Character

The concept of character has been an important one in the lives of American men and in American constructions of masculinity. It can be defined as an internalized commitment to moral or ethical principles, such as honesty, industry, frugality, sobriety, punctuality, and diligence. Men were first encouraged to cultivate character in the eighteenth century, but its prime period of importance was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it became an essential tool for middle-class economic advancement. Character's relative importance to manhood declined during the twentieth century, but it remained an important foundation for a man's success.

In colonial America, men were not concerned explicitly with character. The term did not even appear in relation to masculinity until the eighteenth century, for within the structure of the colonial family and community the prime tenets of what would later be understood as character were so embedded in the definition of masculinity that there was little reason to stress their conscious development.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, as American men became increasingly involved in [Page 86]transatlantic commerce and a burgeoning domestic market economy, traditional family and community structures gradually lost their power to ensure a masculine sense of societal duty. As a result, calls for an internally grounded masculine character became more pronounced. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1789, reveals an early concern with male character. Franklin advised young men to cultivate and display sincerity and moral integrity in order to succeed in an emerging world of capitalist enterprise. In so doing he articulated the foundation for the nineteenth-century concept of character.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, character became fundamental to middle-class constructions of manhood and recipes for success. At first, discussions of character were heavily steeped in religion. For example, Timothy Dwight, a Congregational minister and the president of Yale College from 1795 to 1817, advised Yale's male student body that their salvation, and the salvation of the society that they would someday lead, required acting responsibly and correctly of one's own accord, rather than relying upon externally imposed rules of behavior.

Gradually, concepts of character and character-based manhood became tied to economic ends and class definition. During the late nineteenth century, advice manuals emphasized character as an important asset for lower-class men who sought wealth, favor, white-collar positions, and middle-class status. Male readers learned that possessing the traits associated with character was akin to possessing capital and fortune. By setting those who possessed it apart from greedy capitalists and the immigrant underclass, character became an important way for men to define themselves as members of an emerging middle class. This new ideology of middle-class manhood, in turn, adapted American ideals of manhood to a growing national market economy by defining those ideals in terms of capitalist exchange.

Many nineteenth-century institutions were geared toward building male character. Proponents of character emphasized, first and foremost, the role of the family. Three major developments enhanced the importance of the nineteenth-century middle-class home in the formation of male character. First, the household declined in importance as a site of economic production during the early nineteenth century, enhancing the importance of its socialization functions. Second, whereas young men in colonial America had frequently been “bound out” to neighboring families to learn productive skills, the new market economy of the nineteenth century encouraged young men to stay at home, often into their twenties. Third, the ideology of “separate spheres,” according to which men were responsible for work in the public realm and women for work in the private realm, defined the home as a haven of morality where men were to receive the nurture necessary to achieve success in the commercial marketplace. Advice writers such as Horace Bushnell and Catharine Beecher, who defined women as naturally more virtuous than men, urged upon mothers in particular the importance of instilling morality in their sons (though many writers also advised fathers to help build their sons' character).

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