Roosevelt fused frontier violence with empire to restore American masculinity

Evidence

No one advanced this new American masculinity with more gusto than Theodore Roosevelt. As a young man, Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his “high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing” and derided as a “weakling” and “Punkin-Lily.” But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went west, rechristening himself the “Cowboy of the Dakotas.” It was on the frontier that a new masculinity would be forged, a place where (white) men brought order to savagery, where men served as armed protectors and providers, where violence achieved a greater good. If the Wild West could mold “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt” into a rugged masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally, so the thinking went. But there was a flaw in this plan. Even as Roosevelt was honing his masculinity on the western frontier, the mythical West was fading away. Rugged American manhood would need to be forged elsewhere—on the new frontiers of empire. This shift to a global stage was perfectly encapsulated in Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” a volunteer cavalry who fought in the Spanish-American War—a war that Roosevelt himself helped bring about. In this way, the new American imperialism was framed as a conservative effort to restore American manhood. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 37

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the ADDENDUM on sacrifice and the martial ideal — the framing of violence as ‘achieving a greater good’ recurs in later chapters’ war-embracing evangelicalism.
• DEFINE: Establishes the template ideal of the masculine Christian man as armed protector and violent order-bringer that the book tracks forward to Wayne.