Political Manhood

In a 1907 lecture to Harvard undergraduates, Theodore Roosevelt warned against becoming "too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the world." Roosevelt asserted that colleges should never "turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men," and cautioned that "the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community." A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red blood," was a man of action. Kevin P. Murphy reveals how the popular ideals of American masculinity coalesced around these two distinct categories. Because of its similarity to the emergent "homosexual" type, the mollycoddle became a powerful rhetorical figure, often used to marginalize and stigmatize certain political actors. Issues of masculinity not only penetrated the realm of the elite, however. Murphy's history follows the redefinition of manhood across a variety of classes, especially in the work of late nineteenth-century reformers, who trumpeted the virility of the laboring classes. By highlighting this cross-class appropriation, Murphy challenges the oppositional model commonly used to characterize the relationship between political "machines" and social and municipal reformers at the turn of the twentieth century. He also revolutionizes our understanding of the gendered and sexual meanings attached to political and ideological positions of the Progressive Era.

ISBN 0231129963   Pages 320 ISBN13 9780231129961 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Columbia University Press   Weight (grammes) 567 Imprint Columbia University Press   Published in New York Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 06 Jun 2008   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2007038665   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY 306.7662097309034   Academic level Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

		Introduction		1
1		Of Mugwumps and Mollycoddles: Patronage and the Political Discourse of the "Third Sex"		11
2		The Tammany Within: Good Government Reform and Political Manhood		38
3		White Army in the White City: Civic Militarism, Urban Space, and the Urban Populace		68
4		Socrates in the Slums: "Social Brotherhood" and Settlement House Reform		104
5		Daddy George and Tom Brown: Sexual Scandal, Political Manhood, and Self-Government Reform		125
6		The Problem of the Impracticables: Sentimentality, Idealism, and Homosexuality		171
		Epilogue: Red Bloods and Mollycoddles in the Twentieth Century and Beyond		201
		Notes		211
		Bibliography		275
		Index		293

In shifting the examination of Progressive reform back from the terrain of voting and office-holding to that of gender and sexuality, Political Manhood makes a major contribution to our understanding of American political history. -- Ruth Crocker Historian 4/1/2011 An engaging historical investigation into the negative application of homophobic rhetoric against those deemed political enemies... A must read. -- Jay Hatheway Journal of American History Vol 96 No 1 To understand fully the political shifts in the early twentieth century, or to flesh our gender and sexual identity in this time, this book will serve all of these purposes, and more. Men & Masculinities Vol. 13 no. 2, Dec. 2010

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