Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran
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This book centers on the physical bodies of citizens and the government efforts meant to reshape those bodies. From federal research on working-class dietary needs to programs for measuring and weighing children in the 1920s, and from physical standards for soldiers during World War II to Cold War school fitness programs, there is a rich history of the political uses of physique. I place these cases of government intervention into a century-long narrative. This is a history of federal governance that infuses political history with cultural and social history, gender and sexuality, and the body itself. In the process, I draw attention to the body as both an instrument and an object of public policy. This allows us to see state power at work in unexpected ways.
Most government projects designed to shape American bodies were part of what I call the advisory state. Advisory state projects are instituted through neither physical force nor legal obligation. I conceptualize the advisory state as both a repertoire of governing tools, such as quantification, advertising, and voluntary programming, and the actual implementation of these tools. The aim is to encourage citizens to engage in behaviors that cannot be explicitly legislated within the American political context. The advisory state is subtle but powerful.9
While state interest in weight and physique has been a constant for the last hundred years in the United States, the implementation of such policy has varied over time along a spectrum from the understated nudge to the forceful prod. In the modern context, these advisory state approaches to monitoring citizen physique appeared around World War I. Progressive Era nutrition science and increased attention to low-income Americans’ food choices were mobilized around physique when the United States entered the war. The Children’s Bureau used the context of anxiety over military unfitness to propel programs that encouraged mothers to weigh and measure their children and use the new height-weight tables to assess the children’s health. World War I brought attention to military unfitness, and spurred efforts to improve the bodies of future generations. That goal, alongside the fact that already existing child health projects could be easily adapted, made an advisory approach ideal in this moment.
While this advisory approach worked in the 1910s and 1920s, in the following decades economic depression and another world war changed the landscape for American body projects. During the Great Depression, low-income young men who enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps experienced a more intensive state management of weight and physique than previous civilians. Since these men were welfare clients, and since state expansion was somewhat normalized through the New Deal, the agency had a lot of leeway in monitoring these men’s bodies without it appearing to be federal overreach. The context of World War II then allowed for an even greater expansion of federal management of physique, this time through the Selective Service. Since the Selective Service was a draft system, both men who did and men who did not want to participate now found that they were part of a federal body project. This World War II moment transcended the gentle arm of the advisory state. The physical examinations had material consequences for the young men on the scale. While there was some discontent with the Selective Service and the draft, for the most part the context of war emergency, and vastly increased federal spending and power, meant that this unusual, aggressive federal body project raised few eyebrows.
After World War II, however, the “hot war” context gave way to an extended Cold War. While the desire for strong men was as intense as ever, the changing political context necessitated a move back to gentler advisory state mechanisms for managing physique. The President’s Council on Youth Fitness became an exemplary body project of the early years of the Cold War—years when federal power continued to grow in many arenas while, at the same time, the shadow of the U.S.S.R. convinced Americans to fear a powerful centralized government. As a result, the President’s Council on Youth Fitness of the 1950s and 1960s encouraged fitness through a revival of advisory work. Its body projects relied on relatively informal structures and voluntary efforts, with an emphasis on public service announcements, celebrity endorsements, and noncompulsory fitness tests.
As the President’s Council for Youth Fitness expanded the role of the advisory state in the lives of middle-class youth in the 1960s, other federal agencies began more aggressive body projects focused on low-income children. It was in this period that the nation rediscovered extreme poverty, and as criticism of government intensified over the course of the 1960s, the image of the emaciated black body came to symbolize the limits of existing social policy. Amid that critique, left-leaning politicians came to embrace an expansion of food aid in the late 1960s. By the 1970s, however, this fueled the political project of increased control over welfare clients’ diet and physique. While food aid expansions of the late 1960s offered material aid with limited control, by the early 1970s programs like WIC (the Supplemental Food for Women, Infants, and Children program) suggested the physiques of low-income Americans ought to be addressed through advice. Liberals and conservatives alike argued that low-income Americans, especially mothers, were irrational consumers. Echoing the nutrition science arguments at the turn of the century, the dietary choices poor women made on behalf of their families were once again on trial. Building on previous twentieth-century body projects, WIC adopted advisory state techniques and then added a degree of force and compulsion not found in programs aimed at middle-class Americans. Advisory techniques of governance were applied regularly in modern American politics, and we must recognize their role. At the same time, we must also recognize that, by design, body projects were not applied consistently or equally.
Concern over body image and physique has a long history in the United States. Late nineteenth-century dieting often focused on improving male bodies, alongside improving male financial and social status.10 In 1863 William Banting published A Letter on Corpulence. The pamphlet advocated limiting bread, sugar, and beer for rapid weight loss (four to five glasses of wine a day, though, was fine).11 Middle-to upper-class men increasingly fought body fat in the late nineteenth century, associating it with femininity and a lack of self-control. At the same time, plumpness was valued in women of the same socioeconomic class. Victorian women were encouraged to have curvier figures, and the corset reigned supreme.12 The famous Gibson Girl of the early 1900s offered a thinner but softer bodily aesthetic, although she showed more skin than the Victorian woman.13 This ideal for women’s bodies had shifted by the early 1910s, as women’s magazines, advertising, and silent films began adopting a thinner female form. Once the flapper ideal emerged in the 1920s, the growth of off-the-rack (rather than tailored) clothing necessitated size and measurement standards, and ultimately defined some bodies as normal and others as abnormal.14 It was in this context that a commercial weight loss industry emerged, selling diet advice, cigarettes, and magic bullets.15 Dieting became a rite of passage for adolescent girls and twenty-something women, an obsession that intensified over the course of the century as diet plans, fads, and foods exploded in popularity. This history of the popular promotion of dieting is critical to understanding American bodies, but the emphasis on it tends to obscure the role of the state in shaping those bodies, too. Governing Bodies works from existing cultural and social histories of dieting and weight, but differs from them in its focus on the political and policy dimensions of such body projects.16
This is the story of why the federal government cares about weight and muscles and of the mechanisms through which it regulates them. It is the story of which bodies it cares about, which bodies seem in need of regulation at which moments, and which bodies go untouched. Above all, it is a story about redefining what we understand as politics. In this story, federal agencies, voluntary organizations, politicians, and ordinary citizens take center stage in efforts to shape the American physique. Readers should note that this is not the story of all body projects undertaken in the twentieth century. For example, I do not discuss food rationing, pure food and drug laws, water fluoridation, or mandates to enrich foods with vitamins. Nutrition, enrichment, rationing, and public health all certainly have an indirect impact on the shapes and sizes American bodies take. Rationing might whittle away at a citizen’s waistline, while milk supplemented with Vitamin D might increase skeletal development in youth.17 For my purposes, though, I have chosen to focus on those body projects in which physique was a stated and central concern of policy makers. Sometimes the justifications were related to the military, other times to public health and nutrition, and still others to social welfare. The thread I follow across this varied terrain is that