Political Manhood

Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform

Kevin Murphy

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780231503501
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

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.

1

Of Mugwumps and Mollycoddles

Patronage and the Political Discourse of the “Third Sex”

On April 14, 1907 the following passage appeared in the Minneapolis Journal editorial under the headline ALAS THE MOLLYCODDLE!:

The mollycoddle controversy continues to rage.

The latest definition is “a man over 30 who goes to a skating rink.” The best, probably, is, “A combination of a woman and a man with the weaknesses of each and the strong points of neither.” The male mollycoddle is the womanish man. His complement is the mannish woman.

. . . We do not know what a mollycoddle is, but we all know him when we see him. Indeed, we are uncomfortably conscious of his presence before he comes in sight. He carries his atmosphere with him . . . He is elusive. . . . We do not know why we should rather kick him than shake hands with him, but we would.

The editorial went on to define the elusive and undesirable figure of the mollycoddle in the context of American political life:

The President [Theodore Roosevelt] made it plain . . . that his mollycoddle is a man who won’t take hard knocks, who flinches from the crowd. . . . Curiously enough, it was only a few years ago that such opprobrious epithets were invented to describe men like George William Curtis and others like them, who put on their neckties before they went to vote. This raises the question, when is a mollycoddle a mollycoddle?

. . . In the last New York campaign the New York Journal thought it had found a perfect specimen. It was Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century magazine. Mr. Gilder didn’t drink; didn’t swear. He enjoyed feeble health, and he wrote pale, ineffectual verses. If he was not a mollycoddle, what was he? . . . Then a veteran came forward with testimony that Richard Watson Gilder was a perfectly dashing soldier. . . . Another paid tribute to Mr. Gilder’s work in cleaning up the slums in New York. . . . On both the military and the civil side Mr. Gilder belied his looks. He was not a mollycoddle, even if he did wear polkadot hose.

The editorial concluded by advising caution in the use of the “mollycoddle” epithet: “It appears to be unsafe to classify any man as a mollycoddle unless he has proved it, and then he classifies himself.”¹

The “mollycoddle controversy” invoked in the pages of the Journal referred specifically to a well-publicized and vituperative exchange between the publisher and politician William Randolph Hearst and Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century magazine and a prominent New York City reformer. On October 18, 1906 Gilder published a letter in the New York Times scathingly critical of Hearst’s decision to enter the race for the New York governorship as the Democratic candidate after flirting with running as an independent candidate. Like other elite reformers of his generation, Gilder characterized Hearst’s candidacy as a travesty: an “absolutely grotesque” attempt at self-glorification, financed by his own personal fortune and waged in the pages of the disreputable newspapers he published. He painted Hearst as a dangerous demagogue who merely posed as a friend to the working man.²

While Gilder and his reform colleagues certainly feared that Hearst’s appeals to the working class would threaten their own class interests, they represented their concerns as issues of character. Even as their own manhood was challenged, the reformers remained committed to a distinctive ideal of manhood that espoused hard work and self-sacrifice. They found Hearst utterly lacking in either. “Are we prepared to cast to the winds all our hitherto admiration for unselfish public devotion, for . . . modesty in our public men?” Gilder asked. He continued: “Are we to give our suffrage and our praise and the tribute of imitation to the sheer force of money, to blatant self-seeking, to brutal and unscrupulous success?”³

Shortly thereafter, the New York Times published a similar critique in an editorial called “A Question of Manliness,” which contrasted Gilder’s “modesty and reserve” with Hearst’s “attitude of unbridled hatred and abuse.”⁴ Gilder and the Times referred only obliquely to another element of Hearst’s character that they deemed offensive to ideals of respectable manhood—namely, his scandalous penchant for consorting with show girls and participating in the demimonde of commercialized vice. As David Nasaw has shown, Hearst had been criticized earlier that year on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as a “moral degenerate who insolently casts his eyes upon the noblest of women whose virtue places them beyond the contamination of lust.”⁵ For some reformers, Hearst’s sexual proclivities only deepened their feeling that he was a dangerous political figure. Thomas Mott Osborne, for example, called him “a new and sinister figure in our political history,” and likened him to “those degenerate Roman millionaires who bought their offices with bread and circuses.”⁶

