The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

taciturn courage against the “feminine” 229thick and self-authored volumes, not merely bureaucratic papers written byothers. He was a man of many words. He wrote about ten letters a day,150,000 in total, while Holmes, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court,managed a mere 10,000. A war-mongerer, then a peacemaker, a threatener,then a deal maker, a strike settler, Roosevelt talked, talked, talked from whateverpulpit he could command. 18Literary men of action early in the twentieth century, especially in Americabefore Hemingway masculinized American fiction, were caught uneasilybetween feminine words and masculine action, speaking softly but wantingto be known for carrying a big stick. William Carlos Williams writes in 1913:First he said:It is the woman in usThat makes us write—Let us acknowledge it—Men would be silent.We are not menTherefore we can speakAnd be conscious(of the two sides)Unbent by the sensualAs befits accuracy. 19“Male poets born in the Gilded Age,” writes Guy Rotella about RobertFrost, who masculinized American poetic style, “confronted . . . a businessdominatedsociety [judging] their chosen work not to be work at all, andcertainly not manly work.” 20 About the same time, quoting an imaginedmanifesto for the Writer in Death in Venice (1912), Thomas Mann wrote,“We poets ...may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of ourcraft, yet are we all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still ourdesire—our craving and our shame.” 21In the minds of literary men less subtle than Frost or Mann, such asTeddy Roosevelt, the nonwork work was all supposed to come out gloriouslyin the end, this quasi-manly, poetic yammering leading to undeniablymanly violence, women cheering from the castle window, like a knightly taleof olden times, the splendid little wars of imperialism, the white man’s burden,the charge up San Juan Hill—successful of course, with the boldcolonel on horseback surviving, like a boy’s game. All four of Roosevelt’ssons served in France—as did the sons, I’ve noted, of British ducal families,noblesse oblige—and one got the Croix de Guerre.