This is 99% Invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
If you're a longtime 99% Invisible listener, Avery Truffleman needs no introduction.
And all you need to hear right now is this.
There is a new season of Articles of Interest.
Get excited.
But for those who aren't familiar, I guarantee if you enjoy 99PI, then Articles of Interest is for you.
It's a spinoff show that Avery created when she worked here, but it's now completely independent.
It is a brilliant and compelling exploration about what we wear.
Pockets, plaid, sunglasses, zippers.
There's a fascinating story behind all of them.
The latest season is called Gear.
It's about the surprising intersection of the military and the outdoor goods industry.
Brands that you wouldn't expect like REI, Patagonia, L.L.
Bean, and Eddie Bauer all have their roots in military surplus and design.
In this new season.
Over seven chapters, Avery explores how these two industries shaped so much of our attitudes about nature and about our nation.
Today, we are presenting the very first chapter of Gear.
And after you listen, go find articles of interest in your podcast app and hit the subscribe button.
You are going to love it.
Now, do not infuriate me and make me repeat myself.
Do you understand me?
Chapter one.
Let me start with the basics.
The most basic basics.
Khakis, button downs, crisp white t-shirts.
These are all clothes that one goes to buy at Buck Mason.
And so if we think about what is a classic closet and what belongs within it, then our job as a brand is to make the best version of those archetypes.
Buck Mason was founded in 2013 and has positioned itself to be a purveyor of classic, cool clothes that are so timeless they almost elude description.
And I was in their Los Angeles headquarters with Kyle Fitzgibbons.
I am chief design and creative officer.
Kyle told me that this brand's whole classic, cool vision was inspired by vintage clothes, which makes sense.
I mean, clothes are considered classic for a reason.
Kyle told me they keep a whole stockpile of vintage clothes in storage, but they brought out just a little section to show me.
Wait, oh, you're really not around.
I was led into a conference room that was dripping with old clothes.
It was in piles on the table.
It was dangling from racks.
It was hanging from the walls.
The actual collection's a lot bigger than this.
These clothes are the stuff of Kyle's work.
This is what he and the other designers play with and take apart on a daily basis.
They're copying elements of these classic old clothes down to the tiny details.
Stitch color, fabric finish, trim finish, things like that.
Quite literally, they're copying the details.
So what we'll do is like, let's say, one of the designers is making This pant.
What they'll do is they'll get a magnifying glass and they'll count the stitches per inch on an outseam or a side seam or a fly, and then replicate that.
Replicating tiny details is a way of grafting a little character onto a new piece of clothing.
To Kyle, this is about giving a garment a sense of soul, a feeling like it has a life to it.
But almost all of these classic, timeless garments shared a very similar past life.
All of these garments that had been collected for me in this conference room were all old military surplus clothes.
If you pick things off of this wall, there's almost every archetype for every modern piece of clothing.
Like what?
Like what are we seeing?
I see flight jackets, bomber jackets, 1950s and 60s automotive car culture jackets, every version of a field jacket, chore jackets, it's all there.
Almost all classic menswear is based on 20th century militaria.
I think the majority, if not all, of the industry subconsciously acknowledges how this is the archive.
You either acknowledge the fact that these spawn from military garments or you don't.
But it is.
I would in fact wager that almost every single garment and accessory I have ever reported on has had some connection with.
I have a few pairs of Korean war era pants that I wear that are super comfortable.
They got all the right pockets.
Everything's perfectly thought out.
I'm like, yeah, there's a reason why Old Navy makes like a cheap imitation of these pants.
And clothing's connection to war is not simply a matter of aesthetics.
The United States military is involved in a very practical way in the creation of clothing itself.
This is something that Alex Goulet realized, somewhat ironically, in his quest to become a more ethical shopper.
If clothing is supposed to reflect your values, then what are my values?
And where I think I ended up was that if you can buy something close by to you that was made by a neighbor, the level of transparency is huge.
For the last 10 years, Alex Goulet has only bought clothes that were made in the United States with as fair labor practices as he can find.
Nothing can be confirmed 100 but for me it's worked out really well and I have a really healthy relationship with the things I wear.
And Alex is determined to help other Americans shop like he does.
So can you tell me what this is?
This is a bra. book project called Crafted with Pride.
It's a directory of Made in USA clothing, footwear, and accessories.
Crafted with Pride is a really cool resource.
It's printed in yellow like a phone book.
There's 1,400 companies represented.
Alex and his co-author organized this guidebook by product.
So you could be like, I need a handbag.
And then you could turn to the handbag page and there are a number of different American purse manufacturers.
Granted, there are not many, but there are some.
Other products, however, are easier to find in these pages.
Like, if you want a backpack, you're in luck.
Gore-Tex jackets, down jackets.
This company makes all kayak and rafting gear.
Most of the entries in this guide are from the outdoor industry in all its various forms.
Tons of biking gear, a lot of hunting stuff.
Is it because Americans are so hardcore and outdoorsy?
Sure.
But there's another reason why the outdoor industry still has a viable foothold manufacturing in the United States.
Military contractors and the outdoor industry specifically have a pretty long history with working with the military.
If you page through Alex's guide, you'll see a lot of these small American factories also provide to the military.
Made in USA, the way it exists right now is in a lot of part due to military contracts.
Thanks to the 1941 Barry Amendment, all clothes made for the United States military have to be made in the United States.
It makes sense, right?
It's a matter of national security.
We can't have our army clothes made in say, Vietnam or China, because what if say, we went to war with Vietnam or China?
This is one of the last things that have been holding up American clothing manufacturing over the last couple of decades.
