Review of Fighting for American Manhood by Kirstin L. Hoganson

In her landmark essay “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” Joan Wallach Scott encourages historians to explore gender as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes” and as a “primary way of signifying relationships of power.”  Clearly, Kirstin L. Hoganson heeded the call from Scott when she produced Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.  In this work, Hoganson explores the ways in which ideas of masculinity and manhood framed the political debates over America’s role in Cuba and the Philippines in the waning days of the nineteenth century.  With gendered language, American politicians and civic leaders on both sides of the debates over war and imperialism invoked a variety of ideas of manly citizenship, including themes of generational differences, emasculation, the veneration of the founding fathers, and even varying definitions of just what manliness entailed. 

The “crisis of masculinity” arising during the last few decades of the nineteenth century took on many forms, not all of them overtly political.  In Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show, Louis S. Warren locates the widespread “cultural preoccupations with the decay of white manliness” in audience responses to Cody’s Wild West Show.  For Warren, the emphasis on the virtue of manliness was expressed best by a female witness to the Wild West Show who expressed her feelings by exclaiming that these were “the kind of men that excite my admiration….”

From the earliest days of the debate over possible American intervention in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, the rhetoric in U.S. political circles took on a gendered tone.  Just what did it mean to be a man?  Various definitions of manhood arose during the debates over American participation in Cuba and then in the Philippines.  Men justifying intervention in Cuba appealed to the notion of chivalry as an example of manliness.  As Hoganson notes, the “chivalric paradigm,” the idea of American men intervening on behalf of a victimized, feminized Cuba, appealed to the jingoes (those seeking American intervention in Cuba) both because of its association with the manly art of rescuing the damsel in distress and also because it “dovetailed with their goal of revitalizing the manly ideal of politics” in the U.S. 

But the chivalric paradigm served as only one of the ways in which manhood was defined during the debates over international and military matters in the 1890s.  Both those in favor of American intervention in Spanish colonial matters and those opposed focused a part of their gendered language on generationally different definitions of manhood and masculinity.  Those seeking to expand U.S. imperialist claims to the Philippines, for example, presented themselves as “youthful, bold, and energetic,” a stark contrast to those who did not favor imperialism, for whom those “youthful” imperialists developed a portrait of as “’a lot of over-ripe and decayed citizens,’” akin to Rip Van Winkle.

The opponents of the “youthful” imperialists in the debate over U.S. expansionist dreams, the men that Hoganson terms “antis” (for anti-imperialist), fought back in gendered terms of their own.  Countering the claims of youth and energy, the antis “stressed moral maturity and self-control more than the physical power and belligerence” that characterized their political opponents.  In emphasizing experience, maturity, and a well-developed sense of self-restraint, these antis harkened back to the principles of manliness that had also played a part in the debates over the coming of the Civil War, when the restrained, moral resolve of Northern men contrasted sharply with the aggressive, free-wheeling combativeness of Southern fire-eaters.

Relating back in time to the veterans of the Civil War and even to the Revolutionary generation also played a large part in the development of gendered language in the debate over U.S. foreign policy.  As Hoganson explains, the “popular notion that the Civil War had developed the mettle of the men who fought it” contributed to the theory that American manhood could only truly be found in martial efforts.  Proponents of U.S. intervention in Cuba used their admiration for the Civil War generation to contrast the malaise and “over civilization” of their contemporaries and to demonstrate how military service, the most essential aspect of the “strenuous life,” cultivated the characteristics of the red-blooded American male.  

In the debate over U.S. colonizing efforts in the Philippines, both proponents and opponents used the memory of the Revolutionary generation to frame their argument.  Antis “invoked Washington and other Revolutionary leaders to show that imperial policies were inconsistent with the nation’s democratic traditions.” As Hoganson points out, pro-expansion political leaders countered this by their belief that “it was time to break away from the fathers and assert independence.” However, the pro-expansion men tried to have it both ways.  While decrying the emphasis placed on preceding generations as an ideal that might cause the United States to “’fall into China’s fatal error of paralysis through ancestor worship,’” pro-expansion men like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt professed gendered admiration for their political forebears, with Roosevelt noting that neither Washington or Lincoln had “’the least touch of flabbiness, or unhealthy softness….’”  

