Gear: Chapter 1

"Listen up! Focus your attention on me! Now! Do not infuriate me and make me repeat myself. Do you understand me?" "Chopped up!" "Wooom!" Let me start with the basics. The most basic basics, khakis, button downs, crisp, weight, 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 allude 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 and storage, but they brought out just a little section to show me. "Wait! Oh! You're really not fucking 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 is 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 out seam 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, 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 have 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." "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 that's all there." "Almost all classic menswear is based on 20th century military." "I think the majority of 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. " "But it's how it looks like." "It is." "I would, in fact, wager that almost every single garment and accessory I have ever reported on has had some connection to war." "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 Kule 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 the highest." For the last 10 years, Alex Kule 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 things I wear." And Alex is determined to help other Americans shop like he does. "So can you, can you tell me what this is?" "This is a 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 1400 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. Cortex 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 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 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 the Barry compliance." "Oh yeah, no, absolutely. The only reason these things are made in US is Barry compliance at this point in time." If you buy something that says made in the USA, it's zippers could come from a factory that makes zippers for the military. It's 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 like 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. [Music] Hey, it's Robin here from PRX, and I want to tell you about a brand new show in the Radiotopia family. An exciting partnership with our friends at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and fellow indie network talkhouse. It's called Music Makes Us, and it's hosted by Cultural Icon, the legendary Kathleen Hanna, the front woman of Bikini Kill and Latigra. She sits down with revolutionary musicians like Shaka Khan, Olivia Rodrigo, and Haley Williams of Paramore to speak about the things artists really want to talk about. Perfect lyrics, unforgettable shows, treasured artifacts, and even snacks. From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Radiotopia and a talkhouse, Music Makes Us, out now wherever you listen to podcasts. It 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 archterics 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 industries 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 have pity on me. The name of my country is so long, and no one says USians 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 bohead 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, a-feet 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 bohunts 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 outdoorsmen 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've worn in the US past. American outdoorsmen were supposed to dress like Johnny Appleseed and Davey 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 Adderondack Murray, arguably kickstarted the outdoor recreation industry in 1869 when he published a guidebook called Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp Life in the Adderondacks. This was a guidebook that instructed city dwellers what to do, where to stay, and 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-tand the hide in order to get it soft and pliable, and sewing the suit together themselves. But did everyone do this? Very few people did, including the guidebook authors themselves. No. The most avid wears 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 kidded 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 a thing to shop for gear. With the help of the Native Americans, making buckskins because buckskins were being turned into buckskin breaches and they were at a equivalent of blue jeans of the 18th century as how they're often described. Early English colonizers took a liking to the Indian style buckskin breaches, not only because they were hard-wearing and practical. It was also a style thing. The buckskin breaches 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 archterics to go to the grocery store. The buckskin breaches 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 150,000 pounds of buckskin a year. We nearly hunted deer to extinction and 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're wanting 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. Probably an interest in it over the entire spance of the US Army's existence. And so, before the United States Army even existed, there was this trend for buckskin breaches, 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 this Shenandoah back country. 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 Virginia 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 10,000," 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 of 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 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 Klai who has explored the history of service a fair amount. And they thought that mercenaries are going to be terrible soldiers, but some people who are fighting out of patriotism will fight more valiantly and less 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 red coats, but ours were blue. We think of army green now, but it used to be army blue was the color of the military. Corner 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, US 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 were 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 zoning isn't really introducing to the US Army system until the Civil War itself takes a big manufacture. Throughout the course of the Civil War, you have two 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 wore. 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 and done, 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 uniform 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. US inspector. And these inspectors came from a branch of the US military known. As the quartermaster department, which would later become the quartermaster core. This is the division of the military, responsible for feeding, sheltering, transporting, and clothing, the troops. This is not a heavy flannel design. But it's also unstructured. It also is not. It's completely, completely unstructured. Colonel and I were at the quartermaster core museum in Fort Leigh in Virginia, so we were able to look at some of the samples from American uniform history. This is a Civil War. This is the saddle coat. This Civil War coat that Colonel 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, who's really nice. Wow. Here you go. And this was made from dyed indiglo flannel. And sure enough, there was the quartermaster stamp of approval. Oh, this is a nice, 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 and 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. I mean, it really wasn't an ongoing series of wars. Between 1776 and the early 1900s, there were about 2,500 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 US 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 core 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 forced a creation and mindset of logistical competence at all levels. And after the Civil War, the first mass-produced factory-scale war, this is the first war with excess stuff left over, which kind of gives rise to the surplus industry. 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 his 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. Colonel 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 the super fancy plume on this pression and this pression inspired helmet. All the gold tassels and hide. The American army is now copying the pressions who have beat the French in the Franco-Pression War. The US is still wearing their signature army blue, but the style is now so fancy pants. We take a lot more pression 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 buttplug 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 like 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. Although Teddy Roosevelt liked to pass himself off as the ultimate manly hunter rugged outdoorsman, he was a New York City kid. It's just so funny to me that I could just hop on the subway and go to the theater Roosevelt birthplace. It's right here, it's a Manhattan. In the 1800s, the Roosevelt's were one of the richest families in New York City. There it is, he's 20th Street. Theodore Roosevelt Way 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 said in his autobiography that his father was the greatest man he ever knew. Theodore Roosevelt senior does sound pretty great, even though my tour guide also sounds pretty biased himself. Theodore Roosevelt senior was outstanding in the fact that he was a typical 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 senior was very nurturing to his four children, including his poor sickly son, Teddy. Our future president, born with severe asthma, and that asthma, it was fear that it would overtake him at any point in time. And he is looking at his four children and says, I am so, so proud of your brilliance, and I am so disappointed that you are fed 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 we have to build ourselves up. We must lead the spread of his life." 