Gear: Chapter 1

Almost all clothes have something to do with the military. But one industry in particular has a lot to do with the military. The first episode of the new season establishes how the American military came to be, and how they were dressed. To see images and learn more, go to articlesofinterest.substack.com https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/ Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Listen up. Focus your attention on me. Now, do not infuriate me and make me repeat myself. Do you understand me? Chapter one.

• 0:11Avery Trufelman?

  Let me start with the basics, the most basic basics. Khakis, button downs, crisp white t-shirts. These are all clothes that one goes to buy at Buck Mason.

• 0:25Speaker 02

  And so if we think about what is a classic closet and what belongs within it, then our job as a brand is to make the best version of those archetypes.

• 0:36Avery Trufelman?

  Buck Mason was founded in 2013 and has positioned itself to be a purveyor of classic, cool clothes that are so timeless, they almost elude description. And I was in their Los Angeles headquarters with Kyle Fitzgibbons.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  I am chief design and creative officer.

• 0:54Avery Trufelman?

  Kyle told me that this brand's whole classic, cool vision was inspired by vintage clothes, which makes sense. I mean, clothes are considered classic for a reason. Kyle told me they keep a whole stockpile of vintage clothes in storage, but they brought out just a little section to show me. Wait, oh, you're really not fucking around. I was led into a conference room that was dripping with old clothes. It was in piles on the table. It was dangling from racks. It was hanging from the walls.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  The actual collection's a lot bigger than this.

• 1:24Avery Trufelman?

  These clothes are the stuff of Kyle's work. This is what he and the other designers play with and take apart on a daily basis. They're copying elements of these classic, old clothes, down to the tiny details.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Stitch color, fabric finish, trim finish, things like that.

• 1:42Avery Trufelman?

  Quite literally, they're copying the details.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  So what we'll do is like, let's say, one of the designers is making this pant, what they'll do is they'll get a magnifying glass and they'll count the stitches per inch on an out seam or a side seam or a fly and then replicate that.

• 1:59Avery Trufelman?

  Replicating tiny details is a way of grafting a little character onto a new piece of clothing. To Kyle, this is about giving a garment a sense of soul, a feeling like it has a life to it. But almost all of these classic, timeless garments shared a very similar past life. All of these garments that had been collected for me in this conference room were all old, military surplus clothes.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  If you pick things off of this wall, there's almost every archetype for every modern piece of clothing.

• 2:33Avery Trufelman?

  Like what are we seeing?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  I see flight jackets, bomber jackets, 1950s and 60s automotive car culture jackets, every version of a field jacket, chore jackets, it's all there.

• 2:45Avery Trufelman?

  Almost all classic menswear is based on 20th century militaria.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  I think the majority, if not all of the industry, subconsciously acknowledges how this is the archive. You either acknowledge the fact that these spawn from military garments, or you don't. But it is. Yeah.

• 3:06Avery Trufelman?

  I would, in fact, wager that almost every single garment and accessory I have ever reported on has had some connection to war.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  I have a few pairs of Korean war-era pants that I wear that are super comfortable. They got all the right pockets. Everything's perfectly thought out. I'm like, yeah, there's a reason why Old Navy makes a cheap imitation of these pants.

• 3:31Avery Trufelman?

  And clothing's connection to war is not simply a matter of aesthetics. The United States military is involved in a very practical way in the creation of clothing itself. This is something that Alex Goulet realized, somewhat ironically, in his quest to become a more ethical shopper.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  If clothing is supposed to reflect your values, then what are my values? And where I think I ended up was that if you can buy something close by to you that was made by a neighbor, the level of transparency is the highest.

• 4:07Avery Trufelman?

  For the last 10 years, Alex Goulet has only bought clothes that were made in the United States with as fair labor practices as he can find.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Nothing can be confirmed 100%, but for me, it's worked out really well. And I have a really healthy relationship with the things I wear.

• 4:23Avery Trufelman?

  And Alex is determined to help other Americans shop like he does. So can you tell me what this is?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  This is a book project called Crafted with Pride. It's a directory of made in USA clothing, footwear, and accessories.

• 4:39Avery Trufelman?

  Crafted with Pride is a really cool resource. It's printed in yellow, like a phone book.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  There's 1,400 companies represented.

• 4:46Avery Trufelman?

  Alex and his co-author organized this guidebook by product. So you could be like, I need a handbag. And then you could turn to the handbag page, and there are a number of different American purse manufacturers. Granted, there are not many, but there are some. Other products, however, are easier to find in these pages. Like, if you want a backpack, you're in luck.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Gore-Tex jackets, down jackets. This company makes all kayak and rafting gear.

• 5:13Avery Trufelman?

  Most of the entries in this guide are from the outdoor industry in all its various forms.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Tons of biking gear, a lot of hunting stuff.

• 5:21Avery Trufelman?

  Is it because Americans are so hardcore and outdoorsy? Sure. But there is another reason why the outdoor industry still has a viable foothold manufacturing in the United States.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Military contractors in the outdoor industry specifically have a pretty long history with working with the military.

• 5:39Avery Trufelman?

  If you page through Alex's guide, you'll see a lot of these small American factories also provide to the military.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Made in USA, the way it exists right now is in a lot of part due to military contracts.

• 5:54Avery Trufelman?

  Thanks to the 1941 Berry Amendment, all clothes made for the United States military have to be made in the United States. It makes sense, right? It's a matter of national security. We can't have our army clothes made in, say, Vietnam or China, because what if, say, we went to war with Vietnam or China? This is one of the last things that have been holding up American clothing manufacturing over the last couple of decades. Almost every other kind of clothing has moved its production overseas. It's not like the reason they're still manufacturing in the US, but it sounds like it kind of is, the military and Berry compliance.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, no, absolutely. The only reason these things are made in the US is Berry compliance at this point in time.

• 6:39Avery Trufelman?

  If you buy something that says "Made in the USA", its zippers could come from a factory that makes zippers for the military. Its buttons could come from a factory that makes buttons for the military. There's hardly a reason an American factory would make thread without the military. It's just embedded in American garments.

• 6:59Avery Trufelman?

  So Alex feels very mixed about this.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  You know, it's sad that some of the more technical, interesting products in here were made for the military. There's definitely companies that have military contracts that we did not include that are like tactical gear that increases kill rates. And you're just like, okay, I don't know if I want that in the book. But like, the military informs so much of what we do. I mean, the internet was invented by the military. You know, like, name 30 products, probably half of them were military inventions.

• 7:33Avery Trufelman?

  And the contracts with the Department of Defense have been keeping manufacturers afloat, so they can make all their other cool stuff.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  You benefit from having the military there as your primary customer. And then these other smaller brands are also eating from that same trough. And that's especially true in outdoor industries, because they tend to make super technical products.

• 7:55Avery Trufelman?

  The military and the outdoor industry are interwoven. The outdoor industry had a huge role in forming how the United States military looks. And the military, in turn, came to shape the outdoor industry.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Military is just, it's a crazy section of the world that like, I don't think about as much.

• 8:14Avery Trufelman?

