Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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with temporary jobs to reinforce the idea that male income was meant to support a family, though the program directors rarely spoke explicitly about the money involved in the program. Although the CCC was a social welfare program based on work, a program built on its opposition to charity or unearned welfare, openly discussing the program as workfare still reminded some people of welfare. In a culture that linked economic independence with masculinity and economic dependence with femininity, a focus on these young, low-income men as welfare recipients only further damaged their already besieged manhood. Instead of discussing changes to men’s finances, CCC leaders often focused on changes to participating men’s bodies.
Within camps the CCC helped men reshape their bodies, while outside the camps CCC publicity touted a narrative of the transformation of scrawny, urban male bodies into robust, able-bodied men. The extensive CCC use of film and newsreels focused on strapping, shirtless laborers reinforced this idea nationwide. “The fact that enrollees gain so much weight is proof that it is good for them,” explained one corps pamphlet.33 At a moment when the idealized female body was increasingly slender and weak, the idealization of young white men as husky and muscular spoke to a stark difference in social expectations. The built-up male body had only taken hold as a desirable aesthetic in the years just prior to the Depression. In the late nineteenth century, American reform movements advocated “Muscular Christianity,” and pushed the use of gymnastics and bodybuilding as a means for avoiding urban temptations and isolation.34 By the Progressive Era, this ideal of vigorous, embodied masculinity had gone mainstream. Figures like Theodore Roosevelt and G. Stanley Hall pushed the importance of well-off white men seeking fitness through “the strenuous life,” and emphasized the relationship between racial and physical fitness.35 By the 1920s and 1930s, under the wing of celebrity gurus like Eugene Sandow and Charles Atlas, fitness culture moved from highbrow to low-brow.36 Big names in bodybuilding wrote books, opened gymnasiums, and sold training plans and products designed to build up the American man. This meant that the average CCC man was likely quite familiar with this muscular ideal long before he encountered it in camp rhetoric. Even men who did not aspire to such chiseled extremes absorbed changing cultural ideas about male bodies, notably the transformation of the stout male figure from successful to slothful.37 Meanwhile, the CCC leadership embraced the idea that adding pounds to these young men’s bodies could do more than improve them physically. This bulking-up project also functioned as shorthand for the transformation of a boy into a man poised as breadwinner, family anchor, and productive economic and social citizen.
At the same time that devastating Great Depression economics seemed to threaten American social roles, they also threatened the physical bodies of these same Americans. While middle-class American men might try to build themselves up in the image of Charles Atlas during the early 1930s, the more typical male body looked nothing like his. This was doubly true of the bodies of low-income Americans. Dorothea Lange’s photographs captured the sunken eyes and hunger-stricken faces of Depression-era children. While they could not easily cut back on rent, Americans could cut back on the elastic expense of food when their money ran out. In the 1930s, the result of these sacrifices was malnutrition and sickness. Food relief provided by strained local charities was typically inadequate. Meanwhile, clients found early federal relief programs, with long public lines and goods they did not choose, embarrassing.38 Malnourished children, urban and rural, haunted the national imagination. Visuals of breadlines and underweight children complemented a growing collection of scientific research on underweight American bodies. Researchers produced varied numbers, but most studies showed that about 20 percent of American children were malnourished. Some reports were more extreme, suggesting deficiencies in 70 or 85 percent of children.39
These underweight children were not the only undernourished people in the country. Single men were often ineligible for food aid, which was primarily distributed to families. In 1935, when a federal commodities program was set up to distribute agricultural excess to those in need, single men were excluded.40 The federal Food Stamp Plan, initiated in 1939, explicitly barred “unattached men.”41 While women and children were imagined as innocents who might merit federal resources, many believed that men without families would only become more shiftless and irresponsible if they had access to benefits. At best, urban single men might find private charity through soup kitchens and breadlines. Outside the urban setting this organized relief was harder to come by. Hunger and malnutrition were filtered through gendered cultural lenses. The same political rhetoric that described hungry women and children as malnourished tended to describe underfed white men as weak. This language denied men’s strength and autonomy, instead portraying low-income men as effeminate and sexually perverse.42 This emphasis on their concurrent physical and moral states, so-called weakness, rejected the possibility of structural problems and instead placed the onus on individual men. Paralleling threats to men without breadwinning status, the poor physique of Depression-era men suggested men whose disability and dependency was written on the body.
Underfed bodies thus matched unrealized breadwinner status. In response, the Civilian Conservation Corps sought to both economically and physically improve enrolled men. As one enrollee told it, “things were going from bad to worse, when his honor, President Roosevelt, said, take the young man off the city streets, put the under-nourished in re-conditioning camps until they are capable of swinging [like] an ape.”43 The CCC paid men a little, but improved men’s bodies a lot.
Changing Bodies in the CCC
James McEntee, the second director of the corps, explained that, while men did a variety of work in the corps, the end result was always the same. Whether they drove tractors, dug holes, or swung axes, they grew more masculine. “Whatever they do,” McEntee explained, “it is toughening, a man’s work. Their muscles grow strong under this daily work.” The extensive exercise was only one piece of the hands-on body project. Press releases proudly stated that the average enrollee ate five pounds of food per day, and that the program used “more than 14,000 carloads of food each year.” Additionally, the health programming of the CCC included vaccinations. “The health of enrollees is vigorously guarded,” wrote one CCC enthusiast. “The food … is constantly under expert supervision…. [The enrolled men] are given careful physical inspections at monthly intervals by the camp medical officer.”44 The food served in the camps was basically the same as that served in domestic army and navy camps. The medical corps described the rations as “abundant,” and explained that this food was nutritiously dense and would “speedily overcome the effects of moderate dietary deficiencies suffered by the enrollees, assist their bodies in returning to normal function, and increase resistance and ability to perform manual labor.”45 Control over food was an important component of the CCC body project.
Corps leaders regularly measured men, and used the statistics as evidence of the corps’ success.46 Since weight gain indicated masculinity, economic success, and future prospects, these numbers were critical to the CCC narrative.47 According to one test, men averaged a thirteen-pound gain during their first eight weeks in camp. Another test conducted by the Office of the Surgeon General of the War Department said men gained an average of 6.04 pounds in their first eight weeks.48 Frank Persons, special assistant to the director of the CCC, claimed that enrollees gained around twenty pounds in their first six months.49 In a different report, Fechner proudly told Congress that the standard six-month weight gain for enrollees was an exact 7.2 pounds.50 James McEntee also wrote confidently about the transformation of CCC men. Eighty-four percent of all the boys who were below the minimum at the time of enrollment gained weight rapidly, he said, because they ate beef, potatoes, and vegetables and drank milk. “This is why you notice so much difference between the boy who leaves for a CCC camp and the boy who comes home after his term of service is over,” he explained.51 The CCC reshaped low-income men, and average poundage served as the leadership’s proof.
Figure 4. Men perform daily calisthenics as part of their CCC activities. The official caption for this image notes that CCC men performed fifteen minutes of calisthenics outdoors every day except holidays and Sundays and that this exercise regimen helped “build strong muscles and strong bodies for