From slaveholders fearing rebellion to patriarchs threatened by suffragettes, much of the scholarship on American masculinity focuses on men in crisis. White men are often portrayed as continuously jittery, always teetering on the edge of losing their birthright. But there are moments when this anxiety reaches a fever pitch, when the media and cultural critics turn their attention sharply to the plight of men. One such moment was at the turn of the last century, during a period of rapid urbanization and stark economic inequality.

Americans are currently enduring another prolonged bout of unease, stretching back at least six years. Since the Great Recession began, there has been a general handwringing in the media about the state of men—even the End of Men. The economic downturn disproportionately affected men, and it is clearer than ever that the single-breadwinner family is finally dead. The "traditional" role of the man as the primary provider is now firmly out of reach for most Americans. Which is why it seems particularly apt that (mostly) white, young, urban, middle-class men have once again picked up a symbol invented in the early twentieth century by men very much like themselves, a symbol that has long been gathering dust.

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The lumberjack looms large in the American imagination. He has decked out pavilions at world’s fairs, been built to giant scale as a highway attraction, and his best representative, Paul Bunyan, is often cited as our greatest folk hero. But for all his symbolic power, he is a fairly new invention. The lumberjack, as we know him, only came onto the scene as a symbol of American manhood a little over a century ago, at a moment when American men were in desperate need of a hero.

At the turn of the last century, middle-class white men were, everyone seemed to agree, in crisis. They were effete, anxious, tired, and depressed. Magazines and advice books worried that they had lost their vigor—the industrial economy and urban life demanded too much time inside, too much brain-work. Clerical jobs in dingy offices provided few opportunities for advancement to the ranks of the industrial elite, much less for feats of bravery and derring-do. Men trapped in cities began suffering from neurasthenia, a new disease that skyrocketed to almost epidemic status in the 1880s and 1890s. Neurasthenia was the overtaxing of the nervous system, a sort of male hysteria. Some wealthy and educated urban men suffered from what historian T. J. Jackson Lears called “cultural asphyxiation … a sense that bourgeois existence had become stifling and ‘unreal.’” While women were ordered to bed rest for hysteria, the cure for men seemed to be just the opposite: They had lost their vital force, and they needed it back by getting in touch with their primitive, masculine nature. To do so, they looked westward.