Story

Iron John in the Gilded Age

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Authors: Mark C. Carnes

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

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September 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 5

“The Almighty dollar,’ Washington Irving wrote, was the “great object of universal devotion” among Americans. Tocqueville described moneymaking as the “prevailing passion.” And though the object of their craving sometimes changed, Tocqueville noticed that the emotional intensity persisted. This was why tightfisted Yankee merchants would break down in penitential tears and convert to Christ, why sober Ohio farmers would abandon their homesteads and join Utopian communes. Because Americans were so bound up in the struggle to get ahead, Tocqueville concluded, they rushed “unrestrained beyond the range of common sense” when cut loose. Thus did a materialistic nation beget so many “strange sects,” each striking out on such “extraordinary oaths to eternal happiness.”

 
As Bly’s boys tried to create and perform rituals dating back to the Bronze Age, they overlooked a less-remote source.
 

Yet even Tocqueville might have flinched at the spectacle of thousands of adult men, most of them well-to-do and college-educated, chanting before bonfires and pounding on drums, growling and cavorting in imitation of foxes and bears, plunging naked into baptismal mud holes, and smudging their faces with ashes—all of them following a path blazed by the poet Robert Bly in the final decade of the 20th century.

What set them in motion was Bly’s 1990 Iron John: A Book About Men. Manhood had seldom been of much interest to general readers, and the book’s odd amalgam of romantic poetry, esoteric philosophy, and popular psychology, all bolted to a little-known myth by the Grimm brothers, seemed unlikely to appeal to the masses. But Iron John clambered onto the best-seller list and remained there for more than a year.

The book’s success confirmed its central premise: that American men who had renounced the Vietnam War and embraced feminism now fear thev have become too soft. Having drifted far from traditional manhood, they need help finding their way back. Such men are drawn to Iron John—a Wildman who led boys from the suffocating confines of childhood into the liberating expanses of manhood. BIv believes the storv outlines the initiatory process by which boys become men in most societies. Though deprived of such guidance, American men need not despair, for the requisite rituals are too deeply embedded in the human psyche to be forever lost, or so Bly maintains.

Some of Bly’s readers, calling themselves mythopoets, resolved to exhume those rituals and breathe into them new life. They scoured the works of Joseph Campbell and Mary Stewart for mythological or historical examples of men’s rituals that could be “adapted” for modern usage. Other Bly enthusiasts published magazines and placed ads in newspapers to attract like-minded men to share the experience. Still others—some 100,00-strong—sought to identify with their hoary male forebears by attending weekend “man camps” in the woods (or in suitably bucolic convention centers). Soon the mythopoetic army overran the tiny outposts of “pro-feminist” academics and