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, I 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 yellow hot coffee in the United States. Cheers! Coffee in conjunction with physical exercise transformed him. And Roosevelt is 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 andachronistic hunter from the previous century in a buck's skin suit. He can rehabilitate himself and define himself more as a cowboy, a gunslinger, a hardened frontiers man. 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 color work, the mood from a farm economy, a rural economy to a more urban economy, and more and more middle class men, are sitting at a desk, doing desk jobs instead of strenuous labor. Oh no, fear of 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 metal. And at the very end of that year, December 29, 1890, United States soldiers of the Seventh 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 seized 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 Klyagan, 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 need 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 and 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-crust periodical, the arena warned, "The new danger will be peace wrought, peace wrought." 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 and 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 is middle class women. 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 do 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 that looks as if she should soon be obliged to do their work as well as our own, or nothing will be done. The 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 courts, 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 woman 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. Francis 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 is 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 US Secretary of State and a United 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 wrought, saying, war is healthy to a nation. And a little bloodletting would be an adrobably good thing about this time for the people of the United States. They talked about their fears of overdecidence, 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 skutures 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. An arbitrationist 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 was off in 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 struggle for 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 Hurst 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 a heroic chivalrous nightly, men going off in 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 unbocal in advancing their interests in 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 fucking war? Arbitration, I 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 begging him to please, please, please declare war on Spain. His opponents on both sides of the aisle were very ridiculed. They kept saying the United States needs a man in the White House. Theodore Roosevelt famously said that McKinley had the backbone of a chalk that exclair. 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 dying. 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 vote on congressmen, all our cutters first, and if an honorable man were insulted, he would not honor his trade. He would fight back. McKinley functionally gives in, he punts the decision to declare war or 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 volunteered to enlist, and they asked 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 roughwriters. Teddy Roosevelt, when he went to Cuba with the roughwriters, he worked out the actual ethnic composition of his unit. Phil Klein says the roughwriters 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 roughwriters, 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 Benetanad into victory at San Juan Hill, although he makes it sound like they single-handedly liberated Cuba. It was Roosevelt would have believed that they played a major role because he was a massive self-motor. 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. Roosevelt wore his wide-brimmed cowboy-looking roughwriters hat to the 1900 Republican Convention, and there he was hailed as the heroic fighter and the fighting Republican. It led to a new generation of military heroes. It rehabilitated the upper crust, Harvard-educated, white-collar, theater Roosevelt 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 chocolatey-clair insult. McKinley was looking for a military hero to run as his running mate and then selected the war hero. Roosevelt, and then when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the fighting 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 U.S. 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 had attacked Spain and as many of their colonies as we could reach. The United States ended up a next-ing long and also taking Puerto Rico, which was a Spanish colony-praximate to Chuba and did all the annexation of the Philippines. So the U.S. 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 Cedar Roosevelt, who argued that one of the great things about becoming involved in the Philippines, 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-industrous Cuba. And we had become the villain, the monstrous torture of the Philippines. Soldiers returning from the Philippines reported on the cruel lilies 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 argument that war was inherently good for building the old character. That was the bridge into the 20th century. And then it's the 1900s. And Teddy Roosevelt's president and the U.S. has announced its entry onto the global stage. The most territory the United Faces ever had was in 1902. This is how we set down roots on the other side of the world. This is how we had controlled the Philippines for a long time. This is how we reserved Guantanamo Bay. This is how we have Guam and Puerto Rico. This is how we went from the edge of arbitration to the other extreme. We showed world powers that we don't need a lot of provocation to get involved in other country's issues. So it is short of the roots of like America world police. Significant roads. 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 hatch jacket, his bandana, and his set of gloves that he wore in the Spanish American War. A Lisa 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 John T. French or the Stately Prussians, during our era of colonial ambition, we started to mimic the colonial outfits of the British Empire. Here's Colonel again. Kaki has its origins going back to like the British Empire in India as like a summer uniform. When the Spanish American War first began, American enlisted soldiers arrived to those various Spanish colonies and their blue sackcoats. 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-continuforms 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 smokey. 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 in the course of the 19th century is the introduction of rifle weapons that are easily reloadable. Which means the average infantry man 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 wars 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 Truffelman, who is me. But I have a lot of guardrails on these things. Alice Embaranger 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, Yes, me and El Sayad, who goes through and asks questions like Dubbo Headwales lived to 250 years old. Then after I add music, which is by Royale, with theme songs by Asasami. I send it to Jocelyn Gonzales, an engineer at PRX, who mastered and mixed it. And thank you so much to Angel Ellis and iconic journalist and her own right, who I can't believe listen to this. Thanks as well to Audrey Mardovich and the whole team at Radio Topia, I could not make this work without Radio Topia. I also could not make this work without Drew Helm. To see images of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider outfit and just a little bit of Buck Mason's military collection, go to articlesofinterest.substac.com.