The Last Real American White Man Is a Woman

Why is Sarah Palin so popular? Because she is the Last Real American White Man.

She leaves the governorship of Alaska trailing vibrations of Natty Bumpo, Davy Crockett, Paul Bunyan and Teddy Roosevelt. She shoots big critters like Moose, strides into the H20 in hip waders, has little use for effete book learning and thinks cities are for wimps.

The fact that she's a woman adds more than a dollop of irony to the mix. Sarah is a tintype of what we used to be -- or who we believed we were: rugged individuals who charged across the continent, pushing everybody else out of the way, ripping up trees and taming the prairies. We relied only on our own brass and brawn, needing no help except for the neighbor who occasionally wandered by for a barn raising. (Plus, as judge Sotomayor pointed out, the slaves who picked our cotton or the Chinese who built our railroads, but they didn't count.)

The real America, Palin implies, is the one where fewer and fewer of us live, the rural America where the good hearted folks are the only ones who represent our traditional values. The others -- in cities and suburbs -- many of them several shades darker than the Deerslayer --r ead books, chat about foreign policy over white wine, probably hook up with people of the same sex and don't like guns much.

In a nation that just elected its first African-American president, where state after state appears ready to make same-sex marriage legal, where white folks will soon be a minority, Sarah Palin's incarnation of a mythic past is bound to raise a storm of nostalgia; it's nothing new.

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner developed the notion that it was the frontier that forged the unique American character. The first settlers behaved and thought like Europeans, but as these immigrants pushed west, in the clash between their version of civilization and the "savagery "of the wilderness, a new identity emerged. Americans became more individual, more violent, less trusting of authority or government, and suspicious of Europeans, reading, art, and cities. The latter were seen as swamps of depravity and Un-Americanism.

In the mid-19th century, the closing of the frontier was bemoaned as signaling the end of manhood. "By midcentury," writes sociologist Michael Kimmel of SUNY Stonybrook, "masculinity was increasingly threatened by the twin forces of industrialization and the spread of political democracy." With the end of the frontier, critics worried, went the ideal of the free, unfettered American man, able to push West, to cut down trees and plow the prairies, and then just pull up stakes and move again. Urbanization was changing the landscape and altering men's relations to their work.

Before the Civil war, 88 percent of American males were small farmers or independent artisans or small businessmen. But by 1910, less than one-third of all men were self-employed. Americans worried that manhood was vanishing as men became mere cogs in machines, no longer having control over their labor; that city life was making men weak and cities represented "civilization, confinement and female efforts to domesticate the world," as one critic put it. And no less a sage than novelist Henry James muttered in The Bostonians: "The whole generation is womanized. The masculine tone is passing out of the world. It's a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering canting age..."

Intellectual achievement was seen to be unmasculine, prompting Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge to counsel boys to "avoid books, and in fact avoid all artificial learning, for the forefathers put America on the right path by learning completely from natural experience." The Boy Scouts were founded in 1910 in large degree because of a worry about the "feminization" of young boys who spent their days in the female world of school.

It was against this backdrop that Teddy Roosevelt's hyper-masculinity strode onto the world stage. It wasn't secure manhood that the Rough Rider represented, but the anxiety of the time about what men and boys were, or ought to be. World War I represented another crisis for the male image; Americans were shocked when nearly half the recruits were physically or mentally disqualified for military service. "In these and other ways," writes psychologist Joseph Pleck, a leading authority on men's lives, "American men in the nineteenth and early 20th centuries were having trouble meeting male demands."

In the early 20th century, it was the flood of immigrants from eastern Europe with their strange, foreign ways that made Americans uneasy. Today, immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the West Indies are arriving -- and often thriving and intermarrying with Caucasians, meaning that the face of America will soon likely resemble Barack Obama or Tiger Woods more that the pale faces of the past. Most people live in cities today; the frontier is long gone.

Into this whirl of anxiety strides Sarah Palin, with her hip waders and her moose-blasting skills, to many eyes, a modern rough rider. The Last Real American White Man is a woman.

Maybe that's progress.

Caryl Rivers is professor of Journalism at Boston University, and author of "Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women." (University Press of New England.)

Comments

[SparkyAdams]

Lots of misandry here. So men who are masculine are really just covering up their insecurity?

We can't win can we?

[Malkin71]

The last Real American White Man spent $150,000 on clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue.

The last Real American White Man uses her children as political props.

The last Real American White Man quit her civil servant job to make more money.

The last Real American White Man needs only two digits for her IQ score.

The last Real American White Man takes a per diem from Alaska to live in her own house.

The last Real American White Man is nothing more than political stagecraft and most intelligent people will see through it.

[deepfreezevideo]

American white males, and most of their counterparts, had sufficient brains.
Sorry Caryl, but you're confusing packaging with substance.

[dsws]

There's a new frontier out there. Unfortunately for the anti-intellectuals, though, you need rocket scientists to get you there.

[thenextquagmire]

“The trouble with her is that she had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech” - George Bernard Shaw

[Dark Sphere]

She is definitely more of a man than and male Democrat....

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

and less of a woman than a female Republican!

[marco01]

It seems the American male suffers from pretty severe insecurity complexes.

[SparkyAdams]

If a feminista says so..

[DaizeRK14]

Next to some Frank Rich work, this article elegantly illuminates the identity of a Sarah Palin-type and is some of the most insightful sociological observations I've been exposed to. Thank you Professor Rivers for a read that made my day.

[Malkin71]

Frank Rich is the best columnist in America today?

