This'll probably only be of interest to those of you who sit up nights obsessing about Theodore Roosevelt — and I'm fully aware there aren't that many of us  – but this, from Sarah Watts' Rough Rider in the White House, blew me the fuck away:

The chapters that follow demonstrate how Roosevelt's desire for toughening the nation's body against degeneration, his flight from effeminacy, his need to inflict pain on himself and others, and his rational use of men's capacity for "primitive" violence combined to cultivate an emotionally shared, exclusionary community of white, heterosexual males. Few men of Roosevelt's time understood the deep emotional sources of these urges, for the president and for his era. Owen Wister did, though, when he remarked that Roosevelt's stile of manhood "inevitably" led to the Great War, whose peculiar horror lay in "having our myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true."

I can't track down the Owen Wister quote, but I gotta have it. The only thing I have on the shelves by him is The Virginian, which is itself a pretty good fictionalization of those myths he talks about. I'm guessing it's from an essay Wister wrote called "Roosevelt and the War: A Chapter of Memories." Unfortunately I don't have a subscription to Harper's, goddamnit, though I might have to get one just for this.

Update: Somebody was kind enough to email me a .pdf of the full Harper's article. And it turns out that it doesn't have the quote. Instead, it's in a book Wister wrote called Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, on page 339. Which, y'know, I would have known immediately had I actually checked the footnote instead of just heading straight into Google. Anyway, book ordered from the local library. Soon, the full thing.