Kevin P. Murphy.  Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and
the Politics of Progressive Era Reform.  New York  Columbia
University Press, 2010.  320 pp.  $26.50 (paper), ISBN
978-0-231-12997-8.

Reviewed by Thomas A. Foster
Published on H-Histsex (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Timothy W. Jones Reviews Editor H-histsex
[mailto:twjones@glam.ac.uk]

Of Mollycoddles and Mugwumps: Gender, Sexuality, and Politics in the
Progressive Era

This clearly written and cleanly argued gem of a gendered political
history examines the "historical connections between categories of
gender and sexuality and American political culture" (p. 2).
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century masculinity has been previously
studied, most notably by Gail Bederman, but as Kevin P. Murphy
argues, his book exposes the "political and class contexts" that
birthed the ideal of "strenuous manhood" (p. 3). _Political Manhood_
shows how as Teddy Roosevelt and others gained political power by
wrapping themselves in the politically savvy mantle of masculinity,
they were also successful in marginalizing political opponents by
characterizing them as "weak and effeminate." Murphy ties the
connections he makes between gender and politics to the history of
sexuality by arguing that such a denigration of political manhood was
possible partly because of the "powerful correlation of weakness and
effeminacy with homosexuality at the turn of the century" (p. 3).
Murphy finds that rhetoric used in political campaigns explicitly
used terms emerging in the medical literature of the time period
including "third sex" and "political hermaphrodite."

To accomplish all this, Murphy examines political discourses and pays
special attention to the "careers and writings" of reformers in late
nineteenth-century New York City (p. 171). "Mugwumps" and "goo goos"
were the negative nicknames that a younger generation used to brand
the older generation of elite liberal reformers. The younger
generation positioned itself as more in keeping with working-class
values, culture, and political interests, and forged a cross-class
bond that drew on and reinforced the images of the masculine
working-class man and the effete elite. The Tammany Hall patronage
system was the location for much of this political jockeying. Murphy
shows how the new generation of reformers idealized and appropriated
working-class manhood and successfully competed with the older
generation for the "votes and allegiances" of immigrant men newly
establishing themselves in the social order of New York City.

In the early twentieth century, this generation of reformers, which
included Roosevelt, made full use of the rhetoric of effeminate male
sexual degeneracy to shore up its political power and, at the same
time, helped to create the cultural image of the homosexual and yoked
it to weakness. But not all of his investigation is about the
denigration of homosexuality. In settlement house politics, for
example, Murphy locates an eroticism of same-sex bonds for men and
women that "stood in contrast to emerging medical models of
homosexual pathology and heterosexual normativity" (p. 105).

Other scholars of the history of homosexuality have focused on the
emerging medical literature of the period or in social histories of
working-class life, but Murphy locates the "third sex" in the
political world of New York City. In doing so, he uncovers one of the
ways that medical discussions of homosexuality were disseminated and
popularized. The "mollycoddle" did not drink or swear and according
to Roosevelt was a "man who won't take hard knocks, who flinches from
the crowd" (p. 12). As Murphy astutely discerns, the mollycoddle
looked a lot like the "invert" or "third sex" of medical literature
and the "fairy" or "pansy" of the queer urban social world, as
described by George Chauncey in _Gay New York _(1994). Murphy is
careful to point out that the connections here are "tenuous" yet
nonetheless compelling (p. 27).

Although his focus is on New York City, Murphy points out the broader
applicability of the study by reminding readers that many of the
reformers, including settlement house activists, became nationally
prominent voices and enjoyed a certain cultural status throughout the
United States. More concretely, they also participated in national
and international networks of like-minded liberal reformers via
conventions and correspondence. Roosevelt and his ilk were, of
course, full of contradictions as they employed the rhetoric of
strenuous manhood. He coined a term, "mollycoddle," that only an
elite effete man would know. And they sought to use the same
"militaristic rhetoric" and methods of securing power that Tammany
Hall had used while still characterizing it as politically corrupt.
Additionally, they denigrated homosexuality as "sexual inversion"
while engaging in the homoerotics of an "ideal eroticized cross-class
social brotherhood" (p. 8).

Of course, this is more than a history of the construction of
homosexuality and masculinity for those categories were built
explicitly on freshly developed notions of normative sexuality and
understanding of proper roles for women at the turn of the century.
At one point, Murphy notes the work of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg who
showed how New Women were demeaned as "'mannish lesbians,' who
threatened the nation's social, sexual, and political order" (p. 33).
And he explains that the negative portrayal of sentimentality in
masculine political discourse came about because it was "a quality
typically identified as feminine" (p. 8). Accusing a political
opponent of being sentimental or idealistic was the equivalent of
labeling them weak, womanly, and sexually inverted. If Murphy finds
that the men were criticized for being like women, what does this
tell us about how concerns about the feminization of
turn-of-the-twentieth-century America and misogyny in political life?
Such discourses lurked in the background and broke through at moments
during women's political activism around reform work, settlement
houses, and of course, suffrage. Murphy can hardly be faulted for not
taking on a broader cultural history but scholars of those subfields
should be sure to engage _Political Manhood_ for all it contains.

In an epilogue, Murphy does a wonderful job discussing how, once
unleashed, the political move to combine sex and gender with popular
democratic rule endured through the twentieth century "and beyond,"
and he gestures to a historical arc that draws the transition from
the "familiar figure of the effete and effeminate reformer" to the
"elusive and sinister threat to the American political system" that
he would become (p. 184). He notes the ways that the "mollycoddle"
and the "red blood" operate today--although known by other names--and
hints that at the core, although a study of gender and sexuality in
the political realm, this is also study of the rise of antigay
culture in "American public life" (p. 200).

Citation: Thomas A. Foster. Review of Murphy, Kevin P., _Political
Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive
Era Reform_. H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews. August, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32794

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
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