The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

228 chapter 18which Hammett defined himself: the tireless urging to feel, to connect, totalk, talk, talk.” 13Talk, talk, talk is an American black imperative, too, against an aristocraticRoman and bourgeois American ideal of taciturnity. In Ralph Ellisonor Zora Neale Hurston the men are very Attic Greeks in their eloquence,“big picture talkers . . . using a side of the world for a canvas.” In Their EyesWere Watching God (1937) Jamie complains about her husband Jody beingthe mayor: “You’se always off talkin.’ ” He replies, “Ah told you in de veryfirst beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, causedat makes uh big woman outa you.” 14 Women form in the book, until theyget their own voices, a Greek chorus to the men’s eloquence.Talk of prohibition and the vote for women—never mind blacks—stuckin the craws of a lot of American men, as had earlier the domestication of thebourgeois male, subordinate to the angel in the house.“For most of the nineteenthcentury,” Tompkins notes,“the two places women could call their ownin the social structure were the church and the home. The Western containsneither....[M]en gravitated in imagination towards a womanless milieu.” 15Think of Teddy Roosevelt, the fragile (and “aristocratic”) child whoadopts the strenuous western life with grim manliness. After his first wifeand his mother died suddenly in the same week, he took his sorrowful exercisesfar away from home and church, a New York Dutchman in Dakotawith other splendid fellows shooting everything that moved. Roosevelt hadbeen in fact a Harvard classmate of Owen Wister—The Virginian, 1902, isdedicated to Roosevelt. H. W. Brands writes that Roosevelt’s “great goodluck was to come of age when America had a particular weakness forromantic heroes.” 16Roosevelt was a prolific writer about his self-created romances, like hisyounger contemporary Winston Churchill. Churchill was of course anactual aristocrat, first cousin of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, nephew ofthe 6th Earl of Airlie, witnessing with dismay in Britain, as TR did in America,the decline of “a small and serious ruling class.” 17 Roosevelt wrote a sixvolumeThe Winning of the West (1889–1896), which with Frederick JacksonTurner’s presidential address to the American Historical Association at theChicago World’s Fair of 1893 helped set the tone of nostalgia for a lost frontierof real men. Roosevelt’s history of the American navy of John Paul Jonesand Oliver Hazard Perry remained a classic for decades. In the second yearof his presidency a fourteen-volume oeuvres complètes appeared—fourteen