Chiara Baravalle, Primary Source Analysis

Albert Beveridge

THE YOUNG MAN AND THE WORLD (1905)

Excerpts from Chapter IV “THE NEW HOME”

It is assumed that a young man can ‘carve out his career’ if his attention is not distracted and his powers are not diminished by a wife and children whom he must feed, clothe, and consider. 153

Just what is it that you expect to do with these self-centered and single years during which you intend so to help the race? 154

And how can you better benefit mankind than by founding a home among your fellow men, a pure, normal, sweet, and beautiful home? 154

It has been the races of marrying men that have made the heroic epochs in human history. 156

I am assuming that you are man enough to be a man—not a mere machine of selfishness on the one hand, or anemic imitation of masculinity on the other hand. I am assuming that you think—and, what is more important, feel—that Nature knows what she is about; that ‘God is not mocked’; and that therefore you propose to live in harmony with universal law. 157

Yes, and it would be better for the country if out literary men would describe the healthful life of the Nation’s plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort of thing… our public men and our writers, too, ought to ‘get down to earth.’ 158

It is a good deal more important that the institution of the American home shall not decay, than that the Panama Canal be built or our foreign trade increase. 159

Begin at the beginning and live your lives together, win your successes together, share your hardships together, and let your fortune, good or ill, be of your joint making. 160

And one reason why his credit was established with the money-wise old financier was the ideal home life which he and his wife were leading. 162

After all, what is the purpose and end of all your labor? If it is not that very home, I do not know what it is. 163

‘Apartments’ cannot by any magic converted into a home. 164

Live in you home; do not merely eat and sleep there. 164

And be sure that you let each day have its play-hour… ‘Every young many who has a home commits a crime if he does not each day bring one hour of joy into his household.’ 165

The absence of children is either unfortunate or immoral. 165

There is in children a certain immortality for you. 166

But what a coward a man is who releases in his home all the pent-up irritability and disappointment of the day. 167

It is said that Charles James Fox, the most resourceful debater the British Parliament has ever seen, was so fond of his home and his wife that he would actually absent himself from Parliament for the sheer pleasure of her presence and conversation… She proved to be his shrewdest counselor. 171

I don’t like the tone of the common comment of the American medical profession about the neurotic condition of our American women… for that nation is doomed whose women have ceased to be vital, good-tempered, and home-loving. May not the too heavy early education of young girls have something to do with this later desperation of their nerves? 172-3

Not to counsel with you wife on business matters that affect your mutual fortune is sheer stupidity. Also, it is morally wrong. From the very nature of her she is more interested than you in strengthening the walls of your new home, in making your joint experiment in the living of life a beautiful success. Her words are the counsel of instinct, and therefore of Nature. 174

The care of home, the upbringing of children, the strengthening of a husband’s character here and there, the detection of those thousand little vices of manner and speech and though which develop in every man—in short, the living of a natural woman’s life—is the only method of real helpfulness of a woman to a man. 175

We Americans are a home-making a home-loving people; and as a people we adore the American wife and mother—the maker and keeper of the American home. So you attend to your politics  or your business and let your wife attend to hers. 176

… the propaganda that woman is the equal of man, and that it is all right for her to take on man’s work in business and the professions, is due not so much to an abnormal development in her character as it is to a decadence in our manhood. 177

This Republic is not made up of individuals; it is made up of families. 177

Nobody denies that men and women should have equality of privilege and equality of rights; but equality of duties and similarity of work is absurd. 179

Creator should say… To these men I will give the task of labor in the fields, of warfare with wild beasts. It shall be your duty to subdue wildernesses, and to construct and defend a dwelling-place for this other one whom I am going to make a woman. 179

It shall be for her to create and preserve human happiness. 180

You cannot think of the old home without thinking of your mother; and you cannot think of your mother without thinking of the Bible. 183

ANALYSIS

A senator from Indiana, historian and leading figure during the Progressive Era, Albert Beveridge devoted much of his later career to advising young men about how to cultivate domestic habits. In The Young Man and the World, Albert Beveridge considered the implications of masculine domesticity for ‘manliness.’ In Chapter IV, entitled “The New Home,” Beveridge underscored the centrality of the home for the young man’s success. Beveridge derides the notion that young men should “carve out” their careers before marrying.

On the one hand, the family is central to the young man, just as the American home is central to the American nation. For Beveridge, the family is a mutual endeavor at the heart of a healthy American man and nation. The conflation of individual and nation suggests the extent to which middle-class men carried the torch for the teenaged American nation, or, more concretely, the values of the middle-class became the values of the nation. On the other hand, the young man should not expect to achieve success and sustain hardship without his wife: “begin at the beginning,” recommends Beveridge, “and live your lives together.” In fact, a wife is a source of pleasure and counsel for a man, and the home and man and wife build together is, ultimately, the source of the young man’s success, for instance, in securing credit or respect.

To be sure, Beveridge’s manual delineates separate “duties’ for man and wife, but the crux of his argument lies in the centrality of the home in the lives of both man and wife. Although he cites God’s intentional differentiation between man and woman, Beveridge asserts his belief in their equality of rights. Indeed, Beveridge’s understanding of the family as ‘natural’ was steeped in his expectation of young men’s Christian piety, but also in a pseudo-Atheist promise of immorality conferred by children.

Beveridge’s manual reflects two facets of the Progressive Era middle-class. First, when Beveridge encouraged men to dedicate an hour a day to joy and play he seemed to be responding to the rise of commercial leisure. Echoing T. S. Arthur’s advice from 1856, Beveridge also warns men against releasing their work-related irritability and disappointment into the home. Second, it is also noteworthy that when Beveridge refers to the home is intends a detached house, not an apartment or a hotel. As Margaret Marsh points out, Beveridge’s belief that urban life was a direct threat to family happiness epitomizes the escapist suburban flow that characterized middle-class aspirations at the turn of the twentieth century.