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CHAPTER 2

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, or earned the nickname—or wages—of “tree soldiers.” Instead, CCC 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 and homosexuality were all imagined threats 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.

Underfed bodies thus matched unrealized breadwinner status. In response, the Civilian Conservation 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 Advisory Corps

In its intimate regulation of food and physical activity, the corps’ body project went beyond advisory state regimes in a way few programs aimed at white men could do. As the CCC aggressively changed the bodies of young men in camps, though, it also reshaped the broader American idea of what productive young male bodies ought to look like. Roosevelt, Fechner, McEntee, and other corps leaders imagined their message of physical, economic, and familial strength reaching far beyond the enrolled men within those camps. Through speech, statistics, and propaganda, the CCC cast the successful enrollee body as the physical ideal of the new American male.