  Same. I also used to not think about the military. I mean, I thought about it, in that I was against it categorically, as an institution. But I didn't, like, know any veterans or active duty soldiers for most of my life. Basically, until I started working on this series. And if you're listening to this, and you are a soldier or a veteran, I can just feel you rolling your eyes at this classically clueless civilian. I know. We live in this moment in history where there's a gaping rift between this country's military and this country's civilians. There's even a term for it, like, college students take courses on the military civilian divide.

• 8:55Avery Trufelman?

  And it's gotten to the very practical nightmare, where, as I write this, President Trump is ordering Marines and the National Guard into American cities to detain American citizens. We've been pitted against each other. And yet, oddly enough...

• 9:14Avery Trufelman?

  American soldiers and American civilians have never been more intertwined than we both are now in our clothing. We all wear the same things. Our styles have completely overlapped. Civilians and soldiers alike now wear performance clothes, waterproof shells, sweat-wicking layers, often manufactured by the same companies. We all wear outdoor wear, whether or not we're outdoors. And we helped each other get to this place. This season of Articles of Interest is called Gear.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  Hey there. It's Robyn from PRX. If you're a longtime listener of Radiotopia, you may know that we had a podcast that ran from 2016 to 2020, discussing every episode of the show The West Wing. Well, I'm excited to tell you The West Wing Weekly is back. Joshua Molina, who starred on The West Wing as Will Bailey, and Rishi Kesh Hirway, creator and host of Song Exploder, have reunited to discuss the hit Netflix political thriller, The Diplomat. Just as they did in their original run, they're discussing each episode of the series in sequence, joined by special guests from the show and from the real world of diplomacy. Rishi and Josh will be wrapping up the first season with a special live taping at Union Chapel in London on November 14. Subscribe now to The West Wing Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 10:54Avery Trufelman?

  I always thought that brands like Prada and Louis Vuitton and Tiffany were way beyond my pay grade, but they're actually not, because at The RealReal, you can get all of these name brands that you know and niche designers you don't yet at up to 90% off retail. And The RealReal is so serious about authentication, you know that every single thing is guaranteed authentic. The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale. With over 10,000 new arrivals daily, no one

• 11:23Avery Trufelman?

  Does resale like The RealReal. And now get $25 off your first purchase when you go to the realreal.com/articles. That's the realreal.com/articles to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at the realreal.com/articles. The glasses are green, the color of sea glass, you could say. They are exactly my husband's prescription. They have blue light blocking technology for his computer time, and they were $30. I got them at Zenni. Zenni is an online eyewear shop with so many stylish glasses, prescription and sunglasses and customizable lens options, all starting at under $30.

• 12:05Avery Trufelman?

  And Zenni's virtual try on lets you preview how a frame is gonna look on you before you buy it, so it doesn't feel like a shot in the dark. I feel like most people trying on glasses take pictures of themselves anyway to see how it'll look from the outside. Zenni's tool will help you figure out the right pair effortlessly. I just got my husband these Zenni glasses, and then lo and behold, they have become his everyday pair, arguably his signature. Give the gift of Zenni this holiday season. Glasses, sunglasses, whatever they need. Go to zenni.com/podcast and use code PODCAST15 for 15% off plus free shipping over $65. Styles sell out, so don't wait. That's Z E N N I dot com slash podcast, promo code PODCAST15.

• 12:47Avery Trufelman?

  Zenni.com slash podcast, code PODCAST15. It does not take a fashion journalist to tell you that everybody is wearing outdoor clothes more. Look around you. For years now leggings have been pants and runners have been dashing by you in increasingly more cyborgian rainproof shells. Bankers and businessmen have traded blazers for Patagonia vests and punks have swapped leather for camouflage. And even I, who vowed I would never wear sweatpants ever, have been dressing like Sporty Spice. Why are we all wearing outdoor performance gear? Like, why are we wearing Arc'teryx to like, go to the grocery store and buy eggs?

• 13:26Speaker 05

  I think there are two different reasons. And one that will be a little more palatable for all the listeners to hear is that it works well, right? Effective in like a day like today, it's raining outside and it's nice to be able to stay warm and dry, even if you're just going down the block.

• 13:40Avery Trufelman?

  This is Rachel S. Gross.

• 13:41Speaker 05

  I'm a history professor at the University of Colorado Denver.

• 13:44Avery Trufelman?

  And she is the author of Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America.

• 13:50Speaker 05

  The other answer is a much kind of deeper one, and it's a historical question.

• 13:54Avery Trufelman?

  Hell, yeah. Here we go.

• 13:55Speaker 05

  It's about what meanings do people attach to the kinds of clothing that they wear, to the brands that they're wearing on their chests. And it is steeped in American lore about recovering the rugged masculinity of the American frontier.

• 14:08Avery Trufelman?

  By the way, I know America is a landmass much larger than the United States. I also get annoyed when people in the United States think they are the only Americans. But please, have pity on me. The name of my country is so long, and no one says USians or United Stadians. And so, please know that for my purposes, when I say America, I do mean the United States of America, okay? And so, the United States of America, for the purposes of this podcast, America, is about to turn 250 years old, just narrowly outliving some rough-eyed rockfish and bowhead whales. And yet, for fully the last half of our relatively young existence, we have

• 14:53Avery Trufelman?

  been already overwhelmed with a national sense of nostalgia.

• 14:59Speaker 05

  The notion that somehow Americans of the past, the pioneers, were tougher, more virile than their urban effeminate counterparts.

• 15:09Avery Trufelman?

  In the hearts of American men, for at least 125 years, there's been a gap unfillable in soft, cushy, effete modernity.

• 15:19Speaker 05

  It is only by encountering some kind of tough, physical challenge that they can recover some sense of that lost masculinity.

• 15:25Avery Trufelman?

  Donald Trump Jr. goes on expensive hunting trips to shoot rare sheep and endangered duck. Mark Zuckerberg bow hunts wild boar.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Outdoor recreation, going camping, hunting, or fishing, when it is pursued as a recreational activity in the 19th century, it is often men looking to perform that form of manhood.

• 15:43Avery Trufelman?

  And so what do men wear when they are performing manhood? There was always an insistence that, no, it wasn't a costume. It wasn't style. No, men don't care about that kind of stuff. It was about pure practicality.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  And so being anti-fashion was one of the most important touchstones of outdoor style from the 19th century onward.

• 16:03Avery Trufelman?

  But yeah, fashion is totally a part of going outside. It always has been. Even just the simple idea that you change your clothes to go do a specific activity.

• 16:13Speaker 05

  I think people have long put on separate costumes to go hike or hunt. And this isn't a particularly American phenomenon. In England, the elite classes also had specialized outfit to do similar activities outside of the city at their lodges.

• 16:28Avery Trufelman?

  But American outdoorsmen had a sort of American outdoorsman costume.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  In the United States, though, it wasn't English hunting suits that were popular in the 19th century, but rather an odd combination of white people looking at American Indian style and what they thought pioneers would have worn in the US past.

• 16:50Avery Trufelman?

