Scholars of European imperialism have closely examined how concerns about manliness have shaped imperialist discourses. In Fighting for American Manhood, Kristin Hoganson investigates a parallel theme in United States imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century, contending that concerns over gender roles—a topic usually marginalized in the study of United States foreign relations—were part of a broad cultural framework that “provoked” the militant jingoism of the 1890s.
Hoganson argues that anxieties about threats to American manhood led imperialists to look to war as a means of producing a new generation of martial heroes. In advocating an assertive policy in Cuba, jingoists drew on narratives of chivalric rescue in which they were cast as manly defenders of the nation’s honor who would rescue a feminized Cuba. They sought to build manly character, she suggests, not only to elevate America’s racial and national standing in the world but also to reinforce men’s positions at home against the challenges of the suffrage movement and the New Woman. Their desire to confirm the manly deeds that were widely celebrated during the “splendid little war” continued, in turn, to justify the task of “civilizing” the Philippines. Hoganson shows that imperialist justifications for retaining the Philippines as a colony often intermingled gendered and racial arguments, as Filipino people were depicted as darker-skinned and, therefore, as unmanly, childlike, and lacking in “proper” gender divisions.
The equation of manliness with imperialism, however, did not go uncontested. Hoganson points out that, especially during and after the Philippine-American war, anti-imperialists were able elevate their own claims to manliness. As reports of the “uncivilized” nature of warfare in the Philippines swept the country, anti-imperialists argued that manly men could not thrive in the tropics, where they risked reverting to savagery. Arguments on behalf of the manly virtue of restraint became a persuasive theme, as anti-imperialists stressed that the nation should return to honor the republican faiths of its founding “fathers” rather than the aspirations of a rash and misguided group of imperialists. Gendered arguments, she shows, reformulated manliness to help the anti-imperialists cut short America’s imperial career and turn the country decisively toward an informal, economic empire.
Within the context of this broad thesis, which is based on research in some private papers and many contemporary, published articles, Hoganson offers particularly fascinating discussions of the debate over “McKinley’s backbone”; of contesting metaphors of “national manhood”; of the interrelationships between assumptions about race and gender; of the starkly conflicting claims that portrayed imperialism as regeneration versus imperialism as degeneration. She adroitly explores the ways in which advocates of imperial wars, by elevating the idea of a common fraternity among men, sublimated class, sectional, and ethnic differences.
However, the book exhibits certain weaknesses. Its argument is repetitious and sometimes lacks in subtlety. In so often collectively describing “imperialists” and “antiimperialists,” it creates aggregate categories that are more discursively complicated than this investigation allows. Hoganson, for example, suggests that representations of the era counterpoised a Teddy Roosevelt-style assertion of masculinized “martial spirit” against a feminized advocacy of international arbitration. Yet she does not mention (or resolve) the ways in which Roosevelt’s image combined both brandishing a “big stick” and the arbitration for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Similarly, by describing “imperialists” as being opposed to more independent roles for women, she ignores (as Amy Kaplan has shown) the many representations in which the New Woman was advanced as complementary to, not threatening to, a certain romanticized view of chivalric masculinity. In these, as in other examples, the policymakers and opinion leaders who are the objects of her study can emerge as too one-dimensional and her categories as too overdetermined. In addition, gender itself is presented sometimes as “motivation” (implying an instrumentalist, causal relationship between culture and policy) and sometimes as metaphor (implying a more complex, dialogic relationship between culture and policy). Although Hoganson invokes the work of Joan Scott, she has perhaps insufficiently considered Scott’s admonition about the need to interrogate categories and theorize “experience.”
Some rough edges in style and theoretical clarity aside, however, this book is invaluable for scholars interested in war as a gendered enterprise, in turn-of-the-century gender ideologies, or in the onset and aftermath of the War of 1898. In highlighting how men on all sides vied to assert qualities they identified as manly and to assign these qualities to the state, Hoganson raises important questions about the ways in which visions of personal identity and international politics intertwined in public debates over foreign policy.
