Imperialism

Challenges to American Masculinity in the Late Nineteenth Century

The notions of masculinity that influenced American imperialism drew on several cultural currents of the late nineteenth century. The first was the closing of the frontier and the end of western expansion. The image of the North American frontier as a cradle of American democracy and as a proving ground for generations of young American men to prove their masculinity (a thesis espoused by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893) sparked concern among white men at the end of the nineteenth century that an important source of American manhood had disappeared. For this new generation and its leaders, the disappearance of the strenuous labor of frontier life, and of the male icons associated with that labor (e.g., the yeoman farmer, the independent artisan, the frontiersman, the hunter, the Indian fighter), left them with few models of manhood and few chances to prove themselves either as provider or protector.

The romantic mystique that enshrouded the collective memory of the Civil War, including the national reverence felt toward both Union and Confederate veterans, further heightened American men's concerns about their masculinity. Veterans' sons and grandsons, feeling inadequate by comparison, sought new ways to conceptualize and demonstrate their manhood. From Darwinism, which suggested that the struggle for survival strengthened species, and social Darwinism, which held that nations gained strength through commercial, political, and military competition, American men concluded that war could be a means of personal, social, and national regeneration. Similarly, the notion of the “strenuous life” among the Victorian middle class promised that men turned soft by the domestication and materialism of an urban-industrial “overcivilization” could reinvigorate American masculinity through hunting, outdoor activity, athletic competition, and male camaraderie. All these concerns caused the intellectual and political leaders of the post–Civil War generation (such as the rising politicians Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge and the naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, whose 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History triggered a wave of navalism in the United States and Europe) to look overseas for new worlds to conquer.

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