| Reading Guide for Week 11 | |
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Tuesday Teddy Roosevelt delivered this speech while he was New York Governor, before he was elected Vice President as William McKinley’s running mate, and after doing military service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. As someone who managed to overcome a sickly childhood, Roosevelt here sought to inspire young American men to undertake the pacification of the Philippines, Cuba, and elsewhere in the aftermath of the American defeat of the Spanish empire in 1898. In a manner akin to Rudyard Kipling, Roosevelt insisted that American men must make a serious change in themselves — in order necessarily to enact serious changes in the world. Roosevelt’s brittle masculinity was matched by the fundamental racism that he directed at the newly acquired American colonies. These two websites concern the origins of bodybuilding as commercial enterprise and public entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th century, reflective of the prevailing brittle masculinity in this imperial age. Men could not merely be; they had to become. (Roosevelt’s message, again.) Cultivating empirical intelligence or cultural understanding were not taken for measures of masculinity, predictably at great cost to the world as well as to the United States, yet Eugen Sandow was certainly an astute entrepreneur in promoting something new for Americans to spend their money on: magazines, equipment, clothes. Thursday Hezekiah Butterworth enjoyed a long career as an editor of a youth magazine, and an equally long career as an author of juvenile fiction, at a time when the American middle class was increasingly investing in supposedly edifying materials for its teenagers. Those materials tended to be gender segregated, reserving imperial adventures mainly for teenaged boys. Even as he strove to entertain, Butterworth sought to inculcate what he imagined to be higher purpose and ambition in his readers — again, akin to Teddy Roosevelt. Edward Stratemeyer would be an extraordinary publishing success story in the late 19th and early 20th century, both authoring and syndicating book series for American teenagers, eventually including series that you may recognize: The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew. Early in his literary career, en route to selling more than half a billion (!) books in his lifetime, Stratemeyer’ themes were global and imperial, immediately drawing inspiration from the Spanish-American War. As with Butterworth’s, Stratemeyer’ books circulated images of foreign places and peoples, and instilled and reinforced cultural attitudes disguised as “knowledge” eagerly internalized by American teenagers. |