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MASCULINITY AND THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN

New Heroes: Athletes

In his 1921 novel Three Soldiers, John Dos Passos described soldiers wounded in World War I as "discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows." World War I was a war without heroes, and veterans returned to America disillusioned and cynical. They searched at home for new male heroes and affirmations of manhood. Some men gave hero status to athletes, and popular excitement over spectator sports became intense. The 1920s have been called the "Golden Age of Sport," when athletics were "seated on the American throne." Baseball was the national pastime, but football nearly "became a national religion." One found "real men" on the gridiron and the diamond: the Sultan of Swat (Babe Ruth), the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame (Harry Stuhldreher, Don Miller, Jim Crowley, and Elmer Layden), the Galloping Ghost (Red Grange). A journalist for Collier's wrote in 1929, "I've seen moral courage in football as often as physical. I've seen football make men out of condemned material."

Aviator Hero

Another male hero of the 1920s was Charles Lindbergh. Within days of his pioneering solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, he became a symbol of American dreams. Lindbergh "stands out in a grubby world as an inspiration," declared one newspaper. But the elation over Lindbergh was fleeting, ending with the ticker-tape parade. Journalist Joseph Hart lamented, 'We … go back to the contracted routines of our institutional ways because ninety-nine percent of us must be content to be shaped and moulded by the routine ways and forms of the world to the routine tasks of life."

On the Job

For most American men those routine tasks meant their jobs, and in the 1920s men worked at least eight hours a day, six days a week, fifty7 weeks a year. They typically labored in factories or offices along with hundreds of other employees, not on their own farms or in their own businesses. For middle-class men, proportionately fewer were professionals than in the past, and proportionately more were middlemen—salesmen or agents. At their jobs men now needed an accommodating personality, not the go-getting individualism of prior decades, because few men worked autonomously in the 1920s. Factory workers encountered increasingly routine tasks on the shop floor, and as their jobs became specialized and repetitive, workers became bored, tired, and unhappy. They responded by joining together to manipulate employer efficiency strategies for their own benefit. For example, workers at a meatpacking plant undermined a time-motion observer by deliberately using extra motions to wrap bacon when a rate setter was present and then speeding it up after the observer left.

At Home

Men turned to home and family for affirmation of their worldly achievements and reassurance about the moral order; but things at home were different, too. Husbands who looked toward home at the end of their day for "an asylum and a refuge, a featherbed for aching limbs and an opiate for bruised self-esteem" had to adjust to marriage as a partnership in which his wife handed him his crying baby instead of his pipe and slippers. As more wives expected to share domestic responsibilities with their mates and sought reciprocity in marriage, male authority eroded at home as well as work, and if a man insisted on "playing a patriarchal role," he might discover, according to a 1926 claim in the Ladies' Home Journal^ "that modern families won't put up with it any-more." But while shifts in sex roles were felt in the 1920s, they were subtle, and most men and women still held to more deeply imprinted gender patterns. As it would for many decades, "female equality threatened men, and sexual equality confused them."