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Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others
National Review, March 10, 1997 by Jeffrey Hart
A METICULOUS work of scholarship and, indeed, a beautiful book, Manhood at Harvard evokes post - Civil War Harvard in its Golden Age under the formidable President Charles Eliot, cousin of T. S. (Imagine, by the way, being a student and able to sign up for courses by William James, George Santayana, and Josiah Royce.
James's Principles of Psychology had a shorter student version known locally as "the Jimmy.") Mr. Townshend's subject is the postwar ethos of "manliness" -- men as doers, achievers, fighters, and not "mollycoddles," as Teddy Roosevelt put it. For all its nuances, William James's philosophy had a hard practical edge. Football in a particularly lethal phase was a campus religion. (A Harvard coach legendarily told his team before a Yale game that this was the most important thing they would ever do in their lives; a defensible statement, in my opinion.) Crew was even more elite: it hurt, gave no pleasure, and was more Calvinistic. The ethos came out of the war and took on the task of building a nation and a world power. Mr. Townshend rightly stresses the centrality of "Will." James re-invented himself after a serious breakdown, Roosevelt after crippling childhood asthma. I'm surprised that Mr. Townshend doesn't mention Nietzsche here nor all those Englishmen climbing Alps and pyramids. The ethos did have its absurdities: TR's boxing coach in the White House, etc.; strenuousness probably weakened his and James's hearts. For all his descriptive care, Mr. Townshend doesn't much like the ethos. He senses a few traces of it still among us and seeks "ways to diminish its influence [which is] systemic in our culture." Well, I dunno. When I first read this book in galleys, no dustjacket photo, I assumed it had been written by a woman. But, no. To me the 1870s sound like a great time to have gone to Harvard, and I bet James and Roosevelt had better manners than the current faculty at Amherst, where Professor Townshend teaches.
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