Did he? It's not so simple. Charles McGrath:
The other great theme of the Jungle Books is that of personal growth through manly, stressful adventure in the wild. This idea found a ready enthusiast in Theodore Roosevelt, then a civil-service commissioner in Washington. He and Kipling became friends and would visit the zoo together (where Roosevelt liked watching the bears, while Kipling preferred the beavers). Kipling also discussed his philosophy with William James, who visited Naulakha in 1895, and who drew on Kipling’s thinking, Benfey says, to formulate his notion of a “moral equivalent of war”—a proposed regimen of adventure and challenge designed to rid American youth of their growing softness.James may well have drawn on some lines of Kipling's thought, though it's not immediately obvious how the literature of empire could bolster the repudiation of warfare in favor of constructively channeled alternatives like (say) the Civilian Conservation Corps of FDR's New Deal. In an 1899 letter James made it clear that he did not approve of Kipling's more blustery talk of "white man's burden" etc. "I wish he would hearken a bit more to his deeper human self and a bit less to his shallower jingo self. If the Anglo-Saxon race would drop its sniveling cant it would have a good deal less of a 'burden' to carry."
James, in turn, partly inspired Kipling’s one truly American work, “Captains Courageous,” a 1897 novel about a bratty rich kid who falls off an ocean liner, is picked up by some fishermen sailing out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and learns from them the virtues of responsibility and hard work... And Kipling’s idea of the natural world as a testing ground, and of life itself as a sort of Darwinian struggle, greatly influenced later Americans writers such as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway... Kipling’s jungle, one of those enchanted realms where so many great children’s books take place: a world with no parents and very few rules. NYker
Lots to unpack here, but - speaking of no parents and very few rules, I've been distracted by another New Yorker story. The Woodstock generation, turns out, is not mine after all. Louis Menand:
...it is almost impossible to name a single person born after 1945 who played any kind of role in the civil-rights movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the New Left, the antiwar movement, or the Black Panthers during the nineteen-sixties. Those movements were all started by older, usually much older, people... the peak year of the boom was 1957, when 4.3 million people were born, and those folks did not go to Woodstock. They were twelve years old... a lot of the people who went around saying “Don’t trust anyone over thirty” were over thirty... If you were born during the baby boom, you can call yourself a sixties person. You can even be a sixties person. Just don’t pretend that any of it was your idea.No. I was twelve. But I did already like the Beatles. If you were talkin' about revolution, you could count me in (out)... I did have to register for the draft, just before it ended, but fortunately never actually had to say Hell no, I won't go. Would I have? Would I have lived a Canadian life instead? Guess I'll never know.
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