Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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imagined as a danger rather than a service, especially to neighboring white communities who associated black men with crime and drunkenness.18 Although some of the corps leadership did support black men’s right to enroll in the program, intervening when the program excluded black men, the white American man remained the face—and body—of the CCC.
Debilitation and Rehabilitation
The end of World War I and the subsequent homecoming of large numbers of traumatized or physically disabled young men dealt a blow to the ideals of American masculinity.19 The Great Depression dealt another. As the male breadwinner role of young, white American men was threatened, so, too, was the imagined family unit they anchored. CCC leaders argued that forest-based work camps like those of the corps could rebuild this beleaguered manhood. CCC camps sought to fix the male breadwinner family model that many saw as the backbone of American masculinity. The CCC thus pressured men into taking on a breadwinner role. The program sent the majority of a man’s earnings directly to his family. The generally unmarried young men were meant to be supplementing their father’s income, rather than supporting their own families. The leadership imagined men entering the CCC as scrawny, naive boys, while in the camps they became manly tree soldiers. It was only after CCC participation that they emerged as men ready to be the breadwinners for their own households. The CCC structured its welfare payments within the language of the breadwinner model, which distanced these payments from the fears of dependency often tied to social welfare.20
A decade of American agricultural depression, combined with the stock market crash of 1929, spelled economic disaster. By the early 1930s, about 250,000 young men wandered the nation in search of work. While these so-called drifters and tramps loomed large in the American imagination, a much broader swath of young American men were actually unemployed.21 Around one-fourth of young men under twenty-four could not find any work, and another third of the same population could only find part-time work. The underemployment of these young men threatened to reshape American family dynamics. An early historian of the corps described this population as “bewildered, sometimes angry, but more often hopeless and apathetic.”22 The troubling image of these disaffected male youth was difficult to shake, especially as their equivalents in Germany and China radicalized.23
For politicians who understood men’s relationship to the family unit as a civilizing force, these high numbers of unemployed men were dangerous. These men were undomesticated. Many feared that young men without work would become criminals, or join the bands of wandering tramps and vagrants. Worse still, they might totally—not just temporarily—abandon the idea of the breadwinner model meant to structure American society. One congressman discussing CCC expansion argued that “the young man who is unemployed and is forced into an unfavorable environment not of his choosing will eventually turn against society.”24 While the reality was that young American men came from all sorts of family units, the society at risk here was that of the idealized family unit—explicitly heterosexual, implicitly white and middle class, and containing one couple and their children rather than the multigenerational arrangements common in many immigrant and urban families. This idealized unit lined up with the breadwinner model for families. The male head of household was supposed to earn enough money to support his immediate family all by himself. In Depression-era America, with wages hard to come by, this already unrealistic model became fantastically impossible in the eyes of unemployed young men.25
As mainstream politicians of the 1930s saw it, young men not only needed to be stopped from political deviance but also from the related arena of sexual and gender deviance. Agencies regularly structured social welfare policy in this moment around the necessity of heterosexual attachment and the danger posed by unattached (or nonfamily) individuals.26 In the eyes of supervisors like the first Civilian Conservation Corps director, Robert Fechner, unattached men inherently posed a threat to the social fabric. Another New Dealer explained, in support of CCC expansion, that young men without the responsibilities of a job, home, and family were “a volatile element in society.”27 “They have everything to gain by a change in the established order and nothing to lose.”28 When men could not support the family they had, they might desert their wives and children, leaving them as burdens on the budding welfare state.
In reality, working-class married women had long made money outside the home, and the pre-Depression American family was never such a simple economic structure. Moreover, camps created to domesticate men were at times also charged with overdomesticating them, as CCC men cooked and cleaned during their time away.29 Still, changes in how Americans imagined families to work were as important as changes in how the unit actually functioned. When an unemployed man ceased to be a breadwinner, he ceased to be the head of the household. The unemployed man seemed undeserving of respect from his wife and children. Government planners imagined youth as increasingly delinquent and living in unstable family units. Women might need to work outside the home, undermining their husbands’ authority while simultaneously leaving their children unsupervised (and, in turn, at risk of delinquency). Most men, the concerned parties worried, would not even get that far. Criminality and homosexuality were all imagined threats to the unattached man.30 So long as young men planned to support a family, they had reason to find and keep jobs, to obey laws, and to reproduce. Without the taming influence of rigid sex roles, many imagined, there would be nothing to hold men back from their unsavory natural state.
This social welfare program was built against the backdrop of an emerging New Deal, but its supporters rarely framed it as welfare. The program instead emphasized its workfare approach, and the association with labor and male independence painted the benefits as earned (masculine) rather than as a feminized dependence on the state. They saturated the program with images and claims of masculinity. As workers, CCC men would be independent and autonomous. As so-called tree soldiers, these men would be muscular, obedient, and brave. The two models of masculinity, and the methods through which the different models were instituted, could at times conflict. In the corps, men were both the obedient trainees of a premilitary program and autonomous, self-defined independent men. The Civilian Conservation Corps had both an advisory and a hands-on role in the lives and bodies of its enrollees.
Within camp settings, making a model male breadwinner by physically rehabilitating a welfare client was a bold project. It would have been impossible without the advisory state body projects that came before it. In Atwater’s turn-of-the-century laboratories, the idea that food could be carefully monitored to improve citizens’ bodies blossomed. By the 1930s, the idea of the laboring body as a machine, with food as its fuel, had become widespread.31 Likewise, the explosion of interest in height-weight measurement during the 1920s put poundage into the American vocabulary and made the bathroom scale a familiar object. Americans increasingly understood their bodies to be quantifiable, and to represent something larger about their social and political value. The advisory projects of the Children’s Bureau provided an unacknowledged foundation for corps projects. The Children’s Bureau relied on advisory state methods like education, scientific expertise, and quantification. It had a relatively small budget and its leaders, especially the female leaders, had mainly indirect political influence. Given these circumstances, the bureau worked almost entirely through advisory mechanisms.
The CCC was founded under rather different conditions, which enabled the development of body projects that drew on but also extended the scope of the advisory state. The corps had more funding and more influence than the agencies that came before it. In 1938 the Children’s Bureau asked Congress for $400,000 to pay its employees’ salaries. The corps, during the same fiscal year, spent over $500,000 on denim jumpers alone. For 1938 the Children’s Bureau requested over three million dollars be sent to the states for local child health and welfare programs. The corps, that year, requested just over three hundred million dollars.32 Forty million dollars of that was just for subsistence. The bureau could give advice on food, but the corps could dish it out by the pound.
The corps, however, did not want to simply give away food, a move its leadership equated to mere charity or welfare. Instead, it explicitly sought to push its volunteer enrollees to rehabilitate themselves in both body and behavior. Social commentators at the time understood the problems of 1930s masculinity as stemming from economic issues. It was a problem of men unable to