatic fringe”?) wants to extend the welfare state from needy humans to all the presumed unfortunates of subhuman nature.
“Conservation” is for the purpose of conserving nature, which is for the purpose of conserving manliness. Manliness wants risk, not comfort and convenience. Roosevelt had his own, brazenly exclusive moralism; he liked being “in cowboy land” because it enabled him to “get into the mind and soul of the average American of the right type.” His democracy satisfies not merely the average American but one of the right type. “Life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.” Who would say now that visiting a National Park is a great adventure? Yellowstone, where TR gave one of his most famous speeches in 1903, is now no more, perhaps less, an adventure than visiting Disneyland with its artificial thrills. Yellowstone, he said, would ensure to future generations “much of the old-time pleasure of the hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter in the wilderness … kept for all who have the love of adventure and the hardihood to take advantage of it.”
To challenge the manliness of average Americans of the right type, nature is not chaotic but scenic. To gaze on it is wondrous or sublime; nature does not coddle you but it is not an abyss you must leap across. TR was tough-minded but not a nihilist because being tough-minded requires that you have the right degree of challenge, enough to give you a charge but well short of inducing despair.
The manly reaction to the great outdoors that Roosevelt expected was not to live the life of a woodsman, but to seek positive responsibility for society. His own trip to the Wild West enabled him to become one of the cowboys and then prompted him to return East with energy refreshed. One can certainly question whether it is more manly to be alone and self-sufficient or to be responsible and political. One might make the case that a scholar like William James, however incapable of boxing and hunting, is more manly by himself than is TR with his need to be admired and elected to office by average people of the right sort. In a notable chapter of his Autobiography entitled “Outdoors and Indoors,” Roosevelt says that love of books and love of outdoors go hand in hand, both being loners’ occupations and neither requiring wealth. He himself loved both, but he seems to regard them as preparation for politics rather than attractive mainly for themselves.
TR is at his most emphatic in urging a man to enter politics. Not for him a bland, mollycoddle word like our “participation.” Finding no positive term strong enough to please him, he repeats negative verbs, his favorites being shirk and shrink, to show his contempt for those who abstain from politics. To be efficient and practical a man must ready himself “to meet men of far lower ideals than his own” and not be content “to associate merely with cultivated, refined men of high ideals and sincere purpose to do right.” Politics is struggle, and “it is sheer unmanliness and cowardice to shrink from the contest.” You see what I mean about shrink; and note how vices are magnified with sheer in front of them. Not for TR the use of weasel words, another phrase he coined or made his own.
Here is where the professors like William James go wrong; they consort with one another, cherish their ideals, and shirk their duty to join the actual battle that is less pleasant than discussion with friends over tea. The tough-minded manly man not only accepts pain but actually does his best to avoid pleasure. Yet isn’t manliness for all its risks and trials pleasant for the manly man? And not only at the end of the day? Roosevelt wants his manly man in politics to accommodate himself to the rough and coarse and the selfish, and this would seem to compromise rather than fulfill his manliness by making it depend on success in his relations with others beneath himself. He might become a team player or an organization man, hardly roles for a manly man. So we must not forget the manly loner and the argument to be made on his behalf. The loner would be contemptuous of bookish professors, but he shares with them a taste for solitude.
Roosevelt, however, would insist on the superiority of manly responsibility to manly aloofness, of which one sign is his attitude towards women. As if speaking closer to today, he declares that “women [must be put] on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with men,” including “the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as a man.” Yet normally, he adds, “the woman must remain the housemother, the homekeeper, and the man must remain the breadwinner.” That is because we must not live in a regime of rights abstracted from the performance of duty with “indulgence in vapid ease.” In effect, women are not equal to men according to TR, but both above and below them. Women receive the bread won for them by men, and delivered to them with gallantry. But they are models of effeminacy, the very thing a man must avoid.
Roosevelt’s remarks on American motherhood tell us something about the preference of the manly man for duty over virtue. Impelled by the self-drama of manliness, which posits risk and challenge at every turn, Roosevelt turns away from the American, constitutional notion of rights to embrace a sterner “sense of duty” that appears more Germanic and Kantian. Even virtue might be too undemanding for him, for the virtuous person finds virtue to be pleasantly harmonious with his inclination, does not worry about his will-power, and does not struggle to be good. Roosevelt does speak of manly virtues, but these are habits of the zestful performance of duty. Duty gives shape to will-power, directing and checking it; and society—not the loner—defines duty.
TR’s manliness appears also in his advocacy of equality of opportunity, a phrase not be found in the founders of liberalism that he and his friend Herbert J. Croly were perhaps the first to use. Today “equality of opportunity” is a conservative slogan opposed to the liberals’ “equality of result.” For TR, equal opportunity is not the passive policy of a neutral government that watches benignly over the rivalry of talented people as they compete to succeed. Nor is it like the mixture of hard work and shrewd manipulation set forth in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography by which an individual can rise to public esteem without challenging society’s prejudices. Neither is it Thomas Jefferson’s “aristocracy of talents,” which assumes that in a free country talent will find the means to propel itself to the top. Instead, equal opportunity shows both concern for virtue and affirmative action by government. It requires that individuals accept a duty to grasp opportunity and to go as far as they can. Lack of interest in success—goofing off on long vacations, relaxing in early retirement, or indulging in refined leisure of any sort—is not an option. And equal opportunity results from the use of government to equalize opportunity by making things harder for the rich (with a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax) and thus easier for the poor. But Roosevelt would not use government to reduce the effort required of the poor. They should be manly too. Manliness is preferable to any life of ease or riskless routine.