Almost everything.
Every other kind of clothing has moved its production overseas.
It's not like the reason they're still manufacturing in the US, but it sounds like it kind of is the military and barrier compliance.
Well, yeah, no, absolutely.
The only reason these things are made in the U.S. is barrier compliance at this point in time.
If you buy something that says made in the USA, its zippers could come from a factory that makes zippers for the military.
Its buttons could come from a factory that makes buttons for the military.
There's hardly a reason. an American factory would make thread without the military.
It's just embedded in American garments.
So Alex feels very mixed about this.
You know it's sad that some of the more technical, interesting products in here were made for the military.
There's definitely companies that have military contracts that we did not include, that are like tactical gear that increases kill rates.
And you're just like, Okay, I don't know if I want that in the book.
But like the military informs so much of what we do.
I mean, the internet was invented by the military.
You know, like name 30 products, probably half of them were military inventions.
And the contracts with the Department of Defense have been keeping manufacturers afloat so they can make all their other cool stuff.
You benefit from having the military there as your primary customer.
And then these other smaller brands are also eating from that same trough.
And that's especially true in outdoor industries because they tend to make super technical products.
The military and the outdoor industry are interwoven.
The outdoor industry had a huge role in forming how the United States military looks.
And the military, in turn, came to shape the outdoor industry.
Military is just a crazy section of the world that I don't think about as much.
Same.
I also used to not think about the military.
I mean I thought about it and that I was against it categorically as an institution, but I didn't like know any veterans or active duty soldiers for most of my life.
Basically, until I started working on this series.
And if you're listening to this and you are a soldier or a veteran, I can just feel you rolling your eyes at this classically clueless civilian.
I know.
We live in this moment in history where there's a gaping rift between this country's military and this country's civilians.
There's even a term for it, like college students take courses on the military-civilian divide.
And it's gotten to the very practical nightmare where, as I write this, President Trump is ordering Marines and the National Guard into American cities to detain American citizens.
We've been pitted against each other.
And yet...
Oddly enough, American soldiers and American civilians have never been more intertwined than we both are now in our clothing.
We all wear the same things.
Our styles have completely overlapped.
Civilians and soldiers alike now wear performance clothes—waterproof shells, sweat-wicking layers often manufactured by the same companies.
We all wear outdoor wear, whether or not we're outdoors.
And we helped each other get to this place.
This season of Articles of Interest is called Gear.
Does not take a fashion journalist to tell you that everybody is wearing outdoor clothes more.
Look around you.
For years now, leggings have been pants and runners have been dashing by you in increasingly more cyborgian rainproof shells.
Bankers and businessmen have traded blazers for Patagonia vests, and punks have swapped leather for camouflage, and even I, who vowed I would never wear sweatpants, ever have been dressing like Sporty Spice.
Why are we all wearing outdoor performance gear?
Like, why are we wearing Arc'teryx to, like, go to the grocery store and buy eggs?
I think there are two different reasons.
And one that will be a little more palatable for all the listeners to hear is that it works well, right.
It's effective in, like, a day like today.
It's raining outside and it's nice to be able to stay warm and dry, even if you're just going down the block.
This is Rachel S. Gross.
I'm a history professor at the University of Colorado Denver.
And she is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods.
How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America.
The other answer is a much kind of deeper one, and it's a historical question.
Hell yeah, here we go.
It's about what meanings do people attach to the kinds of clothing that they wear, to the brands that they're wearing on their chests.
And it is steeped in American lore about recovering the rugged masculinity of the American frontier.
By the way, I know America is a landmass much larger than the United States.
I also get annoyed when people in the United States think they are the only Americans.
But please don't.
Have pity on me.
The name of my country is so long, and no one says US-ians or United Stadians.
And so please know that, for my purposes, when I say America, I do mean the United States of America okay.
And so the United States of America.
For the purposes of this podcast, America is about to turn 250 years old, just narrowly outliving some rough-eye rockfish and bowhead whales.
And yet, for fully the last half of our relatively young existence, we have been already overwhelmed with a national sense of nostalgia.
The notion that somehow Americans of the past, the pioneers, were tougher, more virile than their urban, effeminate counterparts.
In the hearts of American men.
For at least 125 years there's been a gap unfillable in soft, cushy effete modernity.
It is only by encountering some kind of tough physical challenge that they can recover some sense of that lost masculinity.
Donald Trump Jr. goes on expensive hunting trips to shoot rare sheep and endangered duck.
Mark Zuckerberg bow hunts wild boar.
Outdoor recreation going camping, hunting or fishing.
When it is pursued as a recreational activity in the 19th century, it is often men looking to perform that form of manhood.
And so what do men wear when they are performing manhood?
There was always an insistence that No, it wasn't a costume.
It wasn't style.
No, men don't care about that kind of stuff.
It was about pure practicality.
And so being anti-fashion, was one of the most important touchstones of outdoor style from the 19th century onward.
But yeah, fashion is totally a part of going outside.
It always has been.
Even just the simple idea that you change your clothes to go do a specific activity.
I think people... have long put on separate costumes to go hike or hunt.
And this isn't a particularly American phenomenon.
In England the elite classes also had specialized outfit to do similar activities outside of the city at their lodges.
But American outdoorsmen had a sort of American outdoorsman costume.
In the United States though, it wasn't English hunting suits that were popular in the 19th century, but rather an odd combination of white people looking at American Indian style and what they thought pioneers would have worn in the US past.
American outdoorsmen were supposed to dress like Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.
And what did those guys wear?
Fringy, rugged, leather, buckskin suits.