 

Another way in which the language of gender found political expression was through the processing of emasculation.  As Hoganson notes with several examples, debates often included references to opponents as, in some way, feminized.  During the debate over U.S. intervention in Cuba, President William McKinley, a Civil War veteran, was often portrayed as weak and effeminate for his hesitancy to take military action after the sinking of the Maine.  Even his Civil War record was attacked when it was noted that his serving consisted of “’making coffee while the fighting went on,’” clearly a womanly duty.  In the consideration of colonial expansion in the Philippines, imperialists accused their opponents of being “’doting mothers’” while they themselves were the young men seeking to “break from women’s confining grasp.”   Antis were “’old women with trousers on,’” “’squaw men,’” and ‘”nagging wife’” in this debate; imperialists were full of “’manliness, zeal, and courage.’”

This use of feminization to denigrate a political opponent speaks to a larger overall process of identifying manliness in contrast to womanliness.  The men of the last decade of the nineteenth century had much to worry about—urbanization, industrialization, immigration—and one more important fear: the rise of the New Woman.  The assertion by women that they could claim a voice in the political arena contributed to anxieties over manhood.  Hoganson illustrates these anxieties through several different political debates, including the ratification of the arbitration treaty, the intervention in Cuba, and expansionist goals in the Philippines.  In addition to seeking a voice in politics, activist women “were critiquing the assumptions about male honor and valor that had played such a prominent role” in the post-bellum political world.  As men struggled with the changing face of modern life, the critiques of activist women only added fuel to the fire, and men accepted the perceived challenge to their masculinity by pushing forward with “manly” endeavors such as military intervention and a “splendid little war.”

To conduct her research, Kristin Hoganson consulted an impressive array of sources, supporting her contentions with what E. Anthony Rotundo of Phillips Academy calls a “dense, complex web of evidence from numerous interlocking texts.”  While Emily S. Roseberg of Macalester College criticizes Hoganson’s work with the notation that her “argument is repetitious,” this criticism may  be grounded in Hoganson’s multitude of sources. To provide fewer examples than she does would lead readers to possibly rebuke Hoganson for expounding a theory that purports a widespread use of gendered language with insufficient evidence.  By stating her position in many ways, some with such subtle nuance that a less-than-careful reader may find them repetitious, Hoganson ensures that her audience will appreciate both the significance and the commonplaceness of gendered language in the political debates of the late 1890s.

Kristin L. Hoganson’s Fighting for American Manhood does just what Joan Scott called for.  It uses gender as a category of historical analysis, in this case “to illuminate a traditional security issue, war.” Hoganson demonstrates conclusively that concerns over gender roles in the late nineteenth century “significantly affected militant U.S. policies.”  Hoganson does not pretend that gender was the only factor at work in American military decisions with regard to Cuba and the Philippines, but she does highlight the significance of gender which, when combined with the other historically specific factors present at the time, sent the U.S. military first into Cuba and then into the Philippines.

Hoganson, Kristin L.  Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Rosenberg, Emily S.  Review of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars by Kristin L. Hoganson.  The Hispanic American Historical Review 79, No. 4 (November 1999), pp. 793-794.

Rotundo, E. Anthony.  Review of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars by Kristin L. Hoganson.  The Journal of American History 86, No. 4 (March 2000), pp. 1817-1818.

Scott, Joan W.  “Gender: A useful Category of Historical Analysis” in The American Historical Review 91, No. 5 (Dec., 1986), pp. 1053-1075.

Warren, Louis S.  Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show.  New York: Vintage Books, 2005.