It wasn't. At least not in the social centers of the nation, where they had tended toward a learned, listless faux-intellectualism. This is why you see occasional outcries against the state of "modern" Americans, particularly from Theodore Roosevelt (you can find this all through Edmund Morris' three volume biography).

In less developed parts of the nation, we don't hear anything particularly for or against or about masculinity, so far as I'm aware (but my expertise is Victorian London, not the United States).