The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

230 chapter 18The ageing Roosevelt was crushed when his youngest son, beloved, troublesomeQuentin, met his fate somewhere among the clouds. Is this whatwar is like, a courageous son actually dying? In August 1918, still threemonths from Armistice, he wrote, “It is rather awful to know that he paidfor his life, and that my other sons may pay for their lives, to try to put inpractice what I preached.” TR’s luck held, though. His other sons survivedthe war, and he himself died in 1919, before the apparent failure of the peacehad devalued the romantic sacrifice. 22After 1916, after Verdun and the Somme, the highbrows at least hadstarted to doubt the old lie. Middle-brow culture held onto it. As you go upthe stairs to the reading room of Harvard’s Widener Library, you come onthe landing to a gigantic, Rubenesque double mural painted by John SingerSargent a little before his death in 1925. One panel is inscribed, “Theycrossed the sea crusaders keen to help the nations battling in a righteouscause”; the other, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embraceclasped death and victory.” Sweet and proper is it to die for the fatherland.The romance of the Homeric hero spreads in American literature in TR’stime. It has roots of course as far back as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales(1823–1841). Think of Daniel Day Lewis’s luscious performance in the movieof The Last of the Mohicans. It persists to the present in the middle- and lowbrowreading of bourgeois men. Early in Zane Grey’s Riders of the PurpleSage (1912; it has since then never been out of print), Bern Venters rejects thevoluble peacemaking by Jane Withersteen, and demands she return hisguns, after a gunslinger who happens along has saved him from a humiliatingbeating: “Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion—after today.Today this strange coming of [the gunslinger] left me still a man, and nowI’ll die a man! . ..Give me my guns.” Venters disarms the woman by stoppingher talk. Quoting the passage, Tompkins remarks, “In Venters, Americanmen are taking their manhood back from the Christian women whohave been holding them in thrall.” 23 With words.