First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity by Maurizio Valsania (review)

Reviewed by: First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity by Maurizio Valsania Toby Ditz First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity. By Maurizio Valsania. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 415 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Maurizio Valsania's First Among Men is not a conventional biography. It is instead a thematic reappraisal of George Washington's character—one that pays more attention to his physical ailments than to his military campaigns, and more to his tailors and London clothiers than to his exploits as a military leader and president. Embodied masculinity and the stylization of the body are at the center of the book, and Valsania handles these themes with brio. Readers who do not need another doorstop-sized biography filled with the details of Washington's public life will find First Among Men a pleasurable read. But it also has shortcomings. Valsania wishes to rescue Washington from the distortions of nineteenth-century idolatry that took root in the "muscular patriotism" (4) of the Jacksonian era and give us instead a Washington who embodies a distinctively eighteenth-century brand of elite masculinity. Exit Washington, the "exalted icon of impossible strength" (9). Enter the paradoxical Washington: strong but capable of "graceful elegance" (23), eager to personify refinement but also violent and inured to cruelty, self-contained but capable of manly tears and intimate friendships. Valsania's takedown of received versions of Washington worship is entertaining, if sometimes given to hyperbole, and his portrait of a less familiar Washington embedded in an eighteenth-century milieu is refreshing. As for embodied masculinity, the author takes seriously the proposition that "the mind is corporeal" (32). Speaking of Washington's childhood immersion in the outdoors and the physical challenges he faced as a young surveyor and soldier in the backcountry at the start of the French and Indian War, Valsania remarks that "nature entered George's body" as "a sense of growing empowerment and … vulnerability" (41). It shaped his character as a brave man accustomed to physical hardship but who was also unromantic about the landscape surrounding him. Valsania also explores at length Washington's many illnesses and bodily infirmities, including his painful abscesses and tumors and his bouts of dysentery and malaria. Making use of these graphic details allows Valsania to remind readers that the eighteenth-century experience of self was, even for privileged men such as Washington, chronically saturated with bodily debility, often compounded by painful medical interventions. For Washington and others like him, these were "tests of masculinity and self-control" (104). Valsania's approach to the stylization of the masculine body is insightful and often amusing. He gives us, for instance, a wonderful portrait of End Page 469 Washington as an excellent dancer. In a lively aside on the minuet, he argues that it conferred on the men who mastered it exactly that combination of grace and strength so highly valued at the time. We also learn that the eighteenth-century waistcoat is essentially a man's corset: its construction forced the chest upward and the shoulders back, creating the hyper-erect posture that heralded the ideal male figure so familiar to us in early formal portraits of Washington. Valsania's analysis of material culture enlivens his discussion of embodied masculinity. Well aware of how his clothing and household furnishings could signal refinement and "genteel masculinity" (257), Washington was a fuss budget about tailors, grousing constantly about faulty measurements and unflattering garments. And like many wealthy Americans, he regularly complained about the quality of goods sent to him by London suppliers and insisted on the latest in men's fashion. He also paid detailed attention to his equipage and to the decorating of the public rooms in the White House and at Mount Vernon, hoping somewhat anxiously to achieve what he called "a handsome style" (261), while avoiding anything that smacked of "a heavy & tawdry look" (221). Valsania's portrait of Washington effectively demonstrates that the "persona" extends beyond the body to include "the innumerable things that surround us" and "make us more visible" (225) in the world. Valsania's delight in the distinctiveness of the eighteenth century is, as I...