About this Book

"On October 19, 1884, the New York Times reported that a "self-invited guest" filled the room with loud applause as he mounted the platform of the Brooklyn Young Republican Club's inaugural meeting. The return of the twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt from Dakota was dramatic enough; after losing his wife and his mother on the same day earlier the same year, the young Assemblyman of New York had refused re-nomination and left his home state to seek solace in hunting in the West, leaving his political career indefinitely suspended. Upon his abrupt return to New York, Roosevelt surprised the audience by declaring his support of James Blaine's presidential nomination despite his undisguised abhorrence of this scandal-tainted candidate. In supporting Blaine, Roosevelt confronted his former allies, Republican reformists known as "mugwumps," who were now backing the Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland against party politics. In his fervent speech denouncing the mugwumps, seemingly out of nowhere, Roosevelt referred to a prominent novelist. The Times reports: Mr. Roosevelt said that his hearers had read to their sorrow the works of Henry James. He bore the same relation to other literary men that a poodle did to other dogs. The poodle had his hair combed and was somewhat ornamental, but never useful. He was invariably ashamed to imitate the British lion. In Mr. Roosevelt's opinion there were many traits in the "Poodle Henry James" that the independents of the Henry James order of intellect had in common. These men formed quite a number of the bolters this year. They were possessed of refinement and culture to see what was wrong, but possessed none of the robuster virtues that would enable them to come out and do the right. As Philip Horne documents, Roosevelt had seen Henry James only once before the speech. Their first meeting was in Boston in January 1883, of which Roosevelt wrote: "The Bostonians were awfully kind to us . . . I was introduced to James, the novelist, and had a most pleasant time." Their encounter seemed agreeable enough. As Horne wonders, therefore, "[j]ust why James strayed into Roosevelt's line of fire" in his speech against mugwumps requires some parsing. To solve the mystery, it might be helpful to begin by understanding how the sex/gender system was mapped onto the Progressive political scape, particularly in relation to the reformist mugwumps, a group of politicians who opposed corruption and the spoils system even if it meant working across party lines. As Kevin Murphy argues, opponents of the mugwumps denounced their disavowal of party loyalty as "a threat not only to the binary structure of the two-party system but also to essentialist distinctions between men and women." Attacking the implausibility of the mugwumps' reform agenda, party politicians derided the elite, college-bred Northeastern reformers for their lack of virility, calling them "political hermaphrodites," "political epicenes," and "third sex reformer[s]." In one striking instance in March 1886, Republican Senator John J. Ingalls stated:"--