| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865–1940. By David Leverenz. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii, 254 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-4167-6.)

David Leverenz's Paternalism Incorporated joins a growing body of literary studies of manhood that Leverenz helped to establish with his 1989 book on antebellum literature, Manhood and the American Renaissance. In Paternalism Incorporated, Leverenz turns to manhood from 1865 to 1940 and examines paternalist themes within multiple texts, from the daddy's girl narratives in the novels of Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser to the uplifting fictions of Horatio Alger, Andrew Carnegie, and Booker T. Washington and the daddy's boy construct especially evident in Alger. At the core of Leverenz's book is the nexus between paternalist impulses and corporate capitalism. As the ballast shifted from landed property to fluid credit, from small-scale entrepreneurship to large-scale corporations, from production to consumption, manhood became detached from its older patriarchal groundings. The point is not new, but Leverenz stresses something else: the democratizing force of corporate capitalism, whose invisible hand opened the workplace to women and non-Anglo males and unleashed diffuse desires for self-fulfillment and advancement. Against such disruptive currents, paternalist narratives imagined white men as the protectors and benefactors of their inferiors, endorsing upward mobility while containing threats from below.

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