  American outdoorsmen were supposed to dress like Johnny Appleseed and Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. And what did those guys wear? Fringy, rugged, leather buckskin suits.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  And so that means we get a lot of white men wearing buckskin suits because they think it's a combination of the expert lore of both Native American guides and also the Daniel Boones that they want to imitate as well.

• 17:16Avery Trufelman?

  And where did many of these white men get this idea from? Guidebooks. A writer named William H. H. Murray, or Adirondack Murray, arguably kickstarted the outdoor recreation industry in 1869 when he published a guidebook called Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp Life in the Adirondacks. This was a guidebook that instructed city dwellers what to do, where to stay, and how to dress the part of the outdoorsman.

• 17:43Speaker 05

  The ethos of the 19th century outdoors was woodcraft, crafting what you need from nature's storehouse in order to survive.

• 17:50Avery Trufelman?

  This inspired a raft of new guidebooks, some written by white men hiding behind Indigenous pen names, who endorsed the idea of crafting over buying and framed the nature vacation as anti-materialistic. "True American outdoorsmen," these books said, "needed nothing from the namby-pamby world of commerce."

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Many guidebooks often told its readers, "Don't buy anything. If you do, you're essentially showing yourself to be a beginner who doesn't know anything really about what the nature experience is supposed to be." And so, a lot of readers took that to heart and thought, "I have to craft my own buckskin suit." And that included not just shooting the deer, the buck, but also learning how to brain tan the hide in order to get it soft and pliable, and sewing the suit together themselves.

• 18:38Avery Trufelman?

  But did everyone do this?

• 18:41Speaker 05

  Very few people did, including the guidebook authors themselves.

• 18:45Avery Trufelman?

  No. The most avid wearers of buckskin suits functionally went shopping.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  They often turned to Native American women, who were the recognized experts at sewing buckskin suits.

• 18:56Avery Trufelman?

  So they would just buy them?

• 18:58Speaker 05

  They would just buy them.

• 18:59Avery Trufelman?

  Shopping is a cornerstone of the American relationship with the outdoors. To this day, when you think about it, it is sort of perversely fascinating that any trip into the outdoors starts with getting kitted up. You have to go shopping. You need all this stuff to do what ought to be the most natural thing, going to sleep outside. And already, in the 1860s, America was already imagining how much more self-sufficient, how much more rugged men used to be. But come on. Since it was a cornerstone of the founding of the United States to completely ignore, if not annihilate, any form of Indigenous knowledge about how to actually live in this land and adapt to this climate.

• 19:44Avery Trufelman?

  White settlers didn't know how to actually dress for this country. And so they bought stuff. They always have. It's foundational. If you go back all the way to the 1700s, to the earliest days, before the official founding of this nation, it was always a thing to shop for gear.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  With the help of the Native Americans, making buckskins, because buckskins were being turned into buckskin breeches. And they were a collant of blue jeans of the 18th century, is how they're often described.

• 20:16Avery Trufelman?

  Early English colonizers took a liking to the Indian-style buckskin breeches, not only because they were hard-wearing and practical. It was also a style thing. The buckskin breeches had this rugged, indigenous look to them. Americans were always dressing up to look more rugged than they were. This was the 1700s version of wearing arcteryx to go to the grocery store. The buckskin breeches became so popular in the colonies that the trend spread back to England. It got to the point where, in the 1750s, Savannah, Georgia, was processing 150,000 pounds of buckskin a year.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  We nearly hunted deer to extinction in Georgia and the Carolinas.

• 20:57Avery Trufelman?

  This is Joshua Kerner, who I'm just going to call Kerner.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  A lot of people do say, "This is what Kerner says," when they reference me in other places.

• 21:05Avery Trufelman?

  Kerner is actually an attorney in Richmond, Virginia. His day job has nothing to do with this. But he moonlights as a war reenactor and a deep archival research obsessive. Kerner is, in fact, so well-versed in the history of military uniforms and uniform procurement that I've seen actual military historians and archivists defer to him.

• 21:25Speaker 06

  I would feel very OK with being called a citizen researcher, if you're wanting to be generous. If you want to call me a World War II nutso, that is also fine.

• 21:33Avery Trufelman?

  As an aside, Kerner holds the record for the longest interview I have ever done in my career, clocking in at 14 hours, 10 minutes, and 45 seconds.

• 21:42Speaker 06

  I have an interest in it over the entire span of the US Army's existence.

• 21:47Avery Trufelman?

  And so, before the United States Army even existed, there was this trend for buckskin breeches. And so, a lot of deer had to be shot to meet this demand. And so, there was a garment that the hunters around the Virginia colony developed to hunt all these deer for this global fashion trend. And the garment that these Virginia hunters wore was called, simply enough.

• 22:14Avery Trufelman?

  The hunting shirt.

• 22:15Speaker 06

  The hunting shirt, which is something that comes from the Shenandoah back country.

• 22:20Avery Trufelman?

  And it's decorated with fringe, so it still has this faux indigenous look to it. But it's way cheaper than buckskin.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  It's made out of linen.

• 22:30Avery Trufelman?

  A hunting shirt is a big, roomy smock. Super simple garment that's easy to make.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  You just have to finish off some seeds, you pull some fringe, and you have an easy uniform.

• 22:40Avery Trufelman?

  So militias in Virginia start wearing these hunting shirts. It turns out to be a simple way to get uniformity because this shirt is very distinctive and you can just slide it on over anything.

• 22:51Speaker 06

  It does mean because the way they're cut means you just wear it over whatever else you have.

• 22:55Avery Trufelman?

  And then, when these Virginian militias hear that their brothers in the North need help fighting the British, they march up to Massachusetts, wearing their hunting shirts, many now with the words "liberty or death" embroidered on the chest. Once the Virginians got to New England, General George Washington himself quickly requested, quote, "a number of hunting shirts, not less than 10,000," because he knew that a uniform of some kind would, quote, "have a happier tendency to unite the men."

• 23:24Speaker 06

  The hunting shirt gets introduced into the wider army during the siege of Boston in 1775, thanks to the arrival of Washington and the Corps of Riflemen.

• 23:34Avery Trufelman?

  So there was this idea that maybe American fighters would all wear hunting shirts. This would be a sort of non-uniform-uniform. This might be perfect, because maybe the United States wouldn't need an official, proper uniform, because this nation wouldn't have an official, proper army. A lot of the founding fathers, especially Thomas Jefferson, looked back to early democracies of antiquity, and they were like, "Look, a standing army usually means trouble."

• 24:09Speaker 06

  Looking back at the classical ideas and the idea that the reason Rome fell and the Roman Republic fell was the standing army.

• 24:15Avery Trufelman?

  Military coups are known to happen.

• 24:16Speaker 06

  But also, standing armies are expensive.

• 24:18Avery Trufelman?

  The Republic is young, and we don't have any money yet.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  So there isn't a lot of money for Congress to play with to give an army.

• 24:26Avery Trufelman?

  And paying people to do military service, or requiring service in America, would be antithetical to the whole project. I mean, demanding service was what kings used to do. But anyway, we don't need an army. We are, in fact... Better than that. Perhaps, Washington and Jefferson thought, our citizens, white, male ones, of course, will voluntarily take up arms for the cause of democracy.