And so that means we get a lot of white men wearing buckskin suits because they think it's a combination of the expert lore of both Native American guides and also the Daniel Boones that they want to imitate as well.
And where did many of these white men get this idea from?
Guidebooks.
A writer named William H.H.
Murray or Adirondack.
Murray arguably kick-started the outdoor recreation industry in 1869 when he published a guidebook called Adventures in the Wilderness or Camp Life in the Adirondacks.
This was a guidebook that instructed city dwellers what to do, where to stay, how to dress the part of the outdoorsman.
The ethos of the 19th century outdoors was woodcraft crafting what you need from nature's storehouse in order to survive.
This inspired a raft of new guidebooks, some written by white men hiding behind indigenous pen names, who endorsed the idea of crafting over buying and framed the nature vacation as anti-materialistic.
True American outdoorsmen, these books said, needed nothing from the namby-pamby world of commerce.
Many guidebooks often told its readers, don't buy anything.
If you do, you're essentially showing yourself to be a beginner who doesn't know anything really about what the nature experience is supposed to be.
And so a lot of readers took that to heart and thought, I have to craft my own buckskin suit.
And that included not just shooting the deer the buck, but also learning how to brain tan the hide in order to get it soft and pliable, and sewing the suit together themselves.
But did...
Did everyone do this?
Very few people did, including the guidebook authors themselves.
No.
The most avid wearers of buckskin suits functionally went shopping.
They often turned to Native American women who were the recognized experts at sewing buckskin suits.
So they would just buy them?
They would just buy them.
Shopping is a cornerstone of the American relationship with the outdoors.
To this day.
When you think about it, it is sort of perversely fascinating that any trip into the outdoors starts with getting kitted up.
You have to go shopping.
You need all this stuff to do what ought to be the most natural thing.
Going to sleep outside.
And already in the 1860s America was already imagining how much more self-sufficient, how much more rugged men used to be.
But come on.
Since it was a cornerstone of the founding of the United States to completely ignore, if not annihilate, any form of indigenous knowledge about how to actually live in this land and adapt to this climate.
White settlers didn't know how to actually dress for this country.
And so they bought stuff.
They always have.
It's foundational.
If you go back all the way to the 1700s, to the earliest days before the official founding of this nation, it was always, Always a thing to shop for gear.
With the help of the Native Americans making buckskins, because buckskins were being turned into buckskin breeches and they were a equivalent of blue jeans of the 18th century is how they're often described.
Early English colonizers took a liking to the Indian style buckskin breeches, not only because they were hard wearing and practical, it was also a style thing.
The buckskin breeches had this rugged indigenous look to them.
Americans were always dressing up to look more rugged than they were.
This was the 1700s version of wearing Arc'teryx to go to the grocery store.
The buckskin breeches became so popular in the colonies that the trend spread back to England.
It got to the point where, in the 1750s, Savannah Georgia was processing 150000 pounds of buckskin a year.
We nearly, like, hunted deer to extinction in, like, Georgia and the Carolinas.
This is Joshua Kerner, who...
I'm just going to call Kerner.
A lot of people do say this is what Kerner says when they reference me in other places.
Kerner is actually an attorney in Richmond, Virginia.
His day job has nothing to do with this, but he moonlights as a war reenactor and a deep archival research obsessive.
Kerner is in fact so well-versed in the history of military uniforms and uniform procurement that I've seen actual military historians and archivists defer to him.
I would feel very okay with being called a citizen researcher if you want me to be generous.
If you want to call me a World War II nutso, that is also fine.
As an aside, Kerner holds the record for the longest interview I have ever done in my career, clocking in at 14 hours 10 minutes and 45 seconds.
I have an interest in it over the entire spans of the U.S.
Army's existence.
And so, before the United States Army even existed, there was this trend for buckskin breeches.
And so a lot of deer had to be shot to meet this demand.
And so there was a garment that the hunters around the Virginia colony developed to hunt all these deer for this global fashion trend.
And the garment that these Virginia hunters wore was called, simply enough, the hunting shirt.
The hunting shirt, which is something that comes from the Shenandoah backcountry community.
And it's decorated with fringe, so it still has this faux indigenous look to it.
But it's way cheaper than buckskin.
It's made out of linen.
A hunting shirt is a big, roomy smock.
Super simple garment that's easy to make.
You just have to finish off some seas, you pull some fringe, and you have an easy uniform.
So militias in Virginia start wearing these hunting shirts.
It turns out to be a simple way to get uniformity because...
This shirt is very distinctive and you can just slide it on over anything.
It does mean because the way they're cut means you just wear it over whatever else you have.
And then, when these Virginian militias hear that their brothers in the North need help fighting the British, they march up to Massachusetts wearing their hunting shirts, many now with the words liberty or death embroidered on the chest.
Once the Virginians got to New England, General George Washington himself quickly requested quote a number of hunting shirts, not less than 10000, because he knew that a uniform of some kind would quote have a happier tendency to unite the men.
The hunting shirt gets introduced into the wider army during the siege of Boston in 1775, thanks to the arrival of Washington and the Corps of Riflemen.
So there was this idea that maybe American fighters would all wear hunting shirts.
This would be a sort of non-uniform uniform.
This might be perfect, because maybe the United States wouldn't need an official proper uniform because this nation wouldn't have an official proper army.
A lot of the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, looked back to early democracies of antiquity and they were like look, A standing army usually means trouble.
Looking back at the classical ideas and the idea that the reason Rome fell and the Roman Republic fell was the standing army.
Military coups are known to happen.
But also standing armies are expensive.
The Republic is young and we don't have any money yet.
So there isn't a lot of money for Congress to play with, to give an army.