This is just another in a line of women coming onto HuffPo and trying to confuse feminism with Sarah Palin love.

[Skiwee]

We've had 2 weeks of silence from this woman, why try to keep her in the limelight.

She's so starved for media attention that she called Mike (sorry forgot last name) of Politico at his home in the middle of the night last night, to have him ask about her alleged divorce.

[WilliePilgrim]

You may have hit the proverbial nail on its metaphorical head...she's shamin' the men folk for not takin' the bull by the horns and othe such picaresque allusions. Of course if a guy does anything like this he is laffed at since we all know, men and some women, that the myth of the rugged individualist, while having some merit, is not what Palin (and a lot of others equally ill informed) thinks it is. I'll give you, that she has moxie...what cute name. The day we can solve real problems by applying moxie or maverickness, or any of the other mystical attributes she ascribes to herself or which others acribe to her, is the day we'll give her a call. In the mean time please don't discourage her. Contrast is her only attribute, which many, the thickest and least perceptive, fail to see is merely an illusion of significance or meaning. but you'd get more benefit by asking a goldfish for financial advice.
And what mullen says above....TR was a lot more than bluster and hypermasculinity, and all that.

[IntellectuallyHonest]

A snobbish title from an out-of-touch academic that has no idea that white, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and Others actually get along despite people like her and Eric Holder, he of 'We're a nation of cowards when it comes to race.' And no, I didn't vote for McCain in 2008.

[SammyD]

Yes, too bad the white American male is disappearing in America. They worked and gave their lives to build the greatest country on earth. Now the American spirit is sprouting in countries other than America. Americans will see the results in years to come. The majority of American males, regardless of race, can't screw in a light bulb today. Enjoy sipping your wine when no one is available to fix your plumbing or grow the food for your table. Don't call the police as they will be gone as as well. All those horrible traits of a "can do" attitude will no longer be serving you in the future. Enjoy.

[OnTheCusp]

The "white American males" did not "disappear." They ran, silently and guiltily, from their duties: namely the last two generations of children, wives and responsibilities, leaving clueless, stupid game-boys in their wake.
The women left behind were an excellent example of who not to hook up with. The chicks are right to steer clear.

[SparkyAdams]

Are today's generation of self-entitled Sex & the City inspired "fashionistas" impressive to you? Have you ever asked why men of today are basically on a marriage strike? Could it be because they don't want to tie themselves up legally with such women?

[LarBear]

The Article above reads like an Old West "Dime Novel"... What made America great is "Exploiting the Nature WE are a part of...." WE, Plowed, Plundered, Raped and Pillaged our very Nature and called that a Man's MAN....

My beloved Pacific Northwest had the Greatest stand of Old Growth Fir, Hemlock, Pine and Cedar until it was plundered... Now there is but less than 20% standing in Protected State and Federal Parks.... To Me, they are Life, Standing People, Love and godly Nature same as Me... To others they are perceived as board feet and so much $$$ per foot.... And, yes, clear cutting the Forest polluted the Pristine bays, streams and rivers...

Sarah needs to go the way of the DIME NOVEL....
Sarah is an Exploiter of Nature, but thinks she is NOT a part of the godly Nature she exploits.... She exploits bears, wolves and the very salmon so much of Alaska depends upon with her anti- godly Nature, pro logging, drilling, pipelines, and Mining...

[VOTERremorse]

GO PALIN!!!

(Quoted"Plus, as judge Sotomayor pointed out, the slaves who picked our cotton or the Chinese who built our railroads, but they didn't count".)
As a black man, I realize slavery was part of the old days and also realize if our ancestors would not have sold us into slavery we would still be in that god forsaken country throwing spheres at elephants so we could eat instead of drinking 5 dollar coffee at starbucks. I am very grateful for the sacrifice, but it was not the white mans fault, it was our own ancestors who sold us into slavery.

[marco01]

Are you serious? You've conned yourself into believing this nonsense so you can live in this country with a free conscience? Slavery was the fault of both the slave catchers in Africa AND the slavers themselves. There were no good guys there. I just wish you could meet your ancestors and "thank" them for the sacrifices they were forced to make - their lives. They would spit in your face.

Good things sometimes come from wrongs, that doesn't make them right.

[dsws]

Spheres? What, you would be playing ball with elephants?

My understanding of the slave trade is that people were not sold into slavery by their own ancestors. They were captured in raids or battles by their different-ethnicity neighbors, and sold to slave traders. The traders were either Europeans or members of a different ethnic group from their victims. In some cases a local ethnicity would be set up as the local elite by Europeans, mostly by supplying them with weapons.

As for "that god forsaken country", slaves did not come from just one country. The whole continent was underdeveloped by Europeans, and kept that way by Europeans until quite recently. Instead of thanking the slave trade for the fact that you as an American are better off than almost all Africans, it would make more sense to blame the slave trade for the fact that almost all Africans are worse off than most Americans.

[MAUIMONKEY]

Maybe it is progress, and maybe it's just a cheap front put up by Palin to fool people into thinking she is a rugged individualist. Do rugged mountain people shop for $90 sweaters at Neimann Marcus, or wear $400 designer eye-glass frames? Do they leave the mountains and forests behind at the first opportunity to cash in? Do they have wardrobes, and hair dressers, and their own makeup lady? Do they live in New York, or Washington DC, and have reality shows on Lifetime or Oxygen? Palin is making a deal to do all of those things, yet she represents the last real american man? White men are in bigger trouble than I thought.