• 24:53Speaker 07

  The founding fathers somewhat fetishized the idea of the citizen soldier as being someone who's going to be superior to a career soldier who fights for money because they're fighting out of patriotism.

• 25:05Avery Trufelman?

  This is author and veteran Phil Cly who has explored the history of service a fair amount.

• 25:09Speaker 07

  And they thought that mercenaries are going to be terrible soldiers, but people who are fighting out of patriotism will fight more valiantly and thus better.

• 25:18Avery Trufelman?

  So this was the whole idea behind our militias. These were just supposed to be groups of folks who would take up arms voluntarily, passionately, at the drop of a hat, who didn't need fancy uniforms or anything. They would just toss on their linen hunting shirts and go off and fight for their friends and countrymen. Just get on your hunting shirt, let's go.

• 25:38Speaker 07

  And then at the Battle of Brooklyn.

• 25:39Avery Trufelman?

  One of the first major battles of the revolution.

• 25:41Speaker 07

  The Hessian mercenaries were professionals at war, and the Americans weren't.

• 25:46Avery Trufelman?

  The British had hired German mercenary soldiers, the Hessians, who were ruthless killers for hire.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  At the Battle of Brooklyn, Hessian mercenaries whooped the citizen soldiers pretty badly.

• 25:55Avery Trufelman?

  There's this big reconsideration. Maybe we couldn't just rely on militias. Maybe we did need to have an actual, regular, professional, standing army dressed in something a little bit better than linen smocks. Maybe they should be actual uniforms made of actual sturdy wool. They opted to put soldiers in a British-style uniform. What else did they know? Our colonial button-down regimental coats looked basically identical to the red coats, but ours were blue.

• 26:26Speaker 06

  We think of army green now, but it used to be army blue was the color of the military.

• 26:32Avery Trufelman?

  Kerner again.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  This is like army blue that goes back to the American Revolution.

• 26:35Avery Trufelman?

  Indigo was already growing on early plantations in the United States, so the color blue was easily accessible. On smoky battlefields, where bayonet fighting and shooting happened at close range, team colors had to be clear.

• 26:49Speaker 06

  Because friendly fire is surprisingly common and is bad.

• 26:54Avery Trufelman?

  During the Revolutionary War, US military clothes had a very British influence. And then, when the United States of America won its independence... They started searching for their own identity through their military clothes.

• 27:08Speaker 06

  In the 19th century, what would often happen is an officer would go on an exchange trip to somewhere in Europe, and he would see some uniform items and like, I kind of like that.

• 27:18Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, they wanted the color to stay blue, but the style was called into question.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  A lot of it is taking inspiration from whoever is seen as the dominant military power at the time.

• 27:29Avery Trufelman?

  So we switched to French-style uniforms in the 1840s. We wore these jaunty little caps, and we looked like little nutcracker soldiers. And we are still in that French influence extending into the Civil War, where the Union Army is, for the first time, wearing clothes produced on a mass scale.

• 27:49Speaker 06

  Machine sewing isn't really introduced into the US Army system until the Civil War itself to expedite manufacture.

• 27:54Avery Trufelman?

  Throughout the course of the Civil War, you have 2 million northern soldiers, so a lot of uniforms needed to be produced.

• 28:01Speaker 06

  There is a pattern and drafting division.

• 28:03Avery Trufelman?

  This is the notorious origins of the sizes, small, medium, and large. The government contracted with manufacturers like Brooks Brothers to get uniforms made, still in blue. But contracting uniforms out ended up being a mess. I'm not trying to throw Brooks Brothers under the bus here specifically, but by and large, the government ended up not being able to trust a lot of these private companies.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  Because they want the biggest profit margin, they would get substandard materials, and that wasn't really noticeable until you wore it.

• 28:33Avery Trufelman?

  These substandard materials were called shoddy. This is why, to this day, we still call busted things shoddy.

• 28:41Speaker 06

  Then you had what was called shoddy then, which would easily fall apart.

• 28:45Avery Trufelman?

  And you do not want your pants to rip on the battlefield. It's not a place for a button to come off, or a knit to come undone, or a thread to pull.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  And there was a lot of these lessons that were learned during the American Civil War, and making sure that the government is getting what they're paying for, and that the soldiers on the receiving end are getting the best uniforms that the government can buy.

• 29:04Avery Trufelman?

  This is a trial and error process throughout the Civil War. You finally start having inspectors who would approve military-grade garments with a literal stamp of approval.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Right here, inspection stamp. Yep. Yes, inspector.

• 29:19Avery Trufelman?

  And these inspectors came from a branch of the US military known as the Quartermaster Department, which would later become the Quartermaster Corps. This is the division of the military responsible for feeding, sheltering, transporting, and clothing the troops.

• 29:35Speaker 06

  This is not a heavy flannel.

• 29:37Avery Trufelman?

  But it's also unstructured.

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Unbeliev-- completely unstructured.

• 29:42Avery Trufelman?

  Kerner and I were at the Quartermaster Corps Museum in Fort Lee in Virginia, so we were able to look at some of the samples from American uniform history.

• 29:50Speaker 06

  This is a Civil War coat.

• 29:53Avery Trufelman?

  This Civil War coat that Kerner and I were looking at was a blue flannel coat with gold-toned brass buttons. It almost looked like a blue blazer you'd get at Brooks Brothers. It was really nice. Wow.

• 30:03Speaker 06

  Here you go. And this was made from dyed indiglo flannel.

• 30:07Avery Trufelman?

  And sure enough, there was the Quartermaster's stamp of approval. Oh, this is a nice jacket.

• 30:13Speaker 06

  So while all countries have quartermasters, the Americans take it to a different level of an art form.

• 30:21Avery Trufelman?

  It was this combination of quality controls that were developed during the Civil War and the ongoing land grab from the ongoing bloody Indian wars across the American West, which raged on throughout the century.

• 30:36Speaker 06

  Because of our long history of having to supply an army over a vast nation.

• 30:40Avery Trufelman?

  I mean, this was the process that I was taught in school was just westward expansion. And yet it really was an ongoing series of wars. Between 1776 and the early 1900s, there were about 2,500 battles between North American tribes and the United States Army. That's a pretty rough statistic, though. It varies a lot depending on how you define a battle. Like, is it a battle if the US Army is just opening fire on a bunch of people? Hard to say. But especially after the Civil War, the indigenous population was all the United States military had to focus on. So they did.

• 31:19Speaker 06

  Outside of the Civil War, largely, the American army is a constabulary force that is doled out across the American West.

• 31:27Avery Trufelman?

  In the 1800s, the United States Quartermaster Corps was getting very good at manufacturing a high volume of good quality clothes and then delivering them to far-flung forts.

• 31:37Speaker 06

  And under those circumstances, where you had to supply these far-off garrisons by covered wagon pulled by a horse, it forced a creation and mindset of logistical competence at all levels.

• 31:49Avery Trufelman?

  And after the Civil War, the first mass-produced, factory-scale war, this is the first war with excess stuff left over.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  Which kind of gives rise to the surplus industry.

• 32:00Avery Trufelman?