And paying people to do military service or requiring service in America would be antithetical to the whole project.
I mean, demanding service was what kings used to do.
But anyway, we don't need an army.
We are, in fact, better than that.
Perhaps Washington and Jefferson thought our citizens white male ones, of course will voluntarily take up arms for the cause of democracy.
The Founding Fathers...
They somewhat fetishized the idea of the citizen soldier as being someone who's going to be superior to a career soldier who fights for money because they're fighting out of patriotism.
This is author and veteran Phil Kley, who has explored the history of service a fair amount.
And they thought that mercenaries are going to be terrible soldiers.
But people who are fighting out of patriotism will fight more valiantly and thus better.
So this was the whole idea behind our militias.
These were just supposed to be groups of folks who would take up arms voluntarily passionately, at the drop of a hat, who didn't need fancy uniforms or anything.
They would just toss on their linen hunting shirts and go off and fight for their friends and countrymen.
Just get on your hunting shirt.
Let's go.
And then at the Battle of Brooklyn... One of the first major battles of the Revolution.
The Hessian mercenaries were professionals at war, and the Americans weren't.
The British had hired German mercenary soldiers, the Hessians, who were ruthless killers for hire.
At the Battle of Brooklyn, Hessian mercenaries... whooped the citizen soldiers pretty badly.
There's this big reconsideration.
Maybe we couldn't just rely on militias.
Maybe we did need to have an actual regular, professional-standing army dressed in something a little bit better than linen smocks.
Maybe they should be actual uniforms made of actual sturdy wool.
They opted to put soldiers in a British-style uniform.
What else did they know?
Our colonial button-down regimental coats looked basically identical to the redcoats, but ours were blue.
We think of army green now, but it used to be army blue was the color of the military.
Kerner again.
This is like army blue that goes back to the American Revolution.
Indigo was already growing on early plantations in the United States, so the color blue was easily accessible.
On smoky battlefields where bayonet fighting and shooting happened at close range, team colors had to be clear.
Because friendly fire is... surprisingly common and is bad.
During the Revolutionary War, U.S. military clothes had a very British influence.
And then, when the United States of America won its independence, they started searching for their own identity through their military clothes.
In the 19th century.
What would often happen is an officer would go on an exchange trip to somewhere in Europe and he would see some uniform items and like I kind of like that.
I mean, they wanted the color to stay blue.
But the style was called into question.
A lot of it is taking inspiration from whoever is seen as the dominant military power at the time.
So we switched to French style uniforms in the 1840s.
We wear these jaunty little caps and we look like little Nutcracker soldiers.
And we are still in that French influence extending into the Civil War, where the Union Army is, for the first time, wearing clothes produced on a mass scale.
Machine stoning isn't really introduced into the U.S.
Army system until the Civil War itself to expedite manufacture.
Throughout the course of the Civil War.
You have 2 million northern soldiers, so a lot of uniforms needed to be produced.
There is a pattern and drafting division.
This is the notorious origins of the sizes small, medium, and large.
The government contracted with manufacturers like Brooks Brothers to get uniforms made still in blue.
But contracting uniforms out ended up being a mess.
I'm not trying to throw Brooks Brothers under the bus here specifically, but by and large the government ended up not being able to trust a lot of these private companies.
Because they want the biggest profit margin, they would get substandard materials and that wasn't really noticeable until you warped.
These substandard materials were called shoddy.
This is why, to this day, we still call busted things shoddy.
Then you had... what was called shoddy then, which would easily fall apart.
And you do not want your pants to rip on the battlefield.
It's not a place for a button to come off or a knit to come undone or a thread to pull.
And there's a lot of these lessons that were learned during the American Civil War and making sure that the government is getting what they're paying for and that the soldiers on the receiving end are getting the best uniforms that the government can buy.
This is a trial and error process throughout the Civil War.
You finally start having inspectors who would approve military-grade garments with a literal stamp of approval.
Right here.
Inspection stamp.
Yep.
U.S. inspector.
And these inspectors came from a branch of the US military known as the Quartermaster Department, which would later become the Quartermaster Corps.
This is the division of the military responsible for feeding sheltering, transporting and clothing The troops.
This is not a heavy flannel.
But it's also unstructured.
Completely unstructured.
Kerner and I were at the Quartermaster Corps Museum in Fort Lee in Virginia so we were able to look at some of the samples from American uniform history.
This is a Civil War coat.
This Civil War coat that Kerner and I were looking at was a blue flannel coat with gold-tone brass buttons.
It almost looked like a blue blazer you'd get at Brooks Brothers.
It was really nice.
Wow.
Here you go.
And this was made from dyed indigo flannel.
And sure enough, there was the quartermaster stamp of approval.
Oh, this is a nice jacket.
So, while all countries have quartermasters, the Americans take it to a different level of an art form.
It was this combination of quality controls that were developed during the Civil War and...
The ongoing land grab from the ongoing bloody Indian wars across the American West which raged on throughout the century.
Because of our long history of having to supply an army over a vast nation.
I mean, this was the process that I was taught in school was just westward expansion.
And it really was an ongoing series of wars.
Between 1776 and the early 1900s, there were about 2,000
1,500 battles between North American tribes and the United States Army.
That's a pretty rough statistic, though.
It varies a lot depending on how you define a battle.
Like, is it a battle if the U.S.
Army is just opening fire on a bunch of people?
Hard to say.
But especially after the Civil War, the indigenous population was all the United States military had to focus on.
So they did.
Outside of the Civil War.
Largely the American army is a constabulary force that is doled out across the American West.
