Masculinity and Nation in the Popular Fiction of the Spanish American War: Kirk Munroe's Forward, March!

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Although the first accounts of the Spanish-American War in 1898 were written by journalists, including the novelist Stephen Crane, book-length memoirs such as Theodore Roosevelt's The Rough Riders (1899) and fiction novels such as Kirk Munroe's Forward, March! (1899) were not far behind. The war was quickly won but the battle over how to narrate, represent, and remember it raged in full force during the years that followed. The stakes were high: not only the question of foreign policy and America's right to control Caribbean territories, but the definition of American nationhood itself seemed bound up with the issue of American men's performance in battle. Race was a major axis of debate and ideological pressure, but class was also important as a vector of ideological tension and containment.1 Appearing at nearly the same time as Roosevelt's, Forward March! narrates the exploits of the Rough Riders, but in a fictionalized form written for young readers and focusing on a fictional protagonist. A coming of age story staged in the theater of war, the novel interweaves the issue of manhood with a larger story of national honor, victory and belonging. Precisely because it is written as an adventure story, and by definition accessible, emotionally engaging and stereotyped, Forward, March! reveals the mechanisms that bound masculinity, nationalism and militarism together in a combination that would profoundly influence twentieth-century American culture. In particular, the novel navigates the transition between earlier nineteenth-century notions of masculinity based on chivalry and self-restraint and a new definition emerging in the 1890s, favoring physical prowess, military experience and active patriotism. In doing so, Forward, March! helped create a conflicted and contradictory masculinity that would inaugurate a century of imperial violence.