  It's not widespread yet. There aren't a lot of surplus stores, but the few that do exist are super popular. Take, for example, a Scottish merchant in New York named Francis Bannerman.

• 32:12Speaker 06

  Bannerman gets to start selling off all the surplus dating back to the Civil War.

• 32:16Avery Trufelman?

  Eventually, he acquires so much stuff that he buys a private island to store it all.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  Bannerman's castle is a little bit up the Hudson River. And to give you an idea of how much surplus they had, they were selling these old Civil War rifles for essentially scrap metal.

• 32:31Avery Trufelman?

  And so after the Civil War, there's this very interesting period. It felt, to a lot of Americans, like peacetime. I mean, in the same way that I feel like I live in peacetime, even though I don't. I just live in a bubble. After the Civil War, it was very easy for a lot of Americans to just ignore the Indian Wars. They're still raging on and claiming thousands of lives. So just to make this perfectly clear, this was not a period of peace. Arguably, America has never had a period of peace. But to many Americans, this time did feel like a period of peace after the Civil War. Just know that that's not true. And it started to look like a period of peace.

• 33:16Avery Trufelman?

  Kerner has this pet theory that military dress gets more practical and simple in wartime and increasingly ornate and dressy in what feels like peacetime.

• 33:25Speaker 06

  During war, everything has to Get simplified and ready for the trenches. And then when you get into peace again, the uniform is more concerned with how it looks on the parade ground.

• 33:35Avery Trufelman?

  This period after the Civil War, even though it's not actually peace, this is probably my favorite chapter of the American military uniform. It's bonkers.

• 33:43Speaker 06

  So yeah, this is enlisted men, 1872, 1871. Look at this super fancy plume on this Prussian, on this Prussian-inspired helmet, all the gold tassels and high.

• 33:54Avery Trufelman?

  Totally. Yes. The American Army is now copying the Prussians, who have beat the French in the Franco-Prussian War. The US is still wearing their signature Army blue, but the style is now so fancy pants.

• 34:05Speaker 06

  We take a lot more Prussian influences and adopt a pickle helmet, actually, for a while, for both the Marine Corps and the Army.

• 34:11Avery Trufelman?

  It's that helmet that Otto von Bismarck would become famous for. It looks like it's got this, like, butt plug spike sticking out of the top. You would never know that these are Americans.

• 34:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:21Avery Trufelman?

  And as military uniforms got fancier and fancier and more and more absurd, so did the idea of war in general. East Coast Americans, removed from the ongoing Indian wars in the West, were unaccustomed to going this long without what they would consider an official war. Again, these years after the Civil War were not peaceful. There's a lot of violence happening in the American West, but in the eyes of the American government and many of its people, this feels like a period of peace. And by this logic, an assertive group of activists and legislators were like, maybe this is a part of the ongoing American experiment.

• 35:05Avery Trufelman?

  We got rid of kings, we abolished slavery, and now maybe war is just another antiquated system that we could get rid of. How American is that, right? We have this, like, beautiful, idealistic, hypocritical goal that we have yet to achieve. But we seriously tried to do it. There was a movement to make pacifism an American value. After the break.

• 35:37Avery Trufelman?

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• 36:20Avery Trufelman?

  featuring customer photos and honest reviews, so you can truly find what's the right fit for your home. Wayfair has literally everything imaginable. I recently purchased a cocktail shaker from Alessi, which is so chic and stylish. When refreshing your home this holiday season, Wayfair delivers exactly what you need. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 36:50Avery Trufelman?

  I first heard about The RealReal, I think, a decade ago. Suddenly, it was this place where you could get Prada pumps, and Burberry jackets, and Gucci handbags for a song. Like, I recently got this vintage 90s Yoji Yamamoto skirt that I wear constantly. The RealReal is adding thousands and thousands of items every single day, so it really does still feel like a treasure hunt, even though it has all the convenience of shopping online. And I periodically use it to clean out my closet. They make it so easy. The RealReal sends a representative to my tiny apartment to pick up my things and assess them for me, and then it's done. Money just appears in my account. The RealReal is the most trusted name in authenticated luxury resale. With over 10,000 new arrivals daily,

• 37:34Avery Trufelman?

  no one does resale like The RealReal. And now, get $25 off your first purchase when you go to the realreal.com articals. That's the realreal.com slash Articles to get your $25 off. Start shopping now at therealreal.com/articles. It's such a beautiful feeling to open up your closet and know that you have the right clothes for every occasion. The clothes that make you feel comfortable and warm and totally like yourself. But the only thing better than that feeling is giving it to someone else. This holiday season, turn to Quince. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials. We're talking Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, the kinds of pieces you'd be just

• 38:18Avery Trufelman?

  as happy receiving as gifting. But here's the secret. It's so affordable. Quince's 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters start at just $50, so you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. I actually recently gave my friend the Mongolian cashmere button-down polo sweater. It's so light and so soft, I just needed to share it with her. As long as you're gifting, Quince has so much more than clothing. They've got leather bags, hotel-quality bedding, chef-grade cookware, skincare, candles, jewelry, basically plenty of ways to find luxury for everyone on your list. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.

• 39:01Avery Trufelman?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Articles of Interest. It's the best way to support the show.

• 39:12Avery Trufelman?

  Although Teddy Roosevelt liked to pass himself off as the ultimate manly hunter, rugged outdoorsman, he was a New York City kid. This is so funny to me that I could just hop on the subway and go to the Theodore Roosevelt birthplace. It's right here, it's in Manhattan. In the 1800s, the Roosevelts were one of the richest families in New York City. There it is, he's 20th Street, Theodore Roosevelt Way. Must have passed this a million times. The stately building that is landmarked as the birthplace of Theodore Roosevelt isn't actually the building that Teddy was born in. That was once right down the street. This is Teddy's uncle's house, but the floor plan is similar, and all the furniture is authentic. All four of the Roosevelt children were not born in this room.

• 39:52Speaker 07

  They were born in this bed, however.

• 39:54Avery Trufelman?

  The Roosevelt birthplace is a national park, and they give free tours a couple times a day. My main takeaway from my tour was that Teddy Roosevelt loved his dad.

• 40:03Speaker 07

  President Roosevelt, it says in his autobiography that his father was the greatest man he ever knew.

• 40:09Avery Trufelman?

  Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. does sound pretty great, even though my tour guide also sounds pretty biased himself.

• 40:14Speaker 07

  Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was outstanding in the fact that he was atypical of a father and a husband. Before he went to work, his first allegation was to spend time and show attention and affection to his four children.

• 40:28Avery Trufelman?

  I suppose the bare minimum of showing attention to your family was pretty remarkable for his time. Although, to be fair, it does sound like Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. was very nurturing to his four children, including his poor, sickly son, Teddy.

• 40:42Speaker 07

  Our future president, he's born with severe, severe asthma. And that asthma, it was feared that it would overtake him at any point in time. And he is looking at his four children and says, "I am so, so proud of your brilliance, and I am so disappointed that you are pathetic as far as your physical capabilities."

• 41:02Avery Trufelman?

  I don't think this is verbatim. I just think this is a tour guide being a little mean.