In the 1800s, the United States Quartermaster Corps was getting very good at manufacturing a high volume of good quality clothes and then delivering them to far-flung forts.
And under those circumstances where you had to supply these far-off garrisons by covered wagon pulled by a horse, it And, after the Civil War, the first mass-produced factory-scale war.
This is the first war with excess stuff left over.
It's not widespread yet.
There aren't a lot of surplus stores, but the few that do exist are super popular.
Take, for example, a Scottish merchant in New York named Francis Bannerman.
Bannerman gets to start selling off all the surplus dating back to the Civil War.
Eventually, he acquires so much stuff that he buys a private island to store it all.
Bannerman's castle is a little bit up the Hudson River.
And to give you an idea of how much surplus they had, they were selling these old Civil War rifles for essentially scrap metal.
And so after the Civil War, there's this very interesting period.
It felt, to a lot of Americans... like peacetime.
I mean, in the same way that I feel like I live in peacetime, even though I don't.
I just live in a bubble.
After the Civil War, it was very easy for a lot of Americans to just ignore the Indian Wars.
They're still raging on and claiming thousands of lives.
So just to make this perfectly clear, this was not a period of peace.
Arguably, America has never had a period of peace.
But to many Americans, this time did feel like a period of peace after the Civil War.
Just know that that's not true.
And it started to look like a period of peace.
Kerner has this pet theory that military dress gets more practical and simple in wartime and increasingly ornate and dressy in what feels like peacetime.
During war, everything has to get simplified and ready for the trenches.
And then, when you get into peace again, the uniform is more concerned with how it looks on the parade ground.
This period after the Civil War, even though it's not Actually Peace.
This is probably my favorite chapter of the American military uniform.
It's bonkers.
So yeah, this is enlisted men, 1872, 1871.
Look at this super fancy plume on this Prussian-inspired helmet.
All the gold tassels and hinds.
The American army is now copying the Prussians who have beat the French in the Franco-Prussian War.
The U.S. is still wearing their signature army blue, but the style is now so fancy pants.
We take a lot more Prussian influences and adopt a pickle helmet, actually for a while, for both the Marine Corps and the Army.
It's that helmet that Otto von Bismarck would become famous for.
It looks like it's got this like butt plug spike sticking out of the top.
You would never know that these are Americans.
And as military uniforms got fancier and fancier and more and more absurd, so did the idea of war in general.
East Coast Americans removed from the ongoing Indian wars in the West were unaccustomed to going this long without what they would consider an official war.
Again, these years after the Civil War were not peaceful.
There's a lot of violence happening in the American West.
But in the eyes of the American government and many of its people, this feels like a period of peace.
And, by this logic, an assertive group of activists and legislators were like maybe this is a part of the ongoing American experiment.
We got rid of kings.
We abolished slavery.
And now, maybe war is just another antiquated system that we could get rid of.
How American is that, right?
We have this beautiful, idealistic, hypocritical goal that we have yet to achieve.
But, We seriously tried to do it.
There was a movement to make pacifism an American value.
After the break.
We're back with Avery Truffleman and more articles of interest.
Although Teddy Roosevelt liked to pass himself off as the ultimate manly hunter, rugged outdoorsman, He was a New York City kid.
This is so funny to me that I could just hop on the subway and go to the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace.
It's right here.
It's in Manhattan.
In the 1800s, the Roosevelts were one of the richest families in New York City.
There it is.
East 20th Street.
Theodore Roosevelt Way.
He must have passed this a million times.
The stately building that is landmarked as the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt isn't actually the building that Teddy was born in.
That was once right down the street.
This is Teddy's uncle's house.
But the floor plan is similar.
And all the furniture is authentic.
All four of the Roosevelt children were not born in this room.
They were born in this bed, however.
The Roosevelt Birthplace is a national park, and they give free tours a couple times a day.
My main takeaway from my tour was that Teddy Roosevelt loved his dad.
President Roosevelt says in his autobiography that his father was the greatest man he ever knew.
Theodore Roosevelt Sr does sound pretty great, even though my tour guide also sounds pretty biased himself.
Theodore Roosevelt Sr. was outstanding in the fact that he was atypical of a father and a husband.
Before he went to work, his first obligation was to spend time and show attention and affection to his four children.
I suppose the bare minimum of showing attention to your family was pretty remarkable for his time.
Although, to be fair, it does sound like Theodore Roosevelt Sr was very nurturing to his four children, including his poor, sickly son, Teddy.
Our future president, he's born with severe, severe asthma.
And that asthma, it was feared that it would overtake him at any point in time.
And Thea is looking at his four children and says, I am so, so proud of your brilliance.
And I'm so disappointed that you are pathetic as far as your physical capabilities.
I don't think this is verbatim.
I just think this is a tour guide being a little mean.
Do something about that.
Essentially, the Roosevelt children say... Papa has said... have to build ourselves up.
We must lead the strenuous lifeline.
This becomes a rallying cry for young Roosevelt.
He must live the strenuous life.
He has to deal with his own asthma.
Because at this point in history, even medical experts are not very good at treating asthma.
And the treatment protocols say, give the baby a cigar to smoke.
No, they do not.
I'm not making that up.
But the future 26th president of the United States did find a treatment that worked for him.
Hot black coffee, in combination with physical exercise.
Allegedly, from his early childhood, Teddy Roosevelt is just pounding hot black coffee.
So much so that when he's president of the United States, he's clocking a minimum of a gallon of hot coffee a day.
Cheers.
Coffee, in conjunction with physical exercise, transformed him.
And Roosevelt, as a child, was a sickly child.
He had a high, squeaky voice.
