Part of the traditional allure of military service was that it promised romantic interest. This was typified at West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office, composed of military wives who taught etiquette to cadets and fielded love letters from girls at Vassar College and other nearby schools. But as the feminist and Vietnam anti-war movements coalesced, the uniform lost its luster.
In 1970, for example, two hundred Vassar students congregated at West Point’s gates where they handed out flowers to cadets and urged them to abandon their commissions. Some cadets snatched the flowers and ate them. Another sarcastically told a protestor that he couldn’t speak because he was on his way to “poison gas class.” A third, boyish-looking senior vented that the anti-war movement “makes you wonder why the hell you should go risk your neck for those kinds of people.”
In this talk, Jasper Craven traces how the darkening mood of military masculinity amid the Cold Wars informed the War on the Terror, the manosphere, and the personal psychology of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Mileage
Projector and connections for laptop
Contact Jacob Pelletier at jpelletier@vermonthumanities.org.
Jasper Craven is a Northeast Kingdom native and former VTDigger staff writer who covers men and the military for outlets including Harper’s, POLITICO Magazine, NY Mag, Wired, GQ, and The New York Times. His first foray on this beat came in 2018 via a seven-part investigative series for VTDigger into sexual misconduct and an ultra-masculine “Top Gun” culture within the Vermont National Guard. That work prompted reforms, firings, and the resignation of the Adjutant General.
While George Washington aimed to curb his own influence and image lest the citizenry come to view him as a monarch, he frequently indulged romantic ideas around his manliness. Jasper Craven shows how the figure he allegedly cut – as the “political savior of our nation” who bravely “conducted the Americans’ thro seas of blood” – helped form America’s foundational warrior archetype, and its closely related, ever-evolving masculine mold.
On the 75th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye, Jasper Craven chronicles the life of J.D. Salinger from a young cadet at Valley Forge Military Academy to an interrogator during World War II, including via unpublished writings provided by his estate, to illuminate the fiercely anti-war sentiments of his most famous novel.
Part of the traditional allure of military service was that it promised romantic interest. This was typified at West Point’s Cadet Hostess Office, composed of military wives who taught etiquette to cadets and fielded love letters from girls at Vassar College and other nearby schools. But as the feminist and Vietnam anti-war movements coalesced, the uniform lost its luster.
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