Governing Bodies. Rachel Louise Moran

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СКАЧАТЬ newspapers described the women as easily tired by their work, and as more likely to eat pastries than the manly rations of the CCC. To the extent that the corps was a project meant to strengthen the male breadwinner and craft a specific family model, a female corps was decidedly off-message.¹²

      The CCC imagined itself making boys into men, not managing women. Some of the CCC leaders even feared inviting too many educators to the men’s camps, lest this aspect of camp life disrupt the labor and man’s work at the center of the corps. One military leader of the corps, worried that “we are going to be hounded to death by all sorts of educators. Instead of teaching the boys how to do an honest day’s work we are going to be forced to accede to the wishes of the long-haired men and short-haired women and spend most of the time on some kind of an educational course.”¹³ The colonel’s views on the subject were extreme; both Fechner and Roosevelt supported after-work schooling for CCC boys. What is striking about the colonel’s statement, however, is his rhetoric. In his imagining, corps camps built masculinity through hard labor, a masculinity under threat from gender nonconformists. In this debate over education in the camps, the colonel could only understand the program in terms of gender and sexuality. The existence of women’s camps reminded men like the colonel of the perceived threat from “short-haired women,” ready to damage the white, heteronormative, male breadwinner, family model that the corps was so focused on strengthening.

      This family ideal of the white, male breadwinner proved an especially uneasy model for enrollees of color. The actual legislation responsible for the corps explicitly stated that the program would not discriminate based on “race, color, or creed.”¹⁴ While black enrollment levels did not correspond with black Americans’ relief needs, the fact that black Americans made up about 10 percent of the corps still suggested it was more racially inclusive than many other New Deal programs. At the level of individual states, numbers could be far less equitable.¹⁵ Georgia would not enroll any black men in the corps until the federal CCC administration intervened. The state director of the CCC there explained that men were classified by need, and that no black men met the need threshold. Moreover, he explained, it is “vitally important that negroes remain in the counties for chopping cotton and planting other produce.”¹⁶ Mississippi, a state where more than 50 percent of its citizens were African American, enrolled a corps with only 2 percent black men.¹⁷

      Although the CCC was actually more inclusive than many New Deal social welfare programs, it was still plagued with inequality and discrimination. The corps leadership was focused on improving the projected white family model; there was little room in this projection for black men. This reality was reflected in, and reinforced by, the place of racial minorities in corps publicity. As the white male body (ultimately including immigrant bodies made American through the CCC project) became a central point of New Deal propaganda, black bodies faded into a segregated, shadowy image. Employing and building up white male bodies and masculinity suggested national progress. Enhancing black men’s bodies and masculinity was likely imagined as a danger rather than a service, especially to neighboring white communities who associated black men with crime and drunkenness.¹⁸ Although some of the corps leadership did support black men’s right to enroll in the program, intervening when the program excluded black men, the white American man remained the face—and body—of the CCC.

      Debilitation and Rehabilitation

      The end of World War I and the subsequent homecoming of large numbers of traumatized or physically disabled young men dealt a blow to the ideals of American masculinity.¹⁹ The Great Depression dealt another. As the male breadwinner role of young, white American men was threatened, so, too, was the imagined family unit they anchored. CCC leaders argued that forest-based work camps like those of the corps could rebuild this beleaguered manhood. CCC camps sought to fix the male breadwinner family model that many saw as the backbone of American masculinity. The CCC thus pressured men into taking on a breadwinner role. The program sent the majority of a man’s earnings directly to his family. The generally unmarried young men were meant to be supplementing their father’s income, rather than supporting their own families. The leadership imagined men entering the CCC as scrawny, naive boys, while in the camps they became manly tree soldiers. It was only after CCC participation that they emerged as men ready to be the breadwinners for their own households. The CCC structured its welfare payments within the language of the breadwinner model, which distanced these payments from the fears of dependency often tied to social welfare.²⁰

      A decade of American agricultural depression, combined with the stock market crash of 1929, spelled economic disaster. By the early 1930s, about 250,000 young men wandered the nation in search of work. While these so-called drifters and tramps loomed large in the American imagination, a much broader swath of young American men were actually unemployed.²¹ Around one-fourth of young men under twenty-four could not find any work, and another third of the same population could only find part-time work. The underemployment of these young men threatened to reshape American family dynamics. An early historian of the corps described this population as “bewildered, sometimes angry, but more often hopeless and apathetic.”²² The troubling image of these disaffected male youth was difficult to shake, especially as their equivalents in Germany and China radicalized.²³

      For politicians who understood men’s relationship to the family unit as a civilizing force, these high numbers of unemployed men were dangerous. These men were undomesticated. Many feared that young men without work would become criminals, or join the bands of wandering tramps and vagrants. Worse still, they might totally—not just temporarily—abandon the idea of the breadwinner model meant to structure American society. One congressman discussing CCC expansion argued that “the young man who is unemployed and is forced into an unfavorable environment not of his choosing will eventually turn against society.”²⁴ While the reality was that young American men came from all sorts of family units, the society at risk here was that of the idealized family unit—explicitly heterosexual, implicitly white and middle class, and containing one couple and their children rather than the multigenerational arrangements common in many immigrant and urban families. This idealized unit lined up with the breadwinner model for families. The male head of household was supposed to earn enough money to support his immediate family all by himself. In Depression-era America, with wages hard to come by, this already unrealistic model became fantastically impossible in the eyes of unemployed young men.²⁵

      As mainstream politicians of the 1930s saw it, young men not only needed to be stopped from political deviance but also from the related arena of sexual and gender deviance. Agencies regularly structured social welfare policy in this moment around the necessity of heterosexual attachment and the danger posed by unattached (or nonfamily) individuals.²⁶ In the eyes of supervisors like the first Civilian Conservation Corps director, Robert Fechner, unattached men inherently posed a threat to the social fabric. Another New Dealer explained, in support of CCC expansion, that young men without the responsibilities of a job, home, and family were “a volatile element in society.”²⁷ “They have everything to gain by a change in the established order and nothing to lose.”²⁸ When men could not support the family they had, they might desert their wives and children, leaving them as burdens on the budding welfare state.

      In reality, working-class married women had long made money outside the home, and the pre-Depression American family was never such a simple economic structure. Moreover, camps created to domesticate men were at times also charged with overdomesticating them, as CCC men cooked and cleaned during their time away.²⁹ Still, changes in how Americans imagined families to work were as important as changes in how the unit actually functioned. When an unemployed man ceased to be a breadwinner, he ceased to be the head of the household. The unemployed man seemed undeserving of respect from his wife and children. Government planners imagined youth as increasingly delinquent and living in unstable family units. Women might need to work outside the home, undermining their husbands’ authority while simultaneously leaving their children unsupervised (and, in turn, at risk of delinquency). Most men, the concerned parties worried, would not even get that far. Criminality СКАЧАТЬ