The Browser - The Manly Ideal, November-December 1996

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The Manly Ideal	Films: Down Off the Farm
Music: Jazz with Ivy League Manners	Chapter & Verse
Off the Shelf	Open Book: Friends of France

Also reviewed: William James Remembered

William James Photograph courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard Unviersity (pfMS AM 1092)

In 1939, with the sound of jackboots reverberating in his head, E.M. Forster proclaimed his belief in an "aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky." In the same essay, he warned his fellow countrymen about Great Men: "They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood, too." Forster had in mind men with "iron will, personal magnetism, dash, flair, sexlessness"--the usual stuff. He cautioned that powerful men leave little space in their regimes for "divine creativeness." Force consumes.

Ernest Hemingway, a decade earlier, had created a more concrete reminder of such consumption in A Farewell to Arms. Against the lingering image of Hemingway's public persona-the big-game hunter, the connoisseur of the ordered, manly life-few still remember the title's irony, or Frederick Henry's sobering reflections as he edges toward desertion on the Italian front: "I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates."

It seems strange now, against the Harvard I know from my recent sojourn there, that the place could once have been a breeding ground for a combative, robust strain of manliness, yet that is what Kim Townsend, professor of English at Amherst College, demonstrates in Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. He suggests, too, that our emergence as "the richest and most powerful nation on earth" was bound up in the breeding that went on at Harvard. We know as well from what Townsend tells us of the period immediately following the Civil War, the period spanning the presidency of Charles William Eliot (1869-1909), that E.M. Forster would have been uncomfortable among the men of Harvard, and that Ernest Hemingway, so susceptible to the rhetoric of manhood, might not have qualified for the Harvard brotherhood: he was not gentleman enough.

That brotherhood made complex demands on its members, no demand more strenuous than the necessity to measure up to the standards of what everyone at Harvard at the time-even those who sought to temper its effects-would have understood as the "patriotism of American manhood." Manliness infested the Cambridge Zeitgeist.

Townsend asks us to see that almost everything of significance that happened at Harvard during Eliot's presidency can be better understood against a pervasive ideal of manliness that recalls Forster's men of iron will and personal magnetism. Townsend depicts the Harvard man as "earnest and courageous, acute and practical"; he had "moral suasionenough to enable him to stay the course." Influenced by this ideal, Eliot was doing no less than giving birth to what he considered the nation's university, while its men of distinction were giving birth to the nation.

It may go without saying that while the men were involved with these multiple births, the women were attending the men's spiritual development, saving them to some degree from their more brutish selves. When the women speak in these pages (and they speak far less than the men), we hear concerns about their men and about the joys of sacrifice. We hear little if anything about their own needs. The men, we learn, were especially wanting both physically and emotionally. Townsend tracks a neurasthenic disorder that seemed to plague the male culture. What was needed, apparently, was an antidote of maleness and a good woman to direct and transform the energy.

William James, who sits at the very center of this study, attributed his recovery from a particularly troublesome bout with nerves, around his thirtieth year, to his appointment as a lecturer at Harvard. The appointment did not cure James of what he would later call the "dead man chained to him," his weaker self, but did put him in the brotherhood of men claiming manliness as their primary virtue. An iron will could assert itself against weakness. And women could help-as could sports-if men would but first develop the constitution that could make them strong enough to win a woman's hand or to hold their ground on the playing field. James did, finally, win a hand, but not without his father's intervention.

From the vantage post of Harvard, the work of the world was apparently less daunting than the business of relationships between the sexes. Townsend reminds us that for James, "women were like music, capable of stirring up feelings a man might not be able to relieve in action." He reminds us, too, that it was not altogether out of the question for men of James's stature to imagine "a man driven mad by masturbation." All of this makes us want to know more about the author of The Principles of Psychology.

Townsend reveals a great deal about James, but these contradictions between the public men of Harvard and their private selves concern him less than the directed work of the public selves. He deals primarily with the effect on Harvard and on the nation of this "rhetoric of manhood" that Eliot introduced in his inaugural address in 1869 when he spoke of an American "aristocracy which excels in manly sports, carries off the honors and the prizes in the learned professions, and bears itself with distinction in all fields of intellectual labor and combat; the aristocracy which in peace stands firmest for the public honor and renown, and in war rides into the murderous thickets." Eliot might just as well have been talking to the faculty at West Point. That he was at Harvard, and that James was under the influence, makes it all the more interesting.

Eliot went on to fashion a university and educate its graduates under the impress of this manly ideal. There followed a reorganization of Harvard founded on what he identified as the "principle of divided and subordinate responsibilities, which rules in government bureaus, manufactories, and all great companies, which makes a modern army a possibility." Along with reorganization, there came over the next 40 years an emphasis on "manly sports," "scholarly manliness" (that held students responsible for electing their own course of study), and the development of exemplary "man to man" relationships between the faculty and the students. While there was certainly diversity on this faculty-Wendell and Copeland in English, Norton in fine arts, Shaler in geology, Sargent in physical education, and James, Münsterberg, Palmer, Santayana, and Royce in philosophy-all these men played their appointed roles under the influence of Eliot's echoing plea for manliness, and under his scrutiny.

