| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mark E. Kann. A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics. New York: New York University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 237. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.50.

Mark E. Kann notes that American boys arrange themselves into a pecking order. Some demand obedience; some acquiesce in these demands; and some boys are tormented as losers—"nerds," "geeks," "sissies"—whose visible humiliation helps ensure the submission of the others. When these boys grow up, they endorse a similar hierarchy of manliness, and thus does hegemonic masculinity perpetuate itself, usually at the expense of most men and of nearly all women. 1

How did this come to be? 2

Kann finds abundant evidence in the writings and oratory of the founding fathers, who seemed obsessively concerned with defining and enshrining manhood. On the eve of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, like many others, denounced those who counseled peace as unmanly: "You are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, and lover" (p. 41). Benjamin Franklin disdained the persistent bachelor as "half a man" (p. 59). "Every man that really is a man," he added, must be "master of his own family" (p. 7). Alexander Hamilton urged President John Adams to exhibit "manly but calm and sedate firmness" (p. 111). Some of Kann's abundant references are striking, such as the words of a debtor, pleading to President Thomas Jefferson for his release: "This ignominious imprisonment unmans the heart" (p. 74). . . .

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