Hearst retaliated in an editorial published in his newspaper, the New York Journal, which purported to respond to a reader’s suggestion that Hearst physically attack Gilder. It read: “Reader, surely you have NEVER SEEN MR. GILDER. Who should as think of ‘ripping up’ the fluffy, feebly-scratching incubator chick as to attack Mr. Gilder . . . in face, in form, in voice, and in movement he is a pathetic imitation of a young girl.” The editorial continued this denigration of his physical appearance, referring to the spectacle of “Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, with his gray hair falling around his little mouse eyes, and his thin body shivering in his black cape, gliding into a room among men.”⁷ Although exceptionally harsh, this kind of gendered and sexual invective was not unique to Hearst.⁸

Although Hearst clearly branded Gilder as insufficiently manly, the 1907 Minneapolis Journal editorial interpreted such characteristics as representing a third gender category: a “mollycoddle” was “a combination of a woman and a man with the weaknesses of each and the strong points of neither.” As invoked in the editorial, the mollycoddle resembled the figure of the “invert”—or member of a “third sex”—introduced into medical discourse in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The mollycoddle also resembled the “fairy” or “pansy,” a familiar urban figure commonly understood to belong to a “third sex.”⁹ In both the medical and the urban social contexts, this figure connoted not only the inversion of gender roles but also same-sex desire. In so doing, it functioned as a precursor to the modern figure of the “homosexual.”¹⁰

However, the terms in which this editorialist sought to define the mollycoddle pertained directly to American political life. The two men subject to the label, Richard Watson Gilder and George William Curtis, were leaders of a group of prominent, elite political reformers in the latter half of the nineteenth century—commonly referred to as the “mugwumps”—who criticized American party politics as thoroughly corrupted by the spoils system of patronage distribution and advocated a disavowal of strict party loyalty.¹¹ Beginning in the late 1870s, politicians and journalists opposed to this political stance asserted that mugwumps posed a threat not only to the binary structure of the two-party system but also to essentialist distinctions between men and women. They utilized the concept of a third sex to make sense of threats to the political system, while medical “experts” invoked the notion to explain the seemingly chaotic and disruptive pattern of sexual relations that they believed characterized modern life.¹²

The “mollycoddle controversy” sheds significant light on the gendered meanings of politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The struggle to shape the American political system during a period of intense social upheaval was intricately connected to contests over the meaning of American manhood. Party politicians employed gendered language and sexual invective to denigrate the elite reformer as incapable of participating in the rough and manly world of politics. Indeed, such participation stood as a crucial marker of manhood; reformers who criticized the system appeared to be attacking the very foundations of that communally sanctioned ideal. By linking their critique of reformers to the stigmatization of the sexual invert, party stalwarts discovered a powerful rhetorical weapon with which to oppose reform. Recognizing the potency of this invective, a younger generation of reformers at the turn of the twentieth century constructed their political identities in opposition to the image of the much-maligned mugwump.

The Minneapolis Journal’s assertion that such epithets as “mollycoddle” were “invented to describe” mugwump reformers suggests that state politics served as a crucial site for the creation of modern sexual typologies. Much attention has been paid to the emergence of the concept of a third sex in medical discourse, in working-class street life, and in literature, but not in the arena of electoral politics.¹³ Writing in 1962, Richard Hofstadter offered some intriguing insights into the interplay of political reform and sexual invective in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Referring to the occasional denunciation of mugwump reformers as “political hermaphrodites,” Hofstadter suggested that such a characterization marked “an easy transition from their [mugwumps’] uncertain location as to political party to an uncertain location as to sex.” Hofstadter also linked such rhetoric to the political culture of the Cold War, claiming that “more recent attacks by Senator McCarthy and others upon the Eastern and English-oriented prep-school personnel of the State Department, associated with charges of homosexuality, are not an altogether novel element in the history of American invective.”¹⁴

