Self-Made Man

The concept of the “self-made man”—the idea that a man can achieve success and fulfill the expectations of manhood through his own merit and hard work—has been central to American constructions of masculinity since the early nineteenth century. First articulated by the politician Henry Clay in 1832, the idea flourished during the Jacksonian era and became a nostalgic hope in the industrial and postindustrial eras.

Puritans grounded their concepts of manhood in family, church, and community, distrusting the man severed from these institutions as sinful and potentially barbaric. Most young men in colonial America achieved their social and economic stations with the help of established patriarchs who bestowed their sons and apprentices with land or training in a skilled trade. In his calling, a man was to serve God and community, not strive to advance his station. In keeping with this vision, all members of colonial society imagined themselves as part of a hierarchically arranged chain of being in which authority rested in patriarchs, kings, and God and relationships of patronage bound superiors and inferiors. Men were not understood to stand or succeed on their own merits in colonial society.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, the American Revolution and the market revolution eroded older notions of economic hierarchy and generated new emphases on self-governance and self-mastery. American men, particularly those of the emergent middle class, increasingly tied masculinity to their own ability to succeed in a competitive economic arena. This development was apparent in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. He presented in his Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1789, a model of success achieved through ingenuity and hard work. Franklin came to be seen as a heroic embodiment of self-made manhood during the Jacksonian period, when—despite an uneven distribution of wealth and the confinement of economic opportunity largely to white men—most men were self-employed and believed that they were in charge of their own destinies. Regarding self-control as necessary to success, advice writers instructed young men they were only truly “manly” when they had learned to check all indulgent impulses.

The ideal of self-made manhood was apparent not only in economic matters, but also in religion, as Americans increasingly rejected teachings about predestination in favor of the view that each man possessed free will and could achieve his own salvation. Similarly, the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson urged self-reliance (dependence on the self alone for reaching truth) as the basis of American manhood. The idea of self-made manhood assumed its most exaggerated form in literary images of western frontiersman, self-sufficient men who lived wholly outside the constraints of women and cities.

During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idea of self-made manhood became increasingly problematic as the growth of industries and corporations left men increasingly in positions of economic dependency. No longer did self-employed master artisans ply their trade; instead, blue-collar [Page 413]workers labored in large factories with little hope of achieving economic independence. Middle-class men answered to bosses and became embedded in complex bureaucracies. Nonwhite men had yet another layer of limits put on their aspirations when architects of scientific racism sought to strengthen the tie between self-made manhood and whiteness by insisting that only white men could achieve upward mobility. Most men continued to define masculinity in relation to earnings, but they increasingly turned to other markers of male identity as well. Suburban lawns—where men still might shape their surroundings through home improvement and yardwork—became a compensatory frontier for office-bound men. For most American men, self-made manhood became an elusive, and therefore heroic, achievement—a symbol of a bygone era rather than a living reality.

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