Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform

In a 1907 lecture to Harvard undergraduates, Theodore Roosevelt warned against becoming "too fastidious, too sensitive to take part in the rough hurly-burly of the actual work of the world." Roosevelt asserted that colleges should never "turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men," and cautioned that "the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community."

A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red...