Historians have expanded on Hofstadter’s insights, demonstrating that anxieties about the growing political presence of women and concerns about a broader “feminization” of American culture motivated antimugwump sentiment. In a 1980 essay, “The Mugwump Reputation, 1870 to Present,” Geoffrey Blodgett compared historians’ negative assessments of the mugwumps to the “brutal invective they sustained from their contemporaries.” Like Hofstadter, Blodgett argued that the anti-intellectualism that predominated in American life assigned to “the preservation of culture a somewhat ladylike function.” He also asserted that “the exaggerated differentiation and rigid role definitions” inherent in the Victorian attachment to a doctrine of separate spheres “seem to have left males with strong, ambivalent attitudes toward the cultural meaning of sex difference, causing them to equate manliness with both potency and animal aggression while the female symbolized not only virtue but fragile passivity.” Mugwumps, who attempted to mix “virtue and virility in public life,” found themselves on hazardous gendered terrain, especially in relation to party politics, which “remained of course a wholly male enterprise”:

Regularity was a credential of manliness and rootedness, and party deviates paid a predictable price, especially if the public environment enforced their isolation and rootlessness in other ways. The man who proposed to tame, cleanse, or elevate public life by means of his own special code of purity violated role stereotypes as brashly as the suffragist who asked for woman’s place in politics. Both ran the risk of acquiring a queer, desexed public reputation.¹⁵

Following Hofstadter again, Blodgett argues that the mugwumps’ refusal to commit to a party, notably their famous “bolt” from the Republican Party to support the presidential bid of Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, precipitated their abuse at the hands of party stalwarts.¹⁶

More recently, scholar Harlen Makemson, who studied the visual representation of mugwumps in the satirical press, has shown that gendered constructions of the mugwumps referenced a much-discussed male type of the period, “the ‘dude,’ who was most often upper-class, English in manner, obsessed with eccentric sartorial style, and somewhat ambiguous in his sexuality.” The “dude” carried meaning in a discourse of American nationalism that figured American men as unadorned and plain-spoken in opposition to European men, often depicted as decadent, frivolous, and unduly interested in aesthetics. Discussions of the dude often invoked a negative image of Oscar Wilde as an effeminate English aesthete. That some American men looked like Wilde generated worries about what the New York Daily Tribune referred to as the “enfeebled and effeminate state of the youth of America.” Makemson has shown that, although the popular depiction of the mugwump overlapped with that of the dude, the latter term never took hold with regard to the reformers.¹⁷ While certain dude qualities applied—especially elitism, effeminacy, and a European orientation—mugwumps, who embedded their calls for reform in a rhetoric of moral righteousness, belied the association of the dude with the decadent and disreputable qualities of the “dandy” or “swell.”¹⁸

The connections that Hofstadter and others have made between antimugwump rhetoric, cultural elitism, and party “irregularity” are persuasive. The most ridiculed mugwumps were patrician, highly educated white men with literary associations. Refined and cultured editors such as Gilder and George William Curtis of Harper’s Weekly, who was also singled out in the mollycoddle editorial, became favorite targets, in large part because the sentimental literature they published in their magazines was perceived to wield a feminizing influence on American culture.¹⁹ The mugwumps also attacked the ideal of strict party loyalty. Curtis, for example, asserted that “the constant, watchful, deadly enemy of republican government is the party spirit.”²⁰

The question remains whether independence from party implied gender indeterminacy, as Hofstadtder suggested. This contention becomes more convincing when one considers that members of the Populist Party and the Prohibition Party were sometimes labeled “she-men” in response to their challenges to the two-party system in the 1890s.²¹ Moreover, party politicians and the party press tended to heap gendered abuse on independent reformers during or after important elections, including the election of 1880, when “Young Scratchers” in New York, led by R. R. Bowker, crossed off the names on the ballot of Republican politicians they deemed corrupt, and the “bolt” to Cleveland in 1884.²² During that same year, editorialists and politicians used the pejorative term “political hermaphrodites” to describe the bolting mugwumps. This became common in press co...