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c h a p t e r o n e Rugged Individualism In examining masculinity, we need to consider at least two types of discourses, figures and texts. Ultragendered, outwardly violent hypermasculinity is a core component of this study. And in this realm, no subject deserves more attention than Teddy Roosevelt. Author as well as adventurer, the young Roosevelt’s sevenvolume study The Winning of the West (1885–94) and his man-making magazine articles on his own Dakota hunting and ranching experiences put forward a historical vision of the frontier as a source of rough and rugged American character and manhood. With his “frontier thesis” celebrating Indian subjugation as a necessary and natural step in the advancement of the Anglo-Saxon race, as Richard Slotkin explains, Roosevelt also developed the “regeneration-through-regression” theme—“the passage of a highly civilized man through a revivifying return to the life of an earlier stage” where “the demands of the historical moment foster the emergence and triumph of a distinctive biosocial ‘character’ or ‘type.’”1 There is great reason to focus on Roosevelt. That TR’s dude, hunter, and soldier personae exemplified the brutish turn in American character and masculinity explains his utter ubiquity in this book. But masculinity also works indirectly and obliquely. It can be found in apparently gender-neutral language and structures of knowledge. And, here, more compelling than Roosevelt is Frederick Jackson Turner. Due to Turner’s great absorptive and synthetic powers, his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) is a virtual compendium of nineteenth-century literary and social scientific convictions—including romantic primitivism, realist attainment of comprehensive factual detail, and high regard for the evolutionary dynamic between organism and environment. In keeping with long-standing conventions of European imagination, Turner tended to cast the North American continent in feminine terms, assuming man as sole agent and actor and all but dissolving women as historical subjects. Turner’s frontier thesis is deeply ethnocentric. Even as he urged Americans to turn away from Europe in understanding themselves and their institutions , Turner adopted an east-to-west frame of reference, from European civilization to American savagery, a perspective that marginalized Indian subject posi- tions. Racialist, nation-building violence, for Turner, resulted naturally from the westward course of European American expansion. He neither celebrated nor ignored that part of American history. He assumed it. This can be seen in his crucial reading of American character: the core trait of individualism had been modified by ruggedness—a euphemism for exceptional violent capacity. Turner’s work penetrated modern U.S. middle-class consciousness. He popularized the frontier thesis through countless commencement addresses and other public speeches, through numerous articles in middle-brow magazines and journals , and, most effectively, during thirty-five years of college teaching. With research in his University of Wisconsin and Harvard students’ class notes, among other material, I attend to the extension of Turner’s thesis from one generation to the next. In this regard, we should understand Turner less as the originary source of any one idea—the frontier as crucible for American exceptionalism certainly had its antecedents, for instance—and more as a multivalent figure bridging nineteenth - and twentieth-century naturalist thought, romantic literature and social science, culture and biology, and academic scholarship and popular understandings of the past. With de-evolutionary masculinity resting on a radically historicist sensibility, Turner contributed a distinctly American dimension to the conviction that man’s natural state is one of solitude, mobility, and autonomy. Far more than Roosevelt, Turner engaged the gendered ideology of American individualism. The idea that the West gave rise to solitary, atomistic existence permeates the whole thesis but is most clearly stated in the essay’s last, climactic section. “To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics,” Turner wrote: That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness, that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients, that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom, these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.2 Turner begged the question of what form individualism would take in postfrontier mass society. One answer would be an urban quest for individuality through mobility of consciousness and differentiation of personality—a...

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