• 41:05Speaker 07

  Do something about that.

• 41:07Avery Trufelman?

  Essentially, the Roosevelt children say...

• 41:09Speaker 07

  Papa has said, "We have to build ourselves up. We must lead the strenuous life."

• 41:15Avery Trufelman?

  This becomes a rallying cry for young Roosevelt. He must live the strenuous life. He has to deal with his own asthma. Because at this point in history, even medical experts are not very good at treating asthma.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  And the treatment protocols say, "Give the baby a cigar to smoke."

• 41:35Avery Trufelman?

  No, they do not.

• 41:36Speaker 07

  I'm not making that up.

• 41:37Avery Trufelman?

  But the future 26th president of the United States did find a treatment that worked for him.

• 41:42Speaker 07

  Hot black coffee in combination with physical exercise.

• 41:47Avery Trufelman?

  Allegedly, from his early childhood, Teddy Roosevelt is just pounding hot black coffee.

• 41:52Speaker 07

  So much so that when he was president of the United States, he clocked a minimum of a gallon of hot coffee in a day.

• 41:57Avery Trufelman?

  Jeez. Coffee, in conjunction with physical exercise, transformed him.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  And Roosevelt, as a child, was a sickly child. He had a high squeaky voice. People ridiculed him.

• 42:09Avery Trufelman?

  Kristin Hogenson is a professor of history at the University of Illinois.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  I think that helps explain why... He went off to the Dakotas to become a ranchman, right?

• 42:18Avery Trufelman?

  On the cover of his 1885 book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Teddy Roosevelt was posed like a rugged, anachronistic hunter from the previous century in a buckskin suit.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  He can rehabilitate himself and define himself more as a cowboy, a gunslinger, a hardened frontiersman.

• 42:35Avery Trufelman?

  T R was very proud of the fact that he was born frail and weak in the lap of luxury in New York City, but by his own will, had vigorously turned himself into a broad-chested, strapping young man by training every day and subjecting himself to the strenuous life just in time for this era of perceived peace in East Coast America.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  So the rise of white-collar work, the move from a farm economy, a more rural economy to a more urban economy, and more and more middle-class men are sitting at desks, doing desk jobs instead of strenuous labor.

• 43:11Avery Trufelman?

  Oh, no, feared Roosevelt. There were fewer and fewer opportunities for men to lead the strenuous life.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  And then, if you remember your high school history, the closing of the frontier in the 1890s. So that led to a lot of anxiety, again, among the same class of white, wealthier men, that they wouldn't have the potential to test their mettle.

• 43:28Avery Trufelman?

  And at the very end of that year, December 29, 1890, United States soldiers of the 7th Cavalry murdered hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children in South Dakota. This was the Wounded Knee Massacre, and it was among the last major battles of the Indian Wars. And Roosevelt sees this as a big problem.

• 43:48Speaker 06

  Roosevelt, he's arguing that it was actually violence between Americans and American Indians that was the furnace that fused the new American race.

• 44:00Avery Trufelman?

  Phil Cly again. The ongoing Indian Wars, for Roosevelt, had been a source of American identity. It was a way that all kinds of men, rich men, poor men, Irish-white, or English-white, or German-white, or Dutch-white, could go west, forget their past, fight side by side, and come together as Americans.

• 44:23Speaker 06

  And once the frontier was closed off, you needed to continue that by having wars in other places.

• 44:30Avery Trufelman?

  And this was not some kooky, personal belief that Roosevelt had. A lot of men agreed with him.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  There were a lot of people involved in politics in the time who were really Worried about what it would mean to and not have another generation of war-tested men overlooking wars, Indian wars, in the American West. The sense was that there wasn't another generation of men in the United States who would carry on the martial virtues, which were understood as being self-sacrificing, dedication to the nation, heroism, valor, physical toughness.

• 45:01Avery Trufelman?

  An essay in the Upper Crest Periodical, The Arena, warned, "The new danger will be peace rot."

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Peace rot, as if peace were a harmful and terrible thing to be avoided.

• 45:14Avery Trufelman?

  In peacetime, soldiers were dressed in feathers and pickle helmets just for show. The wealth of the Gilded Age was drawing attention to class differences. Americans were becoming vain and materialistic and effete now, cried the aging veterans of the Civil War on both sides. They waxed nostalgic about the values that war brought, the camaraderie of being out in the field in the company of other men, away from women. That would do men well these days, veterans thought, especially, they looked around, what with all these uppity new women.

• 45:46Speaker 04

  And so by the new woman, I'm talking about this phenomenon of the 1890s and onward.

• 45:52Avery Trufelman?

  The so-called new woman did not just stay at home and watch the kids. She was starting to have a life outside the home. She was riding bicycles. She was wearing bloomers. She might even have a college degree or a job.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Working-class women had always had jobs, but what was new was middle-class women were more likely to have jobs. And then women were becoming more active in politics.

• 46:17Avery Trufelman?

  She might campaign for suffrage, or if she lived in Utah or other Western states, she might actually be able to vote already. And this is way before the 19th Amendment. That was in 1920. We're talking about the 1890s.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  And more widely, women were voting in school board and local elections.

• 46:34Avery Trufelman?

  Not only did these new women make the men with their desk jobs cling even more tightly to their manhood, the new women brought bold, radical ideas into the political sphere, and this was extra terrifying to men. Their once demure Sweet wives had now become opinionated, pants-wearing and poised for a full-world takeover. And the new women, for their part, didn't deny it. "Man is morally in his infancy," the women's rights essayist Sarah Grand wrote in the North American Review. "In this mismanaged world, it looks as if she should soon be obliged to do their work as well as our own, or nothing will be done."

• 47:11Speaker 04

  A lot of the women activists at the time said, "Like, we as people can make a better world, right?"

• 47:17Avery Trufelman?

  And this extended period of so-called peace they were living in provided a sort of opening for the new woman.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  The valorization of force was often used as a justification for keeping women out of politics.

• 47:29Avery Trufelman?

  The repeated refrain was always, "No fight, no vote." "Sorry, ladies, you can't vote. You didn't serve your country because you weren't allowed to." But that was the logic.

• 47:37Speaker 04

  Voting rests on physical force. It rests on guns. It rests on the capacity to kill.

• 47:43Avery Trufelman?

  But here we were, coming on 30 years since the Civil War, and the vast majority of this new generation of office workers had grown up without fighting. So now what? None of them got to vote? The new women pointed out, "Aha, this is a flaw in the argument. Maybe war is not as necessary to citizenship as you thought, fellas." And so a lot of women were very excited about a burgeoning movement known as arbitration.

• 48:09Speaker 04

  In the late 19th century, a movement for international arbitration arose in the United States. And one of the goals of the movement was to end war via treaty arrangements.

• 48:20Avery Trufelman?

  The arbitration movement argued that we, civilization, had become sophisticated enough to talk through all our problems in lieu of fighting. Admittedly, some of the new women took this idea to the extreme. Frances Willard, the leader of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, proposed that Harvard and Yale cancel their annual football game and use arbitration instead. But generally speaking, arbitration wasn't some pipe dream.

• 48:46Avery Trufelman?

