Political manhood : red bloods, mollycoddles, & the politics of progressive era reform / Kevin P. Murphy.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-292) and index.

1. Of Mugwumps and Mollycoddles: Patronage and the Political Discourse of the "Third Sex" -- 2. The Tammany Within: Good Government Reform and Political Manhood -- 3. White Army in the White City: Civic Militarism, Urban Space, and the Urban Populace -- 4. Socrates in the Slums: "Social Brotherhood" and Settlement House Reform -- 5. Daddy George and Tom Brown: Sexual Scandal, Political Manhood, and Self-Government Reform -- 6. The Problem of the Impracticables: Sentimentality, Idealism, and Homosexuality -- Epilogue: Red Bloods and Mollycoddles in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.

"A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red blood," was a man of action. Kevin P. Murphy reveals how the popular ideals of American masculinity coalesced around these two distinct categories. Because of its similarity to the emergent "homosexual" type, the mollycoddle became a powerful rhetorical figure, often used to marginalize and stigmatize certain political actors. Issues of masculinity not only penetrated the realm of the elite, however, Murphy's history follows the redefinition of manhood across a variety of classes, especially in the work of late nineteenth-century reformers, who trumpeted the virility of the laboring classes." "By highlighting this cross-class appropriation, Murphy challenges the oppositional model commonly used to characterize the relationship between political "machines" and social and municipal reformers at the rum of the twentieth century. He also revolutionizes our understanding of the gendered and sexual meanings attached to political and ideological positions of the Progressive Era."--BOOK JACKET.