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 the CCC boys.” No. 587, Camp Roosevelt, F-1, Edinburg, VA, July 22, 1940, RG 35, Records of the Civilian Conservation Corps, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
Mandatory exercise in camps supplemented this bodybuilding project. “Coupled with the toughening work in the field, the enrollees take a regular daily calisthenics drill,” McEntee wrote. “Much of the field work develops only certain muscles. The calisthenics, scientifically planned by Army experts in body development, are designed to give each muscle in the body proper exercise.”52 The corps’ plan for building strong men was about encouraging employment and breadwinning. At the same time, though, the phrase “building men” had a more literal meaning. All these projects were nested in a shell, in a New Deal image of muscular manhood. Building was about the intersection of economics, masculinity, and the physical body.
Director Fechner wrote that “two principal benefits [had] been received” by CCC men. One was better health, and the other improved employability. He reasoned that disaffected men left camps “with healthy bodies, with heads up, and capable of making their own way if jobs [were] available.”53 While Fechner framed the benefits to bodies and bank accounts as if they were separate, the relationship between the two was evident. As Fechner promised to build up men, he promised a whole package. A strengthening or building up of American men necessitated the development of one specific image of manliness. Fechner’s intention for the program was to produce domesticated yet strong, skilled, and muscular men. One CCC pamphlet, Builder of Men, promised that enrollees “who are overweight and flabby lose weight in camp and soon turn their excess flesh into hard muscle.”54 While the pamphlet certainly meant this at the literal level, intending to directly improve the bodies of American men sent to corps camps, it also functioned as a metaphor. Corps bodies changed from social excess flesh—understood as masculinity gone soft and useless—into hard muscle, or breadwinning, virile, masculinity. This transformation stood at the center of CCC projects.
A 1936 promotional brochure published by the Government Printing Office and called, simply, The Civilian Conservation Corps, listed some of the benefits the CCC provided enrollees. First on the list was “muscles hardened,” followed by vocational training and education. Publicity materials consistently conflated musculature and weight with health. Then, like so many body projects, they used health as a stand-in for a diversity of social and economic concerns.
That brochure went on to explain that an improvement in health and discipline made CCC graduates uniquely prepared to “make good in any kind of honest employment.”55 In an annual report on the 1938 corps, CCC leaders prepared further thoughts on the young bodies under its supervision. “It is significant that the average boy entering the Civilian Conservation Corps will gain between 8 to 12 pounds in weight during a 3-to 6-months period,” the report emphasized. “The food which is furnished is wholesome, palatable, and of the variety that sticks to the ribs.” While the authors of the report went on to explain that “the amount of attention devoted to food is almost bewildering,” they also noted that food—and the associated improvement of the body—is the best indicator of social welfare available.56
Another pamphlet, What About the CCC?, further underscores the physical goals of the program. “The supplying of jobs to unemployed men is important,” it explained, and “the building of men is also important.” The pamphlet went on to make the relationship explicit. “Fortunately, the two go hand in hand,” they explained, “the men need the forests and the forests need the men.”57 The corps was supported (and partially run) by the U.S. Department of Labor. The department supported the project not simply on the grounds of getting jobs for men but on the promise of strong and stable men ready to enter or reenter the paid workforce when more jobs were available. The Department of Labor’s publications reinforced their belief in the relationship between economics and male physique. “The emergency conservation work provides the opportunity to build up men as well as to build trees [i.e. work],” the department wrote in a 1933 bulletin.58 In a corps-issued report, called “The Nation Appraises the CCC: April 1933–September 1939,” Fechner used similar language. The director insisted that “virtually every enrollee” had improved physically, and that the program’s benefit to trees was “at least equaled by the results in improved health, mental outlook and earning ability of jobless youth.” In this report, Fechner emphasized a familiar mantra: the CCC “has conserved youths of nation as well as land.”59 Conserving youth implied the often-touted physical improvements to the men. Senator Elbert D. Thomas of Utah made the relationship between the expanding state and the improved body explicit in his praise for the corps. According to Thomas, the corps “represents the first direct large-scale attempt by the federal government to bring definite physical and character benefits to its idle youth.” As such, he continued, “it has been a successful program.”60
The
