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Boys into Men: Depression-Era Physique in the Civilian Conservation Corps
“Have you ever seen a boy from your community leave for a CCC camp and then come home again six months or a year later?,” the Civilian Conservation Corps director asked in the pamphlet Now They Are Men. “If you have,” James McEntee continued, “you are almost certain to have seen a striking change in his physical appearance.” The young man’s posture was improved, his muscles hardened, his cheeks ruddy, and his scrawny body filled out. This boy, on average, “has gained ten or fifteen, perhaps even twenty or twenty-five pounds.”1 While designed as a social welfare program, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) provided its aid through a literal reshaping of the male body. As one supporter explained, the opportunity to improve “physical development … will help [men] to wage a better battle for economic independence” even after they left the corps.2 Using both advisory (weigh-ins and media) and more hands-on (calisthenics and hard labor) state body projects, the CCC set out to alter the bodies and circumstances of young, low-income American boys, rehabilitating them and transforming them into breadwinning men.
For those men living in CCC camps, the corps’ body project could be coercive. Men labored, ate, slept, and exercised the CCC way. In different circumstances, such a direct, aggressive body project would have been unimaginable. For about 200,000 young men each year of the corps’ existence, though, the American body project was an astonishingly intimate one. These young men, cast by the corps as malleable boys, could be subjected to hands-on body projects ranging from mandatory calisthenics to arduous physical labor. This was because they volunteered, because they were low-income, and because the language of body shaping was sometimes actually less insulting than the language of social welfare. The CCC was domesticating these boys, in their mind, turning them from imagined bands of vagrants and multiethnic drifters into productive protobreadwinners.3
The hands-on experience was meant to reform and rehabilitate these men, to transform them from welfare clients to self-sufficient citizens. One pamphlet called The CCC Offers A Young Man a Chance argued that “enrollment in the CCC may be the best opportunity many men will ever have for building up their health and strength.”4 Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself promoted the CCC by linking health gains with employment prospects and economic recovery. He said that “the clean life and hard work in which you are engaged … cannot fail to help your physical condition.” Improved condition meant better individual and national prospects. “You should emerge from this experience, strong and rugged,” he continued, “and ready for reentrance into the ranks of industry.”5
The corps was not concerned solely with the bodies of those men it had enrolled. It balanced hands-on body projects within camps with widespread advisory 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,