People ridiculed him.
Kristen Hoganson is a professor of history at the University of Illinois.
I think that helps explain why he went off to the Dakotas to become a ranch man, right?
On the cover of his 1885 book Hunting Trips of a Ranch Man, Teddy Roosevelt was posed like a rugged, anachronistic hunter from the previous century in a buckskin suit.
He can rehabilitate himself and define himself more as a cowboy, a gunslinger, a hardened frontiersman.
TR was very proud of the fact that he was born frail and weak in the lap of luxury in New York City but, by his own will, had vigorously turned himself into a broad-chested, strapping young man by training every day and subjecting himself to the strenuous life, just in time for this era of perceived peace in East Coast America.
So the rise of white-collar work, the move from a farm economy, a more rural economy, to a more urban economy.
And more and more middle class men are sitting at desks doing desk jobs instead of strenuous labor.
Oh, no, feared Roosevelt.
There were fewer and fewer opportunities for men to lead the strenuous life.
And then if you remember your high school history, the closing of the frontier in the 1890s.
So that led to a lot of anxiety again among the same class of white wealthier men that they wouldn't have the potential to test their mettle.
And at the very end of that year, December 29 1890, United States soldiers of the 7th Cavalry murdered hundreds of Lakota men, women and children in South Dakota.
This was the Wounded Knee Massacre, and it was among the last major battles of the Indian Wars.
And Roosevelt sees this as a big problem.
Roosevelt.
He's arguing that it was actually violence between Americans and American Indians that was the furnace that fused the new American race.
Phil Kley again.
The ongoing Indian Wars for Roosevelt had been a source of American identity.
It was a way that all kinds of men rich men, poor men Irish, white or English, white or German white or Dutch white could go West, forget their past, Fight side by side and come together as Americans.
And once the frontier was closed off, you needed to continue that by having wars in other places.
And this was not some kooky personal belief that Roosevelt had.
A lot of men agreed with him.
There were a lot of people involved in politics in the time who were really worried about what it would mean to not have another generation of war-tested men overlooking wars, Indian wars in the American West.
The sense was that there wasn't another generation of men in the United States who would carry on the martial virtues, which were understood as being self-sacrificing dedication to the nation heroism valor, physical toughness.
An essay in the Upper Crest periodical, The Arena, warned, the new danger will be peace rot.
Peace rot.
As if peace were a harmful and terrible thing to be avoided.
In peacetime, soldiers were dressed in feathers and pickle helmets just for show.
The wealth of the Gilded Age was drawing attention to class differences.
Americans were becoming vain and materialistic.
And a feat now, cried the aging veterans of the Civil War on both sides.
They waxed nostalgic about the values that war brought.
The camaraderie of being out in the field in the company of other men, away from women.
That would do men well these days, veterans thought.
Especially, they looked around.
What with all these uppity new women.
And so by the new woman, I'm talking about this phenomenon of the 1890s and onward.
The so-called new woman did not just stay at home and watch the kids.
She was starting to have a life outside the home.
She was riding bicycles.
She was wearing bloomers.
She might even have a college degree or a job.
Working class women had always had jobs.
But what was new was middle class women were more likely to have jobs.
And then women were becoming more active in politics.
She might campaign for suffrage.
Or if she lived in Utah or other Western states, she might actually be able to vote already.
And this is way before the 19th Amendment.
That was in 1920.
We're talking about the 1890s.
And more widely, women were voting in school board and local elections.
Not only did these new women make the men with their desk jobs cling even more tightly to their manhood, the new women brought bold, radical ideas into the political sphere.
And this was extra terrifying to men.
Their once demure sweet wives had now become opinionated pants-wearing and poised for a full-world takeover.
And the new women, for their part, didn't deny it.
Man is morally in his infancy.
The woman's rights essayist Sarah Grand wrote in the North American Review
In this mismanaged world.
It looks as if she should soon be obliged to do their work as well as our own, or nothing will be done.
A lot of the women activists at the time said, like, we as people can make a better world, right?
And this extended period of so-called peace they were living in provided a sort of opening for the new woman.
The valorization of force was often used as a justification for keeping women out of politics.
The repeated refrain was always, no fight, no vote.
Sorry, ladies, you can't vote.
You didn't serve your country because you weren't allowed to.
But that was the logic.
Voting rests on physical force.
It rests on guns.
It rests on the capacity to kill.
But here we were, coming on 30 years since the Civil War.
And the vast majority of this new generation of office workers had grown up without fighting.
So now what?
None of them got to vote?
The new women pointed out, aha, this is a flaw in the argument.
Maybe war is not as necessary to citizenship as you thought, fellas.
And so a lot of women were very excited about a burgeoning movement known as arbitration.
In the late 19th century, a movement for international arbitration arose in the United States.
And one of the goals of the movement was to end war via treaty arrangements.
The arbitration movement argued that we civilization, had become sophisticated enough to talk through all our problems in lieu of fighting.
Admittedly, some of the new women took this idea to the extreme.
Frances Willard, the leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, proposed that Harvard and Yale cancel their annual football game and use arbitration instead.
But generally speaking...
Arbitration wasn't some pipe dream.
The United States took real steps to act on it.
And the United States.
As a starting point on this, negotiated and signed a treaty with Great Britain in 1897.
This treaty stated that for the next five years the United States and Great Britain would not fight, but arbitrate all of their disputes.
It was signed by the U.S.
Secretary of State and a knighted British diplomat.
It was supported by President Grover Cleveland, along with many academics and newspapers, and it seemed like this would be the start of an amazing new era of peace.
And then the treaty went to the Senate for ratification, and the Senate nixed it.
