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 obtain and keep family-supporting jobs. The corps, in turn, provided such men 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.
