Tore Olson

He writes this multi-book series called The Winning of the West.

He was obsessed with, you know, going out to the Dakotas, ranching, riding on horseback and all this sort of stuff.

Well, a lot of the reason why has to do with his anxieties of what life was like back home, which is New York, right?

He's a wealthy New Yorker.

He's living at a moment when industrialization is redefining American cities.

When people are moving off of farms and moving into factories or offices for him, very much offices because he comes from this well-to-do background and they're doing work that's super different than what they'd grown up with.

Right.

They're not performing muscular tasks on a farm anymore.

They're balancing checkbooks.

They are, you know, looking at accounting ledgers.

They are typing letters.

And for Roosevelt, this made him really anxious because he believed that this was affecting American manhood.

He believed that office life, that industrial urban life was emasculating men, that it was basically removing their masculine prowess.

And that made him very nervous.

So he sees the West as this safety valve that can restore this fading American masculinity or grandiosity or whatever.

So when he's looking at South Dakota, he's really just seeing a mirror inverse of New York City, which is really important to know.

That's right.

Many Americans were very anxious about that because they really saw, you know, especially white, well-to-do Americans.

They'd look at Europe and they're trying to define themselves in opposition to that, to be certain.

Right.