So you might wonder like why were they so fearful that there might be peace between the United States and Great Britain?
Lawmakers voiced their fear of peace rot, saying...
And a little bloodletting would be an admirably good thing about this time for the people of the United States.
They talked about their fears of over-decadence, of male degeneracy.
Theodore Roosevelt, at this point had returned to New York from the West and started his political ascent.
And Theodore Roosevelt worried that arbitration would produce and I'm quoting him a flabby, timid type of character that would eat away the great fighting futures of our race.
Arbitration was, in other words, for pussies.
And so the movement was seen as a female movement, which is not to say that men were not also supportive of arbitration, but the opponents came to see it as a feminized movement and as a symbol of what was wrong in American politics.
In political cartoons, arbitration was personified as a woman and arbitrationists as ugly, sour-faced hags wearing preposterously proportioned bloomers.
And in opposition to it, they would say, We need manhood asserted.
And Theodore Roosevelt, who is often the poster child for this, said I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.
And this country need only look just off our coast, down to the east.
And there was a poor little colony struggling for its independence from Spain.
And not for the first time.
Right.
So the third major struggle for independence broke out in Cuba in 1895.
But this time, Americans like Roosevelt were like, we have got to intervene.
We have to help Cuba.
Cuba, the island, was often represented as a damsel in distress.
And notoriously William Randolph Hearst and all of his papers spilled a lot of ink trying to convince the American public to get involved in Cuba.
And in the Bowery in Manhattan...
A play about a virtuous Cuban maiden rebuffing the advances of a dastardly Spaniard was presented entirely in Yiddish.
So it fit into a literary genre that was super popular, which was a genre of heroic chivalrous, knightly men going off and rescuing women.
There were some Americans who were genuinely very upset by the horrid plight of innocent Cuban civilians who were being rounded up and put into concentration camps.
Horrifying death tolls from that.
And there were Americans who were less concerned about that loss of civilian life.
There were financial interests.
Especially in the sugar business.
Many sugar plantations in Cuba were owned by American sugar companies, and they sure wouldn't mind having more control over the island.
They were vocal in advancing their interests and wanting a U.S. intervention for economic reasons.
But were potential financial gains or romantic chivalry or even humanitarian aid enough to justify going to fing war?
Arbitrationists didn't think so.
I mean one critic even pointed out.
You know we have lynchings here in our own country and nobody seems to care about that.
Why are we suddenly so riled up about Cuba?
And the president at the time, McKinley, had actually witnessed the Civil War.
He harbored no romance about how awful battle was.
And he refused to listen to the lawmakers who were all but begging him to please please please, declare war on Spain.
His opponents on both sides of the aisle were very critical.
They kept saying the United States needs a man in the White House.
Theodore Roosevelt famously said that McKinley had the backbone of a chocolate eclair.
But then there was an explosion on an American ship that was docked in Havana.
It blew up in the middle of the night and 266 men on board died.
Before we even knew what caused the explosion on the ship.
Like for all we knew at the time, it could have been an accident.
There was outrage.
The Senate was like, Oh, we have got to go to war now.
To quote one congressman, honor comes first.
And if an honorable man were insulted, he would not arbitrate.
He would fight back.
McKinley functionally gives in.
He punts the decision to declare war to Congress.
And, of course, they declare war.
They're really amped on it.
And then they just rallied around the military.
So several members of Congress actually enlisted.
Others offered to do so.
Hundreds of thousands of American men volunteer to enlist.
And they ask questions. to be shipped off to liberate Cuba.
Even Teddy Roosevelt leaves his job as assistant naval secretary when the war breaks out and he gets in on the action in Cuba.
He leads the first volunteer cavalry, known as the Rough Riders.
Teddy Roosevelt.
When he went to Cuba with the Rough Riders he worked out the actual ethnic composition of his unit.
Phil Kly says the Rough Riders were going to go off to Cuba together and they were going to fight side by side and fuse the great American race, just like how Roosevelt thought the Indian Wars once had.
So among the Rough Riders there were lower-class men, middle-class men, upper-class men and men of a number of different races.
So they'd have the right number of Anglo-Saxons, the right number of American Indians, the right number of Irishmen, and then they'd all go and be fused into one kind of new American race in the cauldron, where the heat is provided by war.
So Roosevelt leads this Benetton ad into victory at San Juan Hill, although he doesn't makes it sound like they single-handedly liberated Cuba.
Roosevelt would have you believe that they played a major role because he was a massive self-promoter.
For the rest of his life.
Teddy Roosevelt also went by Colonel and completely minimized the help he got from the battalion of black soldiers known as the Buffalo Soldiers, who were also there at San Juan Hill.
I would say the significance of that battle was making Roosevelt into a war hero that helped launch his political career forward.
Roosevelt wore his wide-brimmed, cowboy-looking Rough Riders hat to the 1900 Republican Convention.
And there he was hailed as the heroic fighter and the fightin' Republican.
It led to a new generation of military heroes.
It rehabilitated the upper-crust, Harvard-educated, white-collar, Theodore Roosevelt-y type.
This model man is people who deserve political leadership and who working-class men could relate to more because they had served in the military.
It was there at that 1900 convention where Roosevelt was nominated to be the vice president to McKinley who, I guess, forgave that whole Chocolaty Claire insult.
McKinley was looking for a military hero to run as his running mate, and then selected the war hero, Dr Roosevelt.
And then when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the fightin' Republican became president.
And the vibe was like, wasn't that fun, boys?
See, I told you we needed a war.
The Spanish-American War, which lasted less than a year with relatively few US casualties, was called the Splendid Little War.