Of those faculty members, James may be the most compelling because he contained so many contradictions, because he was the most flexible and absorbing of the lot. And it was he, more than any of the others, who had a discernable, long-lasting effect on his friends, colleagues, and students. While both he and the others were extolling the manly ideal, James was also making time for the "undisciplinables" and the "pass men" at Harvard. More tolerant than most on the faculty, he could step aside from privilege and his affiliation with Harvard's social clubs to welcome those from different backgrounds into conversation and into his home. He was confident enough of his social position and his academic reputation that he felt no need to defend it, and so he reached out, and people responded.

James was also interested in testing his ideas and improving his own life, and he was continually admitting varieties of experience that would cause him to reappraise his own values. He distrusted systems of belief that closed down new avenues of inquiry, but he held fast to certain cherished beliefs of his own, one of which was his commitment to the "military ideals of hardihood and discipline." He believed that our "gilded youths" ought to have to leave their luxurious lives to work in the coal and iron mines or in the foundries or anywhere else where they might get the "childishness knocked out of them." He wanted them to "come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." James opposed war, but he believed in its "moral equivalent." It was, after all, the robustness of his will that had turned his life around at 30.

As informative as they are, Townsend's chapters on James and his teaching, like those tracing Eliot's reforms, are not the most satisfying in his important study. Concerned with building up the manly ideal, they have about them the taint of scholarship-a network of apt quotations that cuts us off from Townsend himself. The scholarly compilations make us yearn for his reflections.

At his best in the final chapters-"On a Certain Blindness" and "Smile When You Carry a Big Stick"-Townsend begins to develop the troubling implications of Eliot's aristocratic ideal: its effect on the lives of women; its insidious racial undercurrents and overtones; and its susceptibility to misuse in the hands of manly impostors.

What happened to W.E.B. Du Bois, Teddy Roosevelt, and Owen Wister exemplifies what can go wrong with a noble ideal. From Townsend's illuminating portrait of Du Bois, we see how an obsession with Anglo-Saxon might, long associated with America's "manifest destiny," can exclude even those granted temporary privilege within the Harvard aristocracy. Du Bois stood up to affront and spoke back publicly; no one else included in this study saw the need and had the manliness to do so. The Roosevelt portrait shows how that same obsession with Anglo-Saxon might could come back to haunt Harvard (even as it was haunting the world) when presidential restraint gave way to manliness in the Philippines. Or on a less catastrophic scale, Townsend reveals how Owen Wister romanticized a new breed of American cowboy-the manly Easterner (aristocratic, tough, Harvard-educated) gone West in celebration of himself, narcissistic and unregenerate under his mantle of fame.

Townsend's study of manhood at Harvard closes on the opening of a new era, with Abbott Lawrence Lowell presiding over the outstretched academic empire and calling for a shift in emphasis: social responsibility, rigorous intellectual pursuits, and the well-rounded man. But Townsend reminds us that "Lowell continued to privilege the social aristocracy from which both he and Eliot came." He "kept a close watch over American immigration policy generally, and at Harvard he implemented policies that limited the number of Jewish students and barred Negro students from freshman dorms." Talk of manhood died down. Harvard's conception of it, as Townsend suggests, "was of severely limited use to men when they addressed social problems on a national scale; it was proving to be of little psychological use to them as well."

As we witness the passing of the baton from one aristocrat to another, we are left wishing for a closing context that would put today's Harvard in perspective. But that is the problem with good scholarly studies, narrowly focused as most of them are; they leave us wanting. This one leaves me with a desire to know what happens when the manly impulse gets softened and diverted into social programs, social welfare, and the building of governmental empires-activities enlivened and informed by the breeding that is going on, inadvertently or deliberately, at the nation's premier university. Why is it that these days at Harvard, young undergraduates on the scent of Washington some years before their time are known as "gov jocks," and what can we make of a great university that fosters tolerance and seeks cultural and ethnic diversity among its undergraduates but still clings to its aristocratic roots?

I would like to know just a bit more about how Harvard is organizing its goodness: what Harvard stands for, what it cares most about. No doubt it is a place where Forster's sensitive, considerate, and plucky would be more at home than the ironed-willed men of Eliot's day. But that change seems short of enough for an institution that the nation still looks to for leadership and its best ideas.

A different view of William James, not formulated under an obligation to situate him against the manly ideal, may be found in William James Remembered, superbly edited and introduced by Linda Simon, director of the Writing Center of Harvard's Expository Writing Program. The 25 memoirs by faculty colleagues, family members, students, and other friends bring James to life so that we can see many of his "social selves." Simon's perfectly crafted notes at the beginning of each memoir illuminate the memoirist and reveal as well her own deft scholarly touch. Reading these appreciations sharpens our image of the man Townsend puts at the center of the Harvard circle.

Pat C. Hoy II, who runs the expository writing program at New York University, taught writing at Harvard from 1989 to 1993. His essay "Soldiers and Scholars" appeared in the May-June issue of this magazine.

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