TR as president was a great promoter of assertiveness in the exercise of executive power. His notion of the president’s duty was not bound to actions authorized in the actual words of the Constitution. In a notable exchange with his Republican rival William Howard Taft, who held that belief, Roosevelt declared that the president is “the steward of the people, bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin.” The American founders made an executive power strong enough to stand up to popular opinion and to withstand the temptation to seek popularity, but progressives like Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made the president into a “leader”—that is, on occasion a follower—of public opinion. TR, for all his promotion of positive merit (in which he borrows words of the Gospel), is still a steward—and how manly is that? Who is more manly: George Washington, a man of dignity not to be trifled with, or Teddy Roosevelt, steward of the people, who sees humiliating constraint in the Constitution but not in popular favor? Here we detect a soft core to TR’s blustering, outer toughness.
The same might be said of Roosevelt’s imperialism. TR was no “chicken hawk,” no armchair, theoretical imperialist whose main concern is with the ist or ism at the end of the word, and whose only action is egging others on. Quite the contrary! Having got himself named Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President William McKinley in 1897, he was in office when the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up in the harbor of Havana in February 1898. But of course he was not the Secretary of the Navy. So he waited ten days until his boss took the afternoon off for a massage; then, having been routinely designated Acting Secretary, TR sprang into action—summoning experts, sending instructions around the world for the Navy to be ready for war, ordering supplies and ammunition, and requesting authorization from Congress for unlimited recruitment of seamen. In four hours he created momentum toward war that neither his hapless superior nor the President could stem.
After war was declared on April 19, Roosevelt, his alacrity now red-hot zeal, was offered command of a cavalry troop to be formed of frontiersmen, dubbed by him Rough Riders. He declined the command for lack of experience, but took second-in-command as being an office he knew how to work from. In short order Roosevelt formed the troop consisting of cowboys leavened with polo players, having them ready by the end of May. At considerable personal risk, TR led his troops in the famous charge up San Juan Hill and, when he reached the top, shot and killed one of the enemy. After the action he was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, America’s highest decoration for bravery in battle. When he did not receive the medal, he was not too proud to lobby for it, anxious as he was to prevent the War Department from doing an injustice.
In all this Roosevelt grasped his opportunities, or as we would say in his spirit, faced his responsibilities. Responsibilities as we use the word often attach to an office, and they might seem to be particular to it—whether president, assistant secretary, or a nonpolitical office such as parent. But TR’s will-power manliness looks at the office as an excuse for action rather than the source of a duty imposed on the officeholder. It was manly of TR to seek the office, which he did eagerly rather than dutifully. Yet we cannot overlook the fact that taking on a responsibility is—nonetheless for its enthusiasm—accepting a duty. And it is a duty to those less competent and willful than oneself, hence a compromise of one’s own freedom and independence. Again we can ask whether it is more manly to be a loner or a take-charge guy. It takes will-power to withdraw as well as to commit oneself; either way could be condemned or praised as willful. To be sure, TR tries to make it appear that one who shirks or shrinks from his responsibility lacks the will-power of a man, but that is not necessarily so. Even in the form of an opportunity, responsibility is a constraint on one’s will. It is a self-constraint, perhaps, yet still a constraint—and thus not pure will-power. It reflects a desire to meet the legitimate expectations of society.
Pragmatism is an idea with this same ambivalence in its dichotomy between the tough-minded who want to be assertive and the tender-minded who want to fit in. These two contrary temperaments reflect two moods in the use of the word. In American English, pragmatism means getting it done (“let’s be pragmatic”), implying active energy, and taking satisfaction in less (“you have to be pragmatic”), implying a degree of resignation. To be pragmatic is optimism that our problems can be solved, but how can we solve them, given the doubt we are taught by pragmatism in the efficacy of reason? Reason is disdained by pragmatism as being prompted by the tender wish that things will somehow fit together on their own. Progress under pragmatism requires an addition of will-power, of manly assertiveness, to reason so that reason, in the form of science, does not construct a boring, peaceable civilization that appeals only to mollycoddles and fails to meet the ambition of humans who want dignity more than peace. The trouble is that the manliness needed to express confidence depends on doubt of reason, yet reason is the source of our confidence in better things to come. When you add manliness to reason so as to make reason more capable, you also subtract from the capability of reason. The danger to progress is that manliness, instead of endorsing reason, will get the better of reason.
Contrary to what you might first think, pragmatism is a philosophy, not the dismissal of philosophy. And Teddy Roosevelt was more a philosopher than he knew. His advocacy of manliness reflects the difficulties of pragmatism and tells us something about our situation today. We have abandoned—not reason for manliness like the pragmatists, nor manliness for reason like their tender-minded opponents—but both reason and manliness. We want progress without a rational justification and without the manliness needed to supply the lack of a justification.
Harvey Mansfield is a Professor of Government, Harvard University. His essay is excerpted from a book on manliness forthcoming from Yale University Press.
