As the United States marks 250 years since its founding, it is worth asking what kind of man this country has spent two and a half centuries trying to produce.

The answer is not simple. American manhood has never been one thing. It has been citizen, soldier, farmer, husband, father, worker, provider, dissenter, preacher, protester, immigrant, enslaved person, liberator, boss, laborer, veteran, coach, loner and neighbor. It has included courage and cruelty, discipline and denial, sacrifice and domination. But one idea has run through much of American history: a man should be able to stand on his own.

That ideal has produced real strength. It helped create men who took risks, crossed oceans, built homes, fought wars, started businesses, organized unions, raised families and served their communities. But it also carried a dangerous assumption: that needing help was failure, that emotional restraint was maturity, that economic success proved moral worth, and that a man who struggled had only himself to blame. We are now living with the cost of that belief.

In American Manhood, the historian E. Anthony Rotundo describes the shift from an older communal model of manhood to the rise of the self-made man. In the early republic, a man’s identity was shaped by household, church, town and obligation. Over time, as the market economy expanded, American men were increasingly judged by achievement, independence and visible success. Manhood became something to prove.

Michael Kimmel makes a similar point in Manhood in America. American masculinity, he argues, has been shaped by anxiety as much as confidence. Men were not merely trying to be good. They were trying not to be seen as weak. The fear of humiliation became a central force in male life.

That fear did not affect all men equally. Black men, Indigenous men, immigrant men and poor men were often denied the dignity that white American culture claimed to prize. Frederick Douglass understood this better than almost anyone. His fight for........

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