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 of a stated, central concern for physique during policy debates.
The subtlety of state behavior has become a topic of greater interest in political history over the past decade. Historians and political scientists have revealed a hidden state that has influenced everything from security, to transportation, to tax cuts, to trade: all federal interventions critical to American development yet often overlooked.18 Scholars have looked at the way different levels of government operate, at the voluntary state that has relied on the unpaid labor of women’s clubs, schools, and charities, and at the public-private and often improvisational organization of the modern state.19 Recognizing the hidden, voluntary, and public-private aspects of the American state expands our understanding of the meaning and means of federal governance, and the interdependence of state and society.20 Advice, standards, and outsourced government must be understood in conversation with one another, and as part of a single conversation about state development. Ultimately, paying attention to advisory state projects shows the inadequacy of big government versus small government models of state capacity and models of state power that assume a simple dichotomy between choice and coercion.
In chronicling the advisory state, I draw from the literatures on weight and physique culture, biopolitics, and feminist body history, while insisting on their connection to policy, politics, and American state development. Recognizing the connection between the realm of governance and the realm of culture obliges us to refocus our ideas about how federal policy-making works. Policies and projects of the advisory state are not peripheral but are in fact central to modern governance. Sometimes federal body projects related to weight and physique were subtle or indirect. Sometimes they were more aggressive. The implementation of such policies varied widely by era, by agency, and by policy subject. One needs an advisory state during peacetime to accustom citizens to the more intensive body projects of wartime, for instance. This book considers a range of state interventions into physique, as those interventions moved along the spectrum between the subtle and the aggressive, and as citizens maneuvered their physical bodies through the apparatus of the state.
That apparatus took many forms, but one regular feature of advisory state body projects was a reliance on the authority of numbers and quantification. Height-weight statistics, physical standards, and scale readings offered an aura of unassailable truth to political ideas about the body.21 Statistics gave the appearance of objectivity, of making knowledge seem neutral.22 The use of standards conjured the image of a rational, organized project. When height-weight standards were invoked to determine whether or not a body was war-ready or work-ready, the assessment appeared to be expert, above the fray of opinion and bias.23 In this regard, I use weight and related health data as evidence like any other historical evidence, but I do not accept that there was a single, stable scientific or medical concept of physique that ever existed (or that exists today) outside of politics. This distinction is critical in assessing the history of weight and physique for its larger political meaning.
The federal reliance on quantification was especially important when tied to another tool of the advisory state, maternalism. The nurturing roles accepted by most American women in the first half of the twentieth century, whether through motherhood and wifehood or through the caring professions such as teaching and nursing, made women useful allies.24 Wrapping state body projects in gendered, maternal language made certain advisory projects possible, normalizing everything from scientific meal planning to child measurement. Mothers, wives, nurses, and teachers were called on to monitor bodies and implement health standards, while making American body projects seem apolitical and personal. When agencies asking women to monitor bodies relied on numerical standards for that monitoring, they simultaneously heightened the apparent importance of women’s labor by making it more scientific and decreased anxieties about shifting health monitoring from expert to lay hands by emphasizing the seeming objectivity of numbers. When lay women engaged with these health projects, their involvement was technically voluntary labor, but it was voluntary within a system of gendered political power undergirded with powerful languages of medical and professional expertise. In such a system, women’s so-called voluntary political participation was often closer to obligatory.25
Although female actors are at the heart of the maternalist component of this advisory state story, adult female bodies were rarely the ones being measured and monitored. Following decades of feminist scholarship on the body, it may seem strange that a study of weight, shape, and physique in the United States is heavily focused on male bodies. While other aspects of women’s bodies, especially anything related to reproduction, have long been monitored and managed by state entities, women’s body weight only developed as a serious state concern when participation in the paid workforce became permanent for large numbers of white middle-class women, roughly in the early 1960s.26 The story of twentieth-century advisory state body projects, perhaps surprisingly, is a story of primarily male bodies. Male bodies were more present in the public gaze and in public roles in the first half of the twentieth century. At the very least, publicly laboring and militarized bodies were imagined as male, even when they were not actually all male. These imagined male citizen bodies became the objects of advisory state body projects with far greater frequency than female bodies did.
The fact that male bodies, usually white male bodies, are so often the object of government interest is evidence of how important both masculinity and heteronormativity have been to the modern state. American masculinity has long been grounded in the ideals of independence, autonomy, and self-reliance.27 With these ideals, white men differentiated themselves from white women, who were increasingly defined as both selfless and dependent in the early nineteenth century.28 These ideals also served to reinforce heteronormativity, which has been imagined by some as a building block of society and is embedded in many state policies and institutions, from marriage to breadwinner wages to immigration policy.29 As a result, for much of the twentieth century, the federal government has maintained its investment in at least the appearance of the heteronormative family unit, which has compounded the state compulsion to manage and monitor sexuality alongside masculinity.30 With the critical exception of the draft, political interventions designed to repair American manhood—to improve laborers, providers, or soldiers—could not be too aggressive without undermining autonomy, heteronormativity, and independence as central tenets of white masculinity.31
The importance of highlighting male autonomy while initiating body projects was not only about masculinity and heteronormativity, but also about emphasizing the value of certain types of bodies to the nation. As historians of disability have found, normative American masculinity is deeply tied to ideals of the male body.32 While those ideals have changed over time, the notion that a man must be able-bodied to function as a breadwinner has deep roots.33 That man’s status as a useful citizen might also be tied to his earning potential, in ways that favor the able-bodied man as a more competent citizen than a man unable to materially provide for a family.34 Anxieties about improving the physical body of the breadwinner regularly channeled fears of dependency. Whether