  The United States took real steps to act on it.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  And the United States as a starting point on this negotiated and signed a treaty with Great Britain in 1897.

• 48:56Avery Trufelman?

  This treaty stated that for the next five years, the United States and Great Britain would not fight, but arbitrate all of their disputes. It was signed by the US Secretary of State and a knighted British diplomat. It was supported by President Grover Cleveland, along with many academics and newspapers. And it seemed like this would be the start of an amazing new era of peace.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  And then the treaty went to the Senate for ratification, and the Senate nixed it. So you might wonder, like, why were they so fearful that there might be peace between the United States and Great Britain?

• 49:33Avery Trufelman?

  Lawmakers voiced their fear of peace rot, saying-

• 49:36Speaker 04

  "War is healthy to a nation."

• 49:38Avery Trufelman?

  And-

• 49:39Speaker 04

  "A little bloodletting would be an admirably good thing about this time for the people of the United States."

• 49:44Avery Trufelman?

  They talked about their fears of over decadence, of male degeneracy. Theodore Roosevelt, at this point, had returned to New York from the West and started his political ascent.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  And Theodore Roosevelt worried that arbitration would produce, and I'm quoting him, "A flabby, timid type of character that would eat away the great fighting features of our race."

• 50:04Avery Trufelman?

  Arbitration was, in other words, for pussies.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  And so the movement was seen as a female movement, which is not to say that men were not also supportive of arbitration, but the opponents came to see it as a feminized movement and as a symbol of what was wrong in American politics.

• 50:22Avery Trufelman?

  In political cartoons, arbitration was personified as a woman, and arbitrationists as ugly, sour-faced hags wearing preposterously proportioned bloomers.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And in opposition to it, they would say, "We need manhood asserted." And Theodore Roosevelt, who was often the poster child for this, said, "I should welcome almost any war, for I think this- This country needs one.

• 50:45Avery Trufelman?

  And this country need only look just off our coast, down to the east. And there was a poor little colony, struggling for its independence from Spain. And not for the first time.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Right, so the third struggle for, major struggle for independence broke out in Cuba in 1895.

• 51:06Avery Trufelman?

  But this time, Americans like Roosevelt were like, we have got to intervene. We have to help Cuba.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Cuba, the island, was often represented as a damsel in distress.

• 51:16Avery Trufelman?

  And notoriously, William Randolph Hearst, in all of his papers, spilled a lot of ink trying to convince the American public to get involved in Cuba. And in the Bowery in Manhattan, a play about a virtuous Cuban maiden rebuffing the advances of a dastardly Spaniard was presented entirely in Yiddish.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  So it fit into a literary genre that was super popular, which was a genre of heroic, chivalrous knightly men going off and rescuing women.

• 51:41Avery Trufelman?

  There were some Americans who were genuinely very upset by the horrid plight of innocent Cuban civilians who were being rounded up and put into concentration camps.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Horrifying, the death tolls from that.

• 51:52Avery Trufelman?

  And there were Americans who were less concerned about that loss of civilian life.

• 51:56Speaker 04

  There were financial interests.

• 51:57Avery Trufelman?

  Especially in the sugar business, many sugar plantations in Cuba were owned by American sugar companies, and they sure wouldn't mind having more control over the island.

• 52:04Speaker 04

  They were vocal in advancing their interests and wanting a US intervention for economic reasons.

• 52:11Avery Trufelman?

  But were potential financial gains or romantic chivalry or even humanitarian aid enough to justify going to fucking war? Arbitrationists didn't think so. I mean, one critic even pointed out, you know, we have lynchings here in our own country, and nobody seems to care about that. Why are we suddenly so riled up about Cuba? And the president at the time, McKinley, had actually witnessed the Civil War. He harbored no romance about how awful battle was, and he refused to listen to the lawmakers who were all but begging him to please, please, please declare war on Spain.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  His opponents on both. Sides of the aisle were very critical. They kept saying, "The United States needs a man in the White House." Theodore Roosevelt famously said that McKinley had the backbone of a chocolate eclair.

• 52:56Avery Trufelman?

  But then, there was an explosion on an American ship that was docked in Havana.

• 53:01Speaker 04

  It blew up in the middle of the night and 266 men on board died.

• 53:06Avery Trufelman?

  Before we even knew what caused the explosion on the ship, like, for all we knew at the time, it could have been an accident, there was outrage. The Senate was like, "Oh, we have got to go to war now."

• 53:15Speaker 04

  To quote one congressman, "Honor comes first." And if an honorable man were insulted, he would not arbitrate. He would fight back.

• 53:23Avery Trufelman?

  McKinley functionally gives in. He punts the decision to declare war to Congress. And of course, they declare war. They're really amped on it.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  And then they just rallied around the military. So several members of Congress actually enlisted, others offered to do so.

• 53:38Avery Trufelman?

  Hundreds of thousands of American men volunteer to enlist, and they ask to be shipped off to liberate Cuba. Even Teddy Roosevelt leaves his job as Assistant Naval Secretary when the war breaks out, and he gets in on the action in Cuba. He leads the first volunteer cavalry, known as the Rough Riders.

• 53:55Speaker 06

  Teddy Roosevelt, when he went to Cuba with the Rough Riders, he worked out the actual ethnic composition of his unit.

• 54:01Avery Trufelman?

  Phil Clyes says the Rough Riders were going to go off to Cuba together, and they were going to fight side by side and fuse the great American race, just like how Roosevelt thought the Indian wars once had. So among the Rough Riders, there were lower-class men, middle-class men, upper-class men, and men of a number of different races.

• 54:21Speaker 06

  So they'd have the right number of Anglo-Saxons, the right number of American Indians, the right number of Irishmen, and then they'd all go and be fused into one kind of new American race in the cauldron where the heat is provided by war.

• 54:35Avery Trufelman?

  So Roosevelt leads this Benetton ad into victory at San Juan Hill. Although he makes it sound like they single-handedly liberated Cuba.

• 54:44Speaker 04

  Theodore Roosevelt would have you believe that they played a major role because he was a massive self-promoter.

• 54:50Avery Trufelman?

  For the rest of his life, Teddy Roosevelt also went by Colonel and completely minimized the help he got from the battalion of black soldiers known as the Buffalo Soldiers, who were also there at San Juan Hill.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  I would say the biggest significance of that battle was making Roosevelt into a war hero that helped launch his political career.

• 55:07Avery Trufelman?

  Roosevelt wore his wide-brimmed cowboy-looking Rough Riders hat to the 1900 Republican Convention. And there, he was hailed as the heroic fighter and the fighting Republican.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  It led to a new generation of military heroes. It rehabilitated the upper-crust Harvard-educated, white-collar Theodore Roosevelt-type as model men, as people who deserved political leadership and who working-class men could relate to more because they had served in the military.

• 55:37Avery Trufelman?

  It was there, at that 1900 convention, where Roosevelt was nominated to be the Vice President to McKinley, who, I guess, forgave that whole Chocolaty Claire insult.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  McKinley was looking for a military hero to run as his running mate and then selected the war hero, self-promoter Roosevelt.

• 55:53Avery Trufelman?

