Boyhood, Manhood, Football

01 Sunday Feb 2015

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Boyhood, Football, manhood, Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

“Of course, what we have a right to expect of the American boy is that he shall turn out to be a good American man…

No boy can afford to neglect his work, and with a boy, work as a rule means study. Of course, there are occasionally brilliant successes in life where the man has been worthless as a student when a boy. To take these exceptions as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to advocate blindness because some blind men have won undying honor by triumphing over their physical infirmity and accomplishing great results in the world. I am no advocate of senseless and excessive cramming in studies, but a boy should work, and should work hard, at his lessons—in the first place, for the sake of what he will learn, and in the next place, for the sake of the effect upon his own character of resolutely settling down to learn it. Shiftlessness, slackness, indifference in studying, are almost certain to mean inability to get on in other walks of life. Of course, as a boy grows older it is a good thing if he can shape his studies in the direction toward which he has a natural bent, but whether he can do this or not, he must put his whole heart into them. I do not believe in mischief-doing in school hours or in the kind of animal spirits that results in making bad scholars, and I believe that those boys who take part in rough, hard play outside of school will not find any need for horseplay in school. While they study they should study just as hard as they play football in a match game. It is wise to obey the homely old adage, ‘Work while you work; play while you play.’

The boy can best become a good man by being a good boy—not a goody-goody boy, but just a plain good boy. I do not mean that he must love only the negative virtues; I mean he must love the positive virtues also. ‘Good,’ in the largest sense, should include whatever is fine, straightforward, clean, brave, and manly. The best boys I know—the best men I know—are good at their studies or their business, fearless and stalwart, hated and feared by all that is wicked and depraved, incapable of submitting to wrongdoing, and equally incapable of being aught but tender to the weak and helpless. A healthy-minded boy should feel hearty contempt for the coward, and even more hearty indignation for the boy who bullies girls or small boys or tortures animals. […]

In short, in life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is:

Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!”

__________

From Teddy Roosevelt’s essay “The American Boy,” found in his collection The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses.

Saul Bellow on What It Means to Be a Man in Modern Society

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

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Community, Eugene Goodheart, Fiction, Herzog, identity, Industry, Life, manhood, masculinity, modern life, modernism, Mortality, National Book Award, National Medal of Arts, Nobel Prize, novel, Pulitzer Prize, Saul Bellow, science, society, Urban Life, Writing, Zachary Leader

“For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass.

Transformed by science. Under organized power.

Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions against foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you enjoyed delicious old-fashioned Values? You — you yourself are a child of this mass and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

__________

An excerpt from the novel Herzog by Saul Bellow. (This paragraph also makes up the entire prologue of Ian McEwan’s Solar.)

In the Spring of 2005, while on his deathbed in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bellow — husband to five wives and father to three sons; perhaps the most decorated American author of all time; winner of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Medal of Arts, and thrice the National Book Award — was drifting in and out of consciousness when he mustered the energy to turn to his friend Eugene Goodheart, present at his bedside, and enunciate an usual question. “Was I a man, or was I a jerk?”

Here we know the connotations of “jerk,” a classic street-talking Bellow locution that stamps any foolish, flaky, or infuriating, usually male, character. But what he meant by “man” is perhaps more obscure and certainly more important. To Bellow (and to Goodheart), man meant mensch: an admirable, responsible human being who, regardless of wealth or prestige, would elicit trust and favorable words from those who know him.

Goodheart responded with a prompt but solemn nod. “You were a man.”

Thus, as his biographer Zachary Leader summarizes in the video below, “What mattered at the end… was the life he led as a man.”

More Saul:

My favorite passage from Bellow, on the promise of mankind
Bellow describes everyday life in Israel (from To Jerusalem and Back)
Bellow explains why art matters (from his Nobel Prize speech)

Theodore Roosevelt on Setting the Right Example as a Man

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

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Alfred Henry Lewis, Brother, Brother's Keeper, Christian, Christianity, Courage, ethics, Father, fatherhood, Holy Name Society, Honor, Loyalty, manhood, morality, Oyster Bay, Son, speech, Strength, Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Trust, virtue

“Every man here knows the temptations that beset all of us in this world. At times any man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect genuine and sincere effort toward being decent and cleanly in thought, in word, and in deed… I expect you to be strong. I would not respect you if you were not. I do not want to see Christianity professed only by weaklings; I want to see it a moving spirit among men of strength. I do not expect you to lose one particle of your strength or courage by being decent.

There is always a tendency among very young men and among boys who are not quite young men as yet to think that to be wicked is rather smart; to think it shows that they are men. Oh, how often you see some young fellow who boasts that he is going to ‘see life,’ meaning by that that he is going to see that part of life which it is a thousandfold better should remain unseen!

I ask that every man here constitute himself his brother’s keeper by setting an example to that younger brother which will prevent him from getting such a false estimate of life. Example is the most potent of all things. If any one of you in the presence of younger boys, and especially the younger people of our own family, misbehave yourself, if you use coarse and blasphemous language before them, you can be sure that these younger people will follow your example and not your precept…

I have told you that I wanted you not only to be decent, but to be strong. These boys will not admire virtue of a merely anaemic type. They believe in courage, in manliness. They admire those who have the quality of being brave, the quality of facing life as life should be faced, the quality that must stand at the root of good citizenship in peace or in war… I want to see each man able to hold his own in the rough life outside, and also, when he is at home, a good man, unselfish in dealing with wife, or mother, or children. Remember that the preaching does not count if it is not backed up by practice. There is no good in your preaching to your boys to be brave if you run away. There is no good in your preaching to them to tell the truth if you do not… We have a right to expect that in your own homes and among your own associates you will prove by your deeds that yours is not a lip-loyalty merely; that you show in actual practice the faith that is in you.”

__________

Teddy, speaking to the Holy Name Society at Oyster Bay, New York, on August 16th, 1903.

In his original compilation of Teddy’s speeches, Alfred Henry Lewis includes with this text the following worthwhile footnote:

President Roosevelt belongs to the Dutch Reformed Church. His freedom from religious prejudice, however, never fails to stick out. He would no more dream of quarreling with a man because he was a Methodist or a Catholic than he would of quarreling with a man in the car ahead or the car behind on a railway train because of the car he saw fit to travel in. There are many churches just as there are many cars in a train; but he is as tolerant of one as of the other, since they are all going to the same place.

There’s also this old joke, which expresses, in so many words, something of Roosevelt’s point about the gap between preaching and practicing:

A man is driving his five year old to a friend’s house when another car races in front and cuts them off, nearly causing an accident. “Douchebag!” the father yells. A moment later he realizes the indiscretion, pulls over, and turns to face his son. “Your father just said a bad word,” he says. “I was angry at that driver, but that was no excuse for what I said. It was wrong. But just because I said it, it doesn’t make it right, and I don’t ever want to hear you saying it. Is that clear?” His son looks at him and says: “Too late, douchebag.”

Read on: