Comments on: 3 Archetypes of American Manliness-Part I: The Genteel Patriarch

By: Workingman_Chronic_Renter

Workingman_Chronic_Renter — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:32:15 +0000

…These “genteels” were born into DEBT. They were not only born into a slave system which was itself considered, not merely a way of the world for 10,000 years up to that point, but also a peculiarity to American Life and “an abomination” no less by Jefferson than by most Americans at the time. Jefferson had a negative net worth from cradle to grave – the equivalent of over a million dollars of debt today. (I know I know – socialists don’t grasp the concept of debt.) John & Abigail lost everything to a Bank that went under. Adams was in his late 60′s. As for Washington, who the heck do you think Martha Washington is anyway? …George Washington had no money of his own.

The Cold War is over. The ideological battle is done. Stop kidding yourselves. Learn history and Reality Economics.

By: Workingman_Chronic_Renter

Workingman_Chronic_Renter — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:16:49 +0000

I find it tiresome when half-baked cultural Marxists like Brett & Kate, who have clearly never read anything by or about Thomas Jefferson, immediately plop him up to take the hit for all the racism, paternalism, land grabbing collectivism and malignant narcissism we find far more prevalent among socialist Central Planners of pseudo-liberalism. Why not plop up Washington? He had three times as many slaves. Ahh, but Statists need Washington for the militarist warfare/welfare model. And besides, Jefferson is an intellectual threat. The Founding Fathers were born into the institution of slavery. They were Abolitionists and they consciously designed the model of our Constitutional Republic to abolish both Slavery and Serfdom – you morons.

By: Native Son

Native Son — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 17:47:05 +0000

I just finished reading the book. Although the description of the archetypes seems accurate, towards the end, the author draws a conclusion that all the archetypes represent failed models of American manhood. I’m not sure what his opinion of contemporary American manliness is, but he seems to equate manliness with nothing more than attempts by white working and middle class men to oppress and exclude women, men of other ethnic backgrounds and anyone of the “wrong” religious or sexual orientation from the “entitlements” of white, preferably Anglo Saxon, Christian heterosexual men.
I found his developed theme equating American manliness with 19th century nativists, Jacksonian Democrats, “effete” Easterners, Klansmen, and members of various “secret societies” and service clubs to be facile.

By: Hondo

Hondo — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:54:44 +0000

CoffeeZombie,

Georgia was unique in that it didn’t employ traditional black slavery but it did use a version of slavery where debtors served out their sentences doing slave’s work. The wealthy of Georgia weren’t exactly tilling their own soil either.

By: Brett McKay

Brett McKay — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:59:19 +0000

@Brucifer-

Again, you, as others have done, are confusing archetypes for a description of real historical figures and facts. An archetype is an ideal, a symbol in the cultural imagination and conscious. It’s is not a description of how most men or every man lived during a time period, but a description of a popular symbol that existed during that time period. Yes there were quite obviously farmers who owned land in America and did not use slaves. But we’re talking about an archetype of manliness, what one of the ideals of manliness was during early American history. And this archetype, this symbol was of a man who ruled kindly over a large plot of land that was tended by servants and slaves, which allowed him both the independence and status of land owning and the time to cultivate his mind and manners and take part in politics. The reality is that the vast majority of men never attained this kind of life; it existed more as an ideal and an archetype.

I obviously did not make this clear enough in the post; I will begin the next installment with a little primer on archetypes to try to improve things.

By: Brucifer

Brucifer — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:27:18 +0000

Well Bret, I don’t know here…. your thing about slavery is what is tripping things up. There were plenty of Genteel Patriarch types in the northern states and in Canada, where slavery was not a component. In Britain, they would call these chaps “Country Squires” and such. The Genteel Patriarch was not enabled by the use of slavery, per se. It was in fact, a vestige of medieval feudal practices and even of earlier warlord/chiefdom.

By: MKR

MKR — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:03:23 +0000

Well, if you look at this from a global perspective the fact remains that most Americans do rely on cheap or slave labor to support our inflated lifestyles. The crime now is that instead of using our leisure time – the time in which we are not working to grow our own food and make the things we need to survive – we are not pursuing education, seeking to better ourselves, working to bring about positive change. Instead we are wasting our lives on frivolity.

We have been given a great opportunity just by being born in this country and I personally believe we owe it not only to our country but to the world to make ourselves men who, while avoiding the negative aspects of the genteel patriarch, do embody the positive – men who understand the value of education and the arts, who, like our founders and those genteel patriarchs of the Enlightenment saw value in the human spirit, in every human spirit, and sought to bring some form of equality – however imperfect the earliest manifestations of that equality were – to their societies. This website is a good start and I thank the McKays for all their work.

By: Jordan M. Poss

Jordan M. Poss — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:09:37 +0000

Kudos to CoffeeZombie for pointing out the unique place of Georgia in colonial history. James Oglethorpe was a humanitarian par excellence, and would certainly make a good topic on this site.

By: Jordan M. Poss

Jordan M. Poss — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:07:46 +0000

@Brett — I was thinking more of the Deep South, where antebellum patriarchs generally carved fortunes out of wilderness in a few decades. Barely two generations before the Civil War there was virtually nothing in what is now Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. These men certainly conformed to the patriarchal model without being “first family of Virginia” types, the Washingtons, Lees, and so forth. And it’s generally those Deep South patriarchs that get the worst rap. The pop culture mythos that I’m going after is that of a landed gentry that did nothing to get to its position, but relaxed in the shade sipping tea while hired–or forced–labor did its dirty work. The truth is vastly more complex.

Ditto to Mike C. Part of the problem is our own 200-year-distant perspective on topics which barely registered in their minds at the time.

By: CoffeeZombie

CoffeeZombie — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:06:16 +0000

“If you didn’t own property, you weren’t a man. Right away this excluded the lower classes and of course black men, who in many states couldn’t even legally own land. Worse still, black men were often the property of the Genteel Patriarch, and made his leisurely, cultured lifestyle possible.”

Methinks you are confusing Europe with America. Plenty of men in America owned land who were not “Genteel Patriarchs;” indeed, they were quite squarely “lower class.”

The vast, vast majority of land-owning men in the US never owned a slave or hired servant and, instead, worked the land themselves. In the State of Georgia, this was the ideal upon which it was founded: common, hard-working men carving out their lives in the land (which is why Georgia was the only colony in which slavely was illegal, until 1749, when it was legalized in order to compete commercially with the slave-owning colonies).

However, it is, I think, accurate to say that the Civil War was the last stand of the genteel patriarch. Since then, the government those patriarchs founded has eroded into base faux-democracy.