But the part that Roosevelt didn't talk about so readily is that we'd taken it too far.
The Splendid Little War had morphed into something else.
The United States had been so excited about finally getting into a big war that we'd attacked Spain in as many of their colonies as we could reach.
The United States ended up annexing Guam and also taking Puerto Rico, which was a Spanish colony proximate to Chuba, and ditto the annexation of the Philippines.
So the US had entered Manila, where extremely long story cut entirely too short.
We were suddenly like oh, we should just take this colony.
There were a number of American men, including Theodore Roosevelt, who argued that One of the great things about becoming involved in the Philippines is it would build like a masterful class of colonizing men right.
That it would build manhood among U.S. occupiers.
Which is totally bonkers.
Ostensibly the purpose of this whole war was to liberate the people of Cuba, not to go colonize other people.
And at the time a lot of Americans actually raised this point and pointed out that This is kind of against our stated values of democracy and independence.
And yet, here we were, trying to take over the Philippines.
The war became a long, horrible, drawn-out, bloody guerrilla war.
The United States resorted to torture.
We had entered this war to be the great knight, the savior of the damsel in distress, Cuba.
And we had become the villain, the monstrous torturer. of the Philippines.
Soldiers returning from the Philippines reported on the cruelties that the U.S.
Army was perpetuating.
The war went on from like 1898 to roughly 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt declared it over.
The narrative flipped.
It wasn't simply that some bloodletting and a little vigor is good for the boys.
This war, it seemed, was no longer the right kind of war anymore.
Right?
It's taking like our fine young men from the farms in Nebraska and turning them into depraved, diseased alcoholic killers right.
And so I think that really undercut some of the arguments that war was inherently good for building male character.
That was the bridge into the 20th century.
And then it's the 1900s, and Teddy Roosevelt is president and the US has announced its entry onto the global stage.
The most territory the United States has ever had was in 1902.
So it is sort of the roots of, like, America World Police.
Significant roots.
But to bring all this back to close...
The Spanish-American War made a significant change to the American military uniform.
You can see the shift in style in Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Rider uniform, which is there on display in the house that is landmarked as his birthplace.
But here we are looking at the Rough Rider hat jacket, his bandana and his set of gloves that he wore in the Spanish-American War.
Alyssa Parker Geisman, with the National Park Service, met up with me after my tour of Teddy Roosevelt's birthplace to make sure I saw Roosevelt's Rough Rider suit.
So the Rough Rider uniform.
As an officer, TR would be responsible for providing and paying for his own uniform.
Roosevelt's uniform made by Brooks Brothers is constructed of the same khaki-colored canvas material that was used for the enlisted men's uniforms.
So yes, it's pretty cool that this safari-looking suit was made by Brooks Brothers.
I love that.
But this war, the Spanish-American War, is the war where the U.S. military sheds its signature blue.
Instead of copying the jaunty French or the stately Prussians during our era of colonial ambition, we started to mimic the colonial outfits of the British Empire.
Here's Kerner again.
Khaki has its origins going back to the British Empire in India as a summer uniform.
When the Spanish-American War first began, American enlisted soldiers arrived to those various Spanish colonies in their blue sack coats, those blue flannel coats with the gold buttons they had worn in the Civil War.
And in the heat of Cuba, or the sun of the Philippines, they took their jackets off.
So they buy and get a lot of these khaki cotton uniforms direct from like Singapore and India to issue to officers in the Philippines.
Officers like Teddy Roosevelt... got their khakis custom made or fitted for them.
And British khaki had a color that looks a lot like what Americans would now call olive green.
And they're like, man, not only is this more comfortable, we're harder to see.
The battlefield had a new problem, visibility.
All the wars before had been very, very different.
And then, with the introduction of smokeless powder, you no longer have this occluding smoke on the battlefield, which makes everybody easier to see.
So you're a more visible target.
And what's worse, the guns are better.
What ends up happening over the course of the 19th century is the introduction of rifle weapons that are easily reloadable.
Which means the average infantryman is more dangerous.
Which necessitates these skirmish tactics where you're getting further and further apart.
After the Spanish-American War.
In the dawn of the 20th century, America looks at the ways that war is trending.
They take stock of their own experiences fighting in other climates, having to go long distances to foreign lands.
And in August of 1904, the United States Army officially adopts olive green drab.
It's just a better color for blending in with the environment.
And If we were going to keep fighting exotic new wars in exotic new countries?
Uniforms should fit specific tactical and climate needs right.
And so the quartermaster reasoned they should take a look at the methods and techniques and tips that were emerging from a new kind of business in America.
The outdoor industry.
But that's next chapter.
Articles of Interest is reported produced, cut and performed by Avery Truffleman, who is me, but I have a lot of guardrails on these things.
Alison Barringer listens to my drafts, edits my scripts, and makes them make sense.
Then I send my drafts to journalist and costume historian Charles McFarlane, who knows a lot about the military.
Then I send the scripts to a fact-checker, Yasmeen Al-Sayed, who goes through and asks questions like do bowhead whales live to 250 years old?
Then, after I add music which is by Ray Royal with theme songs by Sasami, I send it to Jocelyn Gonzalez, an engineer at PRX, who mastered and mixed it.
And thank you so much to Angel Ellis, an iconic journalist in her own right who, I can't believe, listened to this.
Thanks as well to Audrey Martovich and the whole team at Radiotopia.
I could not make this work without Radiotopia.
I also could not make this work without Drew Helpt.
To see images of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider outfit and just a little bit of Buck Mason's Militaria collection, go to articlesofinterestsubstackcom.
