Fighting for American Manhood

Kristin L. Hoganson. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Hoganson's book is "based on the premise that the conduct of foreign policy does not occur in a vacuum, that political decision makers are shaped by their surrounding culture." (2) Rather than a broad focus on the rather amorphous concept of "culture" at large, she focuses on political culture--specifically "on the gender convictions--meaning the ideas about the appropriate male and female roles--that did so much to define the counters of late-nineteenth-century U.S. political culture." (4)

To be clear, Hoganson is not interested in merely applying a gender-history filter to existing historiography of the war. She instead wants to go back to the sources and start over, making gender the interpretive framework. She does so partly because arguments and debate over gender and masculinity were present throughout American society and cultural institutions at the time; and partly because existing explanations for the outbreak of the war are so unsatisfying. It is not enough to say that yellow journalists were able to exploit the Maine tragedy to drum up jingoistic war fever--we must understand why those journalists wanted to do so, and why that message resonated so much.

Young, white men in the United States of America in the late 1890's knew a few things about their society. It was beginning to offer more professional and vocational opportunities to women, even as it increasingly moved middle-class white men away from physical labor and economic autonomy towards office work in large, impersonal organizations. They also knew that their elders had fought and "proved" themselves in the Civil War, while they were denied the "opportunity" to do likewise. And they were also dimly aware that the United States was becoming more intertwined into a growing global economy and policy makers and business leaders were interested in finding overseas markets, yet there was some sense that the U.S. was not yet regarded as a true peer by the Great Powers of Europe.

Hoganson deftly finds connecting threads of gender anxiety in what many perceived as a crisis of American masculinity running through all these issues, and more. The ways in which McKinley, for example, was somewhat forced into a more belligerent foreign policy at least in part to demonstrate his "manliness" is one of many examples of how gender shaped the terms by which foreign policy decisions were framed and made.

This outburst of hyper-masculinity would not last, however. In the end, qualms about the Philippine insurrection would dampen any enthusiasm for further overtly imperialist adventures, and America's aggressive drive to acquire an overseas empire came to a premature halt. Hoganson's thesis not only helps explain the outbreak of the war against Spain, it also helps explain why in retrospect it would look like an anomaly which historians and students still puzzle over.