  And then, when McKinley was assassinated in 1901, the fighting Republican became president. And the vibe was like, wasn't that fun, boys? See, I told you we needed a war. The Spanish-American War, which lasted less than a year with relatively few US casualties, was called the Splendid Little War. But the part that Roosevelt didn't talk about so readily is that we'd taken it too far. The Splendid Little War had morphed into something else. The United States had been so excited about finally getting into a big war that we'd attacked Spain and as many of their colonies as we could reach.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  The United States ended up annexing Guam and also taking Puerto Rico, which was a Spanish colony praximent to Cuba. And diddled the annexation of the Philippines.

• 56:43Avery Trufelman?

  So the US had entered Manila, where, extremely long story cut entirely too short, we were suddenly like, oh, we should just take this colony.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  There were a number of American men, including Theodore Roosevelt, who argued that

• 57:02Speaker 05

  One of the great things about becoming involved in the Philippines is it would build like a masterful class of colonizing men, right? That it would build manhood among US occupiers.

• 57:14Avery Trufelman?

  Which is totally bonkers. Ostensibly, the purpose of this whole war was to liberate the people of Cuba, not to go colonize other people. And at the time, a lot of Americans actually raised this point and pointed out that this is kind of against our stated values of democracy and independence. And yet, here we were, trying to take over the Philippines.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  The war became a long, horrible, drawn-out, bloody guerrilla war. The United States resorted to torture.

• 57:46Avery Trufelman?

  We had entered this war to be the great knight, the savior of the damsel in distress, Cuba. And we had become the villain, the monstrous torture of the Philippines.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Soldiers returning from the Philippines reported on the cruelties that the US Army was perpetuating. The war went on from like 1898 to roughly 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt declared it over.

• 58:12Avery Trufelman?

  The narrative flipped. It wasn't simply that some bloodletting and a little vigor is good for the boys. This war, it seemed, was no longer the right kind of war anymore.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Right? It's taking like our fine young men from the farms in Nebraska and turning them into depraved, diseased, alcoholic killers, right? And so I think that really undercut some of the arguments that war was inherently good for building male character.

• 58:39Avery Trufelman?

  That was the bridge into the 20th century. And then, it's the 1900s, and Teddy Roosevelt is president, and the US has announced its entry onto the global stage.

• 58:50Speaker 05

  The most territory the United States has ever had was in 1902.

• 58:55Avery Trufelman?

  This is how we set down roots on the other side of the world. This is how we had control of the Philippines for a long time. This is how we reserved Guantanamo Bay. This is how we have Guam and Puerto Rico. This is how we went from the edge of arbitration to the other extreme. We showed world powers that we don't need a lot of provocation to get involved in other countries' issues.

• 59:16Speaker 05

  So it is sort of the roots of like America World Peace. Significant roots.

• 59:21Avery Trufelman?

  But... To bring all this back to close, the Spanish-American War made a significant change to the American military uniform. You can see the shift in style in Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Rider uniform, which is there on display in the house that is landmarked as his birthplace.

• 59:43Speaker 05

  But here we are, looking at the Rough Rider hat, jacket, his bandana, and his set of gloves that he wore in the Spanish-American War.

• 59:54Avery Trufelman?

  Alyssa Parker Geisman with the National Park Service met up with me after my tour of Teddy Roosevelt's birthplace to make sure I saw Roosevelt's Rough Rider suit.

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  So the Rough Rider uniform, as an officer, TR, would be responsible for providing and paying for his own uniform. Roosevelt's uniform, made by Brooks Brothers, is constructed of the same khaki-colored canvas material that was used for the enlisted men's uniforms.

• 1:00:17Avery Trufelman?

  So yes, it's pretty cool that this safari-looking suit was made by Brooks Brothers. I love that. But this war, the Spanish-American War, is the war where the US military sheds its signature blue. Instead of copying the jaunty French or the stately Prussians, during our era of colonial ambition, we started to mimic the colonial outfits of the British Empire. Here's Kerner again.

• 1:00:44Speaker 06

  Khaki has its origins going back to the British Empire in India as a summer uniform.

• 1:00:51Avery Trufelman?

  When the Spanish-American War first began, American enlisted soldiers arrived to those various Spanish colonies in their blue sack coats, those blue flannel coats with the gold buttons they had worn in the Civil War. And in the heat of Cuba, or the sun of the Philippines, they took their jackets off.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  So they buy and get a lot of these khaki cotton uniforms direct from Singapore and India to issue to officers in the Philippines.

• 1:01:18Avery Trufelman?

  Officers like Teddy Roosevelt got their khakis custom-made or fitted for them. And British khaki had a color that looks a lot like what Americans would now call olive green.

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  And they're like, man, not only is this more comfortable, we're harder to see.

• 1:01:36Avery Trufelman?

  The battlefield had a new problem: visibility. All the wars before had been very, very smokey.

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  And then with the introduction of smokeless powder, you no longer have this occluding smoke on the battlefield, which makes everybody easier to see.

• 1:01:51Avery Trufelman?

  So you're a more visible target. And what's worse, the guns are better.

• 1:01:56Speaker 06

  What ends up happening over the course of 19th century is the introduction of rifle weapons that are easily reloadable.

• 1:02:02Avery Trufelman?

  Which means the average infantryman is more dangerous.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Which necessitates these skirmish tactics where you're getting further and further apart.

• 1:02:12Avery Trufelman?

  After the Spanish-American War, in the dawn of the 20th century, America looks at the ways that war is trending. They take stock of their own experiences, fighting in other climates, having to go long distances to foreign lands. And in August of 1904, the United States Army officially adopts olive green drab. It's just a better color for blending in with the environment. And if we were going to keep fighting exotic new wars in exotic new countries, uniforms should fit specific tactical and climate needs, right? And so, the quartermaster reasoned, they should

• 1:02:54Avery Trufelman?

  take a look at the methods and techniques and tips that were emerging from a new kind of business in America: the outdoor industry. But that's next chapter.

• 1:03:10Avery Trufelman?

  Articles of Interest is reported, produced, cut, and performed by Avery Trufelman, who is me, but I have a lot of guardrails on these things. Alison Behringer listens to my drafts, edits my scripts, and makes them make sense. Then I send my drafts to journalist and costume historian Charles McFarlane, who knows a lot about the military. Then I send the scripts to a fact checker, Yasmin Al-Sayad, who goes through and asks questions like, do bowhead whales live to 250 years? Then, after I add music, which is by Ray Royal with theme songs by Sasami, I send it to Jocelyn Gonzalez, an engineer at PRX who mastered and mixed it. And thank you so much to Angel Ellis, an iconic journalist in her own right, who I can't believe listened to this. Thanks as well to Audrey Martovich and the whole team at Radiotopia. I could not make this work without Radiotopia.

• 1:03:54Avery Trufelman?

  I also could not make this work without Drew Haupt. To see images of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Rider outfit and just a little bit of Buck Mason's Militaria collection, go to articlesofinterest.substack.com.

• 1:04:06Avery Trufelman?

  Radiotopia.

• 1:04:09Avery Trufelman?

  From PRX.