Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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body projects aimed beyond the camps. Corps leaders—from President Franklin Roosevelt on down—imagined their program shaping men far beyond the camps of select young enrollees. In this way, the CCC’s directive body project also functioned as a wider advisory project for all young American men. Believing the American breadwinner model itself to be in crisis, the corps’ leadership publicized corps men’s physical changes. The CCC placed muscular bodies at the center of all its publicity, from pamphlets to photographs to movie reels, even to talks from President Franklin Roosevelt himself. “The only difference between us,” Roosevelt told a group of Virginia corpsmen in a filmed speech, “is that I am told you men have put on an average of twelve pounds each. I am trying to lose twelve pounds!”6 The CCC was one of the most popular and most publicized components of the New Deal, in part because of the great visuals that forest landscapes and strong male bodies offered. The CCC project combined building up white, male bodies with building a prosperous and socially stable nation. Its directors eagerly interpreted strength, able-bodiedness, and heteronormativity as markers of the nation they could make out of the ruins of economic depression and dependency. In specific camp settings the CCC could be directive, while in the broader public sphere the CCC cultivated an advisory body project.
The CCC in Brief
In March of 1933, a joint committee session of the seventy-third Congress met to consider S. 598, the bill that created the Civilian Conservation Corps. The bill promised a trade: “relief of unemployment through the performance of useful public work.”7 Men from around the country would be selected to work in camps for one-year stints. They would plant trees on national and state lands, exterminate agricultural pests, work to prevent soil erosion and flooding, and build, maintain, and repair trails in government parks. Most of the work would be done in the American West, far from the cities from which most of the recruits hailed. The federal government owned well over 100,000,000 acres in these western forests. Corps men would be paid up to thirty dollars each month (though they would not see most of it), and receive food, room and board, clothing, and medical attention. The corps enlisted about 250,000 men to start.
Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins described the Civilian Conservation Corps “as entirely a relief measure.” Perkins endorsed the program but, given her position, clarified that she did not consider it a threat to organized labor or an expansion of federal employment.8 Instead, she explained, these were not jobs “in the truest sense of the word.” They should be thought of as projects that kept unemployed young men occupied. Not every unemployed man would do this work. Men with too many dependents or families they could not be separated from would not do this work, nor would men who were so malnourished as to not be physically up to the task. Perkins asked Congress to remember the voluntary nature of the projects that men would undertake. No men, she explained, would be “compelled to go” to work at a CCC camp. This was especially important when committee members questioned Perkins about the similarities between sweatshop wages and corps wages. Factions of organized labor were worried less about the well-being of corps men than the possibility that low CCC wages would depress all wages. The corps has to be understood as a sort of workfare, as Perkins understood it. This appeased organized labor groups. The emphasis on the voluntary and relief nature of the program also allowed the corps leadership to intervene in the bodies of its workers in ways few civilian organizations could.9 In fact, as CCC publicity often focused on men’s physical rather than economic transformations, these corporal interventions were practically necessitated.
Franklin Roosevelt appointed Robert Fechner director of the first CCC in 1933. The selection of Fechner was another attempt at calming unions and demonstrating how the corps was not a typical work program. Fechner was a labor leader, just off a stint as vice president of the International Association of Machinists. By April of 1933, Fechner had begun the recruitment process for the rapidly organizing corps. To be eligible to join the CCC, men needed to be unemployed, unmarried, United States citizens, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The first CCC recruits were chosen from a list of those who were already clients of another social welfare project. At least one young man wrote to the national office complaining that he was not able to get into the corps, since his father kept managing to find work. Only when the eager young man’s father eventually succumbed to Depression economics and needed social services, was the young man finally able to enlist.10 The main purpose of this eligibility requirement was for the CCC to save its own resources by using the current social welfare infrastructure, and having other agencies determine the neediness of clients. Men enrolling in the CCC were supposed to be up for physical labor, although underweight and muscularly underdeveloped men, even those who would not qualify for military work or private sector labor jobs, were accepted.11
Enrollees were entirely male. Eleanor Roosevelt, reportedly inspired by the creation of the CCC, pushed for parallel women’s camps. A couple of years later, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration developed an experimental program like this, centered on one New York camp, although it primarily used women for sewing and forest nursery projects. It was still agricultural and conservation work, as the young women transformed a substantial surplus of cotton into sellable goods through sewing work. While derisively nicknamed “She-She-She” camps, these female workers did not join the actual CCC program. They never fit the corps’ sense of itself, or earned the nickname—or wages—of “tree soldiers.” Instead, CCC newspapers described the women as easily tired by their work, and as more likely to eat pastries than the manly rations of the CCC. To the extent that the corps was a project meant to strengthen the male breadwinner and craft a specific family model, a female corps was decidedly off-message.12
The CCC imagined itself making boys into men, not managing women. Some of the CCC leaders even feared inviting too many educators to the men’s camps, lest this aspect of camp life disrupt the labor and man’s work at the center of the corps. One military leader of the corps, worried that “we are going to be hounded to death by all sorts of educators. Instead of teaching the boys how to do an honest day’s work we are going to be forced to accede to the wishes of the long-haired men and short-haired women and spend most of the time on some kind of an educational course.”13 The colonel’s views on the subject were extreme; both Fechner and Roosevelt supported after-work schooling for CCC boys. What is striking about the colonel’s statement, however, is his rhetoric. In his imagining, corps camps built masculinity through hard labor, a masculinity under threat from gender nonconformists. In this debate over education in the camps, the colonel could only understand the program in terms of gender and sexuality. The existence of women’s camps reminded men like the colonel of the perceived threat from “short-haired women,” ready to damage the white, heteronormative, male breadwinner, family model that the corps was so focused on strengthening.
This family ideal of the white, male breadwinner proved an especially uneasy model for enrollees of color. The actual legislation responsible for the corps explicitly stated that the program would not discriminate based on “race, color, or creed.”14 While black enrollment levels did not correspond with black Americans’ relief needs, the fact that black Americans made up about 10 percent of the corps still suggested it was more racially inclusive than many other New Deal programs. At the level of individual states, numbers could be far less equitable.15 Georgia would not enroll any black men in the corps until the federal CCC administration intervened. The state director of the CCC there explained that men were classified by need, and that no black men met the need threshold. Moreover, he explained, it is “vitally important that negroes remain in the counties for chopping cotton and planting other produce.”16 Mississippi, a state where more than 50 percent of its citizens were African American, enrolled a corps with only 2 percent black men.17
Although the CCC was actually more inclusive than many New Deal social welfare programs, it was still plagued with inequality and discrimination. The corps leadership was focused on improving the projected white family model; there was little room in this projection for black men. This reality was reflected in, and reinforced by, the place of racial minorities in corps publicity. As the white male body (ultimately including immigrant bodies made American through the CCC project) became a central point of New Deal propaganda, black bodies faded into a segregated, shadowy image. Employing and building up white male bodies and masculinity suggested national progress. Enhancing